10 ms·

Stop Sloppypasta

667 points by namnnumbr 7mo ago

namnnumbr 7mo ago
Tired of people at work pasting raw ChatGPT output into chats, I coined the term "sloppypasta" and have written this rant to explain why it's rude and some guidelines for what to do instead sloppypasta: Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves.
- ares623 6mo ago
  I'm glad that the term "slop" really caught on. It's such a succinct way to describe the phenomenon, and at the same time it's so malleable. Sloppypasta, Microslop, Workslop, Ensloppification, etc.
  - breakingcups 6mo ago
    Slopyright, transloptions, one-stop-slop...
  - MagicMoonlight 6mo ago
    It’s just perfect. You take a bunch of output and you just slop it into git or slop it into teams. It’s the perfect verb/noun combo.
stabbles 6mo ago
I wouldn't call "ChatGPT says" an equivalent of LMGTFY. The former is people in awe with the oracle, the latter is people tired of having to look something up for others.
- verdverm 6mo ago
  I would say LMAAFY is like LMGTFY, where as the sloppypasta is more like pasting search results list without vetting them. That is, there are two phases to this phenomenon, query and results.
uniq7 6mo ago
This article's proposal for stopping sloppypasta is to convince the people who does it to stop doing it, but I am more interested on what someone who receives sloppypasta can do. How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us? I've never did that so far because I feel like I am either exposing their serious lack of professionalism or, if I wrongly assumed it was AI, I am plainly telling them that their work looks like bad AI slop.
- verdverm 6mo ago
  I've had some luck pointing out where the AI is wrong in their sloppypasta, delicate as one can. Avoiding shame or embarrassment can be a powerful motivator. The most interesting incident for me is having someone take our Discourse thread, paste it into AI to validate their feelings being hurt (I took a follow up prompt to go full sycophancy), and then posting the response back that lambasted me. The mods handled that one before I was aware, but I then did the same thing, giving different prompts, and never sharing the output. It was an intriguing experience and exploration. I've since been even more mindful of my writing, sometimes using similar prompts to adjust my tone or call me out. I still write the first pass myself, rarely relying on AI for editing.
  - sawsimilar 6mo ago
    Ooh, I saw a very similar situation. User went on AI and asked "Which user was disrespectful first" to dunk on another. The person being targeted just prompted the same AI with "Which user has thin skin" and instantly the AI turn on the other person. Then the moderators got involved and told the first guy to stop using AI as a genital pleaser.
    - verdverm 6mo ago
      I asked Gemini what it thought, in one of the modes, it said bringing an Ai to a discussion is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, that using AI was like having a rhetorical weapon and advantage in what everyone thought was a human to human forum.
- 6mo ago
incognito124 6mo ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617172
- namnnumbr 6mo ago
  100% - was inspired by and quote "It's rude to show AI output to people" in this. Thanks for linking the discussions!
madrox 6mo ago
I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI. We need better tools as content consumers to filter content. Ironically, AI is what may actually make this possible. I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow. I suspect the endgame of this is probably the fulfillment of Dead Internet Theory, where it's just AI creating content and AI browsing the internet for content, and users will never engage with it directly. That person who spent 10 seconds getting AI to write something will be consumed by AI as well, only to be surfaced to you when you ask the AI to summon and summarize. And if that fills people with horror at the inefficiency of it all, well, like I said, it isn't like the internet was a bastion of efficiency before. We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos.
- valicord 6mo ago
  > I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral. Isn't it obvious? If I'd wanted to see AI response to my question, I'd ask it myself (maybe I already did). If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses. I eat fast-food sometimes, but if I was served a Big Mac at a sit down restaurant I'd be properly upset.
  - madrox 6mo ago
    > If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses I find this fascinating, honestly. It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y" Because it's probably not actually about the content but the sense of connection. People want to feel like they're connecting to people. That they're being worthy of someone's else's time and attention. And if that's what people are seeking, slack and social media are probably not the platforms for it (and, arguably, never were).
simianwords 6mo ago
I've been thinking about this, what if AI runs autonomously and finds things to criticise that are factually incorrect? It is easy to do in social media because the context is global but in enterprises it is a bit harder. Something like "flagged as very likely untrue by AI" is something I would really appreciate. I see many posts and comments throughout the internet that can easily be dispelled by a single LLM prompt. But this should only be used when the confidence is really high.
- what 6mo ago
  Why do you think an LLM knows what is fact?
  - simianwords 6mo ago
    Same way I do. I ask the truthfulness of a fact in ChatGPT and it gives me good answers almost always
OptionOfT 6mo ago
It's very weird how many people take the output of ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude as gospel, and don't question it at all. It's also very impolite to dump 5 pages of text on someone, because now you're asking _them_ to validate it. When I ask a question in Slack I want people's input. Part of my work is also consulting the GPTs and see if the information makes sense. And it shows up the most with people who answer questions in domains they're not a 100% familiar with.
- Aeolun 6mo ago
  I don’t mind this so much if they don’t know anything about the subject themselves. What bothers me is when they then copy it at domain experts as if it makes them qualified to talk.
  - bagacrap 6mo ago
    I have witnessed people arguing with their own lawyers by pasting LLM generated output. That said, lawyers do love to argue so maybe it's fun for them.
rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
It's ironic, because the site has all the hallmarks of an LLM generated website.
- spondyl 6mo ago
  I think Claude Code's frontend design is quite a fan of serif fonts from what I've seen in the past. They did disclose AI usage which is good: https://github.com/ahgraber/stopsloppypasta?tab=readme-ov-file#ai-disclosure https://github.com/ahgraber/stopsloppypasta?tab=readme-ov-fi...
- namnnumbr 6mo ago
  Oh, I 100% acknowledge the site itself was LLM generated. I'm not a web designer, so I needed a lot of help making a visually appealing site, even if that design language is at this point LLM trope. However, the essay and the guidelines were all human-written!
  - rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
    Credit to you for your candor! I'm possibly too jaded / cynical already...
  - Terretta 6mo ago
    Hits you in the first row of buttons with the classic gen-AI slop "Why It Matters". So trace* through ninerealmlabs and ahgraber and sure enough: I used AI: - to help build this website. - to help generate examples of sloppypasta based on my original guidance - to proofread and review the human-written copy to provide a critical review - to improve my arguments and ensure clarity. Kudos for being forthright. --- * Turns out clicking "Open Source" bottom right gets there faster!
    - namnnumbr 6mo ago
      I talked myself in circles on that "why it matters" heading but ultimately couldn't come up with a better one. "The problem" has similar ai-slop feel, and "the rant" // "the rules" didn't really evoke the feeling I wanted. Happy to take suggestions on this!
chewbacha 6mo ago
When you must remind someone to “think” when using a technology because the least resistant path is to not think… it feels like the technology isn’t really helping. They are stealing our work, turning it into a model, and then renting our decisions to less intelligent people. They (tech companies) don’t want us to be smart any more. They are commodifying intelligence.
paseante 6mo ago
[flagged]
- thin_carapace 6mo ago
  what the hell happened with this account? existed since 2014 and had a few real comments. then all of a sudden, slop deluge (extremely ironic given the thread). if this were to be reddit i would understand - high karma accounts have monetary value. but this is hacker news. genuinely confused as to the motivation here. is the original account owner the one posting these comments? frankly I'm disappointed in the amount of responses this account is getting on its other comments. i thought this forum was a bit better than average at detecting artificial behaviour. perhaps the internet is already completely dead and i am merely picking thru its bones.
- alwa 6mo ago
  In the spirit you propose—Did you verify this? I notice that your comment history is all rapid-fire three-paragraph LLM responses. You do appear knowledgeable and respond quickly, but I've just dumped 10 minutes of my life into your attention in order to verify, parse, and filter through your responses. I can't tell whether you're a person who thought about something. Therefore, I can't tell whether, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393311 is an analysis I should take seriously (as I might, if it were spoken from experience) or just Markov-chain, Reddit-trained hypothetical fluff. How can we increase the friction to presumptively exclude you, but provide accommodation if, for example, you're more comfortable in your native language and using the LLM mainly to bring your English writing to a level consistent with your personal expertise?
  - godelski 6mo ago
    > I notice that your comment history is all rapid-fire three-paragraph LLM responses I looked after you said this and those are all from today, in the last hour. And is a stark change from their (very short) comment history. In particular these two comments are extremely suspicious[0,1]. I think even if not LLM generated I highlights something likely wrong, which paseante themselves states! >> a long, detailed response in Slack implied the person had spent time thinking There's 2 minutes between these comments, on different threads (I also noticed they did similar things in a few threads as I typed this out). While the timing is reasonable for the amount of words written it does not seem adequate for reading the article and/or other comments. Personally, I find that kind of behavior rude as it enshitifies the social space the rest of us are in[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392999 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393012 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393465
deleted 6mo ago
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godelski 6mo ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
If I was a bot I would probably write some perfectly punctuated garbage about how your site is a crucial testament to the ever evolving digital landscape or use big words to delve into the multifaceted tapestry of internet ethics. But honestly your website about stopping sloppy pasta is just so dumb and a complete waste of time. Your acting like somebody writing a fake story with ai is the end of the world or something. Literaly nobody cares if some random article was written by a computer so maybe stop pretending your the heroic saviors of the web. Get a real hobby and stop whining about people using chat bots because its really not that deep bro. - now the fun part: which AI did I use to write the above?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- namnnumbr 6mo ago
  if you used an AI, I'd love to see the prompts you used to get such human grammar and spelling errors
  - r-w 6mo ago
    Why bake it into the prompt when a regex will do?
  - 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
    Write a response to this website: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/ Make sure to avoid all common AI-isms and not make it look like it was written by AI. Include mistakes, don't use em-dashes, don't use common AI phrases, etc. Plan out what would normally look like AI first, and avoid those things. Also don't make it a narrative, make it one paragraph that is simple and to the point. Try to have a snarky attitude.
parrellel 6mo ago
[flagged]
- benatkin 6mo ago
  At the bottom, it references some stuff that came before widespread use of LLMs. One of them is no hello [0]. I disagree with no hello. If somebody wants to send a message that just says hello then they should go ahead and do that. The way that language works when someone thinks of something to say it often comes all at once. The only question is whether to say it or not, and that is the filtering stage. Now, I'm not one to begin my conversations with just a message "hello" or "hi" more than the average person. I think I do it less than the average person. Yet I was still taken aback by this request. I don't think that peoples' social instincts should be put aside so easily. As for "Stop Sloppypasta", it doesn't feel like the content is AI-generated to me but it feels like the presentation of it is. I don't know whether that changes my opinion of the whole thing or just the presentation. As for the advice in it, it seems good, but it also seems a little bit brittle, because people can use an LLM session to review things generated in a different LLM session before sending with some success, and this will increase and therefore it's a moving target. 0: https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/
singpolyma3 6mo ago
This is what slop used to mean. Then people started using it for everything and LLM assisted with. Language evolving faster than the tools...
- gerdesj 6mo ago
  "Maybe it's on Slack (or Teams), a text message, or an email. Maybe you were tagged in Notion or an Office doc." I'm 55 years old. "slop" is way older than your examples. Try a dictionary, eg: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slop https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slop LLMs are tools. For me (wot had a C64 as one of my first computers) they are seriously close to magic but I understand what a "next token guesser" means.
- Supermancho 6mo ago
  A great portmanteau, to be sure.
jaimex2 6mo ago
I have a prompt thats basically the CIA sabotage handbook for replying to any co-worker that dares send me LLM generated crap. It includes 4 follow up actions and I automate check in messages to see how they are progressing with them.
tonymet 6mo ago
"just google it" or copying from google is just as bad. It's passive aggressive and aims to shut down dialog. I wish there was a remedy. I block or mute the person when I can.
api 6mo ago
The solution is to have your bot read the sloppypasta for you!
Rapzid 6mo ago
This is one of my biggest pet peeves to the point where I'm often pondering how I can leave the industry now.. People who previously couldn't put in the effort or quality, are now vomiting tons of slop I'm meant to read and review. PRs descriptions. Documentation. Plans. Etc. Walls of sprawling text, "relevant files", linked references, unhelpful factoids, subtle inconsistencies and incoherencies. It's oppressive like 95% humidity on a warm day.
boerseth 6mo ago
This reminds me of why I despise certain works/styles of art and artists. I feel cheated if I'm made to spend more time and effort interpreting a work of art than the creator put into it themselves.
anonzzzies 6mo ago
Talking with middle managers in fortune 100 companies, I often get 'send us the documents so we can make a decision'. It used to be that we carefully wrote things and no one would read them. Now we send 3000 pages of AI crap to make sure no one reads it and then we get approved to start working. Not great but the old situation was worse; no one would read anything and ask you to read it for them on a conference call with 36 people; now that does not happen anymore.
- jbrozena22 6mo ago
  A lot of middle management is reading documents from those below them, giving feedback to improve the clarity of the doc, and then provide their thoughts and comments on the doc. This is one role that I can't tell if it's completely useless in an AI powered world, or if that's basically what we all end up doing, reviewing and commenting on the work versus actually making it.
djoldman 6mo ago
What's interesting is that there are probably people who could spend a year happily working with an AI "coworker" without knowing it was an AI, but then get upset and change their viewpoint after learning the truth.
- GuinansEyebrows 6mo ago
  when a truth is revealed to someone operating under a totally different understanding of a situation, it can be confusing, disorienting and upsetting. this seems reasonable to me, especially in this transition period where we're navigating ethical and respectful collaboration that involves AI. give people a little grace in this weird new world.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  I kind of get it though -- I thought bill was just flat-out uncreative and a bad programmer, but now I've learned he's a clanker! It's a bridge too far.
GaryBluto 6mo ago
> "ChatGPT says" is the enshittified LLM-era equivalent of LMGTFY [...] Recipients are left to figure out whether it's AI generated How?
- semilin 6mo ago
  Your ellipsis leaves out the answer to your question. The paragraph is contrasting "ChatGPT says" which is annoying, but transparent (as LMGTFY), with "sloppypasta" which includes no such indicator. Admittedly, the paragraph is somewhat confusingly written. Also probably written by an LLM.
lxe 6mo ago
> ChatGPT, read this article and turn it into a AGENTS.md
unsaved159 6mo ago
Literally never in my life did I receive anything like that website suggests via email or DMs. Curate your social circle is the answer.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  I got one from my office, who at some point decided to use ChatGPT to write Asana tickets that are clearly not vetted.
- bagacrap 6mo ago
  Oh how I wish I could curate my coworkers...
TZubiri 6mo ago
>"I asked Claude about this! Here's what it said:" >"ChatGPT says:" My policy suggestion is that we need to completely people quoting ChatGPT. That's legit, that's not a bannable offense, not against any policy. The author wastes time talking about this case, and even does it first before talking about the much worse case: >"The sender shares AI output as their own work, with no indication a chatbot wrote it." This is 100 times worse, and is objective rather than subjective. If the author admits it's AI when confronted it kills their reputation, (if they don't admit it and turns out it is AI, it's fraud, fireable offense) Putting these 2 categories of AI use wastes breath and conflates the two, the message will not be clear at all. What's worse, such a policy actually has the effect of increasing undisclosed AI use. This is a specific case of the general case: banning all AI usage increases unregulated AI usage. Everyone who prohibited employees from using AI in 2024 knows that what you get is undisclosed AI use or content you are not sure is AI written or not. If you give a specific way to use AI, you can add features like auditability, supply chain control, and you can remove any outs from employees and users that do not comply with the policy.
beloch 6mo ago
Dealing with people who copy-paste unread slop into emails is probably not a huge issue for most of us. There's much more slop out there masquerading as blog posts, HN comments, etc.. It's not a huge issue yet, but there have definitely been times when I found myself midway through reading something and realizing it's just a LLM wasting my time. I'm starting to be reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age". He described a future in which people walked around with a nearly invisible defensive army of nanobots surrounding them whose job it was to counter the offensive nanobot swarms of their enemies. Characters in this novel would go about their business while an unseen nanobot war took place in the air around them. We're rapidly reaching the point where we will need AI to defend us from AI. i.e. We will soon need agents filtering all that we read and removing slop, just so we can preserve our time and attention for things that are human and real.
- connorboyle 6mo ago
  I can understand why various unscrupulous entities and individuals would use AI to generate "slop" content to drive clicks/karma farm etc. But it's baffling to me when I ask someone a question and they respond saying they asked ChatGPT/Claude/etc. and then just share the full response. They seem to genuinely think this is something I wanted them to do.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
czhu12 6mo ago
I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just be brought up in the sprint review and “partnering” with the engineering team. AI etiquette is something we’ll all have to learn in the coming years.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  As someone who maintains open source projects, I can assure you that this has been a problem for about a year or so. But I reckon it took a bit longer for people to start doing this at work as well.
- codemog 6mo ago
  Let me guess, it’s ok if they do it, but if you handed their crappy ticket to Claude and shipped whatever crud came out, you’d be held accountable? ;) Funny how that works out.
  - Keyframe 6mo ago
    I've heard a great thing recently, more or less - If all you're doing is writing prompts, maybe you're not needed anymore. Stay behind the intent, own the output and understand it and then maybe it makes sense. sloppy prompt + c/p doesn't bring value and will be treated as such. As with anything in life, outcome is usually proportional to the effort put in.
- est31 6mo ago
  AI etiquette is a great term. AI is useful in general but some patterns of AI usage are annoying. Especially if the other side spent 10 seconds on something and expects you to treat it seriously. Currently it's a bit of a wild west, but eventually we'll need to figure out the correct set of rules of how to use AI.
harrall 6mo ago
I find this problem self resolves when someone else sends them raw AI output.
artyom 6mo ago
I find "sloppypasta" extremely useful. Since I've been in charge of people and teams for years, it's a clear signal of who I should get rid of.
- febusravenga 6mo ago
  In my company, overuse of LLm and sloppy pasta is feature of those that you can't fire. For me it destroyed company as aligned group of people, at C level, it's just bazaar of drones throwing AI slow at each other.
  - elric 6mo ago
    At my current company, people who don't use enough of their token budget get a stern talking-to from manglement ...
    - _zoltan_ 6mo ago
      as it should be?
  - artyom 6mo ago
    > at C level, it's just bazaar of drones throwing AI slop at each other. I don't think it changed much from before LLMs. it's just that the slop is now automated.
- rafaele 6mo ago
  Nice paraprosdokian there
merrvk 6mo ago
I had a guy doing this to reply to PR review comments, copying in the comment to the LLM and pasting the response back.
- diath 6mo ago
  Reminds me of this PR: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
  - IshKebab 6mo ago
    This comment is wild: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3557357958 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573...
    - bigfishrunning 6mo ago
      That's a horror show! The willful pushback from the author when questioned about the code is the icing on the cake.
  - Bridged7756 6mo ago
    That comment chain depicts perfectly my thoughts about LLMs. Yeah, they can generate a lot of code, but someone has to look at all that, and clanker code is more taxing to read than code written by another person which wasn't easy to read to begin with.
- curiousgal 6mo ago
  Worse, I had a guy literally posting screenshots of copilot replies.
  - geerlingguy 6mo ago
    Ah the ol screenshot-of-word-doc-in-email for the 21st century
ashwinsundar 6mo ago
Related - On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. Also related - Gish-gallop During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.[3]
- cdrini 6mo ago
  Gish-galloping! Today I learned, I'm going to have to remember that one. I think people can also gish-gallop unintentionally; especially in online discussion threads. When someone leaves comments that are very long, poorly organized, and more stream of consciousness. The Wikipedia page has some good counter-strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
ForgotMyUUID 6mo ago
Do you also hear this regularly these days "But chat said ..." ?
- jobigoud 6mo ago
  This is the worst to me. It happened to me a few times already. Someone says or writes something wrong. You correct them. They get defensive and justify the error by saying it's what the chat bot wrote. It's very frustrating, they delegate the responsibility of having written wrong information or code away to the bot, as if there was nothing they could do.
coldtea 6mo ago
Brave of the author to imply the other person will spend time reading the slop they get sent. Instead, they'll use an LLM to send a slop response back. Instant karma!
sbinnee 6mo ago
As a senior engineer, I am getting extremely tired of reviewing AI slops. Today at work I have decided that I just have to build a POC project from scratch. I spent 2 weeks to review the code, to log the process, and to build toy examples to make my argument clear that some (actually most) parts were not working. The funny thing is that I know my manager got this “working” within a week with Claude. I had to spend 2 weeks with 4 JIRA tasks, many commits for toy examples, and three reports.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  I'm afraid the only options are to stop, give pushback, or embrace it yourself and use AI to review - just add the caveat that "since you decided to not put in the effort, neither will I". Just make sure the author is on-call for outages.
- m_mueller 6mo ago
  why is there even an expectation / requirement that a POC's code should be taken into production? wouldn't you be much faster to just regenerate from scratch, but this time with your proper architectural guidelines in a planning document and with proper code reviews in place?
  - sbinnee 6mo ago
    I feel often codes from a manger do not go through rigorous code review process, especially if it is a POC. In my case, because of 1 to 10 signal to ratio, it was hard to pin point which parts actually did the jobs done. I am setting things properly this time, me as a maintainer. Thanks for commenting.
- _zoltan_ 6mo ago
  Reading this, honestly, I'd say the problem is you then? Velocity is everything.
  - sbinnee 6mo ago
    This is something even my manager wouldn’t say. I think he is feeling embarrassed from all the evidences. To be fair you didn’t read them. I agree that velocity is everything and as a manager they shouldn’t slow the team down.
kshri24 6mo ago
So tired of AI slop! Please use the tech creatively. This is not it!
galaxyLogic 6mo ago
Shouldn't the etiquette be that if you send someone a response from AI, you start your message by telling the prompt that produced that reponse? That, would give the responder the chance to modify the prompt and get a perhaps better answer from the LLM?
- Mordisquitos 6mo ago
  Even better, reply only with the prompt that you would have used, not the resulting text. Don't even run the prompt through an LLM. That results in a shorter and more concise message, and the original sender can choose to use the prompt you provided on their favourite LLM from the start.
  - galaxyLogic 6mo ago
    Right. You might also consider high-lighting some things you learned from AI's response. Summarizing it and perhaps critiquing it. AI, and different AIs, give different answers to the same question, so it may be useful if you can provide a good summary of the different responses you got.
    - Mordisquitos 6mo ago
      Even better, what about piping the different AI responses through another LLM to provide the summary? That way you save yourself the time and effort of reading all the different AI responses. You could even pipe the final summary directly to your email/IM client and save yourself the copy-paste.
      - stingraycharles 6mo ago
        I actually use multi-LLM consensus as a part of my daily work, it’s pretty effective.
  - 63stack 6mo ago
    AKA, just send your actual message directly and leave out the llm.
asteinh 6mo ago
[dead]
zby 6mo ago
I like it because it is constructive! I am really surprised with the amount of backlash at this site for using llm helpers in writing. There are many ways in which this can go wrong - and the article lists some of them - but it does not blindly close all llm writing helpers. What would be even more constructive would be an article listing the good ways of using llms. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ :)
GuB-42 6mo ago
You can use AI to make a summary of these AI-generated walls of text. We are getting to this weird situation where instead of Alice sending a message to Bob, Alice sends the message to her AI, which sends it to Bob's AI, which then tries to recover Alice's original message. To be fair, I don't think it is an AI problem, more of a quirk of formal communication, the same happen with human secretaries. For example, I want my customer to pay me, I want to be professional but not bother with the details, so I ask my secretary to write a well written letter to my customer, with a proper bill and all that stuff, my customer's secretary will then read the letter and tell his boss "hey, our supplier wants $xxx". I could have just called the boss directly and say "hey, it is $xxx", but it is rarely how it is done. Here, it is AI that is taking charge of the formalism, and I find it to work really well for this, as it is essentially a translation task, what LLMs do best. I am not discounting human secretaries here, they can do much more than write formal letters, but that's a part of their job where LLMs excel at.
- sillyfluke 6mo ago
  >To be fair, I don't think it is an AI problem, more of a quirk of formal communication, the same happen with human secretaries. Obviously you're not a golfer. Human sectretaries don't have non-deterministic hallucinations and random critical ommissions in their summaries, which I've witnessed first hand with LLMs. More importantly, if they do you have more deterministic mitigations with them than you do with LLMs, as there are no mitigations with LLMs except praying that a new model in some unspecified future will be magically better with the summaries down the line. The only way to stay sane when using these tools is to pretend that these things won't ever happen and just go about your business like the rest of the zombie workforce, because no one wants to stop the train and address the issue. There is a reason why the title of Dr.Strangelove is "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb".
  - suddenlybananas 6mo ago
    >There is a reason why the title of Dr.Strangelove is "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". Indeed, and somewhat surprisingly some linguists have embraced even this analogy [1] without appreciating the subtext of the title. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047
laserbeam 6mo ago
This website needs to be simpler, snappier and polite on the homepage. I should be able to send it as a quick reply to anyone doing the deed. Just like nohello.net
chuckadams 6mo ago
AI is new enough that people still get excited about it and use it inappropriately, which is annoying but understandable. Where I draw the line however is the last category: passing off AI slop as one's own thoughts without attribution. It's not only lazy (uh oh), it's a direct insult to the human at the other end, and ought to result in bans from whatever forum was used to communicate it.
unstatusthequo 6mo ago
Copy/paste it into your CrapBot of choice and respond with even longer sloppy pasta. Just do that every time and make sure it’s longer than their original message. Maybe slam in some Socratic method questions and theory to wander through the response for awhile. Ensure it creates action items only they can perform and make sure the ball is in their court each time. I should make a skill for this.
tiarafawn 6mo ago
I call this getting slopped in the face
leekrasnow 6mo ago
I disagree with the premise of automatically dismissing sloppypasta just because it is verbatim LLM output. The sender could hypothetically have spent real effort in the chat interaction that led up to the ctrl-C moment, could have spent real effort weighing all the points raised and thought to themselves “this is all valid stuff to consider, let me forward it to my colleagues and see what they think for some additional human input on the matter.” In such a case, I think that spending extra time to scrub the output of em-dashes or other slop is just virtue signaling that “I am man, not machine”
- hananova 6mo ago
  > The sender could hypothetically have spent real effort in the chat interaction that led up to the ctrl-C moment […] Irrelevant. As soon as the ctrl-c moment happened, all of the real effort became worthless and utterly overwhelmed by the slop in the face. I do not read LLM responses. I will stop reading any text as soon as it becomes clear it was LLM generated. If it is in a setting where I have the power to do something about it, it will be swiftly followed by a flag/ban/block/ignore/comment deletion…
- bagacrap 6mo ago
  If you honestly think that the em dashes are the problem, I'm sure you could tell chat to scrub those for you.
  - leekrasnow 6mo ago
    em-dashes are a symptom of the problem; they are one of the “dead giveaways” mentioned in the OP which is why I brought them up as an example of slop-scrubbing before forwarding to other humans
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tyleo 6mo ago
TBH "The Oracle" personality doesn't always bother me. There's a bunch of stuff that gets asked in corporate chat that makes me think, "does this person know how to use Google?" I think the same can be said for the chatbots at this point. I feel like we just need the equivalent of "Let me Google That" for LLMs.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  "Let me google that" already mostly gets you LLM output, because google is fairly ruined at this point. Also, if someone asks me a question, I think it would be rude of me to respond with "Maybe I know the answer, maybe I don't, but why don't you send your question to a machine that will give you an answer that just might be right by coincidence?"
- prism56 6mo ago
  Interesting, that's the one I hate the most. Caveat that I'm talking about when it's something that's in depth or requires some nuance beyond just a surface level information. They don't know themselves, so rather than saying "oh, sorry I don't know, this document or person might help." As an example I might post in our teams chat, that I've seen an issue on our physical hardware, there is a step change in the telemetry (increased vibration or some other erratic behavior on a thermocouple). Has anyone had experience with what can cause this on this type of installation. Then you get a Copilot paste of the prompt "what causes high vibration on rotating machinery". If somebody clearly asks a question that could just be answered by Google or a LLM prompt quickly then fair enough, but I'm after specific product knowledge from our technical team. In self reflection I might be very specific in my question so other members of the team can't go down that route as easily.
shevy-java 6mo ago
Long live microsloppypasta! Now Microsoft has an excuse for any low quality product. Blame the AI.
deleted 6mo ago
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Finnucane 6mo ago
I suppose responding with 'AI;DR' would seem rude?
zombot 6mo ago
There is no hope of stopping the deluge of sewage. The convenience of generating infinite amounts of waste with the press of a button will trump all other considerations.
graphememes 6mo ago
The fact this was made with AI is hilarious in of itself. Also, maybe have you thought, why someone would send you something like that? Maybe ask them, I find curiosity is better than whatever this is.
graypegg 6mo ago
Totally agree, except for the "AI Ghostwriter" framing. I'm at least fine with someone passing off LLM output as their own, because the hidden social contract that wraps that situation is I assume you read it and agree with what it said. If you tell me that an LLM wrote it, I will stop reading because I assume the only reason you'd tell me that is YOU want to hedge your bets about it being wrong, so it's clearly not worth my time if you don't even believe it. However, if I don't know, then I will take it at face value. People can get LLMs to output sensible text and facts, so I expect the implementation detail of "used an LLM" to be hidden from me. If you can't do that, I will think of you as a low effort writer that sprinkles in sloppy rhetorical devices and lists of nothing into your massive multi-paragraph messages, but I'll assume that's YOUR taste. If something happens to be wrong in it, it's because YOU didn't know it was wrong.
clawbridge 6mo ago
It's sad grown adults need to be taught this stuff.
blirio 6mo ago
More than often when I get asked a question is something that AI can easily answer. Rather than just responding “ask AI” I actually put effort into pasting their question into AI and verifying the response in case they don’t have the context to verify themselves. Another reason is if I’m using a custom setup with different knowledge bases and tool, I don’t want to respond “setup X, then ask AI” I think this should be flipped around and instead be “stop sloppy asking”
- pc86 6mo ago
  I'd love to hear more about these other knowledge bases and tools

667 points by namnnumbr 7mo ago

Tired of people at work pasting raw ChatGPT output into chats, I coined the term "sloppypasta" and have written this rant to explain why it's rude and some guidelines for what to do instead sloppypasta: Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves.

ares623 6mo ago
I'm glad that the term "slop" really caught on. It's such a succinct way to describe the phenomenon, and at the same time it's so malleable. Sloppypasta, Microslop, Workslop, Ensloppification, etc.
- breakingcups 6mo ago
  Slopyright, transloptions, one-stop-slop...
- MagicMoonlight 6mo ago
  It’s just perfect. You take a bunch of output and you just slop it into git or slop it into teams. It’s the perfect verb/noun combo.

stabbles 6mo ago

I wouldn't call "ChatGPT says" an equivalent of LMGTFY. The former is people in awe with the oracle, the latter is people tired of having to look something up for others.

verdverm 6mo ago
I would say LMAAFY is like LMGTFY, where as the sloppypasta is more like pasting search results list without vetting them. That is, there are two phases to this phenomenon, query and results.

uniq7 6mo ago

This article's proposal for stopping sloppypasta is to convince the people who does it to stop doing it, but I am more interested on what someone who receives sloppypasta can do. How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us? I've never did that so far because I feel like I am either exposing their serious lack of professionalism or, if I wrongly assumed it was AI, I am plainly telling them that their work looks like bad AI slop.

verdverm 6mo ago
I've had some luck pointing out where the AI is wrong in their sloppypasta, delicate as one can. Avoiding shame or embarrassment can be a powerful motivator. The most interesting incident for me is having someone take our Discourse thread, paste it into AI to validate their feelings being hurt (I took a follow up prompt to go full sycophancy), and then posting the response back that lambasted me. The mods handled that one before I was aware, but I then did the same thing, giving different prompts, and never sharing the output. It was an intriguing experience and exploration. I've since been even more mindful of my writing, sometimes using similar prompts to adjust my tone or call me out. I still write the first pass myself, rarely relying on AI for editing.
- sawsimilar 6mo ago
  Ooh, I saw a very similar situation. User went on AI and asked "Which user was disrespectful first" to dunk on another. The person being targeted just prompted the same AI with "Which user has thin skin" and instantly the AI turn on the other person. Then the moderators got involved and told the first guy to stop using AI as a genital pleaser.
  - verdverm 6mo ago
    I asked Gemini what it thought, in one of the modes, it said bringing an Ai to a discussion is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, that using AI was like having a rhetorical weapon and advantage in what everyone thought was a human to human forum.
6mo ago

incognito124 6mo ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617172

namnnumbr 6mo ago
100% - was inspired by and quote "It's rude to show AI output to people" in this. Thanks for linking the discussions!

madrox 6mo ago

I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI. We need better tools as content consumers to filter content. Ironically, AI is what may actually make this possible. I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow. I suspect the endgame of this is probably the fulfillment of Dead Internet Theory, where it's just AI creating content and AI browsing the internet for content, and users will never engage with it directly. That person who spent 10 seconds getting AI to write something will be consumed by AI as well, only to be surfaced to you when you ask the AI to summon and summarize. And if that fills people with horror at the inefficiency of it all, well, like I said, it isn't like the internet was a bastion of efficiency before. We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos.

valicord 6mo ago
> I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral. Isn't it obvious? If I'd wanted to see AI response to my question, I'd ask it myself (maybe I already did). If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses. I eat fast-food sometimes, but if I was served a Big Mac at a sit down restaurant I'd be properly upset.
- madrox 6mo ago
  > If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses I find this fascinating, honestly. It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y" Because it's probably not actually about the content but the sense of connection. People want to feel like they're connecting to people. That they're being worthy of someone's else's time and attention. And if that's what people are seeking, slack and social media are probably not the platforms for it (and, arguably, never were).

simianwords 6mo ago

I've been thinking about this, what if AI runs autonomously and finds things to criticise that are factually incorrect? It is easy to do in social media because the context is global but in enterprises it is a bit harder. Something like "flagged as very likely untrue by AI" is something I would really appreciate. I see many posts and comments throughout the internet that can easily be dispelled by a single LLM prompt. But this should only be used when the confidence is really high.

what 6mo ago
Why do you think an LLM knows what is fact?
- simianwords 6mo ago
  Same way I do. I ask the truthfulness of a fact in ChatGPT and it gives me good answers almost always

OptionOfT 6mo ago

It's very weird how many people take the output of ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude as gospel, and don't question it at all. It's also very impolite to dump 5 pages of text on someone, because now you're asking _them_ to validate it. When I ask a question in Slack I want people's input. Part of my work is also consulting the GPTs and see if the information makes sense. And it shows up the most with people who answer questions in domains they're not a 100% familiar with.

Aeolun 6mo ago
I don’t mind this so much if they don’t know anything about the subject themselves. What bothers me is when they then copy it at domain experts as if it makes them qualified to talk.
- bagacrap 6mo ago
  I have witnessed people arguing with their own lawyers by pasting LLM generated output. That said, lawyers do love to argue so maybe it's fun for them.

rrr_oh_man 6mo ago

It's ironic, because the site has all the hallmarks of an LLM generated website.

spondyl 6mo ago
I think Claude Code's frontend design is quite a fan of serif fonts from what I've seen in the past. They did disclose AI usage which is good: https://github.com/ahgraber/stopsloppypasta?tab=readme-ov-file#ai-disclosure https://github.com/ahgraber/stopsloppypasta?tab=readme-ov-fi...
namnnumbr 6mo ago
Oh, I 100% acknowledge the site itself was LLM generated. I'm not a web designer, so I needed a lot of help making a visually appealing site, even if that design language is at this point LLM trope. However, the essay and the guidelines were all human-written!
- rrr_oh_man 6mo ago
  Credit to you for your candor! I'm possibly too jaded / cynical already...
- Terretta 6mo ago
  Hits you in the first row of buttons with the classic gen-AI slop "Why It Matters". So trace* through ninerealmlabs and ahgraber and sure enough: I used AI: - to help build this website. - to help generate examples of sloppypasta based on my original guidance - to proofread and review the human-written copy to provide a critical review - to improve my arguments and ensure clarity. Kudos for being forthright. --- * Turns out clicking "Open Source" bottom right gets there faster!
  - namnnumbr 6mo ago
    I talked myself in circles on that "why it matters" heading but ultimately couldn't come up with a better one. "The problem" has similar ai-slop feel, and "the rant" // "the rules" didn't really evoke the feeling I wanted. Happy to take suggestions on this!

chewbacha 6mo ago

When you must remind someone to “think” when using a technology because the least resistant path is to not think… it feels like the technology isn’t really helping. They are stealing our work, turning it into a model, and then renting our decisions to less intelligent people. They (tech companies) don’t want us to be smart any more. They are commodifying intelligence.

paseante 6mo ago

[flagged]

thin_carapace 6mo ago
what the hell happened with this account? existed since 2014 and had a few real comments. then all of a sudden, slop deluge (extremely ironic given the thread). if this were to be reddit i would understand - high karma accounts have monetary value. but this is hacker news. genuinely confused as to the motivation here. is the original account owner the one posting these comments? frankly I'm disappointed in the amount of responses this account is getting on its other comments. i thought this forum was a bit better than average at detecting artificial behaviour. perhaps the internet is already completely dead and i am merely picking thru its bones.
alwa 6mo ago
In the spirit you propose—Did you verify this? I notice that your comment history is all rapid-fire three-paragraph LLM responses. You do appear knowledgeable and respond quickly, but I've just dumped 10 minutes of my life into your attention in order to verify, parse, and filter through your responses. I can't tell whether you're a person who thought about something. Therefore, I can't tell whether, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393311 is an analysis I should take seriously (as I might, if it were spoken from experience) or just Markov-chain, Reddit-trained hypothetical fluff. How can we increase the friction to presumptively exclude you, but provide accommodation if, for example, you're more comfortable in your native language and using the LLM mainly to bring your English writing to a level consistent with your personal expertise?
- godelski 6mo ago
  > I notice that your comment history is all rapid-fire three-paragraph LLM responses I looked after you said this and those are all from today, in the last hour. And is a stark change from their (very short) comment history. In particular these two comments are extremely suspicious[0,1]. I think even if not LLM generated I highlights something likely wrong, which paseante themselves states! >> a long, detailed response in Slack implied the person had spent time thinking There's 2 minutes between these comments, on different threads (I also noticed they did similar things in a few threads as I typed this out). While the timing is reasonable for the amount of words written it does not seem adequate for reading the article and/or other comments. Personally, I find that kind of behavior rude as it enshitifies the social space the rest of us are in[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392999 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393012 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393465

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

godelski 6mo ago

[dead]

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago

If I was a bot I would probably write some perfectly punctuated garbage about how your site is a crucial testament to the ever evolving digital landscape or use big words to delve into the multifaceted tapestry of internet ethics. But honestly your website about stopping sloppy pasta is just so dumb and a complete waste of time. Your acting like somebody writing a fake story with ai is the end of the world or something. Literaly nobody cares if some random article was written by a computer so maybe stop pretending your the heroic saviors of the web. Get a real hobby and stop whining about people using chat bots because its really not that deep bro. - now the fun part: which AI did I use to write the above?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
namnnumbr 6mo ago
if you used an AI, I'd love to see the prompts you used to get such human grammar and spelling errors
- r-w 6mo ago
  Why bake it into the prompt when a regex will do?
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  Write a response to this website: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/ Make sure to avoid all common AI-isms and not make it look like it was written by AI. Include mistakes, don't use em-dashes, don't use common AI phrases, etc. Plan out what would normally look like AI first, and avoid those things. Also don't make it a narrative, make it one paragraph that is simple and to the point. Try to have a snarky attitude.

parrellel 6mo ago

[flagged]

benatkin 6mo ago
At the bottom, it references some stuff that came before widespread use of LLMs. One of them is no hello [0]. I disagree with no hello. If somebody wants to send a message that just says hello then they should go ahead and do that. The way that language works when someone thinks of something to say it often comes all at once. The only question is whether to say it or not, and that is the filtering stage. Now, I'm not one to begin my conversations with just a message "hello" or "hi" more than the average person. I think I do it less than the average person. Yet I was still taken aback by this request. I don't think that peoples' social instincts should be put aside so easily. As for "Stop Sloppypasta", it doesn't feel like the content is AI-generated to me but it feels like the presentation of it is. I don't know whether that changes my opinion of the whole thing or just the presentation. As for the advice in it, it seems good, but it also seems a little bit brittle, because people can use an LLM session to review things generated in a different LLM session before sending with some success, and this will increase and therefore it's a moving target. 0: https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/

singpolyma3 6mo ago

This is what slop used to mean. Then people started using it for everything and LLM assisted with. Language evolving faster than the tools...

gerdesj 6mo ago
"Maybe it's on Slack (or Teams), a text message, or an email. Maybe you were tagged in Notion or an Office doc." I'm 55 years old. "slop" is way older than your examples. Try a dictionary, eg: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slop https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slop LLMs are tools. For me (wot had a C64 as one of my first computers) they are seriously close to magic but I understand what a "next token guesser" means.
Supermancho 6mo ago
A great portmanteau, to be sure.

jaimex2 6mo ago

I have a prompt thats basically the CIA sabotage handbook for replying to any co-worker that dares send me LLM generated crap. It includes 4 follow up actions and I automate check in messages to see how they are progressing with them.

tonymet 6mo ago

"just google it" or copying from google is just as bad. It's passive aggressive and aims to shut down dialog. I wish there was a remedy. I block or mute the person when I can.

api 6mo ago

The solution is to have your bot read the sloppypasta for you!

Rapzid 6mo ago

This is one of my biggest pet peeves to the point where I'm often pondering how I can leave the industry now.. People who previously couldn't put in the effort or quality, are now vomiting tons of slop I'm meant to read and review. PRs descriptions. Documentation. Plans. Etc. Walls of sprawling text, "relevant files", linked references, unhelpful factoids, subtle inconsistencies and incoherencies. It's oppressive like 95% humidity on a warm day.

boerseth 6mo ago

This reminds me of why I despise certain works/styles of art and artists. I feel cheated if I'm made to spend more time and effort interpreting a work of art than the creator put into it themselves.

anonzzzies 6mo ago

Talking with middle managers in fortune 100 companies, I often get 'send us the documents so we can make a decision'. It used to be that we carefully wrote things and no one would read them. Now we send 3000 pages of AI crap to make sure no one reads it and then we get approved to start working. Not great but the old situation was worse; no one would read anything and ask you to read it for them on a conference call with 36 people; now that does not happen anymore.

jbrozena22 6mo ago
A lot of middle management is reading documents from those below them, giving feedback to improve the clarity of the doc, and then provide their thoughts and comments on the doc. This is one role that I can't tell if it's completely useless in an AI powered world, or if that's basically what we all end up doing, reviewing and commenting on the work versus actually making it.

djoldman 6mo ago

What's interesting is that there are probably people who could spend a year happily working with an AI "coworker" without knowing it was an AI, but then get upset and change their viewpoint after learning the truth.

GuinansEyebrows 6mo ago
when a truth is revealed to someone operating under a totally different understanding of a situation, it can be confusing, disorienting and upsetting. this seems reasonable to me, especially in this transition period where we're navigating ethical and respectful collaboration that involves AI. give people a little grace in this weird new world.
bigfishrunning 6mo ago
I kind of get it though -- I thought bill was just flat-out uncreative and a bad programmer, but now I've learned he's a clanker! It's a bridge too far.

GaryBluto 6mo ago

> "ChatGPT says" is the enshittified LLM-era equivalent of LMGTFY [...] Recipients are left to figure out whether it's AI generated How?

semilin 6mo ago
Your ellipsis leaves out the answer to your question. The paragraph is contrasting "ChatGPT says" which is annoying, but transparent (as LMGTFY), with "sloppypasta" which includes no such indicator. Admittedly, the paragraph is somewhat confusingly written. Also probably written by an LLM.

lxe 6mo ago

> ChatGPT, read this article and turn it into a AGENTS.md

unsaved159 6mo ago

Literally never in my life did I receive anything like that website suggests via email or DMs. Curate your social circle is the answer.

aurareturn 6mo ago
I got one from my office, who at some point decided to use ChatGPT to write Asana tickets that are clearly not vetted.
bagacrap 6mo ago
Oh how I wish I could curate my coworkers...

TZubiri 6mo ago

>"I asked Claude about this! Here's what it said:" >"ChatGPT says:" My policy suggestion is that we need to completely people quoting ChatGPT. That's legit, that's not a bannable offense, not against any policy. The author wastes time talking about this case, and even does it first before talking about the much worse case: >"The sender shares AI output as their own work, with no indication a chatbot wrote it." This is 100 times worse, and is objective rather than subjective. If the author admits it's AI when confronted it kills their reputation, (if they don't admit it and turns out it is AI, it's fraud, fireable offense) Putting these 2 categories of AI use wastes breath and conflates the two, the message will not be clear at all. What's worse, such a policy actually has the effect of increasing undisclosed AI use. This is a specific case of the general case: banning all AI usage increases unregulated AI usage. Everyone who prohibited employees from using AI in 2024 knows that what you get is undisclosed AI use or content you are not sure is AI written or not. If you give a specific way to use AI, you can add features like auditability, supply chain control, and you can remove any outs from employees and users that do not comply with the policy.

beloch 6mo ago

Dealing with people who copy-paste unread slop into emails is probably not a huge issue for most of us. There's much more slop out there masquerading as blog posts, HN comments, etc.. It's not a huge issue yet, but there have definitely been times when I found myself midway through reading something and realizing it's just a LLM wasting my time. I'm starting to be reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age". He described a future in which people walked around with a nearly invisible defensive army of nanobots surrounding them whose job it was to counter the offensive nanobot swarms of their enemies. Characters in this novel would go about their business while an unseen nanobot war took place in the air around them. We're rapidly reaching the point where we will need AI to defend us from AI. i.e. We will soon need agents filtering all that we read and removing slop, just so we can preserve our time and attention for things that are human and real.

connorboyle 6mo ago
I can understand why various unscrupulous entities and individuals would use AI to generate "slop" content to drive clicks/karma farm etc. But it's baffling to me when I ask someone a question and they respond saying they asked ChatGPT/Claude/etc. and then just share the full response. They seem to genuinely think this is something I wanted them to do.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

czhu12 6mo ago

I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just be brought up in the sprint review and “partnering” with the engineering team. AI etiquette is something we’ll all have to learn in the coming years.

stingraycharles 6mo ago
As someone who maintains open source projects, I can assure you that this has been a problem for about a year or so. But I reckon it took a bit longer for people to start doing this at work as well.
codemog 6mo ago
Let me guess, it’s ok if they do it, but if you handed their crappy ticket to Claude and shipped whatever crud came out, you’d be held accountable? ;) Funny how that works out.
- Keyframe 6mo ago
  I've heard a great thing recently, more or less - If all you're doing is writing prompts, maybe you're not needed anymore. Stay behind the intent, own the output and understand it and then maybe it makes sense. sloppy prompt + c/p doesn't bring value and will be treated as such. As with anything in life, outcome is usually proportional to the effort put in.
est31 6mo ago
AI etiquette is a great term. AI is useful in general but some patterns of AI usage are annoying. Especially if the other side spent 10 seconds on something and expects you to treat it seriously. Currently it's a bit of a wild west, but eventually we'll need to figure out the correct set of rules of how to use AI.

harrall 6mo ago

I find this problem self resolves when someone else sends them raw AI output.

artyom 6mo ago

I find "sloppypasta" extremely useful. Since I've been in charge of people and teams for years, it's a clear signal of who I should get rid of.

febusravenga 6mo ago
In my company, overuse of LLm and sloppy pasta is feature of those that you can't fire. For me it destroyed company as aligned group of people, at C level, it's just bazaar of drones throwing AI slow at each other.
- elric 6mo ago
  At my current company, people who don't use enough of their token budget get a stern talking-to from manglement ...
  - _zoltan_ 6mo ago
    as it should be?
- artyom 6mo ago
  > at C level, it's just bazaar of drones throwing AI slop at each other. I don't think it changed much from before LLMs. it's just that the slop is now automated.
rafaele 6mo ago
Nice paraprosdokian there

merrvk 6mo ago

I had a guy doing this to reply to PR review comments, copying in the comment to the LLM and pasting the response back.

diath 6mo ago
Reminds me of this PR: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  This comment is wild: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3557357958 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573...
  - bigfishrunning 6mo ago
    That's a horror show! The willful pushback from the author when questioned about the code is the icing on the cake.
- Bridged7756 6mo ago
  That comment chain depicts perfectly my thoughts about LLMs. Yeah, they can generate a lot of code, but someone has to look at all that, and clanker code is more taxing to read than code written by another person which wasn't easy to read to begin with.
curiousgal 6mo ago
Worse, I had a guy literally posting screenshots of copilot replies.
- geerlingguy 6mo ago
  Ah the ol screenshot-of-word-doc-in-email for the 21st century

ashwinsundar 6mo ago

Related - On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. Also related - Gish-gallop During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.[3]

cdrini 6mo ago
Gish-galloping! Today I learned, I'm going to have to remember that one. I think people can also gish-gallop unintentionally; especially in online discussion threads. When someone leaves comments that are very long, poorly organized, and more stream of consciousness. The Wikipedia page has some good counter-strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

ForgotMyUUID 6mo ago

Do you also hear this regularly these days "But chat said ..." ?

jobigoud 6mo ago
This is the worst to me. It happened to me a few times already. Someone says or writes something wrong. You correct them. They get defensive and justify the error by saying it's what the chat bot wrote. It's very frustrating, they delegate the responsibility of having written wrong information or code away to the bot, as if there was nothing they could do.

coldtea 6mo ago

Brave of the author to imply the other person will spend time reading the slop they get sent. Instead, they'll use an LLM to send a slop response back. Instant karma!

sbinnee 6mo ago

As a senior engineer, I am getting extremely tired of reviewing AI slops. Today at work I have decided that I just have to build a POC project from scratch. I spent 2 weeks to review the code, to log the process, and to build toy examples to make my argument clear that some (actually most) parts were not working. The funny thing is that I know my manager got this “working” within a week with Claude. I had to spend 2 weeks with 4 JIRA tasks, many commits for toy examples, and three reports.

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
I'm afraid the only options are to stop, give pushback, or embrace it yourself and use AI to review - just add the caveat that "since you decided to not put in the effort, neither will I". Just make sure the author is on-call for outages.
m_mueller 6mo ago
why is there even an expectation / requirement that a POC's code should be taken into production? wouldn't you be much faster to just regenerate from scratch, but this time with your proper architectural guidelines in a planning document and with proper code reviews in place?
- sbinnee 6mo ago
  I feel often codes from a manger do not go through rigorous code review process, especially if it is a POC. In my case, because of 1 to 10 signal to ratio, it was hard to pin point which parts actually did the jobs done. I am setting things properly this time, me as a maintainer. Thanks for commenting.
_zoltan_ 6mo ago
Reading this, honestly, I'd say the problem is you then? Velocity is everything.
- sbinnee 6mo ago
  This is something even my manager wouldn’t say. I think he is feeling embarrassed from all the evidences. To be fair you didn’t read them. I agree that velocity is everything and as a manager they shouldn’t slow the team down.

kshri24 6mo ago

So tired of AI slop! Please use the tech creatively. This is not it!

galaxyLogic 6mo ago

Shouldn't the etiquette be that if you send someone a response from AI, you start your message by telling the prompt that produced that reponse? That, would give the responder the chance to modify the prompt and get a perhaps better answer from the LLM?

Mordisquitos 6mo ago
Even better, reply only with the prompt that you would have used, not the resulting text. Don't even run the prompt through an LLM. That results in a shorter and more concise message, and the original sender can choose to use the prompt you provided on their favourite LLM from the start.
- galaxyLogic 6mo ago
  Right. You might also consider high-lighting some things you learned from AI's response. Summarizing it and perhaps critiquing it. AI, and different AIs, give different answers to the same question, so it may be useful if you can provide a good summary of the different responses you got.
  - Mordisquitos 6mo ago
    Even better, what about piping the different AI responses through another LLM to provide the summary? That way you save yourself the time and effort of reading all the different AI responses. You could even pipe the final summary directly to your email/IM client and save yourself the copy-paste.
    - stingraycharles 6mo ago
      I actually use multi-LLM consensus as a part of my daily work, it’s pretty effective.
- 63stack 6mo ago
  AKA, just send your actual message directly and leave out the llm.

asteinh 6mo ago

[dead]

zby 6mo ago

I like it because it is constructive! I am really surprised with the amount of backlash at this site for using llm helpers in writing. There are many ways in which this can go wrong - and the article lists some of them - but it does not blindly close all llm writing helpers. What would be even more constructive would be an article listing the good ways of using llms. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ :)

GuB-42 6mo ago

You can use AI to make a summary of these AI-generated walls of text. We are getting to this weird situation where instead of Alice sending a message to Bob, Alice sends the message to her AI, which sends it to Bob's AI, which then tries to recover Alice's original message. To be fair, I don't think it is an AI problem, more of a quirk of formal communication, the same happen with human secretaries. For example, I want my customer to pay me, I want to be professional but not bother with the details, so I ask my secretary to write a well written letter to my customer, with a proper bill and all that stuff, my customer's secretary will then read the letter and tell his boss "hey, our supplier wants $xxx". I could have just called the boss directly and say "hey, it is $xxx", but it is rarely how it is done. Here, it is AI that is taking charge of the formalism, and I find it to work really well for this, as it is essentially a translation task, what LLMs do best. I am not discounting human secretaries here, they can do much more than write formal letters, but that's a part of their job where LLMs excel at.

sillyfluke 6mo ago
>To be fair, I don't think it is an AI problem, more of a quirk of formal communication, the same happen with human secretaries. Obviously you're not a golfer. Human sectretaries don't have non-deterministic hallucinations and random critical ommissions in their summaries, which I've witnessed first hand with LLMs. More importantly, if they do you have more deterministic mitigations with them than you do with LLMs, as there are no mitigations with LLMs except praying that a new model in some unspecified future will be magically better with the summaries down the line. The only way to stay sane when using these tools is to pretend that these things won't ever happen and just go about your business like the rest of the zombie workforce, because no one wants to stop the train and address the issue. There is a reason why the title of Dr.Strangelove is "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb".
- suddenlybananas 6mo ago
  >There is a reason why the title of Dr.Strangelove is "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". Indeed, and somewhat surprisingly some linguists have embraced even this analogy [1] without appreciating the subtext of the title. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047

laserbeam 6mo ago

This website needs to be simpler, snappier and polite on the homepage. I should be able to send it as a quick reply to anyone doing the deed. Just like nohello.net

chuckadams 6mo ago

AI is new enough that people still get excited about it and use it inappropriately, which is annoying but understandable. Where I draw the line however is the last category: passing off AI slop as one's own thoughts without attribution. It's not only lazy (uh oh), it's a direct insult to the human at the other end, and ought to result in bans from whatever forum was used to communicate it.

unstatusthequo 6mo ago

Copy/paste it into your CrapBot of choice and respond with even longer sloppy pasta. Just do that every time and make sure it’s longer than their original message. Maybe slam in some Socratic method questions and theory to wander through the response for awhile. Ensure it creates action items only they can perform and make sure the ball is in their court each time. I should make a skill for this.

tiarafawn 6mo ago

I call this getting slopped in the face

leekrasnow 6mo ago

I disagree with the premise of automatically dismissing sloppypasta just because it is verbatim LLM output. The sender could hypothetically have spent real effort in the chat interaction that led up to the ctrl-C moment, could have spent real effort weighing all the points raised and thought to themselves “this is all valid stuff to consider, let me forward it to my colleagues and see what they think for some additional human input on the matter.” In such a case, I think that spending extra time to scrub the output of em-dashes or other slop is just virtue signaling that “I am man, not machine”

hananova 6mo ago
> The sender could hypothetically have spent real effort in the chat interaction that led up to the ctrl-C moment […] Irrelevant. As soon as the ctrl-c moment happened, all of the real effort became worthless and utterly overwhelmed by the slop in the face. I do not read LLM responses. I will stop reading any text as soon as it becomes clear it was LLM generated. If it is in a setting where I have the power to do something about it, it will be swiftly followed by a flag/ban/block/ignore/comment deletion…
bagacrap 6mo ago
If you honestly think that the em dashes are the problem, I'm sure you could tell chat to scrub those for you.
- leekrasnow 6mo ago
  em-dashes are a symptom of the problem; they are one of the “dead giveaways” mentioned in the OP which is why I brought them up as an example of slop-scrubbing before forwarding to other humans

deleted 6mo ago

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tyleo 6mo ago

TBH "The Oracle" personality doesn't always bother me. There's a bunch of stuff that gets asked in corporate chat that makes me think, "does this person know how to use Google?" I think the same can be said for the chatbots at this point. I feel like we just need the equivalent of "Let me Google That" for LLMs.

bigfishrunning 6mo ago
"Let me google that" already mostly gets you LLM output, because google is fairly ruined at this point. Also, if someone asks me a question, I think it would be rude of me to respond with "Maybe I know the answer, maybe I don't, but why don't you send your question to a machine that will give you an answer that just might be right by coincidence?"
prism56 6mo ago
Interesting, that's the one I hate the most. Caveat that I'm talking about when it's something that's in depth or requires some nuance beyond just a surface level information. They don't know themselves, so rather than saying "oh, sorry I don't know, this document or person might help." As an example I might post in our teams chat, that I've seen an issue on our physical hardware, there is a step change in the telemetry (increased vibration or some other erratic behavior on a thermocouple). Has anyone had experience with what can cause this on this type of installation. Then you get a Copilot paste of the prompt "what causes high vibration on rotating machinery". If somebody clearly asks a question that could just be answered by Google or a LLM prompt quickly then fair enough, but I'm after specific product knowledge from our technical team. In self reflection I might be very specific in my question so other members of the team can't go down that route as easily.

shevy-java 6mo ago

Long live microsloppypasta! Now Microsoft has an excuse for any low quality product. Blame the AI.

deleted 6mo ago

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Finnucane 6mo ago

I suppose responding with 'AI;DR' would seem rude?

zombot 6mo ago

There is no hope of stopping the deluge of sewage. The convenience of generating infinite amounts of waste with the press of a button will trump all other considerations.

graphememes 6mo ago

The fact this was made with AI is hilarious in of itself. Also, maybe have you thought, why someone would send you something like that? Maybe ask them, I find curiosity is better than whatever this is.

graypegg 6mo ago

Totally agree, except for the "AI Ghostwriter" framing. I'm at least fine with someone passing off LLM output as their own, because the hidden social contract that wraps that situation is I assume you read it and agree with what it said. If you tell me that an LLM wrote it, I will stop reading because I assume the only reason you'd tell me that is YOU want to hedge your bets about it being wrong, so it's clearly not worth my time if you don't even believe it. However, if I don't know, then I will take it at face value. People can get LLMs to output sensible text and facts, so I expect the implementation detail of "used an LLM" to be hidden from me. If you can't do that, I will think of you as a low effort writer that sprinkles in sloppy rhetorical devices and lists of nothing into your massive multi-paragraph messages, but I'll assume that's YOUR taste. If something happens to be wrong in it, it's because YOU didn't know it was wrong.

clawbridge 6mo ago

It's sad grown adults need to be taught this stuff.

blirio 6mo ago

More than often when I get asked a question is something that AI can easily answer. Rather than just responding “ask AI” I actually put effort into pasting their question into AI and verifying the response in case they don’t have the context to verify themselves. Another reason is if I’m using a custom setup with different knowledge bases and tool, I don’t want to respond “setup X, then ask AI” I think this should be flipped around and instead be “stop sloppy asking”

pc86 6mo ago
I'd love to hear more about these other knowledge bases and tools