doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.
The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.
If someone sends me LLM output that they read and thought was fine, then that's OK with me.
They might be wrong and it's not fine, and I have a few people I know who have a much higher tolerance than I do for LLM outputs, and I'm aware of that when they send them to me and I often reject it.
But it's a totally different category than someone who only skimmed what they sent me.
If someone sends me something they read and digested and think it's good, but I don't think it is, then I'm not upset with them. If someone sends me something without that first step, then I am.
(Of course they could tell me they didn't read it, and that's fine too, I can choose to read it or not.)
To be honest I don't particularly feel the need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who dump 10 paragraphs of AI on me. If they want to give a thorough explanation of it to prove they really understand it, that's fine and I can update on the new evidence, but I'm OK with my default baseline assumption being they didn't read it so I don't need to either.
Well, they can serve it that way. Based on my experience, everyone knows who the person always serving slop on the team is except the person serving slop.
On a more recent note, today I'm really fed up with Opus 5.5.
Yes, it's the best model right now if you want cheaper than Astra, but they increased the verbosity again!
It just keeps dumping whole novels on me. Its writing might be an improvement over the ludicrous Opus 5 speak, but much of the grating way of speaking is still there.
It's been three days since Tuesday and I'm already tired of Opus 5.5.
Yeah how many times have we seen this sort of thing on HN now? We get it, people hate AI writing. But screeds like this can be even more annoying as it's pure clickbait for the HN crowd as every time these sorts of posts rocket to #1 on the homepage just like this one is now. HNers say they don't like algorithmic feeds but they sure fall for the same sort of thing they decry others for falling for.
I came up with it before that but I'm not going to claim I'm the only one, or even that I didn't hear it somewhere and have it get into my weights and stochastically parrot it later.
IMO I'd rather have fewer enshittified unusable websites so filled with ads I can't actually read anything than some awkwardly written paragraphs that I can skim/move on. I'd rather the pitchforks have been pointed at ad revenue toxicity the past decade than the AI stuff being the focal. Just my opinion.
I used to feel this way, but now, I want more people to send me AI slop because I'm tired of human slop. I am tired of parsing through two word git commits where the author didn't care enough to tell Claude to write the commit message for them. Sure, I would prefer to read your personal thoughts on the change, but if the choice is between no meaningful information and an agent's mostly coherent if a bit verbose description, I'll take the AI.
The same goes for AI generated code. I've seen some code that I'm pretty sure would have been better quality if my 90 year old grandma was steering Claude. The standard that I want to hold myself is derived from the open source world like SQLite. Sadly, some people just want to take the minimal path to ticket completion without regard for future maintenance or pride in their work. At least AI is token predicting off the code bases that I admire.
I can't even force myself to read Claude's multi-paragraph PR summaries, and instead just go read the code. They're barely coherent and incredibly verbose.
There has been an ancient form of slop that the highest form of authority has read for hundreds of years, and its a presidential brief... The President doesn't reads all the stuff that goes on, he doesn't know, he is handled the a slopified version of reality. Now the presidential briefing is at everyone's hand.
I understand the sensation of disgust when being offered to read a piece of AI slop. However, I'm actually curious about how our sensitivity towards slop will evolve. I imagine people will have varying degrees of tolerance.
Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted.
Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.
I've been thinking the same. Imagine 5 years from now - nothing is slowing down. The pace that my SW teams can produce legitimately good code that my Sr devs are like "yeah looks good, comes with test coverage, tests look good, CI is green, ship it" - it's insane.
For written work, i think we're so new that over a couple years two things will happen
1 - people get kinda used to it (frog in pot?)
2 - the AI will keep getting better and reducing these cringey sounding tells
What will be tough is finding that line of "does this paragraph add value to X" but that applies whether a person wrote it or an AI.
Sometimes at work I get slop emails from some VP or other, and the problem isn't the tone or use use of AI per se, it's that 2 sentences of meaningful content is diluted into 3 paragraphs for no discernible reason.
I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models.
I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated.
If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status.
I think they definitely are. One of the Opus 5.5 selling points in the release announcement was something like "less jargoney / rambling communication"
Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime
I can say first hand after having years of my life blown by an (eventually) AI slop powered vexatious litigant and the thousands of pages of slop filings and slop evidence forgeries I had to read... I feel a physical urge to give anyone who slops me a black eye.
Probably not a typical response-- but perhaps it's useful to keep in mind that every day there are many people being victimized by attackers using AI (and shitty corporations.. wait I repeat myself). So in addition to the ordinary signals of indifference, ignorance, and carelessness that hitting someone with obvious LLM slop implies you'll also be accidentally taking on the voice of some people's abusers, and pick up the spillover effects of their impressions.
This can happen randomly, of course, -- picking up a chose phrase that someone else used-- but slop isn't just a random match. Right now an AI written piece (especially from claude) will identify itself over and over and over again in a way that wouldn't happen with another writer that happened to share some cultural background.
Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.
What I mostly find issue is with people pushing incorrect, buggy, and low skill human work when AI would do the work better. It's sad to see oldschool pros clutching to their pearls; These days I often find myself trying to push them to do something that AI _can't_ do as well, instead of forcing a comparison.
Care about people but always through caring about the product and making people capable of earning their dignity.
>If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
that's why I keep all logging thoroughly disabled across all systems.
Saves a lot of room.
I don't get these new logic statements everyone is coming up with against AI systems.
If the excuse is "I meant literature!" well then I argue that where that line is drawn in the sand is exactly the question these kind of black and white expressions strolling entirely past.
(and that's actually the important question; where does it become neglectful for a human to throw an AI into the drivers seat wrt human read media?)
This is an outdated take. It used to be the case, but now detectors have low false positive rates. In other words good precision but not necessarily good recall for detecting AI. So some AI text evades detection, but when it flags something as AI, then it's usually right.
I believe that one was discussed with the author on HN, and that they used AI to 'copyedit'. Unfortunately that's a trap because if you make a general copyediting request most LLMs will absolutely slopify your work-- and make edits that are unambiguously bad as well as just making it look like lazy llm output.
The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself (or direct highly targeted fixes that don't let it slopify). Never hand the clanker the pen for your writing unless you're looking to subject everyone to your Honest Take That Recontextualizes Everything.
IME, it's best to ask an AI to criticize your work and suggest changes without providing actual rewrites, and make the changes you agree with in your own voice.
> If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
I mean, you didn't write that, you're just repeating a meme for the 1 millionth time. People have always been saying things they didn't write, and AI is just one new way.
I just wonder how many people smugly cry 'slop' and then immediately go ask chatgpt about something they want to know about. I suspect it's a surprisinly large amount.
There’s a difference between using and sharing. I don’t want to see your notebook. I want to see the finished document. To some of us, the difference is intuitively obvious, so we’re offended by what we’re getting at work these days.
Those are different though. One is just reading your own slop, the other is trying to make others read your slop. I don't love either one, but it's clear that one is a lot worse.
Reminds me a little bit of that guy who made his company called "Polsia" about like one-shotting full companies or something. I think he had actual investors, would have loved to be in their internal staff meeting when the intern walked in and said "you know that spells AI slop right"
[delayed]
While I agree with the sentiment, this:
If you couldn't bother to read it, why should I?
doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.
I like Oxide's version of this: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.
From my experience, they likely read 30% of it, convinced themselves that it was good enough and they thought about all of it, then shared it.
If someone sends me LLM output that they read and thought was fine, then that's OK with me.
They might be wrong and it's not fine, and I have a few people I know who have a much higher tolerance than I do for LLM outputs, and I'm aware of that when they send them to me and I often reject it.
But it's a totally different category than someone who only skimmed what they sent me.
If someone sends me something they read and digested and think it's good, but I don't think it is, then I'm not upset with them. If someone sends me something without that first step, then I am.
(Of course they could tell me they didn't read it, and that's fine too, I can choose to read it or not.)
There’s no reason to give these people the benefit of the doubt if they bother doing this.
Also the distinction between whether they read/wrote it is nil. Either is disrespectful.
To be honest I don't particularly feel the need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who dump 10 paragraphs of AI on me. If they want to give a thorough explanation of it to prove they really understand it, that's fine and I can update on the new evidence, but I'm OK with my default baseline assumption being they didn't read it so I don't need to either.
Strongly disagree with your sentiment.
> You don't know that they didn't read it!
If someone sends me AI slop to read then I am going to assume and behave as if they didn’t read it until proven otherwise.
It is the responsibility of the sender to proactively say “I read this and stand by it as at least mostly correct and reasonable”.
They are also free to say “AI slop have not yet proof read”. Then I have an informed choice.
Well, they can serve it that way. Based on my experience, everyone knows who the person always serving slop on the team is except the person serving slop.
How do you tactfully fix that, or can you?
What the industry is discovering is that copywriting is actually a skill. And it becomes pretty obvious if you don’t have any of it.
Perhaps:
Did you even read it through carefully once? If you couldn't bother to craft it, why should I read?
Especially for personal communication, I'm comfortable saying if you couldn't bother to write it, why should I read it.
If I'm reading reference material/documentation or an update, I care a bit less so long as it isn't tedious.
Ironic that this site is AI-generated
Not really ironic. They even say it here:
> Not anti-AI. Pro-giving-a-damn.
AI isn't the problem. The problem is that people are sending text without proof reading.
Wouldn't hypocrite be more suitable?
AI written, AI read
https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
How many times have people written this exact same rant now? This is honestly getting more annoying than the AI generated content.
On a more recent note, today I'm really fed up with Opus 5.5.
Yes, it's the best model right now if you want cheaper than Astra, but they increased the verbosity again!
It just keeps dumping whole novels on me. Its writing might be an improvement over the ludicrous Opus 5 speak, but much of the grating way of speaking is still there.
It's been three days since Tuesday and I'm already tired of Opus 5.5.
Yeah how many times have we seen this sort of thing on HN now? We get it, people hate AI writing. But screeds like this can be even more annoying as it's pure clickbait for the HN crowd as every time these sorts of posts rocket to #1 on the homepage just like this one is now. HNers say they don't like algorithmic feeds but they sure fall for the same sort of thing they decry others for falling for.
I have my AI agents read documents on my behalf and then ask them questions. Whether those documents are written by humans or not.
TAI;DR.
I think maybe just AI;DR...?
Yes, somebody else came up with that last month (AFAIK): https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read
I came up with it before that but I'm not going to claim I'm the only one, or even that I didn't hear it somewhere and have it get into my weights and stochastically parrot it later.
AI;DR fits. Though some deserve a stronger response -- "AI;FU" -- like the disingenuous AI-powered hiring spam targeting HN users recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849134
It is hard to know what is getting more tiresome, AI writing or complaining about AI writing. We get it, we feel the same way.
Part of not allowing it to become normalized is complaining about it..
Normalising complaining about a thing is the first step to normalising that thing.
IMO I'd rather have fewer enshittified unusable websites so filled with ads I can't actually read anything than some awkwardly written paragraphs that I can skim/move on. I'd rather the pitchforks have been pointed at ad revenue toxicity the past decade than the AI stuff being the focal. Just my opinion.
I used to feel this way, but now, I want more people to send me AI slop because I'm tired of human slop. I am tired of parsing through two word git commits where the author didn't care enough to tell Claude to write the commit message for them. Sure, I would prefer to read your personal thoughts on the change, but if the choice is between no meaningful information and an agent's mostly coherent if a bit verbose description, I'll take the AI.
The same goes for AI generated code. I've seen some code that I'm pretty sure would have been better quality if my 90 year old grandma was steering Claude. The standard that I want to hold myself is derived from the open source world like SQLite. Sadly, some people just want to take the minimal path to ticket completion without regard for future maintenance or pride in their work. At least AI is token predicting off the code bases that I admire.
I can't even force myself to read Claude's multi-paragraph PR summaries, and instead just go read the code. They're barely coherent and incredibly verbose.
Why TAI-DR instead of TMAI;DR (pronounced “tee-my; dee-ar”) ?
As in “Too Much AI; Didn’t Read”.
Too Bandwagony; Didn't Bother
> a boundary, not an acronym problem
The irony...
Not the startup-themed website featuring logins and calls to action…
Well.. don't think I'll be reading because the site is AI
I prefer the simpler “aidr”
Really don't like the weird grey yellow sites...they're just ugly
There has been an ancient form of slop that the highest form of authority has read for hundreds of years, and its a presidential brief... The President doesn't reads all the stuff that goes on, he doesn't know, he is handled the a slopified version of reality. Now the presidential briefing is at everyone's hand.
I understand the sensation of disgust when being offered to read a piece of AI slop. However, I'm actually curious about how our sensitivity towards slop will evolve. I imagine people will have varying degrees of tolerance.
Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted.
Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.
I've been thinking the same. Imagine 5 years from now - nothing is slowing down. The pace that my SW teams can produce legitimately good code that my Sr devs are like "yeah looks good, comes with test coverage, tests look good, CI is green, ship it" - it's insane.
For written work, i think we're so new that over a couple years two things will happen 1 - people get kinda used to it (frog in pot?) 2 - the AI will keep getting better and reducing these cringey sounding tells
What will be tough is finding that line of "does this paragraph add value to X" but that applies whether a person wrote it or an AI.
I don't want your prompt either. Do the work to make "your" writing not sound like AI, or write it yourself, or don't expect me to read it.
Sometimes at work I get slop emails from some VP or other, and the problem isn't the tone or use use of AI per se, it's that 2 sentences of meaningful content is diluted into 3 paragraphs for no discernible reason.
I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models. I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated. If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status.
Surely that's something that can be trained for.
This is largely a Claude problem and GPT models don't suffer from it to nearly the same extent.
I think they definitely are. One of the Opus 5.5 selling points in the release announcement was something like "less jargoney / rambling communication"
Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime
I can say first hand after having years of my life blown by an (eventually) AI slop powered vexatious litigant and the thousands of pages of slop filings and slop evidence forgeries I had to read... I feel a physical urge to give anyone who slops me a black eye.
Probably not a typical response-- but perhaps it's useful to keep in mind that every day there are many people being victimized by attackers using AI (and shitty corporations.. wait I repeat myself). So in addition to the ordinary signals of indifference, ignorance, and carelessness that hitting someone with obvious LLM slop implies you'll also be accidentally taking on the voice of some people's abusers, and pick up the spillover effects of their impressions.
This can happen randomly, of course, -- picking up a chose phrase that someone else used-- but slop isn't just a random match. Right now an AI written piece (especially from claude) will identify itself over and over and over again in a way that wouldn't happen with another writer that happened to share some cultural background.
Need a "website is Claudish; skipping to next" one-pager.
Do they really not understand that their website uses the most definitive form of design slop?
All the visually noisy parts really don't help it get the point across. More like the opposite.
It should be line https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
omg i love that. reminds me of the hours i've spent on the paperclip game
Really cool!
Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.
https://www.just-prompt-motherfucker.com/
Most people at my work don't think I'm using AI simply because I instruct it to never use more than two sentences of max 10-15 words each.
I'm not reading any slop, period.
Ironic that this itself is an obvious slop site
AI Slop; Didn't Bother AS;DB
I’m a fan of AI;DR
Random text in many random places is quintessential slop
What I mostly find issue is with people pushing incorrect, buggy, and low skill human work when AI would do the work better. It's sad to see oldschool pros clutching to their pearls; These days I often find myself trying to push them to do something that AI _can't_ do as well, instead of forcing a comparison.
Care about people but always through caring about the product and making people capable of earning their dignity.
If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
That said, wouldn’t it be funny if this site, too, were AI generated?
The irony is it's ai generated. It has codex's markings all over it. That lime green look is a dead giveaway.
>If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
that's why I keep all logging thoroughly disabled across all systems.
Saves a lot of room.
I don't get these new logic statements everyone is coming up with against AI systems.
If the excuse is "I meant literature!" well then I argue that where that line is drawn in the sand is exactly the question these kind of black and white expressions strolling entirely past.
(and that's actually the important question; where does it become neglectful for a human to throw an AI into the drivers seat wrt human read media?)
The other similar site making the rounds, https://noslopgrenade.com/, is indeed in part written by AI as evaluated by Pangram.
AI detectors are useless. I don't know how this forum got so infected with Pangram shills, but at this point they need to be banned.
This is an outdated take. It used to be the case, but now detectors have low false positive rates. In other words good precision but not necessarily good recall for detecting AI. So some AI text evades detection, but when it flags something as AI, then it's usually right.
Apart from their own data, a lot of people's anecdotal experience is that its pretty accurate, why would they need to banned for that?
Is that with or without the slop grenade examples included, because I can see how those might trigger the detector
Without.
I believe that one was discussed with the author on HN, and that they used AI to 'copyedit'. Unfortunately that's a trap because if you make a general copyediting request most LLMs will absolutely slopify your work-- and make edits that are unambiguously bad as well as just making it look like lazy llm output.
The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself (or direct highly targeted fixes that don't let it slopify). Never hand the clanker the pen for your writing unless you're looking to subject everyone to your Honest Take That Recontextualizes Everything.
IME, it's best to ask an AI to criticize your work and suggest changes without providing actual rewrites, and make the changes you agree with in your own voice.
> If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
Would you extend that approach to the conversations you have with AI? If not, why not?
> If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
I mean, you didn't write that, you're just repeating a meme for the 1 millionth time. People have always been saying things they didn't write, and AI is just one new way.
it's 100% written by ai lmao
I just wonder how many people smugly cry 'slop' and then immediately go ask chatgpt about something they want to know about. I suspect it's a surprisinly large amount.
There’s a difference between using and sharing. I don’t want to see your notebook. I want to see the finished document. To some of us, the difference is intuitively obvious, so we’re offended by what we’re getting at work these days.
Those are different though. One is just reading your own slop, the other is trying to make others read your slop. I don't love either one, but it's clear that one is a lot worse.
This website is ironically too AI to read.
the irony here is that this entire website is dripping with AI design slop
edit: didn't realize i verbatim repeated what everyone else said
Reminds me a little bit of that guy who made his company called "Polsia" about like one-shotting full companies or something. I think he had actual investors, would have loved to be in their internal staff meeting when the intern walked in and said "you know that spells AI slop right"