7 ms·
I am a SOTA 0-shot classifier of your slop
- tracedddd 1y agoWhile I agree on the core idea, I found the way you went about saying it pretty embarrassing.
- stephantul 1y agoHaha yeah, it comes off as pretty insecure, from the looks of it the person writing has no reason to be insecure either.
- ckrapu 1y agoTo be honest, as the author, I am pretty insecure. That sounds like an accurate reading.
- throwanem 1y agoDon't be so honest; better said, don't confuse honesty and volunteerism this way. I was about to call it beautifully written, and now I'm going to call it beautifully written in what I regard as a voice to which you are wise to aspire. (Of course, you would be well advised to review my comment history on this website before deciding how much of a commendation that constitutes, versus how much a warning.)
- Incipient 1y agoI feel like anyone that is in a industry that is being encroached on my AI should be insecure. That's not a bad thing, and we need to take it on board, realise what it means, and how we can move forward. Im in half data and half software engi...and I have no clue how to best move forward for what it's worth haha. Just know I need to, in some direction, with how the tech is going. Definitely can't keep going like it's still in the pre-AI days.
- _zoltan_ 1y agosecond hand embarrassment in peak form.
- throwanem 1y agoYou would, though, wouldn't you?
- sudhirb 1y agoI'm not sure when I would rather rebuke someone for sending me AI-generated output than either just ignoring it, or sending a polite minimal response to the same effect
- barbazoo 1y agoWhy not attack the substance instead of the presentation then? It’s like code, I review it as if the person had written it by hand.
- visarga 1y agoSimple, don't read anything in original, pass everything through your unslopifiying AI. That is the end game.
- stavros 1y agoYou can't get human output back by passing AI output through AI. You'll just get double the AI. I don't mind AI output, AI is useful for getting you to "mediocre" fast, which is extremely useful for 75% of the population. The rest write well. I'm very grateful that AI raised the floor to what used to be the 75th percentile.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Cheer2171 1y agoI honestly thought this was a satire piece until I got halfway through, it was so obnoxious in tone. > I’ve gotten perfect scores on every reading test I’ve ever taken, including the SAT and GRE.
- ckrapu 1y agoAdmittedly cringe, and changed!
- bix6 1y agoSo you get to spend $700/mo to use AI but we can’t? :p
- rf15 1y agoThis reads like an LLM take by the Navy Seal guy. I love it. In all honesty though, it is certainly relatable, and more people should be pissed at the state of our industry.
- jacob019 1y agoI've been seeing AI slop being used as ad-hominem. If I'm writing a couple paragraphs, I'll often run it through a model and ask it to make minimal edits for spelling and grammar. It makes it more readable and saves me time editing. If someone doesn't like my thoughts and they see an em dash, they can call it AI slop instead of responding, which is really annoying because the model otherwise does a good job of editing. In some cases I've been accused of AI slop for original unedited content.
- sroussey 1y agoSome of us are older—and use en dash all the time.
- trollbridge 1y agoI’ve stopped using em and en dashes for this specific reason.
- throwanem 1y agoTo hell with that. It will be a bad day when someone accuses me of using AI to forge original work—a bad day for them, not for me.
- Veen 1y agoI just use commas or semi-colons where I would have previously used em dashes. It's annoying to have to adapt to avoid triggering people's faulty AI slop pattern matching, but the alternatives are perfectly fine.
- Spivak 1y agoI actually associate it with a younger writer, perhaps it skipped a generation. I can imagine that someone who grew up in a world where typing an em dash meant looking up an alt code would develop a style that avoids them—but it's only a long press of the - away on the device where I do most of my writing by volume so of course I'm going to use them.
- nDEis 1y ago> At my first job out of grad school, I tried to convince my manager that GPT-3 could be used to figure out whether or not a building had air-conditioning vents. I cannot tell whether that's a joke, but I'm very interested if it's serious
- ckrapu 1y agoMy colleagues definitely thought it was a joke at the time. We had this project (all public research) to classify buildings and identify their different subsystems (e.g. load-bearing structure, roof type, ventilation type) to figure out the expected casualties if there was a WMD event of some type. We could get decent data for much of the world, but for some places we had literally nothing beyond a tiny picture of it from satellite imagery. I had been playing with using GPT-3 to try to have it autocomplete forms like the following. This was 2021 before we had good APIs for instruct models, so this was just straight up letting the LLM regurgitate after pretraining. Here was the type of prompt we used: """ Engineering building report for building located at 123, X Street, Knoxville TN Prepared by Benjamin Lee, FE --- Building footprint area: 1200 m2 Roof type: built-up roofing Facade material: brick HVAC present: """ Surprisingly (at the time), this was a decent prior. You could also add all sorts of one-off points of interest and amenities like swimming pools and other trivia to help guide the conditional probabilities.
- bitshiftfaced 1y ago> You should also know that I learned to read early and skipped first grade. Consequently, I was the perennial runt of the classroom and spent all my time reading as a child. I’ve gotten perfect scores on every reading test I’ve ever taken, including the SAT and GRE. This is actually useful to know. Many people grew up in a time or place where they didn't receive the same kind of education. They may have weak reading and writing skills. Many of these folks might feel self conscious about their writing. A writing assistant is one way they can feel more confident, and I don't think that's a bad thing, even if I can usually tell.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y agoThe Straussian read is fascinating: If LLMs get even marginally better at what they do, even people with perfect SAT and GRE reading scores who spend their entire adult lives working with these models won't be able to tell.
- justlikereddit 1y agoIt doesn't matter if a penis enlargement advertisement is written by a Pulitzer price winner or an AI that can conquer the galaxy, it will still be slop.
- phito 1y agoI definitely don't like it either. These people make themselves look like their have more skills than they actually do.
- globalnode 1y agoDamn, what a beatdown. I was thinking of asking gpt about a sorting algorithm but now I'm too afraid... better go think about it myself I guess.
- karmakaze 1y agoOne solution is to always hand-write like an AI right down to the em-dashes. Then it will be your writing style and hard to distinguish from AI output. Personally I find it hard to maintain a business-cheery persona or use verbose phrasing or office filler words.
- ezekiel68 1y ago[Just before I added this comment I realized it was more or less a direct message to the author, whom I noticed was replying here] As someone born very near the start of the Unix epoch, this isn't cringe at all - though I guess it is a bit Quixotic. I think in every tectonic shift of society there will be those who clutch onto the virtues of craftsmanship over "the plant" that can churn out... well, "slop"to those who appreciate craftsmanship. [my mind spun into several historical examples but 'nuff said.] The two things that really resonated with me were: > LLMs are very good at producing output, but they are not a substitute for you. and > You are a rich soup of learnings and experiences, and you’ve been simmering for decades. Please let me try some of it. Your piece reminds me of an old song by Supertramp called "Hide in your Shell"[0]. The speaker tries to figure out how he can lead the subject out of their futile refuge and the punch lines are "I wanna know you" "Please let me near you". Fun fact, I spent about 20 minutes composing this comment. Still "I lacked the time to make it shorter." I too was cursed with top 2% language skills and composing (and re-formulating) language is such a part of my flesh-and-blood identity that I could not conceive of a life worth living without it. When I do prompt LLMs for software solutions, I spend at least 15-25 minutes crafting context MD files and/or prompts. But then again, I'm not asking them to churn out yet another 1-shot modern web stack app. I agree the world is richer because of folks like us. Carry on, wayward son. There'll be peace when you are done. [0] https://www.letras.com/supertramp/84400/ https://www.letras.com/supertramp/84400/ I chose this site because it had the fewest pop-ups (still has a lot). Obviously, just prompting the title and the group returns the lyrics instantly from any mainstream LLM.
- DocTomoe 1y agoIronically, that text itself reads a lot like slop. At the same time, thanks to anti-AI-snobs like this distinguished gentleman, I have started spending significant amounts of time to deliberately not sound like an LLM (foreign-language speaker, analytical writer, typographical nerd who used em-dashs unironically), which makes me do double the work (and ironically makes the workflow of 'think yourself' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' more expensive than 'let the LLM do the thinking' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' in a business setting). And yet - on the other hand - this absurdity has given rise to a strange, decadent joy: I've begun to write in florid, fanciful style simply to lampoon the process itself. A mockery wrapped in velvet. A jest dressed in brocade. If one must dance for the algorithmic (or anti-algorithmic) court, why not do so with powdered wig and fan in hand?
- ckrapu 1y agoI do know my writing style has problems. My writing teacher said my style was pretentious, and I try to tone it down. I sort of take this as a compliment, because I've been writing like this my whole life and if it reads like LLM slop, then there's the implication that the result of all of OpenAI's A/B testing and post-training leads to something like my style which at least means it gets people to engage with it!
- DocTomoe 1y agoBut of course. For you, it's all about engagement - that darling coin of the petty court jester, who sets the salon ablaze not to warm the room, but simply to watch the tapestries curl and blacken. What care has the arsonist for architecture, so long as the firelight flatters his silhouette? You brandish your self-critique like a silken fan: ostentatiously self-aware, artfully tousled, and utterly disconnected from the soot you scatter. A noble affectation, perhaps - if not for the peasantry scorched beneath your rhetorical fireworks. While the rest of us trudge back to our manuscripts, redrafting not for clarity, but to appease the ever-shifting inquisitions of those who declare to sniff out AI like perfumed bloodhounds. Pretentious? No, Monsieur. Not your prose - which prances nicely enough in its embroidered slippers. What is pretentious is your Marie-Antoinette shrug whispering "Why can't they write more like pastry?" while your courtiers cheer. Your writing is not the crime. Your indifference is.
- driverdan 1y agoI really hope this is sarcasm. It's very copypasta-esque, cringy, and holier-than-thou judgemental.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago> holier-than-thou judgemental Unfortunately that's rewarded a lot these days. It's basically the same thing as rage bait. You can capitalize on fear of AI by throwing the word slop around, getting people angry, and getting those sweet clicks.
- throwanem 1y agoCan you explain what your product actually does? I looked at the Crowdbotics website, but it just seems like it's designed for nontechnical C-suite and EVP types.
- driverdan 1y agoThere is a description at the top of the site: > Crowdbotics uses AI to analyze your code base across three layers of abstraction, giving developers, architects, and business stakeholders the insights they need to modernize and maintain legacy code. FWIW the site will be undergoing major changes soon which should help more clearly explain it.
- throwanem 1y agoWell, that's my point. I see some JSON screenshots with highlighting, but nothing really that corresponds with what my own brown- and grayfield experience leads me to look for, and not really anything very persuasive toward the interpretability of what is on offer, so that I can evaluate the quality of the tool's "judgment." But I suppose that just goes to clarify the case for the redesign you mentioned! Not that you're asking, but what would really convince me would be being able to point a cut-down version of the tool, presumably in a BYOAPI fashion, at one of my own old stale repos like https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder, and see what kind of a modernization plan it comes up with and how that compares with my own. A toy problem to be sure, but what better field for evaluation? Think of it like a take-home interview, perhaps.
- Fripplebubby 1y agoI think this is a great post. It will ruffle some feathers and people will feel attacked, but I think the core idea is exactly right: if we are communicating and the goal is the exchange of information, use your incredible language faculty to communicate with me. To do otherwise is a disrespect to me and it indicates that you value the act of showing me your brilliant idea (in your estimation) more than you value taking the effort to actually communicate the idea to me. You are essentially an "ideas guy". I know that an LLM is a yes-man, and that a yes-man and an "ideas guy" is a combination that produces confident mistakes. If you can't be bothered to communicate your idea, or the essence of your idea, in your own words, please keep it to yourself until you've put in that effort.
- Fripplebubby 1y agoMaybe I worded this more harshly than I meant. I value anybody who tries to communicate with me and I don't mean to try to discourage people from having ideas or communicating them to me, but - writing is thinking, the act of trying to actually use your language and your reasoning will improve your idea. How many times have I thought I had a good idea, then in the process of writing it out, I realize its flaws (many times)? If you pass this process off to an LLM, you skip a key step, and you leave it to me the receiver to do this work for you.
- lispitillo 1y agoThis piece sounds like a second order LLM, the first-order one generates text and the second-order one filters and optimizes it. But, in fact, this work is done by a human being. The human reviewer asks and wants you to proof-read your output before submission. It claims being able to detect any AI slop. I wonder whether this is true, and if so, for how long. Maybe it will be replaced by a GAN LLM, and then the loop will be closed.
- barbazoo 1y agoPersonally this feels very judgemental. I’d be happy to get an AI aided response by someone trying to improve getting their point across like many of us English language learners. LLM are a godsend for people that aren’t masters of the language in all kinds of ways.
- ckrapu 1y agoI did make a comment to that effect at the end
- barbazoo 1y agoIt feels like gatekeeping to me. An attempt to prescribe a way to convey information that the author happens to be genius level at. As a developer when I first encountered auto-linters I felt threatened. When I saw coding agents my first reaction was to feel threatened. Maybe the author is going through something similar.