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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

That is exactly how I see it generally being used. Why else would people be dismissing work as AI slop without even reading it, discovering what it says, or even looking into how and to what extent AI was used in a project? Saying things like "if you didn't write it I won't read it" at the first whiff of an AI smell is absolutely said to delegitimize all ai output.

Or in this specific case, why would someone call these proofs (no one is saying they are wrong) AI slop if not to delegitimize all AI output?

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This. There's a large subset of people who, seemingly consciously, try to delegitimize anything related to AI by calling it* "slop".

* even pretty amazing advances like this one

AI Derangement Syndrome

People call some work AI slop "without even reading it" when the intention/substance of the work might exist somewhere buried within a wall of impenetrable LLM text (aka "the slop").

Good AI output is indistinguishable from human output. The whiff you mention is the reasoning pleonasm and tautology (intended) escaping into the output and the "author" not proof-reading/editing it out.

But it also happens in many other contexts where that is not true, such as this one right now. Bringing me back to my point that it’s not to discriminate and clarify between good and bad, but to muddy the water.

We can't argue the latter without quantifying the former. All terms are misused by someone, but if it's statistically insignificant that's not an issue. I'm not convinced this one is sufficiently misused to detract from the common definition.

How is it not true here? Plenty of papers in this release are hard to follow, use non-standard terminology, make hard to understand leaps, and so forth.

This is a feat of superhuman intelligence, completed by a state of the art computer system. It's just done something humans long thought impossible (again), and the future is looking more like the ones science fiction has dreamt of for decades.

Sorry you don't like the phrasing.

I mean, this is possible, but it seems quite unlikely if you take a good impartial look. It's nothing I personally dislike, in fact I enjoy LLMs when they are understood as what they are, which is a tool.

What I do not don are these rose-tinted, thought-terminating glasses which make people assume that this just must be an impenetrable product of superhuman intelligence.

> it seems quite unlikely if you take a good impartial look.

I have no idea what you mean by this? The experts, including many here, don't seem to think it's unlikely.

1) Many humans labored for many years to solve these problems and did not.

2) Something else did solve at lest some of these problems.

3) The thing that did wasn't human.

What else do you need to know before you can allow yourself to be happy just to live in such an exciting time?

I was responding to a comment from a person claiming this is not an example where the "intention/substance of the work might exist somewhere buried within a wall of impenetrable LLM text". I am saying this is in fact the case, given human experts almost universally agree that the papers are badly written, with inscrutable, hard to follow logic.

I had initially understood you as saying that this inscrutable logic was merely a consequence of superhuman intelligence, which is what I deemed unlikely. I don't see experts agreeing with that position either.

I am not unhappy about this result, but I am somewhat unhappy about it being dumbed down, decontextualised and understood without any nuance.

The other reason is to delegitimize the word slop. If everything is slop, then nothing is slop. So some AI supporters also just call everything slop.

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