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Generative AI. "Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use [ ]"
- Fade_Dance 1y ago>Slop Generator Using that term through the article makes it hard to take seriously. I know nothing of this project but right off the bat it seems like a project that has little credibility just because of the tone used throughout. There's no need to turn it into a full-on tirade against this set of technologies either. Is this an appropriate place to complain about Reddit comments? Ironically, the author could well benefit from running this slop through an llm to make it more professional.
- doesnt_know 1y agoInteresting that you could have posted about any of the points being made in the link but you choose this one. Personally I think the term is well deserved and am glad it continues to be popularised.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoTo be clear I don't mind it as a casual term, I'm simply saying that, to me, it comes off as puerile in this context. It's akin to putting out a press release for a project with "Suckerberg" written everytime Meta comes up, or for an older reference, Micro$oft. It personally made the article hard to take seriously, and cast a bad first impression on the project. It may not come across that way to all - I've simply never been a fan of that highly editorialized and charged communication style when it comes to community management. It almost has a combative tone, sort of like when CMs argue with users that have opinions they don't like. Take it or leave it. _____________ As for the individual points: The initial concerns about copyright are convincing. The point about resource impact ending with "these resources would literally be better spent anywhere else" devolved into meaningless grandstanding. I wouldn't mind seeing a project take a stand because of environmental impact, but again it just ends up sounding like the author has a bone to pick rather than a genuine concern about the environment. If that's not the case, then that's a prime example of why tone matters in communication. The Reddit comment paragraph where the author berates users for using LLMs on social media is just odd and out of place. Maybe better suited to the off-topic section of their community forum/discord. And the last point I simply disagree with. Highly knowledgeable people in a field that requires precision use LLMs every day. It's a tool like any other. I use it in financial trading (ex: it's great for scanning reams of SEC filings and earnings report transcripts), I know others who use it successfully in trading, and I know firms like Jane Street have it deeply integrated in their process.
- RUnconcerned 1y ago> Ironically, the author could well benefit from running this slop through an llm to make it more professional. Have you considered that it is not the intent of the author to appear professional? That running it through the Slop Generator would obfuscate their intent to be snarky towards those who outsource all their thinking to Slop Generators?
- JimDabell 1y ago> Have you considered that it is not the intent of the author to appear professional? They have no obligation to sound professional but if they intended to appear incredibly childish then they succeeded, and people will judge them accordingly.
- electricboots 1y agoI think for a project like asahi, and frankly any project with a reasonable blast radius, software or otherwise, the article is on point. The authors lack of professionalism is a reasonable counter to the completely unhinged mainstream takes on ai/llms that we hear daily. I think the Reddit example provides useful, generally relatable context, otherwise missing to the average reader. My opinions are not to detract from the use of the tech or engineers working in the space, but motivated by a disgust for the hype.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoThe mainstream seems sort of anti-AI from what I get in the non-tech sphere. Ex: artists generally hate it. Writers generally hate it. Many people think it's damaging to society and are very pessimistic. Marketing is completely ridiculous when it comes to the topic, but when isn't that enough in the case with the next shiny thing. They even extolled the life changing virtues of 3D TVs for one of the cycles. I honestly hear far more unhinged AI doomer stuff and constant pessimism that makes me sort of sad (after all it is cool tech that will do a lot of new things) than AI sycophantism, do you not? If so, where? Granted this is a US perspective, where there is currently a deep seated pessimistic undercurrent about just about everything right now.
- electricboots 1y agoI will go as far to say as every time I’ve used ai it has provided critically incorrect output, never anything of use.
- skerit 1y agoI agree. They have some good reasons on why AI-generated code should not be used in this project, but the page just devolves into a "All AI is bad" and the constant use of "Slop generator" just makes me think of all the people that used to write "Micro$oft" (Well, I did too. When I was twelve)
- retired_account 1y ago> I know nothing of this project It's an impressive one, to say the least. It's worth taking a closer look and weighing the excellence created by the human mind before completely dismissing the article's arguments. > Ironically, the author could well benefit from running this slop through an llm to make it more professional. True, that would effectively strip out all the heart and soul from the prose.
- FeteCommuniste 1y agoIt would read so much nicer with a dozen em dashes and a bunch of “not only _, but _” constructions.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoIt's not a high bar that the author failed to cross, correct.
- retired_account 1y agoBulleting every list with emoji might be nice, too, no?
- rimbo789 1y ago[flagged]
- nurettin 1y agoHere's some context into what they mean by "AI slop" https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... Reading the first two vulnerability reports makes it very clear.
- andybak 1y agoExcept they don't mean "specific examples of AI content are slop". They unambiguously say that all uses of generative AI are slop.
- nurettin 1y agoThat is indeed controversial, I'm just saying that after seeing enough examples like the above one might be persuaded to think that way.
- queenkjuul 1y agoI've yet to see output from a generative AI that wasn't slop
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- andybak 1y agoSo all AI generated code is "slop"? Without exception? Without any nuance? It's hard to take opinions like that seriously and not just dismiss them as hyperbole.
- queenkjuul 1y agoAll the code I've seen from an LLM has been slop. Reread what i said
- andybak 1y ago[flagged]
- washadjeffmad 1y agoThat mindset is itself part of the problem. A healthy sign of free speech is poor taste.
- simianwords 1y agoEnvironmental aspect is listed as one of the reasons which makes me think this is more ideological than practical.
- mschuster91 1y agoFirst of all, it isn't wrong. The power consumption of AI training and inference is massive. Second, that page is obviously meant to shed light at AI issues from a lot of different viewpoints, it would have been a serious omission to not mention environmental concerns.
- simianwords 1y ago>First of all, it isn't wrong. The power consumption of AI training and inference is massive. This is massively overstated. We ought to be more careful in performing such calculations.
- mschuster91 1y agoTo quote [1]: > Alex de Vries is a Ph.D. candidate at VU Amsterdam and founder of the digital-sustainability blog Digiconomist. In a report published earlier this month in Joule, de Vries has analyzed trends in AI energy use. He predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). That's a lot of power, and the availability of electricity is already seen as a bottleneck in the development of AI models [2]. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-energy-consumption https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-energy-consumption [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/aws-ceo-estimates-large-city-scale-power-consumption-of-future-ai-model-training-tasks-an-individual-model-may-require-somewhere-between-one-to-5gw-of-power https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- rootnod3 1y agoNot to mention that the amuont of energy compared to the debatable benifits is...worrying.
- pfoof 1y agoI can agree with all but last point. There’s no proof nor counter-proof that human brain doesn’t work like that.
- captn3m0 1y agoThe submission title should be “Asahi Linux Generative AI Policy”
- pjc50 1y agoThe IP point: this hasn't yet been fully resolved, and I expect companies to continue to fudge it by sticking "if disney return false" in their image generators. My own employer has a stance of "no AI generated code in production use" (but allowed for testing and infrastructure which will not be distributed). I'm suprised they didn't make a point which is especially painful for Open Source projects, that AI might reduce coding effort but increases review effort, and maintainers are generally spending the majority of their time on review anyway. Making it easier to generate bad pull requests is seen as well-poisoning.
- sandworm101 1y ago> "These resources are better used on quite literally anything else." What shocks me most is that we have found something less useful than bitcoin mining. Remember all the articles about the environmental impact of bitcoin? That is peanuts compared to what the worlds largest companies are biulding to power the next LLM.
- RUnconcerned 1y agoWhile I agree that the value of LLMs is wildly overstated, I disagree that it is less useful than bitcoin mining, which is entirely useless. At least LLMs can produce usable output.
- TrackerFF 1y agoI am by no means an AI/ML evangelist, but these types of posts just come off as something written by modern day luddites.
- terminalbraid 1y agoLuddites in what sense? Because there's the lazy, gross stereotype that's been perpetuated with negative connotation and the movement that was not at face anti-technology, but against how that technology was used to suppress labor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- lucumo 1y agoThe historical luddites were not heroes of the working class. They were a special interest that used violence to keep less skilled people out of their industry, so they could keep making more money than the hoi pollo. Dumb or evil, either way they are not people to be celebrated.
- krapp 1y ago>They were a special interest that used violence to keep less skilled people out of their industry, so they could keep making more money than the hoi pollo. So apart from the use of violence, the Luddites were essentially equivalent to modern tech culture. It's weird that they don't get more sympathy on HN. Regardless, the complaints of the Luddites resonate because they would eventually apply to everyone, including the working class. It just happens that they came for the textile workers first.
- salawat 1y ago>The historical luddites were not heroes of the working class. They were a special interest that used violence to keep less skilled people out of their industry, so they could keep making more money than the hoi pollo. You mean like Doctors and lawyers? Make no mistake. Laws are threats. You can tell yourself it's about some imagined Quality concern, but the extreme resource burden to enter the field creates a stark class boundary that is in general very hard to get past. If anything, the Luddites actually understood what society was doing even if that same society said they weren't. The only difference between a craftsman destroying a machine, and a lawyer or doctor erecting entry barriers through political means is the tools being employed at the time. >Dumb or evil, either way they are not people to be celebrated. I see them as neither dumb, nor evil. I see them as both wise, intelligent, motivated, and thoroughly realistic about the direction society was headed and recognizing no one wanted to be on the hook for answering the question of "what about me?" It's a natural response for a class suddenly evicted from a meta stability in the social order, and if anything should be vilified, it's the kind of rapid progress at all costs, bundled with lack of care who gets left behind by it that so characterizes the modern incarnation of tech-capitalism.
- harringdev 1y agoThis is very hard to take seriously, it feels ideologically driven. The introduction where they claim LLMs are useless for software engineering is just incorrect. They are useful for many software engineering tasks. I do think that vibe coding is rubbish however, and more junior SWEs very regularly misuse LLMs to produce nonsense code. The only substantive point is that the LLM may regurgitate pieces of proprietary training data; although it seems unlikely that it would be incorporated wholesale into the codebase in such as way it matters or opens them up to liability. I do question if LLMs would even be useful for such a niche project -- but I think this should be left up to developers to figure out how it complements their workflows rather then ruling out all uses of LLMs. EDIT: I want to point out that I think the Asahi Linux project is a jewel of engineering and is extremely impressive.
- roxolotl 1y agoWhy is something ideologically driven inherently not worth taking seriously? I appreciate maybe their understanding will be more challenging to change but people don’t necessarily arrive at ideologies for unserious reasons nor do ideologies have unserious results.
- mpalmer 1y agoI think the better word is extremist, because choosing to brand all LLMs as "Slop Generators" is just that, an extremist position with a rather self-satisfied air about it.
- harringdev 1y agoYou make a good point, and I will clarify what I mean. A small disclaimer, I am not a AI-booster. I think LLMs do have issues, and one should be careful with them. I've found that there's a large group of people who dislike LLMs strongly and claim they are totally useless or even pernicious. I think this is grounded in truth -- they are trained on copyright work, they are used for spreading misinformation, they can produce sh^t code. Although some folks take a radical/extremist approach and totally dismiss them as useless -- often without actually using LLM-powered tools in any meaningful way. They are useless for many applications, but programming is not one of them. I think a blanket ban on LLMs has to be somewhat unfounded/radical because they do have practical applications in writing code. The tab-completion models are extremely useful for example. For this more niche project I would think LLMs might not be as useful as they are for other projects. This said, I still think there would be a variety of use-cases where they could be helpful.
- meindnoch 1y agoSo far I was aversive of Asahi Linux mostly due to the furry anime girl roleplay thing, but this is something I can stand by!
- openmarkand 1y agoDo I miss something? I've been following the project since the beginning and just checked the wiki, the website and all over the documentation and haven't found something relevant to anime.
- orphea 1y agoThe parent comment meant Asahi Lina, a virtual YT persona: https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Asahi_Lina https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Asahi_Lina
- am17an 1y agoIn the future there will be safe havens where LLM generated code has not been merged. It will marketed as “hand-crafted” by Romanian programmers or something like that, akin to Swiss watches. It will be extremely high quality, but too expensive to mass produce.
- WithinReason 1y ago> This is fundamentally the same mathematics that is used to predict the weather. And yet, weather prediction works. Therefore, LLMs work?
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoAgreed on the IP point. Strongly agreed on not wanting to go to court in the current US political climate. On the rest, especially the confidently incorrect argument.. Not. so. much. Firstly, models are stochastic parrots, but that truth is irrelevant because they're useful stochastic parrots. Second, hallucinations and confidently incorrect outputs may yet be a thing of the past, so we should keep an open mind. It's possible that mechanistic interpretability research (a fancy term for "understanding what the model is thinking as it produces your response") will allow the UI to warn the user that uncertainty was detected in the model's response. Unfortunately none of that matters because the IP point is a blocker. Bummer.
- josefritzishere 1y agoI really have to agree with this take. Most of what AI spits out is hot trash. This is why studies have found AI makes us code 19% slower. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made...
- queenkjuul 1y agoI've been genuinely trying to incorporate Claude Code into my workflow but it just ends up wasting my time and i write everything myself anyway. Its output is occasionally _useful_ but it's absolutely never _good_
- rootnod3 1y agoIt seems apparent in this thread that any remote criticism of AI results in downvotes. Yes, the article might have some wording issues, but for an operating system project to choose to not allow AI written code for a product that is inherently in need of good security, and rather opt for “think before you write and fully understand what you are doing”, I don’t think that their choice is invalid. I wouldn’t wanna get into a plane where have the core systems are written by hallucinating AI.
- serf 1y agoHave whatever opinion you want , we're going to rapidly run into issues where certain organizations are outran by others that have more liberal policies about this kind of work. Call it slop all you want, doesn't change the unreasonable effectiveness that some individuals seem to have with such systems.
- satisfice 1y agoHow do you know it is effective? Many of us think it isn’t. Prove us wrong, if you can. A problem with the slop coding movement is that they are happy living with wishful thinking.