Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

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Here's another thing: I think spending too much time with generative AI makes your taste worse, by habituating you to stuff that's pretty bad.

I think it's a sort of slot machine effect, you get used to losing and when something goes slightly well you wildly overestimate how good it is. You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation. Because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output, because that output is not all that great.

It looks good compared to all the failed generations though!

Also, spending all your time cranking the slot machine handle and occasionally winning convinces your brain that you have a magic ability at cranking the slot machine handle, when actually you were at best slightly lucky. So you get people who convince themselves they are geniuses at using AI when they are actually average or slightly above average.

> You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation, and because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output

Is this actually true? I know of no artists nor programmers who used to have strict requirements, careful eyes and "good taste" who after playing around with AI suddenly dropped those things, that'd be very against basically their personality.

Do you have any concrete and practical examples of any currently public artists you've seen be affected by this?

Darren Aronofsky

https://www.decodingeverything.com/darren-aronofsky-ai-slop-...

(Also, this website when Show HNs with slop READMEs get to the front page and nobody seems to notice that it's written in grating Claudese.)

> READMEs get to the front page and nobody seems to notice that it's written in grating Claudese

Or you know, it's just not that important whether the README is written by Claude or not.

Generally speaking people don't use a service/library for the author's ability to write excellent proses.

> Generally speaking people don't use a service/library for the author's ability to write excellent proses.

I think this is incredibly wrong. I'd even go as far to say that a well presented README/website is the second most important factor, only behind network effect.

Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.

I've seen developers who genuinely like to write code, but never met one who likes to write documents. I know they exist somewhere, but I'd not judge someone's programming ability/willingness by their English writing ability/willingness.

I like to write documents. It helps me understand the code much better, as I'm forced to write down what's happening at each stage. Yes, code itself can be self documenting, but writing it in English can elucidate any hidden assumptions.

I could vibe code the hell out of something but write a good README for it by hand, doesn't mean that something is actually good. But yes, A -> B != B -> A, as your last sentence says.

From my point of view, if I wanted an AI summary of a project I could generate one myself. An unlabeled AI readme is almost worse than nothing! I've generated AI readmes myself- they can be useful- but they aren't something to show off.

I'll read a badly-formatted readme written by a human with far more interest than a formulaic LLM summary of a project. But it seems like nobody even notices a readme is slop because it has nice Markdown, and my best guess as to why is that people have become habituated to this stuff.

In this case the point is that they accompany the new flood of low-effort self-promoted shovelware vibecode projects.

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