low_tech_love

To be honest I’m surprised, I actually like them, even though they are obviously reductions to the average, bland repetitions of stuff that’s been done over and over again. That’s not necessarily a criticism, I know that’s what AI is and we should not expect more. And of course a small event with little budget does not need more than that (although of course you could think of something more unique if you wanted).

What scares me is what happens after we park on these ideas for years/decades because they are cheap and fast and just good enough. Will anyone take the time and effort to continue being creative?

Here is my suggestion: scale the “difficulty” to the same rate as the submissions. Instruct the reviewers like this: “this year we had 10x the average submissions of the last 5 years, so be 10x stricter than you would normally.”

Another idea: make it less about the written word and more about artifacts. Require more proof, more protocols, more spreadsheets, more code, etc.

And stop caring about the words so much, as they really don’t mean anything anymore. Larger papers should be punished instead of rewarded; the shorter the paper (in terms of words) the higher the chance to be published. Every word should be backed up by data, code, etc. Any paragraph that doesn’t pair with proof should mean rejection.

Ok but what you described is very different than being forced to review if you submit. If anyone who submits a paper has to review that is just ridiculous. There is no requirement for submitting a paper.

It’s important to notice that flagged papers were still accepted; anyone who spends any time around researchers knows the fact that most people are salivating over AI. That’s why they don’t want to punish it, they’re also using it. And they don’t want to create an environment where it is overly punished, at least not while they can take advantage of it. There is only a small amount of serious people complaining, but in my experience the opinion of the vast majority is “stop worrying and learn to love it”. Which brings to the surface a very harsh reality: almost nobody gave a damn about the science to begin with.

This is the truth. As a researcher, I say good riddance. It was always kinda stupid, AI is just accelerating the demise of something that hasn’t worked correctly for a few decades now. The time is way overdue for us to figure out some other system.

“…because conferences have made it mandatory to review 4-5 papers if you submit to them.”

Is that really a thing? So if I submit a legit paper it is being reviewed forcefully by a bunch of random people from god knows where?

You are arguing that creativity is still alive by showing creative works from before AI? I think your argument is backwards.

Hey, I gotta say that reading your actual original words feels much more interesting than whatever is that artificial slop on your website!

The problem is that we want, at the same time, to allow everyone to do it (by not enforcing any rules against it) AND laugh at a satire like this as if it was ridiculous. Both things cannot happen at the same time. It’ll be some time before we acknowledge that there is no research without AI, so we’ll keep pretending it doesn’t exist, but in the meantime, we will be doing all research with AI anyway. And by the time we arrive at a scenario like the article’s, it won’t be so ridiculous anymore, because we will be used to the even more ridiculous situation of pretending we’re not doing it.

It’s a joke and all but also not really? You might have to go do a chalk talk at some point, and that is basically the only part of this article that is actually not real. The rest (about how everyone in academia is prompting everything) is absolutely VERY real.

The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.

Why would you bother telling them it’s satire?

To be honest, given the overwhelming (and unfair, and unreasonable) pressure against them from the Leviathan, which the other companies do not have to deal with, they’re doing pretty damn good. In my mind the trust has actually increased that they can handle bad times and still push forward.

The FBI has started to test the idea in other countries:

https://www.mixvale.com.br/2026/06/26/fbi-warns-brazilian-po...

Let me guess, somebody magically set some huge bets on poly and stock market 5 minutes before the announcement ?

Honest question: how do you think you contributed to the discussion by throwing some AI slop into an AI slop conversation?

That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI.

So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt?

So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?

Interesting when you mention Ship of Theseus, I never thought of that but I wonder if that is where the name “Ship of Harkinian” comes from?

It’s funny when people dismiss this as some kind of Luddite argument, when the reality is so simple: you have a producer-consumer system where the producer has been accelerated 1000x but the consumer remained the same. How can that work?

If the writer did not put effort to write, why would you put effort to read? Writing became 1000x faster but reading stayed the same speed.

” Perhaps we’ll get used to this new tool, and move on.”

Perhaps we’ll be flooded with slop to the point where nobody can distinguish reality from fiction anymore, because it takes too long to check and reason about it with our outdated tools and thinking processes. Then perhaps people will lose faith in the “truth” and simply accept that one-sided ideology and biased belief is all that exists and matters, and corrupt leaders (at all levels) will make use of that to sway masses of useful idiots.

Wait…

It does not matter, to be honest. Slowly people are realizing that nobody checks anything anymore, and when they check, nobody cares about positives or negatives, be them true or false. Actually, if you write something by hand today, all you’re doing is slowing yourself down, because truthfully nobody else will do that. Do you really think that you will have 100 times the benefit for doing 100 times more work than the other medíocre competition? No, because the audience does not care, and will care less and less as time goes on.

Not only that but the vacation is real. If someone is off then you should not expect them to answer at all (because if you do you’ll get very disappointed).

I read one sentence into this and knew directly that the developer must’ve been Swedish!

They’re using public money to “train” this.

Looks really cool, please release episode 1 as shareware! (Or a demo on Steam works too)

I understand what you mean and it’s not wrong, but still there is a contract that is being fulfilled: human in both ends. Whether it’s rambling or not, someone wrote it, and it represents a person’s idea of whatever is being discussed. That contract is now broken, but in an asymmetrical way, only one side gets to save time. My brain refuses to spend time reading crap that I don’t even know if someone even took time to prompt. Maybe they just wrote “give me something to post, whatever makes me look smart”. It’s just completely broke for me and makes me actually sick in the stomach when I read almost anything (textual uncanny valley?)

And worse, you use it so much that when the question is actually great, you can’t convey that convincingly anymore.

I’m still holding on to my hope that LLMs will destroy verbosity and usher in an era of concise and objective human-written works. Especially in academia. In my research area people write 10-page articles that could easily have been 2 or 3, for no reason other than that 10 page is the publication limit most of the time and if you write less it’s seen as lazy or something. Not to mention 20-page journal articles with humongous literature reviews that everyone skips, and so many meaningless diagrams and sections. I still hope that LLMs will make people so tired of reading slop that they’ll beg you to please submit shorter articles.

Yeah, you’re spot on, and I hope people catch up on this soon (it’s already taking too long). I think one thing that most people haven’t realized yet is that reading AI slop bombs is really time consuming and stressful. We’re still operating on the assumption that reading is “free”, which came from the fact that writing took time and effort and written words were mostly meaningful before (at least you read something that you know took someone some time to write). But now that “writing” slop is so easy, reading can’t keep up. We can’t just keep reading all the meaningless crap people dump everywhere. It’s not scalable or even doable.

I think you’re wrong in one thing: Reading through meaningless walls of text takes time and effort that I’m not willing to waste. So it’s not just accepting a different culture; it’s not “free”. Reading AI grenades is really stressful (at least for me).