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Comment by maxdo | Hacker News Reader

I participate book club for several years with friends, we casually navigate certain topics, and i can tell you human slop in literature is a real thing.

- almost every book try to stretch core idea into book size format

- unique ideas are rare people attack them under different angels

- a later phenomena : their believes almost predict entire book, outcomes etc, brainwash impact is real

so not sure, how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea, with the book, you have to spend 10-40 hours to digest average, absolutely non fresh ideas, that author brought in just to sell that book, otherwise it would be magazine article worth.

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This is sadly correct/true. This is one of the many reasons why I militantly reject carbon chauvinism. Most of the potshots people take against AI can be easily retorted with “have you seen how bad the average human is at X?”

> how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea

Why don't you just use whatever LLM you have on hand to summarize every book you could read instead of reading it? The idea that ai slop is 'better' because you can distill the idea is an insane point to me because it treats books as a pure consumption-based concept, where the goal is strictly to finish a book and move on.

I think even the worst book is more valuable than whatever garbage an LLM writes because you can at least learn from the intent. Where and why the author failed, where they got stuck, the points they failed to make. LLM writing is a void, there's nothing to be learned.

In your experience, how do you determine book slop? For me I don't really stray from authors and topics I like, and non-fiction isn't really my go to outside of sci-fi, and mystery/law books. Like on the stretch point, I can tell that in other media but not so much books.

Business books are 99% slop.

Self improvement books! All of them! "Make good habits, not bad habits because this is what Lincoln did..."

They’ve used a pretty good filter for the human slop - prestigious awards.

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