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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 d

by madrox 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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).
  - valicord 7mo ago
    > It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask But it doesn't? I'm more than capable of using Google and chatgpt myself. If I was looking for a machine generated answer to my question I would have already found it myself and never made the post in the first place. If I went to the effort of posting the question, it means that either the slop answer is not sufficient for some reason or that I want to hear from actual humans that have subjective experiences that an LLM cannot. Posting an AI response verbatim basically says "I think you're too stupid to click a couple of buttons, so let me show you how it's done". I think it's very reasonable to get upset at the implication.
    - madrox 7mo ago
      I think it is reasonable, yes, but I don’t think it’s ever been reasonable to expect reasonableness on the internet. We have a difficult enough time showing each other decency.
      - YurgenJurgensen 7mo ago
        Then why even have this discussion in the first place? You weren’t expecting any reasonable responses to it, after all.
        coldtea 7mo ago
        Do you only do stuff where you expect the outcome to be good? Perhaps they did it for the off chance of a good response.
        the_af 7mo ago
        But then it'd be false that the internet is the wrong place. This person's account is from 2011, which shows they don't believe what they claim. I think they are playing devil's advocate in the most irritating way. Good things, and good venues, are worth preserving against enshittification. Let's not blandly accept this. Fight against it, even if it's a losing battle. "It was always like this" is false, anyway.
- falcor84 7mo ago
  I am really into this approach of AI being used as a user-agent. In particular, I've been thinking a lot about educational content, and what I'd love to ask educational providers for is not AI-generated content, but rather carefully human-built curricula offered in a structured manner, which my own AI could then use to create dynamic content for me.
namnnumbr 7mo ago
I acknowledge that those likely to copypaste slop aren't likely to find this article themselves, but I built the page to be shared or guide discussions around etiquette like nohello.net or dontasktoask.com. IMO a common understanding of AI etiquette would provide social pressure to halt some of these behaviors. I honestly don't mind someone else's AI as long as I can trust it/them. One problem I have with sloppypasta specifically is that it reads as raw LLM output and the user isn't transparent about how they worked with the AI or what they verified. "ChatGPT says" isn't enough; for me to avoid inheriting a verification burden, I'd also need to understand what they were prompting for, if they iterated with the AI, and if/what/how they validated. (the other problem is that dumping a multi-paragraph response in the midst of a chat thread is just obnoxious, but that's true even if its artisanal human-written text)
- Aeolun 7mo ago
  Yes, I can replace the link to nohello in my automated responses now :)
- lovemenot 7mo ago
  Couple of expressions from pre-AI culture: "RTFM", "Google is your friend". These were well-used because they are directed, pithy, abrasive. (n)amow(?): (not) All my own work ?
  - username223 7mo ago
    Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief. But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.
- madrox 7mo ago
  I think you will find you will get farther by offloading this unpleasantness to an AI and open sourcing it rather than teaching etiquette to the internet, a place not known for its decency.
mcphage 7mo ago
> We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos. Well, cat videos make people happy.
- jjgreen 7mo ago
  This Firefox extension replaces Daily Mail pages by pictures of kittens https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kitten-block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kitten-block/
- madrox 7mo ago
  Touche
waterTanuki 7mo ago
I find your comment disingenuous at best. > The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI. I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of AI-related discourse, watched hundreds of videos since 2022, maybe even a thousand now on it. NEVER at any point in time did people opine for the "high quality" internet of before. They opined for the imperfect HUMAN internet of before. We are now seeing once pristine, curated corners of the internet being infected with sloppypasta. This is quite a broad brush to paint the internet with. It's like saying The Earth is not a bastion of warzones/peaceful places to live. That is HIGHLY dependent on location.
- marcus_holmes 7mo ago
  Sorry, not related to your point, but the language: To "opine" is to give an opinion on something. To "pine" for something is to wish for it, usually in a nostalgic sense. I get how the two are related and can be confused, especially when you're talking about comments on the web. Just thought I'd clarify.
- madrox 7mo ago
  Even before AI, the human social internet was loaded with bots and disingenuous actors. You want the imperfect human internet that is also pristine and curated. I've been socializing on the internet since 1994, and I feel fairly confident in sharing that this never existed, except in nostalgia. If that's what you're pining for, you're going to have to find a highly protected part of the internet that is walled off from untrusted actors. However, that's always been the solution, and AI doesn't change that.
  - fzeroracer 7mo ago
    And since the foundation of the internet, the correct response to bots and disingenuous actors has been to a) ignore them b) ban them and c) ostracize then. We're talking about basic behaviors that have been understood since Usenet, something you surely should be aware of since you grew up in that era.
    - 7mo ago
lich_king 7mo ago
I don't think that "it's more of the same" is a good way to think about it. The internet contained a lot of low-quality content, but even low-quality content used to be fairly expensive and time-consuming to produce. Further, you could immediately discern bottom-of-the-barrel content-farmed nonsense by the writing style alone. Now, LLMs make it practically free to generate unlimited amounts of slop that drowns out human-written stuff, and they can imitate the style hints we used to depend on for quick screening.
- madrox 7mo ago
  Yet how are the alternative ways of thinking about it better? Spending your time angry about what others can do? In any era, that’s a poor life philosophy. The problem is the same as it has always been. Figure out how to use your time and attention effectively,
  - lich_king 7mo ago
    A sufficient number of people being angry about something is how you end up with social norms. These norms will shape how the technology is used. Conversely, if your take is that there's no point being angry and we should just take it in stride, that just emboldens the producers of slop.
    - madrox 7mo ago
      You're reading too much into my words if you think I'm suggesting we should take it in stride. I think we should accept that trying to enforce social norms is a waste of time as that will only work on the politest part of the internet. Instead, focus on what you can control: better mechanisms for managing your attention and time.
  - beepbooptheory 7mo ago
    Is it possible to be critical without being angry? Are the only options here misplaced ire or total queiescent fatalism? Does the site here even seem excessively angry?
  - 7mo ago
JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior I ignore it. But if that isn’t an option, this sort of writing can help you convince someone in power around you it’s okay to ignore it.
slackbaitnow 7mo ago
I am sorry, but in what way is everyone letting the "We've been creating bait content for a long time" comment slide? Did you even read the article? It is about person to person interactions. The three examples weer: * Someone butting in to an ongoing discussion with a solution (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop) * Someone being asked for their expertise and responding (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop) * Someone comes with a problem thesis looking for help (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop) The only one of these that existed prior to AI was the middle one, and the article very specifically calls out how transparent it used to be, because it had the shape of a google link. The first one would be impossible because the person would have to either write an unhelpful response, and they wouldn't find the words at length. You could ignore them or pick it apart easily. The last one would be impossible unless if they were copy pasting from a large PDF, which would look nothing like a chat message. What kind of workplace hellscape do you work on where people posting low effort bait on SLACK was the norm? The premise of this reply is entirely non-sensical.
Aurornis 7mo ago
> The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow. Reading AI generated prose, even if it’s my prompt, always gives me the same feeling as when I read a LinkedIn post: Like a simple concept was stretched into an unnecessarily long, formulaic format to trick the reader into thinking it was more than it was. Everyone taking their scraps of thoughts and putting them into an LLM likes it because the output agrees with them. It’s flattering. But other people don’t like it because we have to read walls of text to absorb what should have been a couple of their scattered bullet points. Just give me the bullet points. Don’t run it through the LLM expander. That just wastes my time.
bandrami 7mo ago
Everybody wants to use LLMs to produce things and absolutely nobody wants to consume the things that LLMs produce and this is the fundamental reason this is all going to collapse unless we find a way for producers to pay consumers to consume their LLM output.
- eucyclos 7mo ago
  Gotta disagree. I've found several great new YouTube channels that clearly use ai for everything but the script writing. I assume it's an enthusiastic and smart niche expert who lacks the charisma to make videos in addition to doing the research. In very glad ai is filling in those people's weak spots.
  - grey-area 7mo ago
    How would you know it’s an enthusiastic and smart expert creating the content you’re consuming, do you have the subject matter expertise to judge that? The odds are far higher it’s somebody who knows very little about anything but wants to make money from the gullible.
  - ngetchell 7mo ago
    How do you know the scripts aren't AI generated?
    - eucyclos 7mo ago
      Brevity mostly. I'm sure they are partially ai generated, just not in a way that detracts from my enjoyment.
  - leptons 7mo ago
    One person's slop is another person's treasure, I guess. I've seen a lot of slop on Youtube, and I block the channels putting it out. It's pretty awful. They use AI narration that can't pronounce simple common phrases correctly. I'm not wasting my time with that garbage, I'd rather give views to actual people producing good content. I don't have time for slop.
hastily3114 7mo 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...like they're being hoodwinked somehow. The problem is that getting an AI to answer a question is trivial. If I wanted to know what an AI has to say about the topic, I would just ask myself. Sending AI output has, as the author writes, the same connotation as sending a LMGTFY link. It does not provide me any value at all, I know how to write a question to an AI, just as I know how to use Google.
- amarant 7mo ago
  I'm starting to realise I might have completely misunderstood the whole lmgtfy thing. I thought it was a semi-rude way to call someone out for asking lazy questions instead of trying to find the answer themselves.
  - executesorder66 7mo ago
    No, you completely had it correct. And sending an AI response to a question is the same semi-rude way to respond. The context here is that the person logging the ticket (or asking the original question by using AI to do it) is the one who is ALSO being a lazy piece of shit, and deserves and equally lazy useless response in the form of a LMGTFY or AI response, because they were too lazy to actually think about their original query and spend time to craft a succinct but useful ticket/query.
coldtea 7mo 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. Which is irrelevant. TFA is talking about personal communication (and the examples are from a business setting). And their concern is not the mere quality or lack thereof, but also its origin, and this is something new. >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. No, many of us hate "our AI" content too, and wouldn't impose it to other people, same way we wouldn't fling shit at them.
TonyStr 7mo ago
Talking about bait, good job getting 42 responses on hacker news! Your opinions are controversial enough to draw out people who need to correct them, yet genuine enough to not be passed off as a troll and downvoted.
- madrox 7mo ago
  It's been pretty amusing seeing the total upvotes for my comment go up and down. I wasn't expecting it to be so controversial. Reading and responding to many of the replies, I think many people are strawmanning me as being in support of AI slop.
Gigachad 7mo ago
>like they're being hoodwinked somehow Because they are. It would be like if I bought some trinket off aliexpress and told you I made it by hand just for you. You wouldn't mind if you bought it yourself, but the fact that I lied about it to make it seem like I care is deceptive and immoral. Sending someone AI generated text without disclosing so is incredibly offensive. It says you don't care about wasting the receivers time and don't care about honesty either.
- madrox 7mo ago
  I agree. I think it's interesting that, even if AI handles the conversation effectively, we're still repulsed. I'm curious what will happen once AI generated text gets good enough that people can't tell the difference. Will we just assume everything is AI and remain suspicious, or will we stop caring? My hunch is we'll all retreat to places of the internet where we can feel sure we're talking to real people and there are chains of trust. For example, I spend most of my time on discord servers where people are real life friends or friends of friends, and increasingly assume "public" internet to be AI default, and therefore use our own AI to browse and summarize for us.
  - Gigachad 7mo ago
    I like to think that a lot of the current internet is just going to die and we will return to more in person interaction. And I think awareness of this is continuously rising. Terms like "chronically offline", talking about quitting social media, reducing phone use, etc are hot right now. But I'm still yet to see awareness and talk convert to action. People are as addicted to social media as they ever have been. We just widely recognize much like junk food and cigarettes where we know it's bad but keep doing it anyway. What I'm fairly confident of is people will not just enjoy being deceived in to talking to bots. We have seen this before, companies and customer service platforms have been using templated messages to imitate real human conversation for a while. When you load a website and the Intercom chat box pops up with a message that looks like a real person from the company is trying to talk to you, initially it might have worked but very quickly you learn it's fake and tune it out.
maplethorpe 7mo ago
I think the difference was that before all this, there would be additional information embedded in the way a person types, or the way they'd written their code, that you could use to build a larger picture of the situation. Right now it's as if everyone started wearing digital face masks that replaced their facial expressions with "better" ones. Sure, maybe everyone's faces weren't perfect before, but their expressions contained useful information.
jclardy 7mo 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. Somehow nobody that replied to you mentioned this. The issue is reciprocity. If I spend two hours manually researching and using my expertise to reply to a ticket, then 10 minutes later I get a novel-length AI reply in response...I now have no respect for the person replying with AI, because they can't even be bothered to spend a few minutes and summarize their "findings" and I suspect they didn't even read what their AI wrote. Especially in a professional setting, where you were hired for your (supposed) skillset, not your prompting skills. If I'm sending out AI content, then sure, give me AI content in return.
- leptons 7mo ago
  The biggest vendor I work with uses "AI" for all email communications. It's like they use it to sanitize and corporate-speakify their communications, and I really hate it. They can never communicate like a real human being in email. But when we have actual zoom calls they speak like real humans, but in email it becomes so robotic. It's frustrating to feel like I'm speaking with a robot.

by madrox 7mo ago

valicord 7mo 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 7mo 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).
- valicord 7mo ago
  > It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask But it doesn't? I'm more than capable of using Google and chatgpt myself. If I was looking for a machine generated answer to my question I would have already found it myself and never made the post in the first place. If I went to the effort of posting the question, it means that either the slop answer is not sufficient for some reason or that I want to hear from actual humans that have subjective experiences that an LLM cannot. Posting an AI response verbatim basically says "I think you're too stupid to click a couple of buttons, so let me show you how it's done". I think it's very reasonable to get upset at the implication.
  - madrox 7mo ago
    I think it is reasonable, yes, but I don’t think it’s ever been reasonable to expect reasonableness on the internet. We have a difficult enough time showing each other decency.
    - YurgenJurgensen 7mo ago
      Then why even have this discussion in the first place? You weren’t expecting any reasonable responses to it, after all.
      - coldtea 7mo ago
        Do you only do stuff where you expect the outcome to be good? Perhaps they did it for the off chance of a good response.
        the_af 7mo ago
        But then it'd be false that the internet is the wrong place. This person's account is from 2011, which shows they don't believe what they claim. I think they are playing devil's advocate in the most irritating way. Good things, and good venues, are worth preserving against enshittification. Let's not blandly accept this. Fight against it, even if it's a losing battle. "It was always like this" is false, anyway.
falcor84 7mo ago
I am really into this approach of AI being used as a user-agent. In particular, I've been thinking a lot about educational content, and what I'd love to ask educational providers for is not AI-generated content, but rather carefully human-built curricula offered in a structured manner, which my own AI could then use to create dynamic content for me.

namnnumbr 7mo ago

I acknowledge that those likely to copypaste slop aren't likely to find this article themselves, but I built the page to be shared or guide discussions around etiquette like nohello.net or dontasktoask.com. IMO a common understanding of AI etiquette would provide social pressure to halt some of these behaviors. I honestly don't mind someone else's AI as long as I can trust it/them. One problem I have with sloppypasta specifically is that it reads as raw LLM output and the user isn't transparent about how they worked with the AI or what they verified. "ChatGPT says" isn't enough; for me to avoid inheriting a verification burden, I'd also need to understand what they were prompting for, if they iterated with the AI, and if/what/how they validated. (the other problem is that dumping a multi-paragraph response in the midst of a chat thread is just obnoxious, but that's true even if its artisanal human-written text)

Aeolun 7mo ago
Yes, I can replace the link to nohello in my automated responses now :)
lovemenot 7mo ago
Couple of expressions from pre-AI culture: "RTFM", "Google is your friend". These were well-used because they are directed, pithy, abrasive. (n)amow(?): (not) All my own work ?
- username223 7mo ago
  Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief. But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.
madrox 7mo ago
I think you will find you will get farther by offloading this unpleasantness to an AI and open sourcing it rather than teaching etiquette to the internet, a place not known for its decency.

mcphage 7mo ago

> We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos. Well, cat videos make people happy.

jjgreen 7mo ago
This Firefox extension replaces Daily Mail pages by pictures of kittens https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kitten-block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kitten-block/
madrox 7mo ago
Touche

waterTanuki 7mo ago

I find your comment disingenuous at best. > The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI. I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of AI-related discourse, watched hundreds of videos since 2022, maybe even a thousand now on it. NEVER at any point in time did people opine for the "high quality" internet of before. They opined for the imperfect HUMAN internet of before. We are now seeing once pristine, curated corners of the internet being infected with sloppypasta. This is quite a broad brush to paint the internet with. It's like saying The Earth is not a bastion of warzones/peaceful places to live. That is HIGHLY dependent on location.

marcus_holmes 7mo ago
Sorry, not related to your point, but the language: To "opine" is to give an opinion on something. To "pine" for something is to wish for it, usually in a nostalgic sense. I get how the two are related and can be confused, especially when you're talking about comments on the web. Just thought I'd clarify.
madrox 7mo ago
Even before AI, the human social internet was loaded with bots and disingenuous actors. You want the imperfect human internet that is also pristine and curated. I've been socializing on the internet since 1994, and I feel fairly confident in sharing that this never existed, except in nostalgia. If that's what you're pining for, you're going to have to find a highly protected part of the internet that is walled off from untrusted actors. However, that's always been the solution, and AI doesn't change that.
- fzeroracer 7mo ago
  And since the foundation of the internet, the correct response to bots and disingenuous actors has been to a) ignore them b) ban them and c) ostracize then. We're talking about basic behaviors that have been understood since Usenet, something you surely should be aware of since you grew up in that era.
  - 7mo ago

lich_king 7mo ago

I don't think that "it's more of the same" is a good way to think about it. The internet contained a lot of low-quality content, but even low-quality content used to be fairly expensive and time-consuming to produce. Further, you could immediately discern bottom-of-the-barrel content-farmed nonsense by the writing style alone. Now, LLMs make it practically free to generate unlimited amounts of slop that drowns out human-written stuff, and they can imitate the style hints we used to depend on for quick screening.

madrox 7mo ago
Yet how are the alternative ways of thinking about it better? Spending your time angry about what others can do? In any era, that’s a poor life philosophy. The problem is the same as it has always been. Figure out how to use your time and attention effectively,
- lich_king 7mo ago
  A sufficient number of people being angry about something is how you end up with social norms. These norms will shape how the technology is used. Conversely, if your take is that there's no point being angry and we should just take it in stride, that just emboldens the producers of slop.
  - madrox 7mo ago
    You're reading too much into my words if you think I'm suggesting we should take it in stride. I think we should accept that trying to enforce social norms is a waste of time as that will only work on the politest part of the internet. Instead, focus on what you can control: better mechanisms for managing your attention and time.
- beepbooptheory 7mo ago
  Is it possible to be critical without being angry? Are the only options here misplaced ire or total queiescent fatalism? Does the site here even seem excessively angry?
- 7mo ago

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago

> I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior I ignore it. But if that isn’t an option, this sort of writing can help you convince someone in power around you it’s okay to ignore it.

slackbaitnow 7mo ago

I am sorry, but in what way is everyone letting the "We've been creating bait content for a long time" comment slide? Did you even read the article? It is about person to person interactions. The three examples weer: * Someone butting in to an ongoing discussion with a solution (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop) * Someone being asked for their expertise and responding (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop) * Someone comes with a problem thesis looking for help (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop) The only one of these that existed prior to AI was the middle one, and the article very specifically calls out how transparent it used to be, because it had the shape of a google link. The first one would be impossible because the person would have to either write an unhelpful response, and they wouldn't find the words at length. You could ignore them or pick it apart easily. The last one would be impossible unless if they were copy pasting from a large PDF, which would look nothing like a chat message. What kind of workplace hellscape do you work on where people posting low effort bait on SLACK was the norm? The premise of this reply is entirely non-sensical.

Aurornis 7mo ago

> The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow. Reading AI generated prose, even if it’s my prompt, always gives me the same feeling as when I read a LinkedIn post: Like a simple concept was stretched into an unnecessarily long, formulaic format to trick the reader into thinking it was more than it was. Everyone taking their scraps of thoughts and putting them into an LLM likes it because the output agrees with them. It’s flattering. But other people don’t like it because we have to read walls of text to absorb what should have been a couple of their scattered bullet points. Just give me the bullet points. Don’t run it through the LLM expander. That just wastes my time.

bandrami 7mo ago

Everybody wants to use LLMs to produce things and absolutely nobody wants to consume the things that LLMs produce and this is the fundamental reason this is all going to collapse unless we find a way for producers to pay consumers to consume their LLM output.

eucyclos 7mo ago
Gotta disagree. I've found several great new YouTube channels that clearly use ai for everything but the script writing. I assume it's an enthusiastic and smart niche expert who lacks the charisma to make videos in addition to doing the research. In very glad ai is filling in those people's weak spots.
- grey-area 7mo ago
  How would you know it’s an enthusiastic and smart expert creating the content you’re consuming, do you have the subject matter expertise to judge that? The odds are far higher it’s somebody who knows very little about anything but wants to make money from the gullible.
- ngetchell 7mo ago
  How do you know the scripts aren't AI generated?
  - eucyclos 7mo ago
    Brevity mostly. I'm sure they are partially ai generated, just not in a way that detracts from my enjoyment.
- leptons 7mo ago
  One person's slop is another person's treasure, I guess. I've seen a lot of slop on Youtube, and I block the channels putting it out. It's pretty awful. They use AI narration that can't pronounce simple common phrases correctly. I'm not wasting my time with that garbage, I'd rather give views to actual people producing good content. I don't have time for slop.

hastily3114 7mo 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...like they're being hoodwinked somehow. The problem is that getting an AI to answer a question is trivial. If I wanted to know what an AI has to say about the topic, I would just ask myself. Sending AI output has, as the author writes, the same connotation as sending a LMGTFY link. It does not provide me any value at all, I know how to write a question to an AI, just as I know how to use Google.

amarant 7mo ago
I'm starting to realise I might have completely misunderstood the whole lmgtfy thing. I thought it was a semi-rude way to call someone out for asking lazy questions instead of trying to find the answer themselves.
- executesorder66 7mo ago
  No, you completely had it correct. And sending an AI response to a question is the same semi-rude way to respond. The context here is that the person logging the ticket (or asking the original question by using AI to do it) is the one who is ALSO being a lazy piece of shit, and deserves and equally lazy useless response in the form of a LMGTFY or AI response, because they were too lazy to actually think about their original query and spend time to craft a succinct but useful ticket/query.

coldtea 7mo 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. Which is irrelevant. TFA is talking about personal communication (and the examples are from a business setting). And their concern is not the mere quality or lack thereof, but also its origin, and this is something new. >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. No, many of us hate "our AI" content too, and wouldn't impose it to other people, same way we wouldn't fling shit at them.

TonyStr 7mo ago

Talking about bait, good job getting 42 responses on hacker news! Your opinions are controversial enough to draw out people who need to correct them, yet genuine enough to not be passed off as a troll and downvoted.

madrox 7mo ago
It's been pretty amusing seeing the total upvotes for my comment go up and down. I wasn't expecting it to be so controversial. Reading and responding to many of the replies, I think many people are strawmanning me as being in support of AI slop.

Gigachad 7mo ago

>like they're being hoodwinked somehow Because they are. It would be like if I bought some trinket off aliexpress and told you I made it by hand just for you. You wouldn't mind if you bought it yourself, but the fact that I lied about it to make it seem like I care is deceptive and immoral. Sending someone AI generated text without disclosing so is incredibly offensive. It says you don't care about wasting the receivers time and don't care about honesty either.

madrox 7mo ago
I agree. I think it's interesting that, even if AI handles the conversation effectively, we're still repulsed. I'm curious what will happen once AI generated text gets good enough that people can't tell the difference. Will we just assume everything is AI and remain suspicious, or will we stop caring? My hunch is we'll all retreat to places of the internet where we can feel sure we're talking to real people and there are chains of trust. For example, I spend most of my time on discord servers where people are real life friends or friends of friends, and increasingly assume "public" internet to be AI default, and therefore use our own AI to browse and summarize for us.
- Gigachad 7mo ago
  I like to think that a lot of the current internet is just going to die and we will return to more in person interaction. And I think awareness of this is continuously rising. Terms like "chronically offline", talking about quitting social media, reducing phone use, etc are hot right now. But I'm still yet to see awareness and talk convert to action. People are as addicted to social media as they ever have been. We just widely recognize much like junk food and cigarettes where we know it's bad but keep doing it anyway. What I'm fairly confident of is people will not just enjoy being deceived in to talking to bots. We have seen this before, companies and customer service platforms have been using templated messages to imitate real human conversation for a while. When you load a website and the Intercom chat box pops up with a message that looks like a real person from the company is trying to talk to you, initially it might have worked but very quickly you learn it's fake and tune it out.

maplethorpe 7mo ago

I think the difference was that before all this, there would be additional information embedded in the way a person types, or the way they'd written their code, that you could use to build a larger picture of the situation. Right now it's as if everyone started wearing digital face masks that replaced their facial expressions with "better" ones. Sure, maybe everyone's faces weren't perfect before, but their expressions contained useful information.

jclardy 7mo 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. Somehow nobody that replied to you mentioned this. The issue is reciprocity. If I spend two hours manually researching and using my expertise to reply to a ticket, then 10 minutes later I get a novel-length AI reply in response...I now have no respect for the person replying with AI, because they can't even be bothered to spend a few minutes and summarize their "findings" and I suspect they didn't even read what their AI wrote. Especially in a professional setting, where you were hired for your (supposed) skillset, not your prompting skills. If I'm sending out AI content, then sure, give me AI content in return.

leptons 7mo ago
The biggest vendor I work with uses "AI" for all email communications. It's like they use it to sanitize and corporate-speakify their communications, and I really hate it. They can never communicate like a real human being in email. But when we have actual zoom calls they speak like real humans, but in email it becomes so robotic. It's frustrating to feel like I'm speaking with a robot.