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There was always content that wastes people's time because people have always confused length and complexity with comprehensiveness and depth. These were alway

by ronsor 6mo ago

There was always content that wastes people's time because people have always confused length and complexity with comprehensiveness and depth. These were always poor proxy metrics for "good content," but in a lot of environments, especially professional ones, they were how work was evaluated. Naturally others used LLM to generate content that satisfies these metrics. The slop epidemic is a consequence of what people erroneously valued for so long. Now they have it, and it's meaningless, and even if most of it was always meaningless, they can't easily tell the difference between "fluff with something meaningful" and "fluff with only fluff" anymore.

Forgeties79 6mo ago
That is my point. It doesn’t matter what they’re built for or the ideal use is. People are using them to waste other people’s time.
moron4hire 6mo ago
But now we're "democratizing" wasting people's time. If the AI-boosters have their way, we won't even be able to have good conversations about something as simple as the movies we saw over the weekend. It will all be "bespoke, AI-generated content." The conversations will be the equivalent of telling a story about a weird dream you had last night.
- ronsor 6mo ago
  The solution was always not to view wasting people's time as proof of effort. But we did, and now AI is replicating it, and the result is this dysfunction. If we properly valued conciseness over complexity and didn't insist on 5 paragraphs of polite fluff in business communications, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    The issue is we have let the attention economy overrun us. It’s not people being too verbose. Shorter content is the objective these days. You are more consistently rewarded, typically financially, for putting out 100 terrible blog posts than 10 great ones. The terrible ones tend to be short too. Your time is saved letting ChatGPT write all your emails. The recipient’s time is wasted by emails with little to no substance that the sender couldn’t even bother to spend time on. Hell there are people using LLM’s to comment on forums now. That’s not what I come here for. This has always existed to some degree but it has, as another person pointed out, been so democratized that it’s becoming a bigger problem. Now I have to constantly expend mental effort questioning if I’m talking to actual people. When I discover it’s a bot, it’s infuriating. It’s disrespectful, frankly. We all came here to talk to each other. Not be duped by facsimiles of each other. I want to talk to you.

by ronsor 6mo ago

Forgeties79 6mo ago

That is my point. It doesn’t matter what they’re built for or the ideal use is. People are using them to waste other people’s time.

moron4hire 6mo ago

But now we're "democratizing" wasting people's time. If the AI-boosters have their way, we won't even be able to have good conversations about something as simple as the movies we saw over the weekend. It will all be "bespoke, AI-generated content." The conversations will be the equivalent of telling a story about a weird dream you had last night.

ronsor 6mo ago
The solution was always not to view wasting people's time as proof of effort. But we did, and now AI is replicating it, and the result is this dysfunction. If we properly valued conciseness over complexity and didn't insist on 5 paragraphs of polite fluff in business communications, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.
- Forgeties79 6mo ago
  The issue is we have let the attention economy overrun us. It’s not people being too verbose. Shorter content is the objective these days. You are more consistently rewarded, typically financially, for putting out 100 terrible blog posts than 10 great ones. The terrible ones tend to be short too. Your time is saved letting ChatGPT write all your emails. The recipient’s time is wasted by emails with little to no substance that the sender couldn’t even bother to spend time on. Hell there are people using LLM’s to comment on forums now. That’s not what I come here for. This has always existed to some degree but it has, as another person pointed out, been so democratized that it’s becoming a bigger problem. Now I have to constantly expend mental effort questioning if I’m talking to actual people. When I discover it’s a bot, it’s infuriating. It’s disrespectful, frankly. We all came here to talk to each other. Not be duped by facsimiles of each other. I want to talk to you.