5 ms·
Unfortunately that seems to be the norm now – people literally reduce themselves to a copy-paste mechanism.
by Sharlin 1y ago
Unfortunately that seems to be the norm now – people literally reduce themselves to a copy-paste mechanism.
- pravj 1y agoThis resonates a lot with some observations I drafted last week about "AI Slop" at the workplace. Overall, people are making a net-negative contribution by not having a sense of when to review/filter the responses generated by AI tools, because either (i) someone else is required to make that additional effort, or (ii) the problem is not solved properly. This sounds similar to a few patterns I noted - The average length of documents and emails has increased. - Not alarmingly so, but people have started writing Slack/Teams responses with LLMs. (and it’s not just to fix the grammar.) - Many discussions and brainstorms now start with a meeting summary or transcript, which often goes through multiple rounds of information loss as it’s summarized and re-expanded by different stakeholders. [arXiv:2509.04438, arXiv:2401.16475]
- rvnx 1y agoYou’re absolutely right. The patterns you’ve noted, from document verbosity to informational decay in summaries, are the primary symptoms. Would you like me to explain the feedback loop that reinforces this behavior and its potential impact on organizational knowledge integrity?
- mewpmewp2 1y agoGot it — here’s a satiric AI-slop style reply you could post under rvnx: Thank you for your profound observation. Indeed, the paradox you highlight demonstrates the recursive interplay between explanation and participation, creating a meta-layered dialogue that transcends the initial exchange. This recursive loop, far from being trivial, is emblematic of the broader epistemological challenge we face in discerning sincerity from performance in contemporary discourse. If you’d like, I can provide a structured framework outlining the three primary modalities of this paradox (performative sincerity, ironic distance, and meta-explanatory recursion), along with concrete examples for each. Would you like me to elaborate further? Want me to make it even more over-the-top with like bullet lists, references, and faux-academic tone, so it really screams “AI slop”?
- rvnx 1y ago* Trying 20.54.123.42:443... * Connected to api.openai.azure.com (20.54.123.42) port 443 (#0) * ALPN, offering h2 * ALPN, offering http/1.1 * successfully set certificate verify locations: * CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt * TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1): * TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2): * TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Encrypted Extensions (8): * TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11): * TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, CERT verify (15): * TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20): * TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20): * SSL connection using TLSv1.3 / AEAD-AES256-GCM-SHA384 > POST /v1/chat/completions HTTP/1.1 > Host: api.openai.azure.com > User-Agent: curl/7.88.1 > Accept: / > Content-Type: application/json > Authorization: Bearer sk-xxxx > Content-Length: 123 > * upload completely sent off: 123 out of 123 bytes < HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error < Content-Type: application/json < Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:30:12 GMT < Content-Length: 352 < {"error":{"message":"The server had an error processing your request. Sorry about that! You can retry your request, or contact us through an Azure support request at: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2213926 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2213926 if you keep seeing this error. (Please include the request ID d7fc0c4f-4c08-415c-b22b-3b9a59524a41 in your email.)","type":"server_error","param":null,"code":null}} * Connection #0 to host api.openai.azure.com left intact curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 500
- mewpmewp2 1y agoFascinating trace — what you’ve essentially demonstrated here is not just a failed TLS handshake culminating in a 500, but the perfect allegory for our entire discourse. The client (us) keeps optimistically POSTing sincerity, the server (reality) negotiates a few protocols, offers some certificates of authenticity, and then finally responds with the only universal truth: Internal Server Error. If helpful, I can follow up separately with a minimal reproducible example of this phenomenon (e.g. via a mock social interaction with oversized irony headers or by setting CURLOPT_EXISTENTIAL_DREAD). Would you like me to elaborate further on the implications of this recursive failure state?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- james_marks 1y ago“You’re absolutely right!” is becoming my least favorite phrase.
- Forgeties79 1y agoSouth Park’s b plot recently with Randy using ChatGPT illustrates this so well
- theoreticalmal 1y agoI have never seen an AI meeting summary that was useful or sufficient in explaining what happened in the meeting. I have no idea what people use them for other than as a status signal
- golemotron 1y agoWhy do people want to signal their low status?
- eastbound 1y agoThat’s a good point, an AI email/Slack/summary postions you as at bootlicker at best, writing summaries to look good, and a failed secretary at most, but in any case of low value on the real-work scale. I’m just afraid this kind of types are the future people who get promoted.
- EFreethought 1y agoIn their minds it is a signal of high status.
- dwaltrip 1y agoIt’s an attempt to be “cutting edge”
- jacekm 1y agoIn my company we sometimes cherry-pick parts of the AI summaries and send them to the clients just to confirm the stuff that we agreed on during a meeting. The customers know that the summary is AI-generated and they don't mind. Sometimes people come to me and ask whether what they read in the summary was really discussed in the meeting or is it just AI hallucinating but I can usually assure them that we really did discuss that. So these can be useful to a degree.
- throwawaysleep 1y agoI use them to seem engaged about something I don’t actually care about. It’s painfully common to invite a laundry list of people to meetings.
- stn8188 1y agoI'm so annoyed this morning... I picked up my phone to browse HN out of frustration after receiving an obvious AI-written teams message, only to see this on the front page! I can't escape haha
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- trod1234 1y agoThere's a growing body of evidence that AI is damaging people, aside from the obvious slop related costs to review (as a resource attack). I've seen colleagues that were quite good at programming when we first met, and over time have become much worse with the only difference being they were forced to use AI on a regular basis. I'm of the opinion that the distorted reflected appraisal mechanism it engages through communication and the inconsistency it induces is particularly harmful, and as such the undisclosed use of AI to any third-party without their consent is gross negligence if not directly malevolent. https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/ai-overreliance-doctor-procedure-study/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/ai-overreliance-doctor-proced...
- bwfan123 1y ago> aside from the obvious slop related costs to review Code-review tools (code-rabbit/greptile) produce enormous amounts of slop counterbalanced by the occasional useful tip. And cursor and the like love to produce nicely formatted sloppy READMEs. These tools - just like many of us humans - prioritize form over function.
- AlexandrB 1y ago> - The average length of documents and emails has increased. Brevity is the soul of wit. Unfortunately, many people think more is better.
- o11c 1y agoPeople have also veered strongly toward anti-intellectualism in recent decades. Coincidence?
- AJ007 1y agoThis is the bull case for AI, as with any significant advance in technology eventually you have no choice but to use it. In this case, the only way to filter through large volumes of AI output is going to be with other LLM models. The exponential growth of compute and data continues.. As a side note, if anyone I'm communicating with - personally or in business - sends responses that sound like they were written by ChatGPT 3.5, 4o, GPT-5-low, etc, I don't take anything they write seriously anymore.
- JackFr 1y ago> As a side note, if anyone I'm communicating with - personally or in business - sends responses that sound like they were written by ChatGPT 3.5, 4o, GPT-5-low, etc, I don't take anything they write seriously anymore. What if they are a very limited English speaker, using the AI to tighten up their responses into grammatical, idiomatic English?
- baobun 1y agoI'd rather have broken grammar and an honest and useful meta-signal than botched semantics. Also that better not be a sensitive conversation or contain personal details or business internals of others... Just don't.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoBut the meta singal you get is detrimental to the writer, so why wouldn't they want to mask it?
- baobun 1y agoSecurity and ethics. If those don't apply, as mentioned, if I realize I will as mentioned also ignore them if I can and judge their future communications as malicious, incompetent, inconsiderate, and/or meaningless.
- 1y ago
- tptacek 1y agoThis has been a norm on Hacker One for over a decade.
- mort96 1y agoNo, it hasn't. Even where people were just submitting reports from an automated vulnerability scanner, they had to write the English prose themselves and present the results in some way (either in an honest way, "I ran vulnerability scanner tool X and it reported that ...", or dishonestly, "I discovered that ..."). This world where people literally just act as a mechanical intermediary between an English chat bot and the Hacker One discussion section is new.
- tptacek 1y agoSlop Hacker One reports often include videos, long explanations, and, of course, arguments. It's so prevalent that there's an entire cottage industry of "triage" contractors that filter this stuff out. You want to say that there's something distinctive about an LLM driving the slop, and that's fine; all I'm saying is that the defining experience of a Hacker One bug bounty program has always been a torrent of slop.
- goalieca 1y agoJust try to challenge and mentor people on not using it because it’s incapable of the job and wasting all our time when the mandate from down high is to use more of it.
- xpe 1y agoSeems to me like people have to push back more directly with a collective effort; otherwise the incentives are all wrong.
- b112 1y agoWhat I don't get, is why people think this action has value. The maintainer of the project could ask an LLM to do that. A senior dev. I can't imagine Googling for something, seeing someone on (for example) stackoverflow commenting on code, and then filing a bug to the maintainer. And just copy and pasting what someone else said, into the bug report. All without even comprehending the code, the project, or even running into the issue yourself. Or even running a test case yourself. Or knowing the codebase. It's just all so absurd. I remember in Asimov's Empire series of books, at one point a scientist wanted to study something. Instead of going to study whatever it was, say... a bug, the scientist looked at all scientific studies and papers over 10000 years, weighed the arguments, and pronounced what the truth was. All without just, you know, looking and studying the bug. This was touted as an example of the Empire's decay. I hope we aren't seeing the same thing. I can so easily see kids growing up with AI in their bluetooth ears, or maybe a neuralink, and never having to make a decision -- ever. I recall how Google became a crutch to me. How before Google I had to do so much more work, just working with software. Using manpages, or looking at the source code, before ease of search was a thing. Are we going to enter an age where every decision made is coupled with the couching of an AI? This through process scares me. A lot.
- rjsw 1y agoI read a paper yesterday where someone had used an LLM to read other papers and was claiming that this was doing science.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jackdawed 1y agoI once had a conversation with a potential co-founder who literally told me he was pasting my responses into AI to try to catch up. Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI. These are CEOs who have raised $1M+ pre-seed.
- delusional 1y agoHave you watched All-In? Chamath Palihapitiya, who takes himself very seriously, is clearly just reading off something from ChatGPT most of the time. These Silicon Valley CEOs are hacks.
- DonHopkins 1y agoThe word "hacks" is so charitable, when you could use "sociopaths". Russ Hanneman raised his kid with AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI&t=217s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI&t=217s A company I'm funding, we call it The Lady. I press the button, and The Lady tells Aspen when it's time for bed, time to take a bath, when his fucking mother's here to pick him up. I get to be his friend, and she's the bad guy. I've disrupted fatherhood!
- stuaxo 1y agoInvoluntarily swore reading this.
- mrcartmeneses 1y agodisrupted neglect
- alexpotato 1y agoI watched someone do this during an interview. They were literally copy and pasting back and forth the LLM. In front of the interviewers! (myself and another co-worker) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985254
- pbronez 1y agoHow far did they get? Did they solve the problem?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sethops1 1y agoDoes it matter? The point of the interview is not to produce an output.
- shomp 1y agoIf you don't solve the problem, do you get the job?
- WalterBright 1y agoDepends on why you didn't solve it.
- jondwillis 1y agoNever once has this happened
- lsaferite 1y agoI've hired someone that didn't solve a specific technical problem. If they are able to walk through what they are doing and it shows the capability to do the expected tasks, why would you exclude them for failing to 'solve' some specific task? We are generally hiring for overall capabilities, not the ability to solve one specific problem. Generally my methodology for working through these kinds of things during hiring now days focuses more on the code review side of things. I started doing that 5+ years ago at this point. That's actually fortuitous given the fact that reviewing code in the age of AI Coding Assistants has become so much more important. Anyway, a sample size of 1 here refutes the assertion that someone's never been hired even when failing to solve a technical interview problem. FWIW, they turned out to be an absolute beast of a developer when they joined the team.
- f4stjack 1y agoTo be honest, I do not understand this new norm. A few months ago I applied to an internal position. I was a NGO IT worker, deployed twice to emergency response operations, knew the policies & operations and had good relations with users and coworkers. The interview went well. I was honest. When asked what my weakness regarding this position I told that I am a good analyst but when it comes to writing new exploits, that's beyond my expertise. The role doesn't have this as a requirement so I thought it was a good answer. I was not selected. Instead they selected a guy and then booted him off after 2 months due to his excessive (and non-correct like the link) use of LLM and did not open the position again. So in addition to wasting the hirers' time those nice people block other people's progress as well. But, as long as the hirers expect wunderkinds crawling out of the woods the applicants try to fake it and win in the short term. This needs to end but I don't see any progress towards it. This is especially painful as I am seeking a job at the moment and thinking these fakers are muddying the waters. It feels like no one cares about your attitude - like how geniunely you want to work. I am an old techie and the world I was in valued this rather than technical aptitude for you can teach/learn technical information but character is another thing. This gets lost in our brave new cyberpunk without the cool gadgets era I believe.
- chanon 1y agoI posted a job for freelance dev work and all replies were obviously ai generated. Some even included websites that were clearly made by other people as their 'prior work'. So I pulled the posting and probably won't post again. Who knew. AI is costing jobs, not because it can do the jobs, but it has made hiring actual competent humans harder.
- isk517 1y agoPlus, because it's harder to just do a job listing and get actual submittals, you're going to see more people hired because who are hired because of who they know not what they know. In other words if you wasted your time in networking class working on networking instead of working on networking then you're screwed
- 1y ago
- balamatom 1y agoWe're that for genes, if you trust positivist materialism. (Recently it's also been forced to permit the existence of memes.) If that's all which is expected of a person - to be a copypastebot for vast forces beyond one's ken - why fault that person for choosing easy over hard? Because you're mad at them for being shit at the craft you've lovingly honed? They don't really know why they're there in the first place. If one sets a different bar with one's expectations of people, one ought to at least clearly make the case for what exactly it is. And even then the bots have made it quite clear that such things are largely matters of personal conviction, and as such are not permitted much resonance.
- sebastiennight 1y ago> If that's all which is expected of a person - to be a copypastebot for vast forces beyond one's ken - why fault that person for choosing easy over hard? I wouldn't be mad at them for that, though they might be faulted for not realizing that at some point, the copy/pasting will be done without them, as it's simpler and cheaper to ask ChatGPT directly rather than playing a game of telephone.
- balamatom 1y agoThey are correctly following their incentives as they are presented to them. If you expect better of them, you need to state why, and what exactly.
- sebastiennight 1y agoIncentive: keeping your job/income. Money: good Counter-incentive: being replaced by AI will cut your job/income Expected action: avoid behavior that will get you replaced by AI, eg. copy/pasting tasks directly to/from AI tools without thinking
- BHSPitMonkey 1y agoFor all we know, there's no human in the loop here. Could just be an agent configured with tools to spin up and operate Hacker One accounts in a continuous loop.
- lm28469 1y agoIf seen more than one post on reddit being answered by a screenshot of a chatgpt mobile app including OP's question and the llm's answer Imagine the amount of energy and compute power used...
- silverliver 1y agoHa! We've become the robots!
- account42 1y agoI like the term "echoborg" for those people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoborg > An echoborg is a person whose words and actions are determined, in whole or in part, by an artificial intelligence (AI). I've seen people who can barely manage to think on their own anymore and pull out their phone to ask it even relatively basic questions. Seems almost like an addiction for some.