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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

It's LLM phraseology.

It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).

It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.

I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".

You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.

But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".

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Related story: I recently watched a new video by a well-known YouTuber whom I was subscribed to for years. Something was off with the video: the script sounded like LLM slop. It sounded as if the author provided some bullet points on the main content of the script, and then let the LLM "expand" on it, with its typical, overly verbose, mode-collapsed LLM style. Then the YouTuber seems to have added some light edits to the script himself because it did sound real occasionally.

This was just after a few minutes of video and I didn't finish watching it. At a quick glance, I didn't see anybody else pointing this out in the comments. Disappointing.

How can I be so certain about LLM usage after just a few minutes? It's both the fact that it sounded like slop, and the fact that I intuitively know his real writing style from past years, and it simply sounded very different this time.

An article about OneDrive being substantially LLM written is sort of okay (who cares about OneDrive by some Office365 blog), but if people you thought you like resort to these methods I feel betrayed.

I had something similar happen where someone linked a blog article, I thought it sounded like slop, especially since they were posting 2-3 articles a day, but I wasn't sure so I checked their back catalogue.

I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.

Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.

Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.

Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.

Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?

A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.

Compare:

Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20191017113113/https://www.geeky...

Rewritten slop: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/metal-detecting-sandals/

Damn this is horrible. So the author chose to waste everyone's time by expanding with cow manure. I generally don't read much articles online anymore since they are all likely to contain slop unless authored by known non-slop users.

Yea, that’s sad.

I get the feeling lots of blogs that are making advertising money are incentivized to do this: the most SEO buzzwords, the most "clinical" language, the most adjectives... I get that "this isn't right" feeling often now and I usually just close the browser and do something else.

So he is rewriting the past without any visible indicator that he did so, and with the original publication date. That's deceptive and borders on unethical.

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