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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

I think I'm going to puke if I see one more "It's not X. It's Y." phrase or the word "load-bearing" used metaphorically.

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I guess the good news may be that if/when there is a major pricing correction, that many of the people using free or $20/mo subscriptions to generate social media commentary may balk at the real cost and go back to writing it themselves.

One can at least hope.

Something I have noticed is that the people who are using it to write everything are the same people who had a poor level of English writing a year or two ago.

It's just "intellectual" botox.

> It's just "intellectual" botox.

Could be just ESL, it's hard to close the proficient to native gap.

I've never had a problem with direct translation... but the 3 paragraph choppy structure with subheadings full of AI-isms is not ESL users using it faithfully

The people I've seen are English / American and monolingual.

Would make sense ... writing is a skill, and one that I think most people are proud of if they are good at it.

Maybe it's different if you are doing technical/commercial writing, but for social media where you are writing for fun, and to express yourself, it'd be odd to let AI be your voice unless you realize your own writing is very poor.

> for social media where you are writing for fun, and to express yourself, it'd be odd to let AI be your voice unless you realize your own writing is very poor.

A lot of people post for clout, so something that can skip the difficult process of becoming a good writer (and original thinker) is more than enough. They can churn out think pieces about any topic at an unlimited pace, basically.

It doesn’t add much to the world, but they get a lot of traction (which I cannot understand, given the quality of content.) And that’s what matters to them.

I think if you gave most people the choice between (a) being a thoughtful and original writer (b) being seen as a thoughtful and original writer, the vast majority choose (b). Especially when it is zero effort.

Many, many people post to social media not for fun, but to maintain a more-or-less fake image or to advance some sort of agenda.

I noticed this from former coworkers who I know couldn't write beyond first grader level a few years ago. They weren't good at their native language either.

Now they write "competent" blog posts on LinkedIn that seem 100% AI slop. Some are employed at AWS, too.

I'm not a native English speaker as I'm sure my writing shows. My point is that I'd rather read genuine posts full of grammar errors instead of slop.

I can't tell from your post that English is not your native language, outside of the Americanisms (I assumed that American English was your native language) :-)

>if/when there is a major pricing correction

Github Copilot moves to usage-based billing in two weeks.[1]

1. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

I think there will always be a free tier that they'll be willing to use. Even if it sounds hackneyed, those folks will still use it because many people are not discerning readers anyway.

Despite what I just said, I do hope so, because I'm really not inclined to pay for it, at least not very much. I don't need another $100-200/mo bill in my life, and it doesn't provide that level of value as a chatbot. Google is enough.

I'm not sure that free tier will necessarily continue forever though, unless there is a way to monetize it (presumably by advertising, or by selling data they've gleaned about the user), or perhaps if there is no privacy and the provider is treating you as a source of free data. Right now we're still in the market-share grabbing "never mind the profits, count the users" stage.

A free tier will almost always exist. Mostly for the reasons you already describe. That's a training ground for their small models as well as a way to get full access to new training data (and advertisements). As well as funnel new paying users. Why would you ever give that up?

Thanks for calling that out. I went through and extracted a good handful of those. It’s not a short list. It’s a handful.

“”” The subsidy era is not winding down gracefully. It is showing cracks everywhere. … the question is not whether they got a good deal. The question is how long that deal survives. … A developer running three or four concurrent coding agents is not consuming 3x or 4x the tokens of a chat conversation. It is an order of magnitude more … These are not experiments anymore. They are load-bearing workflows. … That is not a rounding error. That is a line item that needs its own budget code. “””

"Thanks for calling that out"? That's what Claude and ChatGPT tell me a few times a week.

You're absolutely right to call that out. Let me restate that with the correct assumptions and that feedback, honestly and directly...

It's not metaphorical. It's load-bearing.

If you want the belt-and-suspenders version, it's both.

Server load, for sure.

Load bearing slop phrases, you're touching up on something real!

Or describing something as “the unlock”.

This is key. /s

I hate it. This article starts off well! There is data and it seems well argued, but then halfway through, there it is: example of trend. Another example. Third example. It’s not just X – it’s Y.

It’s as jarring as getting halfway into a well written article, clicking a link to a source, and getting rickrolled.

It’s all you can do to not let it distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.

load bearing has snuck into my vocabulary, but I work with construction workers so it's slightly more intuitive I guess? :/

I definitely heard it semi-frequently from SRE types well before the rise of LLMs.

LLMs are just parroting relevant documents they've assimilated.

It's so obvious that they've been trained on a metric shit-tonne of white papers and corporate emails it's not even funny.

Managers in my org love using it in "their" Slack messages.

I've come to realize that folks are including "ai-slop" in their ~public use of AI to intentionally signal to others that they're using AI. To some, that signal results in revulsion. To others, that signal results in approval. In my opinion, the approval signal comes from investors, board members, c-suite, and now management. They want us to use AI? Let's make sure they know we are.

I used to think that signalling that I am not using AI would be a good thing, and that people would appreciate that, but now all my public profiles are AI.

This is the real unlock.

please stop giving hints on LLM writing markers, let's not do their adversarial training for free

AI companies are more than aware of those telltale signs by now though

or the word 'canonical'

Or they're a prolog programmer.

X is the adjective framing.

witness the first signs of AI fatigue

Based on the number of upvotes my comment has received (70+ as of now), it's nowhere near "first signs" any more, and hasn't been in a while.

I have been saying this and viscerally reacting to this “contrastive language” for months. it… “hits different”…

“Load-bearing” is a new one for me though, yuck.

It is not human language. It's AI slop!

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