Too AI; Didn't Read
tai-dr.com
tai-dr.com
If you couldn't bother to read it, why should I?
doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.
Did you even read it through carefully once? If you couldn't bother to craft it, why should I read?
If I'm reading reference material/documentation or an update, I care a bit less so long as it isn't tedious.
The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.
No one reads a piece of text BECAUSE the writer had more work writing it than the writer will have reading it (this could end up not being true regardless of AI either way).
The “old social contract” is that readers trust the writers had something to say, and said it. The inner workings have always been irrelevant.
Trouble with genText is that it’s easy for your point to get lost in the narrative exactly because you didn’t write it—it’s like when you know something but can’t put it into words. Your own voice can get lost and so does the appeal to the readers. Nothing to do with effort, entirely to do with the content itself.
I don’t want to read your genAI text because I don’t trust that you managed to get your point across in prose, but I don’t mind reading an LLM’s output because I just wanted a piece of information.
The old social contract was between two humans. Effort was a consequence, not the target.
The more generative AI content there is in a piece, the less value it has per word.
Deep down our brains seem to know this, too.
LLM content is smooth, without novelty or surprises or shared amusement, and in text we have not summoned up ourselves, we are looking for that as a proxy for connection with the author.
I have used this analogy before but it’s like a rollercoaster without jerk or jounce; there are no thrills or interesting quirks for our brains.
So much so that when you see an AI-assisted piece of any length that has human-written sentences in it, they tend to stick out more, even before you have fully read the text, whereas the LLM words scan past so easily.
The thing that brings this home for me is that the final output of an LLM very rarely makes me chuckle at whimsy or weirdness, but the more disordered thinking traces more often do.
The problem is that your biases kick in long before you read the stuff. And I do not see a solution for this.
I write my devlog by hand and then run it through an LLM for a quick sanity check. Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in stuff you publish in this age of AI is lazy. But I don't do it when I comment on HN/Reddit etc because this is stream-of-consciousness stuff and using AI actively interferes with my thought process.
My code is almost entirely written by LLMs today, but no one can judge how much time I spend on it unless they actively follow my comments on WA, Reddit, HN, my devlog and other places. All they would see is a repo with commits done in the space of a day with nice multi-para commit messages.
This is because I get an LLM to rewrite the entire commit tree once I stabilize a project and have it reproduce the final state in a sequential manner with bite-sized commits. My own development process involves 3-5 word opaque commit messages and a lot of squashing/force pushes: impenetrable/cryptic for anyone other than myself.
There is also the problem with pushing people --- for whom English is a second/third language --- out of entire conversations. Last year, I was talking (on Reddit) to someone from South America who was using LLMs to write in English and a few people were so dismissive of the messages.
I see this as an unstated case of preening.
For better or for worse, the world now communicates in English. You cannot shut people out --- because LLM --- when you yourself would not take the time to read someone if they wrote in Spanish or Russian or Japanese (or the ~25 commonly used languages from my own country).
Also the distinction between whether they read/wrote it is nil. Either is disrespectful.
> You don't know that they didn't read it!
If someone sends me AI slop to read then I am going to assume and behave as if they didn’t read it until proven otherwise.
It is the responsibility of the sender to proactively say “I read this and stand by it as at least mostly correct and reasonable”.
They are also free to say “AI slop have not yet proof read”. Then I have an informed choice.
the the short quippy triplicate comparisons, the inability to contradict itself or reference itself, it's a stink you can pick up immediately and if I see it, it tells me you either can't tell, or didn't read it.
here's my comment ran thru ChatGPT, I hope you dont read it!
""" I don’t really understand the bandwagoning around this either. I’m a terrible writer, so I generally don’t write much. But if I could give an AI my thoughts and have it turn them into something clear, readable, and actually worth reading, why would that suddenly make the ideas themselves less valuable?
You’d be dismissing my thoughts—not because they’re bad, but because AI helped me express them. That just seems like reflexive “AI bad” nonsense.
And that’s before you even get to people who speak English as a second language. Are we really saying their ideas somehow count for less if they use AI to communicate them more clearly? That makes no sense to me. """
They might be wrong and it's not fine, and I have a few people I know who have a much higher tolerance than I do for LLM outputs, and I'm aware of that when they send them to me and I often reject it.
But it's a totally different category than someone who only skimmed what they sent me.
If someone sends me something they read and digested and think it's good, but I don't think it is, then I'm not upset with them. If someone sends me something without that first step, then I am.
(Of course they could tell me they didn't read it, and that's fine too, I can choose to read it or not.)
> Not anti-AI. Pro-giving-a-damn.
AI isn't the problem. The problem is that people are sending text without proof reading.
Yes, it's the best model right now if you want cheaper than Astra, but they increased the verbosity again!
It just keeps dumping whole novels on me. Its writing might be an improvement over the ludicrous Opus 5 speak, but much of the grating way of speaking is still there.
It's been three days since Tuesday and I'm already tired of Opus 5.5.
Opus 5 was in another league. But often Opus 5.5 still has its moments.
I was informing it of a bug and it started its lengthy response with: "I confirmed less than I claimed" as if I had just accused it of being wrong or otherwise complained.
I found that one weird, and it reminded me that I am talking to Claude rather than an OpenAI model.
And it manages to overcomplicate even the most simple concepts in its explanations.
It's still very poor compared to OpenAI models.
This seems like a fantasy to me, maybe you can offer an example where it played out like that for something that had a wide appeal or value to a lot of people. Ignoring the people complaining seems just as likely to be positive reinforcement.
I'm curious what value you think people are getting by being able to spew out large amounts of low to mid quality writing. I'm not saying we should complain about AI in general, just how some people use it.
> maybe you can offer an example where it played out like that for something that had a wide appeal or value to a lot of people
Sure, the French aristocracy had wide appeal and value for a lot of people, complaining played a part in keeping their behavior from becoming normalized even further.
Writing is hard, AI writing is not hard, that seems to be it in a nutshell. Not everyone has the same judgement of writing quality. AI tends to write with a very persuasive voice and use a lot of figurative language, maybe that is exactly what they want. I don't really know, but the point is that they find it valuable and it was easy, that seems like enough.
On the more understandable side, there are a lot of people who use it to translate what they wrote into another language.
normalization works, and therefore it's important to not be a part of it and be brave enough to create an atmosphere where it's a bad idea socially. If you can't trust people to understand that plagiarism is bad, then I guess you've just got to make it toxic to be associated with.
People didn't just sit idly by and let bigotry make a comeback, there is a massive amount of pushback, to a degree that it can be unhinged. That is exactly why it has so much appeal to some people.
I think maybe just AI;DR...?
Here's a little tip: If you're going to truly take a stand against AI - you don't use AI to build the house.
AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
The irony...
The same goes for AI generated code. I've seen some code that I'm pretty sure would have been better quality if my 90 year old grandma was steering Claude. The standard that I want to hold myself is derived from the open source world like SQLite. Sadly, some people just want to take the minimal path to ticket completion without regard for future maintenance or pride in their work. At least AI is token predicting off the code bases that I admire.
I joined this team not long ago, and I was trying to add a new feature to an API server. I saw a pretty obvious UnboundaLocalError that would occur given the right parameters. I hovered over the line and saw, "fix login". I then looked at the git log for that file and found three commits with the same text. No explanation of how login was broken, how it was fixed, and it introduced a bug. Some people care less and have less diligence than the AI agents.
I have a standard that I hold myself to which falls somewhere in the middle w.r.t. AI usage, but for the other people I work with, I want them to maximize their AI usage.
Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted.
Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.
Surely that's something that can be trained for.
Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime
For written work, i think we're so new that over a couple years two things will happen 1 - people get kinda used to it (frog in pot?) 2 - the AI will keep getting better and reducing these cringey sounding tells
What will be tough is finding that line of "does this paragraph add value to X" but that applies whether a person wrote it or an AI.
Probably not a typical response-- but perhaps it's useful to keep in mind that every day there are many people being victimized by attackers using AI (and shitty corporations.. wait I repeat myself). So in addition to the ordinary signals of indifference, ignorance, and carelessness that hitting someone with obvious LLM slop implies you'll also be accidentally taking on the voice of some people's abusers, and pick up the spillover effects of their impressions.
This can happen randomly, of course, -- picking up a chose phrase that someone else used-- but slop isn't just a random match. Right now an AI written piece (especially from claude) will identify itself over and over and over again in a way that wouldn't happen with another writer that happened to share some cultural background.
Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.
It should be line https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
You really think you coined this,"Ben"?
Also, building this in the bog sloppy way? c'mon.
Do they really not understand that their website uses the most definitive form of design slop?
Care about people but always through caring about the product and making people capable of earning their dignity.
edit: didn't realize i verbatim repeated what everyone else said
That said, wouldn’t it be funny if this site, too, were AI generated?
The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself (or direct highly targeted fixes that don't let it slopify). Never hand the clanker the pen for your writing unless you're looking to subject everyone to your Honest Take That Recontextualizes Everything.
Would you extend that approach to the conversations you have with AI? If not, why not?
that's why I keep all logging thoroughly disabled across all systems.
Saves a lot of room.
I don't get these new logic statements everyone is coming up with against AI systems.
If the excuse is "I meant literature!" well then I argue that where that line is drawn in the sand is exactly the question these kind of black and white expressions strolling entirely past.
(and that's actually the important question; where does it become neglectful for a human to throw an AI into the drivers seat wrt human read media?)
My personal line in the sand is human-to-human communication. I’m fine with AI use on either end, but keep the channel clean. I see it as a sign of respecting each other’s time.
Btw, there are pre-genAI cases of generated text. Webshop product descriptions and sports news summaries, for instance – both of those are easily templatized. I guess the difference is there is no human name attached to them and they’re fairly short
I mean, you didn't write that, you're just repeating a meme for the 1 millionth time. People have always been saying things they didn't write, and AI is just one new way.
Is that the part that matters when it comes to writing, the mechanical work of pressing the keys? Not the thinking? What if someone generates some AIslop text, and then re-types it out with their thumbs, is that then worthy of your time to read it, simply because some person felt strongly enough to retype it? Because that's basically what you did by re-posting memeslop.
Moreover, let's say you read something and you learned something from it and actually enjoyed reading it, but only afterwards find out it was written by AI. Does that mean you had wasted your time?
"Long walls of AI slop flip the equation"
Not really, there's always been long walls of human slop text to figure out if there's thinking behind it. You ever been manic or known someone with mania? Got ADHD and racing thoughts? The vast output of corporations and politicians? Nuff said.
Is there more now? Probably but it doesn't "flip the equation"; that was true after radio, tv, the internet, heck even the printing press. It's always been incumbent upon the reader to figure out the intent and quality of a piece of writing, no matter the source, and that's never been an easy or automatable task. Inb4 "but it used to be that writing something at least indicated a modicum of thought" memeslop, because that actually isn't true for the reasons I stated already.