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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

What's exhausting is getting through a ten-paragraph article and realising there was only two paragraphs of actual content, then having to wade back through it to figure out which parts came from the prompt, and which parts were entirely made up by the automated sawdust injector.

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That's not an AI problem, it's a a general blog post problem. Humans inject their own sawdust all the time. AI, however, can write concisely if you just tell it to. Perhaps you should call this stuff "slop" without the AI and then it doesn't matter who/what wrote it because it's still slop regardless.

I completely agree with your parent that it's tedious seeing this "fake and gay" problem everywhere and wonder what an unwinnable struggle it must be for the people who feel they have to work out if everything they read was AI written or not.

It used to require some real elbow grease to write blogspam, now it's much easier.

I hardly ever go through a post fisking it for AI tells, they leap out at me now whether I want them to or not. As the density of them increases my odds of closing the tab approach one.

It's not a pleasant time to read Show HNs but it just seems to be what's happening now.

It never used to be a general blog post problem. It was a problem with the kinds of blogs I'd never read to begin with, but "look, I made a thing!" was generally worth reading. Now, I can't even rely on "look, I made a thing!" blog posts to accurately describe the author's understanding of the thing they made.

I see your point. You need to recalibrate how to decide what to read since the proxy has changed its meaning. I found a similar issue when monetized Youtubers started making things. It used to be amazing to see some hobby project that was a little bit sophisticated but now big stars have lots of money and their full-time job is doing incredible projects just to make videos of them. It's not AI but it's something that didn't used to exist. I'm thinking channels like "Stuff Made Here" and "I Did A Thing" that sound humble but doing difficult, expensive projects that have no purpose except to look good on a video.

> and wonder what an unwinnable struggle it must be for the people who feel they have to work out if everything they read was AI written or not

Exactly!

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