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Comment by guytv | Hacker News Reader

Which raises the question: if everything is generated, why bother reading it at all? Just ask the LLM what you want to know—why treat headlines like bookmarks?

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One interesting thing about the LLM era is it really highlights what things in life actually add value.

I haven’t had that experience at all. My experience is that if you allow people to be lazy they will be, at the expense of society.

What has your experience been like?

My experience, AI has shown me that a lot of stuff I do online. Watching videos, reading random articles, is mostly vapid pointless nonsense.

AI slop has finally woken me up and I am prioritizing IRL activities with friends and family, or activities more in the real world like miniature painting, piano, etc. It's made me much more selective with what activities I engage in, because getting sucked in to the endless AI miasma isn't what I want for my life.

That’s awesome, really happy to hear that!

Personally I still haven’t run into slop in long form video format, but it’s definitely concerning.

how so, any examples

Personally, it’s highlighted the value of physical books and helped me spend less time getting sucked into rabbit holes on devices. I’ve been much more deliberate about what text I choose to read. Been burning through classics that have been on my shelf for decades.

exactly what we're trending towards.

You can use the LLM, but you don't also have the rest of the data they relied on. A LLM can generate everything if it starts from a minimal prompt, but this is a recipe for slop. If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate, the article will reflect your ideas and the data if was fed.

I know it is fashionable to put everything a LLM outputs in the slop box, but I don't think it reflects reality.

> If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate

Then the LLM can still make shit up and be absolutely wrong.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s wrong as long as the ideas it comes up with are good or interesting, which they often are.

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