5 ms·
This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the oth
by overrun11 1y ago
This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour.
We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass.
And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all.
Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
- mcfry 1y agoWas thinking the same thing. It's impossible to take this article's criticisms of AI seriously when it's so obviously over-edited with AI itself.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoMaybe the best criticism of it is that it's become synonymous with bad content.
- antonvs 1y ago> "Because this is how real learning often arrives: sideways, unscheduled, alive." And this is how AI slop often arrives: so recognizable it hurts.
- woopsn 1y agoIt's depressing how common this accusation is become here. Before LLM idiot ruined everything, you know what? People wrote things you wouldn't like, in a way you wouldn't like. Especially on their blogs. HN so smart though they can immediately see, tenured Yale professor has no life and is trying to win the message board game with AI slop!
- pessimizer 1y agoNobody in this thread accused LLM of writing the OP. Instead, they are saying that it is dumb and easy in the way a lot of LLM writing is, and that LLMs wouldn't have any problem writing it. This author is being disliked in the traditional way, but with a LLM-assisted proof that actually shows that LLMs can write this crap, and write it well. The real proposal should be that slate dot com type "Is Food Really Good For You?" or "Hands Are A Completely Unnecessary Part Of The Arm" article authors should be replaced by LLM. I like the proliferation of LLM slop, because it involuntarily reveals the emptiness of an enormous proportion of actual human writing. You can't help but see it, even if you don't want to. You end up forced to talk about the author's resume in defense.
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- BobaFloutist 1y ago>It's impossible to take this article's criticisms of AI seriously when it's so obviously over-edited with AI itself. Someone in this thread accused LLM of writing the OP.
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- antonvs 1y agoAre you attempting to claim that my identification of AI slop is incorrect? If so, you're almost certainly wrong.
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- lucianbr 1y agoIt's so weird how "AI slop" is generally recognized as a problem, as low quality and doing more harm than good, and at the same time AI is generally considered a huge great thing. How can AI itself be so great if it's output is literally AI slop, which is basically garbage?
- antonvs 1y agoIn my experience, LLMs can be pretty great at coding and math. When it comes to writing ordinary natural language, the constraints are less rigorous, and LLM output tends to focus on rhetoric, where the goal is to fool people into accepting a conclusion rather than actually supporting the conclusion from a logical perspective.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIt's good for people who want to take shortcuts to do their work with minimal effort, good for employers who are waiting for it to mature enough to be able to eliminate most employees, and good for the people selling it. Outside of those bubbles, it's seen as garbage. None of these use cases increases quality or makes the world better.
- ablerman 1y agoHas the medium become the message?
- williamcotton 1y agoWhen was it not?
- sebmellen 1y agoAs Marshall McLuhan might say “The Medium is the Massage”
- djoldman 1y agoIndeed; these seem to be more frequent of late. The language seems over-the-top, almost breathlessly pearl-clutching without any sort of evidence: "Childhood itself, reframed: not as a journey to be nurtured, but a system to be streamlined." "But what starts as adaptation ends in control." "And when you name your school Alpha, you signal something deeper: Not growth. Not care. But dominance." "What’s lost in Alpha’s world isn’t content—it’s interiority: the struggle, the slowness, the human friction." "And in that shift, the soul becomes overhead." "Human scaffolding gives way to sleek sterility." "...we risk raising children who are fluent—but forever waiting for the next prompt." "It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task..."
- Erem 1y agoWhat fantastic use of imagery the poetic quality of these LLMs has grown considerably. I know this is aside to the point you're making but the every dying sunflower line really got me as a reader of poems. As an argument of course there's barely one at all which was closer to your point.
- nartho 1y agoFunnily enough, Diderot made this very same argument. Except it was that you should travel by foot instead of by horse. For the very reasons ChatGPT stated.
- coldtea 1y ago>This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy Don't know about the "without ever arguing why one is better than the other" part. The LLM made a very strong case for horse and buggy. It just takes the right sensibility to appreciate it...
- kccqzy 1y agoCreative writing is not the same as an argumentative essay. The former can very well just contrast particularities while getting the author's general sentiment across (or I should say, get the imageries that evoke certain feelings in readers). The latter tries to convince the reader by means of logic and reason. Different writing styles for different purposes. One appeals to your logical faculty. One appeals to your emotions. It's pathos vs logos; and it's known since Aristotle's time.
- lenkite 1y ago> And maybe—just maybe— Ahh..the iconic and obnoxious ChatGPT marker. Half the fiction I read these days has this BP rising phrase.