> You should also know that I learned to read early and skipped first grade. Consequently, I was the perennial runt of the classroom and spent all my time reading as a child. I’ve gotten perfect scores on every reading test I’ve ever taken, including the SAT and GRE.
This is actually useful to know. Many people grew up in a time or place where they didn't receive the same kind of education. They may have weak reading and writing skills. Many of these folks might feel self conscious about their writing. A writing assistant is one way they can feel more confident, and I don't think that's a bad thing, even if I can usually tell.
I would rather see a piece with grammatical and spelling flaws that I _know_ came from that person's original thoughts than a LLM-perfected read with no clue about its inspirations.
Also, you can't get better without practice. LLMs being so easily accessible will make it possible to never need to learn how to write, which is extremely dangerous given how Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are the companies driving model development in the US and that LLMs aren't available all of the time (like, when you're outside interacting with real people).
Not just writing, but reading and comprehension. LLMs are a life-changing technology for a very large proportion of the population. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate, but are forced to go through life in a world that at best wasn't designed for them and at worst is actively malicious towards them.
A lot of people will look at a credit agreement they're about to sign and have no way of knowing whether it's a fair deal or naked exploitation that will financially ruin them. Thanks to LLMs, they can now point their phone camera at it and ask "is this a fair contract, or am I being ripped off". The LLM will give you an answer in speech and happily go back-and-forth with questions and clarifications for as long as you need. Whether the LLM is 90% accurate or 99% accurate at that task isn't truly critical, because it's a vast improvement over the status quo. Modern life is full of tasks that are utterly trivial for people in the top 10%, but a fraught ordeal for people lower down in the distribution.
To paraphrase a very old adage: God created man and Sam Altman made them equal.
Technology should not be fixing such a societal or legislative issue. In the example you're providing, why should the user trust the LLM, but not the credit agreement? Why shouldn't the LLM point the user to a different credit agreement, just as exploitative? The company operating the LLM may have such an incentive, and it could be very lucrative.
Illiteracy in the case you are proposing can only increase, for the benefit of some.
(The argument that people can use open source models can't possibly be applied, considering you're speaking about, as you called them, the other 90%, or even the functionally illiterate.)
The last paragraph is concerning to say the least.
We should be addressing _why_ so much of our population is functionally illiterate and _why_ people can't read financial agreements that can harm them. This should definitely not be left to an extremely-profit-motivated entity to equalize.
Instead, more states are eroding public education in favor of school choice and voucher programs, which is scary in a world wherein many parents would have no issues pulling their kids out of school or sending them to religious schools that consider the Bible as the authoritative text for everything, and for-profit schools would have no problem sacrificing curriculum, learning development and staff the minute it complicates revenue.
The Straussian read is fascinating: If LLMs get even marginally better at what they do, even people with perfect SAT and GRE reading scores who spend their entire adult lives working with these models won't be able to tell.
It doesn't matter if a penis enlargement advertisement is written by a Pulitzer price winner or an AI that can conquer the galaxy, it will still be slop.
FWIW, I was in the same boat (>95% reading/writing comprehension scores) but graduated with a circa-2.7 GPA. Everyone's always cherry-picking the nicest looking numbers for themselves.
I feel like anyone that is in a industry that is being encroached on my AI should be insecure. That's not a bad thing, and we need to take it on board, realise what it means, and how we can move forward.
Im in half data and half software engi...and I have no clue how to best move forward for what it's worth haha. Just know I need to, in some direction, with how the tech is going. Definitely can't keep going like it's still in the pre-AI days.
Don't be so honest; better said, don't confuse honesty and volunteerism this way. I was about to call it beautifully written, and now I'm going to call it beautifully written in what I regard as a voice to which you are wise to aspire.
(Of course, you would be well advised to review my comment history on this website before deciding how much of a commendation that constitutes, versus how much a warning.)
I'm not sure when I would rather rebuke someone for sending me AI-generated output than either just ignoring it, or sending a polite minimal response to the same effect
Personally this feels very judgemental. I’d be happy to get an AI aided response by someone trying to improve getting their point across like many of us English language learners. LLM are a godsend for people that aren’t masters of the language in all kinds of ways.
It feels like gatekeeping to me. An attempt to prescribe a way to convey information that the author happens to be genius level at.
As a developer when I first encountered auto-linters I felt threatened. When I saw coding agents my first reaction was to feel threatened. Maybe the author is going through something similar.
One solution is to always hand-write like an AI right down to the em-dashes. Then it will be your writing style and hard to distinguish from AI output. Personally I find it hard to maintain a business-cheery persona or use verbose phrasing or office filler words.
I think this is a great post. It will ruffle some feathers and people will feel attacked, but I think the core idea is exactly right: if we are communicating and the goal is the exchange of information, use your incredible language faculty to communicate with me. To do otherwise is a disrespect to me and it indicates that you value the act of showing me your brilliant idea (in your estimation) more than you value taking the effort to actually communicate the idea to me. You are essentially an "ideas guy". I know that an LLM is a yes-man, and that a yes-man and an "ideas guy" is a combination that produces confident mistakes. If you can't be bothered to communicate your idea, or the essence of your idea, in your own words, please keep it to yourself until you've put in that effort.
Maybe I worded this more harshly than I meant. I value anybody who tries to communicate with me and I don't mean to try to discourage people from having ideas or communicating them to me, but - writing is thinking, the act of trying to actually use your language and your reasoning will improve your idea. How many times have I thought I had a good idea, then in the process of writing it out, I realize its flaws (many times)? If you pass this process off to an LLM, you skip a key step, and you leave it to me the receiver to do this work for you.
> At my first job out of grad school, I tried to convince my manager that GPT-3 could be used to figure out whether or not a building had air-conditioning vents.
I cannot tell whether that's a joke, but I'm very interested if it's serious
My colleagues definitely thought it was a joke at the time.
We had this project (all public research) to classify buildings and identify their different subsystems (e.g. load-bearing structure, roof type, ventilation type) to figure out the expected casualties if there was a WMD event of some type. We could get decent data for much of the world, but for some places we had literally nothing beyond a tiny picture of it from satellite imagery.
I had been playing with using GPT-3 to try to have it autocomplete forms like the following. This was 2021 before we had good APIs for instruct models, so this was just straight up letting the LLM regurgitate after pretraining. Here was the type of prompt we used:
"""
Engineering building report for building located at 123, X Street, Knoxville TN
Prepared by Benjamin Lee, FE
---
Building footprint area: 1200 m2
Roof type: built-up roofing
Facade material: brick
HVAC present:
"""
Surprisingly (at the time), this was a decent prior. You could also add all sorts of one-off points of interest and amenities like swimming pools and other trivia to help guide the conditional probabilities.
[Just before I added this comment I realized it was more or less a direct message to the author, whom I noticed was replying here] As someone born very near the start of the Unix epoch, this isn't cringe at all - though I guess it is a bit Quixotic. I think in every tectonic shift of society there will be those who clutch onto the virtues of craftsmanship over "the plant" that can churn out... well, "slop"to those who appreciate craftsmanship. [my mind spun into several historical examples but 'nuff said.]
The two things that really resonated with me were:
> LLMs are very good at producing output, but they are not a substitute for you.
and
> You are a rich soup of learnings and experiences, and you’ve been simmering for decades. Please let me try some of it.
Your piece reminds me of an old song by Supertramp called "Hide in your Shell"[0]. The speaker tries to figure out how he can lead the subject out of their futile refuge and the punch lines are "I wanna know you" "Please let me near you".
Fun fact, I spent about 20 minutes composing this comment. Still "I lacked the time to make it shorter." I too was cursed with top 2% language skills and composing (and re-formulating) language is such a part of my flesh-and-blood identity that I could not conceive of a life worth living without it. When I do prompt LLMs for software solutions, I spend at least 15-25 minutes crafting context MD files and/or prompts. But then again, I'm not asking them to churn out yet another 1-shot modern web stack app.
I agree the world is richer because of folks like us. Carry on, wayward son. There'll be peace when you are done.
[0] https://www.letras.com/supertramp/84400/ I chose this site because it had the fewest pop-ups (still has a lot). Obviously, just prompting the title and the group returns the lyrics instantly from any mainstream LLM.
I've been seeing AI slop being used as ad-hominem. If I'm writing a couple paragraphs, I'll often run it through a model and ask it to make minimal edits for spelling and grammar. It makes it more readable and saves me time editing. If someone doesn't like my thoughts and they see an em dash, they can call it AI slop instead of responding, which is really annoying because the model otherwise does a good job of editing. In some cases I've been accused of AI slop for original unedited content.
I just use commas or semi-colons where I would have previously used em dashes. It's annoying to have to adapt to avoid triggering people's faulty AI slop pattern matching, but the alternatives are perfectly fine.
I actually associate it with a younger writer, perhaps it skipped a generation. I can imagine that someone who grew up in a world where typing an em dash meant looking up an alt code would develop a style that avoids them—but it's only a long press of the - away on the device where I do most of my writing by volume so of course
I'm going to use them.
"AI slop" is following the same path as "Dunning-Kruger effect," "enshittification," and so many other terms. Someone introduces a term that's useful to describe an actual phenomenon, it rapidly spreads to dominate the discourse because it's topical and punchy, and pretty soon using it is such a strong signal of being one of the "cool people who hates all the correct bad stuff" that people use it to describe stuff they merely don't like or disagree with. Once everyone's using it, it becomes useless for both its original descriptive purpose and as a social signal, so all the trendy discourse addicts move onto the next linguistic innovation and you only see random people on Facebook or Reddit who are behind the times using it, usually inaccurately as they're just following the misuse they learned it from.
It's particularly scary watching "AI slop" follow that path because of the extreme moral polarization associated with using LLMs or generative art. There's people who will see some casual mention of a game or film or app or something "using AI" on social media without evidence and immediately blast off into a witch hunt to make sure the whole world knows that whoever involved with that thing are Bad People who need to be shunned and punished. It has almost immediately become the go-to way to slam someone online because it carries such strong implications, requires little/no evidence, and is almost impossible to fully refute. Think there's a lot to learn from observing this, and it does not bode well for the next few years of discourse.
I agree. My first thought when reading the post: "who do you think you are??" Oh right, you're the guy who... learned to read early? That's... great, congrats?
> If you are reading this, you were most likely sent here after you shared a document with me and I viewed it unfavorably.
"Did this peasant just talk to My Majesty? Ew, how dare they, I view their document unfavorably."
> Alternately, perhaps I really like you and think you have potential, so I am sending you this message prematurely so that you don’t accidentally trigger a peeve of mine.
"Yeah, I like that one, he's funny, I'll keep him as a pet. But don't you dare send me AI slop, you peasant!"
> My life is busy. I have children, a demanding job, and personal aspirations. When I want information to help you, enable you, or supervise you, I want it in the most efficient format possible.
"Look at me, I'm the busiest. Don't have time for nothing, can't you see? Ungrateful peasants, I enable them by the thousand, only to be sent AI slop."
> I’ll cut you a break. I will hold my nose despite all the text smells because I genuinely want to see your best work in the best light possible.
"Ugh, fine, I'll have a look at your slop, you filthy slave. But that's solely because I always see everyone in the best light possible."
Can you explain what your product actually does? I looked at the Crowdbotics website, but it just seems like it's designed for nontechnical C-suite and EVP types.
> Crowdbotics uses AI to analyze your code base across three layers of abstraction, giving developers, architects, and business stakeholders the insights they need to modernize and maintain legacy code.
FWIW the site will be undergoing major changes soon which should help more clearly explain it.
Well, that's my point. I see some JSON screenshots with highlighting, but nothing really that corresponds with what my own brown- and grayfield experience leads me to look for, and not really anything very persuasive toward the interpretability of what is on offer, so that I can evaluate the quality of the tool's "judgment." But I suppose that just goes to clarify the case for the redesign you mentioned!
Not that you're asking, but what would really convince me would be being able to point a cut-down version of the tool, presumably in a BYOAPI fashion, at one of my own old stale repos like https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder, and see what kind of a modernization plan it comes up with and how that compares with my own. A toy problem to be sure, but what better field for evaluation? Think of it like a take-home interview, perhaps.
This piece sounds like a second order LLM, the first-order one generates text and the second-order one filters and optimizes it. But, in fact, this work is done by a human being.
The human reviewer asks and wants you to proof-read your output before submission. It claims being able to detect any AI slop. I wonder whether this is true, and if so, for how long. Maybe it will be replaced by a GAN LLM, and then the loop will be closed.
Ironically, that text itself reads a lot like slop.
At the same time, thanks to anti-AI-snobs like this distinguished gentleman, I have started spending significant amounts of time to deliberately not sound like an LLM (foreign-language speaker, analytical writer, typographical nerd who used em-dashs unironically), which makes me do double the work (and ironically makes the workflow of 'think yourself' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' more expensive than 'let the LLM do the thinking' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' in a business setting).
And yet - on the other hand - this absurdity has given rise to a strange, decadent joy: I've begun to write in florid, fanciful style simply to lampoon the process itself. A mockery wrapped in velvet. A jest dressed in brocade. If one must dance for the algorithmic (or anti-algorithmic) court, why not do so with powdered wig and fan in hand?
I do know my writing style has problems. My writing teacher said my style was pretentious, and I try to tone it down.
I sort of take this as a compliment, because I've been writing like this my whole life and if it reads like LLM slop, then there's the implication that the result of all of OpenAI's A/B testing and post-training leads to something like my style which at least means it gets people to engage with it!
> You should also know that I learned to read early and skipped first grade. Consequently, I was the perennial runt of the classroom and spent all my time reading as a child. I’ve gotten perfect scores on every reading test I’ve ever taken, including the SAT and GRE.
This is actually useful to know. Many people grew up in a time or place where they didn't receive the same kind of education. They may have weak reading and writing skills. Many of these folks might feel self conscious about their writing. A writing assistant is one way they can feel more confident, and I don't think that's a bad thing, even if I can usually tell.
I would rather see a piece with grammatical and spelling flaws that I _know_ came from that person's original thoughts than a LLM-perfected read with no clue about its inspirations.
Also, you can't get better without practice. LLMs being so easily accessible will make it possible to never need to learn how to write, which is extremely dangerous given how Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are the companies driving model development in the US and that LLMs aren't available all of the time (like, when you're outside interacting with real people).
Not just writing, but reading and comprehension. LLMs are a life-changing technology for a very large proportion of the population. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate, but are forced to go through life in a world that at best wasn't designed for them and at worst is actively malicious towards them.
A lot of people will look at a credit agreement they're about to sign and have no way of knowing whether it's a fair deal or naked exploitation that will financially ruin them. Thanks to LLMs, they can now point their phone camera at it and ask "is this a fair contract, or am I being ripped off". The LLM will give you an answer in speech and happily go back-and-forth with questions and clarifications for as long as you need. Whether the LLM is 90% accurate or 99% accurate at that task isn't truly critical, because it's a vast improvement over the status quo. Modern life is full of tasks that are utterly trivial for people in the top 10%, but a fraught ordeal for people lower down in the distribution.
To paraphrase a very old adage: God created man and Sam Altman made them equal.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
Technology should not be fixing such a societal or legislative issue. In the example you're providing, why should the user trust the LLM, but not the credit agreement? Why shouldn't the LLM point the user to a different credit agreement, just as exploitative? The company operating the LLM may have such an incentive, and it could be very lucrative.
Illiteracy in the case you are proposing can only increase, for the benefit of some.
(The argument that people can use open source models can't possibly be applied, considering you're speaking about, as you called them, the other 90%, or even the functionally illiterate.)
The last paragraph is concerning to say the least.
Sorry, but this is a bad take.
We should be addressing _why_ so much of our population is functionally illiterate and _why_ people can't read financial agreements that can harm them. This should definitely not be left to an extremely-profit-motivated entity to equalize.
Instead, more states are eroding public education in favor of school choice and voucher programs, which is scary in a world wherein many parents would have no issues pulling their kids out of school or sending them to religious schools that consider the Bible as the authoritative text for everything, and for-profit schools would have no problem sacrificing curriculum, learning development and staff the minute it complicates revenue.
The Straussian read is fascinating: If LLMs get even marginally better at what they do, even people with perfect SAT and GRE reading scores who spend their entire adult lives working with these models won't be able to tell.
It doesn't matter if a penis enlargement advertisement is written by a Pulitzer price winner or an AI that can conquer the galaxy, it will still be slop.
I definitely don't like it either. These people make themselves look like their have more skills than they actually do.
A bit like a crutch. I wouldn’t judge someone using those.
FWIW, I was in the same boat (>95% reading/writing comprehension scores) but graduated with a circa-2.7 GPA. Everyone's always cherry-picking the nicest looking numbers for themselves.
This reads like an LLM take by the Navy Seal guy. I love it.
In all honesty though, it is certainly relatable, and more people should be pissed at the state of our industry.
While I agree on the core idea, I found the way you went about saying it pretty embarrassing.
Haha yeah, it comes off as pretty insecure, from the looks of it the person writing has no reason to be insecure either.
To be honest, as the author, I am pretty insecure. That sounds like an accurate reading.
I feel like anyone that is in a industry that is being encroached on my AI should be insecure. That's not a bad thing, and we need to take it on board, realise what it means, and how we can move forward.
Im in half data and half software engi...and I have no clue how to best move forward for what it's worth haha. Just know I need to, in some direction, with how the tech is going. Definitely can't keep going like it's still in the pre-AI days.
Don't be so honest; better said, don't confuse honesty and volunteerism this way. I was about to call it beautifully written, and now I'm going to call it beautifully written in what I regard as a voice to which you are wise to aspire.
(Of course, you would be well advised to review my comment history on this website before deciding how much of a commendation that constitutes, versus how much a warning.)
second hand embarrassment in peak form.
You would, though, wouldn't you?
Simple, don't read anything in original, pass everything through your unslopifiying AI. That is the end game.
You can't get human output back by passing AI output through AI. You'll just get double the AI.
I don't mind AI output, AI is useful for getting you to "mediocre" fast, which is extremely useful for 75% of the population. The rest write well.
I'm very grateful that AI raised the floor to what used to be the 75th percentile.
I'm not sure when I would rather rebuke someone for sending me AI-generated output than either just ignoring it, or sending a polite minimal response to the same effect
Why not attack the substance instead of the presentation then? It’s like code, I review it as if the person had written it by hand.
Personally this feels very judgemental. I’d be happy to get an AI aided response by someone trying to improve getting their point across like many of us English language learners. LLM are a godsend for people that aren’t masters of the language in all kinds of ways.
It feels like gatekeeping to me. An attempt to prescribe a way to convey information that the author happens to be genius level at.
As a developer when I first encountered auto-linters I felt threatened. When I saw coding agents my first reaction was to feel threatened. Maybe the author is going through something similar.
I did make a comment to that effect at the end
I honestly thought this was a satire piece until I got halfway through, it was so obnoxious in tone.
> I’ve gotten perfect scores on every reading test I’ve ever taken, including the SAT and GRE.
Admittedly cringe, and changed!
One solution is to always hand-write like an AI right down to the em-dashes. Then it will be your writing style and hard to distinguish from AI output. Personally I find it hard to maintain a business-cheery persona or use verbose phrasing or office filler words.
I think this is a great post. It will ruffle some feathers and people will feel attacked, but I think the core idea is exactly right: if we are communicating and the goal is the exchange of information, use your incredible language faculty to communicate with me. To do otherwise is a disrespect to me and it indicates that you value the act of showing me your brilliant idea (in your estimation) more than you value taking the effort to actually communicate the idea to me. You are essentially an "ideas guy". I know that an LLM is a yes-man, and that a yes-man and an "ideas guy" is a combination that produces confident mistakes. If you can't be bothered to communicate your idea, or the essence of your idea, in your own words, please keep it to yourself until you've put in that effort.
Maybe I worded this more harshly than I meant. I value anybody who tries to communicate with me and I don't mean to try to discourage people from having ideas or communicating them to me, but - writing is thinking, the act of trying to actually use your language and your reasoning will improve your idea. How many times have I thought I had a good idea, then in the process of writing it out, I realize its flaws (many times)? If you pass this process off to an LLM, you skip a key step, and you leave it to me the receiver to do this work for you.
> At my first job out of grad school, I tried to convince my manager that GPT-3 could be used to figure out whether or not a building had air-conditioning vents.
I cannot tell whether that's a joke, but I'm very interested if it's serious
My colleagues definitely thought it was a joke at the time.
We had this project (all public research) to classify buildings and identify their different subsystems (e.g. load-bearing structure, roof type, ventilation type) to figure out the expected casualties if there was a WMD event of some type. We could get decent data for much of the world, but for some places we had literally nothing beyond a tiny picture of it from satellite imagery.
I had been playing with using GPT-3 to try to have it autocomplete forms like the following. This was 2021 before we had good APIs for instruct models, so this was just straight up letting the LLM regurgitate after pretraining. Here was the type of prompt we used:
""" Engineering building report for building located at 123, X Street, Knoxville TN Prepared by Benjamin Lee, FE --- Building footprint area: 1200 m2 Roof type: built-up roofing Facade material: brick HVAC present: """
Surprisingly (at the time), this was a decent prior. You could also add all sorts of one-off points of interest and amenities like swimming pools and other trivia to help guide the conditional probabilities.
[Just before I added this comment I realized it was more or less a direct message to the author, whom I noticed was replying here] As someone born very near the start of the Unix epoch, this isn't cringe at all - though I guess it is a bit Quixotic. I think in every tectonic shift of society there will be those who clutch onto the virtues of craftsmanship over "the plant" that can churn out... well, "slop"to those who appreciate craftsmanship. [my mind spun into several historical examples but 'nuff said.]
The two things that really resonated with me were:
> LLMs are very good at producing output, but they are not a substitute for you.
and
> You are a rich soup of learnings and experiences, and you’ve been simmering for decades. Please let me try some of it.
Your piece reminds me of an old song by Supertramp called "Hide in your Shell"[0]. The speaker tries to figure out how he can lead the subject out of their futile refuge and the punch lines are "I wanna know you" "Please let me near you".
Fun fact, I spent about 20 minutes composing this comment. Still "I lacked the time to make it shorter." I too was cursed with top 2% language skills and composing (and re-formulating) language is such a part of my flesh-and-blood identity that I could not conceive of a life worth living without it. When I do prompt LLMs for software solutions, I spend at least 15-25 minutes crafting context MD files and/or prompts. But then again, I'm not asking them to churn out yet another 1-shot modern web stack app.
I agree the world is richer because of folks like us. Carry on, wayward son. There'll be peace when you are done.
[0] https://www.letras.com/supertramp/84400/ I chose this site because it had the fewest pop-ups (still has a lot). Obviously, just prompting the title and the group returns the lyrics instantly from any mainstream LLM.
I've been seeing AI slop being used as ad-hominem. If I'm writing a couple paragraphs, I'll often run it through a model and ask it to make minimal edits for spelling and grammar. It makes it more readable and saves me time editing. If someone doesn't like my thoughts and they see an em dash, they can call it AI slop instead of responding, which is really annoying because the model otherwise does a good job of editing. In some cases I've been accused of AI slop for original unedited content.
Some of us are older—and use en dash all the time.
And some of us are the sort of nerds¹ who use Unicode numeric superscript characters for footnotes.
¹ An unstylish or socially awkward person generally devoted to intellectual, academic, or technical pursuits or interests.
I’ve stopped using em and en dashes for this specific reason.
To hell with that. It will be a bad day when someone accuses me of using AI to forge original work—a bad day for them, not for me.
I just use commas or semi-colons where I would have previously used em dashes. It's annoying to have to adapt to avoid triggering people's faulty AI slop pattern matching, but the alternatives are perfectly fine.
Some of us even know where to find them on the iOS—and the Android—keyboard.
I fell in love with them a long time ago when reading Nietzsche aphorisms.
I actually associate it with a younger writer, perhaps it skipped a generation. I can imagine that someone who grew up in a world where typing an em dash meant looking up an alt code would develop a style that avoids them—but it's only a long press of the - away on the device where I do most of my writing by volume so of course I'm going to use them.
Back when the English Internet was Latin-1, one
which held over well enough that I believe Word by default probably still replaces one of them if you use it."AI slop" is following the same path as "Dunning-Kruger effect," "enshittification," and so many other terms. Someone introduces a term that's useful to describe an actual phenomenon, it rapidly spreads to dominate the discourse because it's topical and punchy, and pretty soon using it is such a strong signal of being one of the "cool people who hates all the correct bad stuff" that people use it to describe stuff they merely don't like or disagree with. Once everyone's using it, it becomes useless for both its original descriptive purpose and as a social signal, so all the trendy discourse addicts move onto the next linguistic innovation and you only see random people on Facebook or Reddit who are behind the times using it, usually inaccurately as they're just following the misuse they learned it from.
It's particularly scary watching "AI slop" follow that path because of the extreme moral polarization associated with using LLMs or generative art. There's people who will see some casual mention of a game or film or app or something "using AI" on social media without evidence and immediately blast off into a witch hunt to make sure the whole world knows that whoever involved with that thing are Bad People who need to be shunned and punished. It has almost immediately become the go-to way to slam someone online because it carries such strong implications, requires little/no evidence, and is almost impossible to fully refute. Think there's a lot to learn from observing this, and it does not bode well for the next few years of discourse.
So you get to spend $700/mo to use AI but we can’t? :p
I really hope this is sarcasm. It's very copypasta-esque, cringy, and holier-than-thou judgemental.
I agree. My first thought when reading the post: "who do you think you are??" Oh right, you're the guy who... learned to read early? That's... great, congrats?
> If you are reading this, you were most likely sent here after you shared a document with me and I viewed it unfavorably.
"Did this peasant just talk to My Majesty? Ew, how dare they, I view their document unfavorably."
> Alternately, perhaps I really like you and think you have potential, so I am sending you this message prematurely so that you don’t accidentally trigger a peeve of mine.
"Yeah, I like that one, he's funny, I'll keep him as a pet. But don't you dare send me AI slop, you peasant!"
> My life is busy. I have children, a demanding job, and personal aspirations. When I want information to help you, enable you, or supervise you, I want it in the most efficient format possible.
"Look at me, I'm the busiest. Don't have time for nothing, can't you see? Ungrateful peasants, I enable them by the thousand, only to be sent AI slop."
> I’ll cut you a break. I will hold my nose despite all the text smells because I genuinely want to see your best work in the best light possible.
"Ugh, fine, I'll have a look at your slop, you filthy slave. But that's solely because I always see everyone in the best light possible."
Can you explain what your product actually does? I looked at the Crowdbotics website, but it just seems like it's designed for nontechnical C-suite and EVP types.
There is a description at the top of the site:
> Crowdbotics uses AI to analyze your code base across three layers of abstraction, giving developers, architects, and business stakeholders the insights they need to modernize and maintain legacy code.
FWIW the site will be undergoing major changes soon which should help more clearly explain it.
Well, that's my point. I see some JSON screenshots with highlighting, but nothing really that corresponds with what my own brown- and grayfield experience leads me to look for, and not really anything very persuasive toward the interpretability of what is on offer, so that I can evaluate the quality of the tool's "judgment." But I suppose that just goes to clarify the case for the redesign you mentioned!
Not that you're asking, but what would really convince me would be being able to point a cut-down version of the tool, presumably in a BYOAPI fashion, at one of my own old stale repos like https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder, and see what kind of a modernization plan it comes up with and how that compares with my own. A toy problem to be sure, but what better field for evaluation? Think of it like a take-home interview, perhaps.
> holier-than-thou judgemental
Unfortunately that's rewarded a lot these days. It's basically the same thing as rage bait.
You can capitalize on fear of AI by throwing the word slop around, getting people angry, and getting those sweet clicks.
Damn, what a beatdown. I was thinking of asking gpt about a sorting algorithm but now I'm too afraid... better go think about it myself I guess.
There's no harm in asking the oracle!
Do it, but just don’t pass it forward blindly!
This piece sounds like a second order LLM, the first-order one generates text and the second-order one filters and optimizes it. But, in fact, this work is done by a human being.
The human reviewer asks and wants you to proof-read your output before submission. It claims being able to detect any AI slop. I wonder whether this is true, and if so, for how long. Maybe it will be replaced by a GAN LLM, and then the loop will be closed.
Ironically, that text itself reads a lot like slop.
At the same time, thanks to anti-AI-snobs like this distinguished gentleman, I have started spending significant amounts of time to deliberately not sound like an LLM (foreign-language speaker, analytical writer, typographical nerd who used em-dashs unironically), which makes me do double the work (and ironically makes the workflow of 'think yourself' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' more expensive than 'let the LLM do the thinking' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' in a business setting).
And yet - on the other hand - this absurdity has given rise to a strange, decadent joy: I've begun to write in florid, fanciful style simply to lampoon the process itself. A mockery wrapped in velvet. A jest dressed in brocade. If one must dance for the algorithmic (or anti-algorithmic) court, why not do so with powdered wig and fan in hand?
I do know my writing style has problems. My writing teacher said my style was pretentious, and I try to tone it down.
I sort of take this as a compliment, because I've been writing like this my whole life and if it reads like LLM slop, then there's the implication that the result of all of OpenAI's A/B testing and post-training leads to something like my style which at least means it gets people to engage with it!