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Comment by rollinDyno | Hacker News Reader

I understand the sensation of disgust when being offered to read a piece of AI slop. However, I'm actually curious about how our sensitivity towards slop will evolve. I imagine people will have varying degrees of tolerance.

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.

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I can say first hand after having years of my life blown up by an (eventually) AI slop powered vexatious litigant and the thousands of pages of slop filings and slop evidence forgeries I had to read... I feel a physical urge to give anyone who slops me a black eye.

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.

I've been thinking the same. Imagine 5 years from now - nothing is slowing down. The pace that my SW teams can produce legitimately good code that my Sr devs are like "yeah looks good, comes with test coverage, tests look good, CI is green, ship it" - it's insane.

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.

I don't want your prompt either. Do the work to make "your" writing not sound like AI, or write it yourself, or don't expect me to read it.

I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models. I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated. If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status.

Surely that's something that can be trained for.

This is largely a Claude problem and GPT models don't suffer from it to nearly the same extent.

I think they definitely are. One of the Opus 5.5 selling points in the release announcement was something like "less jargoney / rambling communication"

Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime

You can create a skill for that today. No need for specific training.

Sometimes at work I get slop emails from some VP or other, and the problem isn't the tone or use use of AI per se, it's that 2 sentences of meaningful content is diluted into 3 paragraphs for no discernible reason.

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