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Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations
- automatic6131 5mo ago"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document." Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.
- jchip303 5mo ago[dead]
- renticulous 5mo agoThe particular question in the blogpost can just be answered by a skill. Once you ask enough questions, the solution becomes obvious at the end. 5 Claude Code skills I use every single day https://youtu.be/EJyuu6zlQCg?t=80 https://youtu.be/EJyuu6zlQCg?t=80
- PunchyHamster 5mo agough
- maplethorpe 5mo agoWhere should they have put the comment?
- HeartStrings 5mo agoNowhere since gpt wrote it. Normal humans dont talk like that. Normal actual humans with veins, arteries and a fully functioning endocrine system talk like ME
- degenerate 5mo agoReplace "Them" with "Coworker" and the point of linking to the site is instantly understood (a LMGTFY-style shaming with a dash of humor to soften the blow) With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...
- hootz 5mo agoLMGTFY definitely did not soften the blow, maybe it even increased the shaming factor lmao
- amelius 5mo ago> Should we use Redis or Memcached? Couldn't they have used an example aimed at a broader audience? I'm in IT but even I barely know what Redis or Memcached is about (never used either).
- 0x696C6961 5mo ago90% of people here know what those are.
- AlecSchueler 5mo agoAnd with a more broadly applicable example we could share the link with friends, family and coworkers who aren't on HN.
- amelius 5mo agoYes that was exactly my point :)
- u_fucking_dork 5mo agoBut then it wouldn’t have tickled the HN reader quite the same way and wouldn’t have gotten voted to the top. This doesn’t even need to be a website at all. This is pure slop designed in a pig lab for HN trough.
- Arainach 5mo ago> This doesn’t even need to be a website at all It does, because it allows for quickly sharing a prepared response instead of saying the same thing over and over. It also works because the kind of person this link gets sent to is already used to trusting random websites over their human interactions.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Mezzie 5mo ago
- naich 5mo agoObviously you need to use an AI to summarise the wall of text generated by the AI. Duh.
- lc9er 5mo agoThere’s someone in this thread unironically suggesting this.
- lioeters 5mo agoPretty sure there's an implicit dynamic where the more someone uses AI, the more you require AI to understand and work with what it produced. If everyone around you is using AI, you are pressured to use AI to keep up with their level of "productivity". Like a cultural virus it multiplies in the space between people, I guess meme-like but far more virulent. Sure it empowers us, but at what cost.
- Sharlin 5mo agoIt’s a classic tragedy of the commons situation.
- Fogest 5mo agoI was getting a lot of overly verbose annoying emails at my one workplace and I swear they probably had started to use AI to generate a lot of it. Outlook had added AI summarization buttons built right into the email client and I must admit that I did make use of it for these kind of emails. Sadly the answer to save time in these cases sometimes is to use AI. Sometimes the emails being sent weren't even AI generated. Just emails from managers/directors who don't respect peoples time enough and think we care about their long essays of nothing. You kinda have to check the emails to make sure this isn't the one time something important was being said, so that's where the quick AI summarization comes in.
- reducesuffering 5mo agoA(P)I serialization and deserialization. With a healthy helping of telephone and signal loss
- SwiftyBug 5mo ago> Nobody writes essays in Slack I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.
- warumdarum 5mo ago<context> <tutorial> <anecdata> <answer> <sumary> <funny hook> Introducing AI made markdown tags for conversations so others can only see what the wanty
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoCould add a <vitriol> tag to that - but yes, if that was auto assigned by LLM - i could see that. Could even add a "Autistism" filter, preventing conversation digressing, filtering out only points that stay on topic and only the <summary>, that way.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5mo ago> Could add a <vitriol> tag to that Is that equivalent to the already popular <rant>?
- paultopia 5mo agoHah, can we do that for recipes next?
- warumdarum 5mo agoConversation add blocker unlocked
- donatj 5mo agoHonestly, speaking as a friend, and as someone who's been at this a very long time, maybe stop doing that? It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time. It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity. If there's something in the middle of a wall of text that invalidates something much further down, trying to communicate the problem becomes a pain in the butt. It's just not a good method for discovery.
- dude250711 5mo ago[flagged]
- tyleo 5mo agoThat’s interesting. When I use AI to help me write chat messages it’s almost always, “make this shorter,” or “clean this up”
- microtonal 5mo agoWhy do you use an AI to write chat messages? Either you have to give the AI the points you want to convey, then just put those points in a message. Or you don't have anything to convey, then don't post a message. I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say.
- disgruntledphd2 5mo ago> I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say. Lots of people lack confidence around their writing, and many people (particularly in tech) are not english native speakers. I can definitely see both of those groups getting use out of AI assistance in writing. That being said, I sometimes use AI to see if I've missed anything, but the last thing I'll give up to our future AI overloads is writing text, as I enjoy it.
- jjulius 5mo ago>Lots of people lack confidence... Not to single out OP or anything, but the more we do things on our own, the more likely we are to build our confidence. Relying on something or someone to hold our hand risks slowing down personal growth.
- disgruntledphd2 5mo agoI agree, but there's lots of stuff I'm pretty bad at (javascript, for instance) that AI is super helpful for. I feel like I'm learning a bunch of new stuff quicker than I otherwise would've. So I probably wouldn't argue against this in all cases, except where someone is just outsourcing all their thought to the model(s), that feels much worse to me.
- joenot443 5mo agoThis is slop too though, right? > Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste. > It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document. It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write
- Biganon 5mo agoWhat makes you think this is AI slop?...
- firmretention 5mo ago[dead]
- joenot443 5mo ago> You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document. > It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness. These are particular sentences I find questionable. Would you write that way? I certainly wouldn't. GPTZero is by no means perfect, but it agreed this was likely generated.
- nrclark 5mo agoNot the parent, but yes I would/do write that way for effect.
- HeartStrings 5mo agoBro, do i got the bad news for you
- HeartStrings 5mo agoWe should instaban anyone who uses these patterns on ycombinator. If you talk like that for realsies, well too bad, try being more human and less linkedin next time
- jappgar 5mo agoI swear most executives can barely read so you're not doing your career any favors sending them more than 150 characters.
- alexpotato 5mo agoThe CEO of one firm I worked at wrote emails totally in bullet point format. Made it much easier to read and you could just reply with: > bullet point response which made life much easier
- jjice 5mo agoI love terse text communications most of the time (Slack and email at least). So much clearer. And easier to respond to. I think we've all worked with someone who (I imagine subconsciously) feels the need to make things longer without actually adding more information in there, and it just makes everyone's day a little harder.
- el_benhameen 5mo agoI developed this habit when I worked in software support. It made me substantially more effective. Sometimes people are reading for the joy of the prose. Sometimes they’re reading because they want to get to the answer. In the latter case, writing that is easily visually parsable is quite valuable.
- quietsegfault 5mo agoIn instances where context is important, I have been including a summary with call to action at the start of the message, then include details below to hopefully eliminate back and forth. It helps me be more clear with my point, and most people once they have an action only use the context for reference later.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoIt's called an executive summary because that's the only thing the executive will read of your carefully put together report.
- shevy-java 5mo agoWhen real people use AI slop to spam me down, I instantly know that this person does not want to communicate with me. So I stop all communication with that person. What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs. For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people. I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.
- andai 5mo agoWhat did he say? I'm very curious about his perspective. Presumably he wouldn't knowingly be harming his own project. So he must think it's actually good.
- time0ut 5mo agoThe best are the Jira tickets with a huge wall of AI slop requirements. Usually full of nonsense of course including implementation recommendations in the wrong language or framework. Questions for clarification met with blank stares from the author. Ah well, copy/paste into claude code and say “do this. make no mistakes” and get back to browsing HN…
- mmasu 5mo agoI am so tired of these people, but it’s so sad they don’t understand themselves how ridiculous they are
- misswaterfairy 5mo ago> Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it. If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen: 1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot; 2. The message gets deleted. I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague. Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit. [1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.
- crimsontech 5mo agoI usually respond with AI;DR so they don’t expect a response.
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- zaphar 5mo agoI have begun using the acronym TL;DP (Too long didn't prompt) For when someone sends a wall of text and I didn't want to waste tokens having an agent summarize it for me when the sender could have done that for me with their own agent.
- captainbland 5mo agoJust prompt them back: "that's a lot of detail, could you please summarise as briefly as possible what differences concern our requirements specifically?"
- tensegrist 5mo ago"Why it's wrong"
- hootz 5mo agoThen at the end, "Use AI to make things clearer". NO! STOP USING AI AND JUST TALK!
- maipen 5mo agoI have had experiences where customers use AI to communicate and express their issues. Sometimes they produce walls of text like the website exemplifies, but overall it's a better alternative to not be able to explain the issue because you don't know the specific terminology and you are just a layman trying to do things. Show some love for the layman, we are all laymen in areas we don't know about.
- great_wubwub 5mo agoI have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much effort into post-AI copy editing, it's just clear and useful writing. Sure, the occasional non-idiomatic phrase creeps in but those are hard to find. That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.
- hootz 5mo agoThen a better recommendation should be to use specialized AI proofreading tools, such as Kagi Translate's proofread feature. Yeah, it uses AI, but the "harness" around it forces you to use it only to improve your text, not sloppify it. https://translate.kagi.com/proofread https://translate.kagi.com/proofread
- lesostep 5mo agoI have stolen your link, dear sir Thank you kindly for sharing
- 5mo ago
- maipen 5mo agoI like how the website matches the message. Short and Simple. It's a matter of having good taste. But AI education will help.
- paultopia 5mo agoDo people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.
- jjice 5mo agoI've never seen it, but I have a buddy who had a coworker like this. Would basically treat his slack as a manual copy-paste bridge to an LLM and it's was incredibly unhelpful because most questions were heavily context dependent. I imagine this is the kind of thing you see at a large company where a good chunk of people are just coasting by doing nothing, Nelson Big Head style.
- bni 5mo agoYes all the time. Healthy conversations are shut down immediately with the "AI research" slop-wall. Meetings are 55 minutes of speculating about what AI will be able to do in a few years. Then if you are lucky the last 5 minutes can be used to discuss a real issue.
- LAC-Tech 5mo agoWe desperately need some cultural norms and taboos to develop around AI usage.
- pixel_popping 5mo agoMost of my friends are starting to talk like models (myself included), it's actually concerning to an extent, because we spend most of the time interacting with AI instead of humans, we are starting to mimick their behavior and speech.
- quietsegfault 5mo agoI love asking someone who sent me a Slack wall of AI text to join a huddle, then ask them deep questions about said wall of text while they struggle because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It seems to encourage folks to be a little more careful about their wall of texts in the future.
- anuramat 5mo agonow I know what to call it, thanks
- kseniamorph 5mo ago[flagged]
- kseniamorph 5mo agodon't undervote me....it's a joke
- satisfice 5mo ago“Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.” I can reply. I can push back. I can clarify. I am not helpless.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago"Sorry, I asked you, if I wanted to ask AI I'd do it myself, if you don't know just say"
- satisfice 5mo agoThat's a good one.
- krater23 5mo ago"TLDR?"
- tonetegeatinst 5mo agoDarn and I was hoping we would see a new invention someone could form1 with the BATFE.
- bdcravens 5mo agoThe other day I found the worst podcast I think I've ever tried to listen to. AgentStack Daily, which apparently sums up AI stories (mostly focused on OpenClaw and the like), using computerized voices. I don't even have an issue with it being AI-generated. However, the content is delivered so fast and monotone that it's impossible to listen to, and every episode is 40 minutes or more, every day. A brief daily summary, perhaps using the creator's real voice (via ElevenLabs or similar; the creator has a real podcast on the same site), would be so much more valuable.
- projektfu 5mo agoAI-generated podcasts are terrible. I came across one that was supposed to be summarizing FAA training material and it was unearthly and fast-paced, with pointless "humanization" umms and aahs, and in a weird conversation style. It's doubly bad because it's important to get things right, and if you just yolo the AI summary, you don't really know if it's getting everything right.
- anonzzzies 5mo agoI find that the people who are the worst at their jobs, write the largest blocks of absolutely useless texts. In all disciplines. So yes, I see humans writing 2 A4 docs in slack; they have no clue what the question was about and just insert drivel.
- boutell 5mo agoSlop is not data is not information is not knowledge is not wisdom.
- paleotrope 5mo agoThe stated problem is so context dependant that this is borderline useless and quite hostile.
- emsign 5mo agoI've noticed this happening here as well. The instance I realize it's not another human I lose all interest in argueing or conversing. If this happens too often I leave those sites. Because nothing feels more like wasting my time than talking to an answering machine that is working against me. It's exhausting and demotivating.
- nikeee 5mo agoWhen I'm encountering some WoT like that, I'd like to have a button like "view source", but for "view prompt". Most ai generated messages or docs are unnecessarily verbose and just reading the prompt would suffice. I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text. It just wastes my time. And probably only makes it look like it took more effort than it actually did (it may be the exact opposite).
- jtbayly 5mo agoExcept often the prompt is just the previous comment. In the example, the prompt would be "Should we use Redis or Memcached?" In that case, there is nothing beneficial about the prompt, but the answer could be boiled down to a useful recommendation (from an AI, not a person).
- nikeee 5mo agoIn that case I still want to see exactly this prompt. Then I know that the person didn't even think about my question thoug I asked _them_ for their opinion and I could have asked ChatGPT myself (and already probably have).
- fusslo 5mo ago"WoT" hmm.. Wheel of Time? never got into those books personally
- utopiah 5mo agoYep indeed, if I discuss with you I want YOUR opinion. If I wanted a generic opinion... I wouldn't bother you.
- bandrami 5mo agoThis is what I keep coming back to: I also have access to an LLM. Just send me the prompt you used
- fontain 5mo agoI like the naming. I tackled this same pitch with https://writelesswithai.com https://writelesswithai.com but a "slop grenade" is better, more memorable, a nice brand. Good work. ps. register slopgrenade.com too
- Aeolun 5mo agoI think what is interesting is that we keep needing these pages to teach people how not being an asshole works. I don't really understand why it is so hard to understand not to do (what I consider to be) impolite stupid shit.
- mdmower 5mo agoDid you read your own post?
- Sharlin 5mo agoAnd the effect is always near zero because the people who need to read and learn from those pages the most are those who are the least likely to do so.
- booleandilemma 5mo agoLots of stupid folks out there. All the technology in the world can't make them smart. Even if you strapped meta glasses onto them and they read the AI's output verbatim, the morons would probably stumble over the words. We'd get a society of stutterers.
- dominicrose 5mo agoOutside of social media, I never saw a slop grenade except in places where it already existed without AI, like SAV responses or other scripted marketing/HR stuff. Even a real person calling me on my phone to talk 5min about its company without allowing me to interrupt feels like a kind of grenade. Obviously I could interrupt the impolite way but that's beside the point.
- BeetleB 5mo ago> I don't really understand why it is so hard to understand not to do (what I consider to be) impolite stupid shit. Tip 1: Starting off by denigrating folks who do this is not a way to make people change. More often than not, it amplifies the behavior you don't like. Tip 2: It helps to indicate you understand the perspective of why people do it before asking others to change. Reading your comment, I really doubt you understand their perspective. People listen to those willing to understand them.
- ho_schi 5mo agoMy boss. Generates entire websites with AI Slop. Instead of sending a single text mail with three links and the words please make that certificate. No. He wastes the time of all personnel. Wastes energy. And hides the important message in a wall of text (I was the only person which recognized, that he requires the certificate…it was hidden in a side box). Right now we re-implementing every frogging tool which was ever developed by more experienced people. Excuse the long letter, I hadn’t the time to write a short one.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoI had a boss who was the opposite. He was so terse in his emails that if you just read one without context you'd have no idea what he was asking for.
- master-lincoln 5mo agoCommunication is hard, but considering that it is an important skill for all managers one wonders how these people got into their position...
- andai 5mo agoMaybe these people don't understand the impact of walls of text because they're not reading in the first place?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hsuduebc2 5mo agoThe sheer audacity of using generated slop like this is something that always amazes me in a bad way. You can always tell. Every time someone uses answer like this it shows that he doesn't even want to discuss something with you and possibly knows nothing about the question asked. So the answer it self could potentionally be bogus or straightforward lie. It's just rude. It's even more rude that when someone tells you to google answer instead.
- stek29 5mo agoreminds me of https://stopsloppypasta.ai/ https://stopsloppypasta.ai/ related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389570
- hmokiguess 5mo agoI prefer the brevity and branding of slopgrenade, to be honest sloppypasta itself has a slop energy to me. Maybe it's the UX and the density of the website though, it does have a similar messaging.
- Rp8yXmdmr 5mo agoReminds me about similar "manifestos" about netiquette, properly asking questions, searching web and answering emails. And I expect exactly the same impact - none.
- sermah 5mo agoI actually saw nohello in some bios. About 2-3 times.
- mr-wendel 5mo agoThis is very reminiscence of the whole LMGTFY (let me google that for you) phase of things. At a job in a while back, when front-level support reached out to senior staff for help the two golden rules were: 1. Do NOT answer right away. If they wait, there is a good chance the next message is "Oh wait, I figured it out" (e.g. they googled it finally) 2. Send them a google link w/ the search term showing the first result. Granted, this was a bit tongue-in-cheek and we did a LOT of trainings to help facilitate actual learning. Still, it was far too easy for senior staff time to get burned up by folks making minimal effort to think for themselves so friction remained. While the site makes a good point, they miss the most important point, IMO, which is inferable by the example of a good response. The good response is better principally because it contains business-contextual information, which AI can never provide without proper prompting (and if you know to provide that, you prob don't need the AI answer): "We need pub/sub for the notifications feature." I'm not anti-AI, but good answers include historical business context to explain decision making. Sometimes if you're lucky, code comments contain this in relevant sections :).
- cbold 5mo agoJust post the prompt bro
- HeartStrings 5mo agoJust pack the fries
- fudged71 5mo agoThis is a variant of "Computational Kindness"
- thih9 5mo agoBut you can ask AI to summarize it. /s
- kadhirvelm 5mo agoI’ve been thinking about this one a lot! Wrote a post on it a little while ago: https://productnow.ai/blogs/write-for-human-download-time https://productnow.ai/blogs/write-for-human-download-time But I really agree with use AI to make your communication sharper. I think a lot of us, especially in corporate settings could use the help
- booleandilemma 5mo agoNo no, let's just stop thinking entirely and paste conversations from LLMs back and forth to each other. Then we'll use an LLM to summarize the conversation to tell us what was said. Then we'll use an LLM to do what was said. Then we can ask an LLM if what was done works.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Kim_Bruning 5mo agoYou're ha ha only serious describing some of the agent swarm concepts that are currently being built.
- CommieBobDole 5mo agoI think this touches on the core difference between good and bad use of AI; using AI as part of the process vs cutting and pasting LLM output. Use AI as part of the research process, to help understand a concept or problem. Use it to format data, or as a part of the design or brainstorming process. Use it to build manageable portions of code that you can read and understand before committing. But if the output doesn't go through your brain somehow before you unleash it on the world, that's really no different from a seventh-grader Googling the subject of his homework and then cutting and pasting the entire text of the first result, headers and all, and turning it in.
- charcircuit 5mo ago>If they wanted an AI essay, they would have asked ChatGPT themselves. This is not true in the least bit. The page even included an example of calling someone to ask when a meeting was instead of asking an AI assistant to check their calendar. There is a reason why so much of company support can be done using AI or via people following a flowchart. People do not know how to solve problems by themselves.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoI usually find out when meetings are when I get a text from someone asking "are you coming to the meeting?"
- ramesh31 5mo agoThe only way to defeat a grenade is to toss it right back where it came from. Slop replies get 2x the slop in response. Most effective way I've seen to get people to stop doing it.
- nlawalker 5mo agoI've decided that I'm done being pissy about this kind of response, or thinking that it's something that can be coached away. I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference - something that you learn about, try to give some grace to, and work a little harder to bridge (unless you're defusing a bomb, performing surgery, flying an airplane etc.). In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help." For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem. Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.
- csbrooks 5mo agoTo me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoI'd prefer just "I don't know." I can ask Claude on my own.
- nlawalker 5mo ago> To me > I'd prefer This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect. Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
- saltyoldman 5mo agoSlop grenades are the new "let me google that for you"
- m0llusk 5mo agoYikes, first LLMs took my emdash away and now they are coming for my verbose qualifications.
- hmokiguess 5mo agoAnother great one is https://dontasktoask.com/ https://dontasktoask.com/
- HeartStrings 5mo agoAI was used in writing that article. Know how I can tell? "You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document." " It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness" hello GPT "Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it." holy slop goddamn
- BoneShard 5mo agoIsn't it ironic? don't you think?
- danabramov 5mo agoit’s like raaayeyeeeaaaayeeeain
- _dain_ 5mo agoThat "weapon" quip from TFA really pisses me off. It implies actual malice on the part of the person copypasting GPT. But people aren't being malicious, they're mostly just clueless. "Weapon", "weaponized" etc sound punchy so they're a safe choice in the AI's slopertoire. And on the subject of weapons, consider the example of a delayed-action fuze. They're designed to penetrate through the outer defenses of a target, before the warhead detonates deep inside. What might this look like in written form? Well, you'd start by getting on the reader's side, with shared loathing against some outgroup. Get them to let their guard down. And then at the end: >Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it. You, yes you, the very clever and sophisticated person reading this who is exasperated by slop-grenades, should use AI more. You should use AI to "sharpen your thinking". You use AI, but in a good way. Not like those rubes, who use AI in a bad way. Use AI. Use AI. Use AI. Bang!
- GMoromisato 5mo ago[dead]
- gwbas1c 5mo agoI think the bigger issue is the motivations for posting AI slop. To me, a lot of these responses aren't made in good faith; instead, they come from bots that are some kind of training experiment. (Like when a bot responds to one of my HN posts.) Even if the response isn't a bot, if it's just someone copying and pasting AI, how can someone reasonably think that just shuffling a comment into AI is adding any value?
- Terr_ 5mo agoI agree that between humans the example given is laziness and disrespect. That said, I want to make it clear that if people are going to regurgitate LLM results either way, I'd rather get the longer slop than trust a concise "Use Redis" conclusion from a system that doesn't think the way we wish/assume it does. Ultimately we're using a statistical language algorithm to predict what kinds of words usually come next in a short story we've constructed. * If you train it for short outputs (or stories where a fictional computer character has short dialogue) you're prioritizing text from places where someone answered without explaining. * If you run its output through a hidden "summarize yourself" path, you're adding additional potential for error and dropping details you could have used to detect it.
- syllogistic 5mo agoHad AI help me write a blog post last week. Most of the process was deleting verbosity. I guess it solves the blank page problem but once you get going the noise is worse than doing it yourself.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- arjie 5mo agoHuh, just strikes me how we're all on the Internet seemingly inhabiting the same world, but really this never happens to me and I'm in a pretty AI-forward world.
- tty46 5mo agoI love this. We also need a ChatGPT version of LMGTFY :D
- tsss 5mo agoSpeak for yourself. I do write essays in Slack. Just because you, the author, are too dumb or too lazy to put some effort into written communication, doesn't mean that we can't do it either.
- Theodores 5mo agoA while ago I worked with a guy that did not put effort into written communication and he was doing the marketing for the company. I would have words with the boss about this and, initially, I struggled to explain why spelling, grammar, punctuation and use of paragraphs was important. After some thought I was better able to explain the not-so-obvious. It is all about respecting the time of the reader. Some people don't respect the reader since they think they are important. Notably with the Ep*tein files, we have this clique of wealthy people, with few of them able to string two sentences together. Writing standards were those of an eight year old at best. Personally I write fairly long form because I don't have ideas that I can express in glorified grunts. However, this LLM stuff is encroaching on my turf, since the likes of the guy I used to struggle with can now churn out better English than I can. That is the problem for those of us from the pre-internet, pre-grammar-checking age when written communication mattered.
- hax0ron3 5mo ago>Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste. I could easily write essays in Slack if I wanted to. The reason why I don't has nothing to do with whether I'm capable of it or not.
- The_Fox 5mo agoI view this use of AI as a type of denial of service attack. Alice sends Bob a wall of text (low effort) and Bob must parse it (high effort, yet probably no value received for the effort).
- ge96 5mo agoAnnoys me when somebody thinks helping is sharing an LLM dump I get that the solution is in there but it's like you didn't really help me if I have to go through and read something myself. Just tell me your conclusion if I'm asking you the human. Context is a 7 page word doc output or pdf.
- shervinafshar 5mo agoBaudrillard shaming McLuhan on Slack. :chef-kiss:
- danabramov 5mo agoDo people actually do this? I’ve been on a sabbatical when the whole AI thing happened and I might start working again soon and I’m not sure what to expect in the Slack mines.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- redwood 5mo agoThe response to the question in the example image should have been "what's the question behind the question?"
- tamimio 5mo agoThe sad part of our reality is now any well written text is assumed an AI. The other day I wrote a funny long text in some group chat, took me some time to do and proofread, only to be ask if it was AI generated! I like details and I am sure a lot do, now people will be inclined to write shorter “dumber” text to counter signal the AI slop, which in the long run might actually make people dumber.
- torben-friis 5mo ago>You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document. Did you slop grenade the slop grenade warning?
- nuancebydefault 5mo ago[dead]
- pmontra 5mo agoThe point of OP could be right but I decide to provide a counter example. This morning I asked Claude to find why locale = empty string slipped into some of our customers records. Of course it's something I used to do myself but it did it in less than a minute. I couldn't match that speed, ever. Then I verified the analysis and the suggested fix. Finally I pasted Claude's analysis in a slack conversation, with attribution. I could have summarized what claude wrote to me, but it would be a waste of time because it was already pretty terse. We decided to solve the problem in a different way but I think that starting with Claude's analysis was the right thing to do.
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoThat's a best case scenario. My experience is that it's more common for an LLM to confidently predict incorrect solutions to the problem, and then you wind up wasting time chasing down wild geese. At those times, it winds up being more of a hindrance than a help.
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- jaredcwhite 5mo agoThis page rather reeks of LLM slop itself. If not…well I don't know what to call this style of writing exactly but I see it all the time on LinkedIn (or some annoying startup landing page) and it's very upsetting to me. "You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document." "Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness." "Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it." Why structure sentences like this? Maybe go read some well-written novels, a solid essay or two…or at the very least, write in a normal conversational style?
- semitones 5mo agoIt is absolutely AI-generated.
- gck1 5mo agoIt's also possible that this will become (or already has) a 'standard' writing style of humans. A style has to come from somewhere, and it would be most influenced by the style that you consume often. People read this style for every single question that they ask nowadays. Who knows, maybe watercooler chats will also start having higher occurence of the phrase "You're absolutely right" in the not so distant future.
- isityettime 5mo agoI actually don't care about the length so much. Short AI slop answers are also offensive, and people who act like reading a paragraph or two is a huge burden are frankly get no respect from me either. Idk why professionals should tolerate subliteracy among their colleagues.
- low_tech_love 5mo agoThe sad thing is that the website itself is AI written, only made to be shorter and more concise. But still not human written.
- submeta 5mo agoNot everything can be answered with yes or no. I used to give thorough answers even pre-LLMs. When someone asks about a project and its details, I am supposed to give a one sentence answer because LLMs give lengthy answers and that sucks? This is like people hating on em-dash because LLMs use them a lot.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoAI conversations are like dreams: everyone has one they like and wants to share it with others ... but no on gives a crap about your dream/chat session, because it was uniquely appealing to you, and not them. Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.
- AlienRobot 5mo agoI was writing a comment after some code I wrote and Copilot autocompleted saying "This is hacky, but..." I thought it was funny so I put a comment above saying "This is what Copilot said about my code:" and it autocompleted a line after it saying "Copilot was correct, but..."
- jraph 5mo agoI don't know, I don't mind someone telling me about a dream, if it's not too long. It can be interesting or funny. As always, when one says something, they need to check that the public they have is interested and the public must give cues about how they receive the thing. Of course it doesn't always work well, but this could concern any topic. Definitely don't share your AI chat with me though, I can sustain a poker face and politeness only for so long, after that I will probably need to complain, vent or practice sarcasm.
- pravj 5mo ago
- low_tech_love 5mo agoI’m still holding on to my hope that LLMs will destroy verbosity and usher in an era of concise and objective human-written works. Especially in academia. In my research area people write 10-page articles that could easily have been 2 or 3, for no reason other than that 10 page is the publication limit most of the time and if you write less it’s seen as lazy or something. Not to mention 20-page journal articles with humongous literature reviews that everyone skips, and so many meaningless diagrams and sections. I still hope that LLMs will make people so tired of reading slop that they’ll beg you to please submit shorter articles.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoAnd yet this website is just AI slop. It has that classic Claude smugness to it.
- connorboyle 5mo agoThe first several paragraphs of this article got a score of "100% AI-generated" on Pangram: https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec102fc984?ucc=7ahTNBfg1so https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec...
- squibonpig 5mo agoYeah I noticed it myself, "You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."
- semitones 5mo agoAgreed, this article has a lot of tell-tale signs of AI writing... Which is so ironic
- mybbor 5mo agoThis was helpful to hear. I added Slackmoji and encouraged my colleagues to use it liberally on me. https://x.com/RobbyMcCullough/status/2057570435936731273 https://x.com/RobbyMcCullough/status/2057570435936731273
- vonnik 5mo agoIf the poster cannot do the work of writing, they should not expect others to do the work of reading. People read based on trust and respond to invest in relationships. LLM verbiage breaks both dynamics.
- SequoiaHope 5mo agoAt work they recently added AI note taking to meetings. In interviews we have a panel of interviewers and everybody publishes feedback. I continue to take candidate notes by hand in the interview and write my own feedback. During the review process we read each other’s notes. Some people just take the summary of the conversation and use AI to convert that in to feedback, so now my coworkers are sharing sometimes paragraph after paragraph of slop when what I want is their own thoughts on the candidate! Very annoying.
- kazinator 5mo ago[dead]
- DmitriyBuchilin 5mo ago[dead]
- threethirtytwo 5mo agoEasy solve: "ChatGPT, generate an explanation that's short and concise and won't be interpreted as a slop grenade. Also write it in a way where nobody can tell it's written by AI because everyone thinks they can spot AI, but really if you tell the AI to write it in a way where no one can spot it... it can." This was a slop grenade btw.
- winterbourne 5mo agoAI verbosity is similar to AI sycophancy: a dark pattern, disguised as earnest assistance.
- hankbond 5mo ago1. I fully agree with this sentiment of not using AI to info-dump. 2. In person, as a human, I have a bad habit of doing this myself.
- platevoltage 5mo agoThis will be great to send to one of my clients who routinely pastes Gemini conversations into the Upwork chat to tell me how to do my job.
- andrewljohnson 5mo agoA lot of organizations right now are dealing with the "Claude says..." problem. It's not that you should never include any AI generated text in a conversation with other engineers, but you mostly shouldn't. AI is a tool to help you understand/debug/review yourself, but you shouldn't be conferring authority to your AI (because it doesn't understand anything and is often wrong in the text it spews), and you shouldn't be running an AI for other people, they should run it themselves.
- ineedasername 5mo agoThis is unfair to those of us who’ve been writing walls of text to simple questions all our lives. I demand AI be the ones who start writing shorter things. Then I can go back to people ignoring my accidental wall building— accident because lots of times you’re a page in still going on things you see as relevant and— well, you see how things can get away from a person. But I want people to ignore me for what I write, not for thinking i don’t have anything worth ignoring in the first place.
- albert_e 5mo agoWhat do we do about asymmetric warfare in corporate emails -- where one side has access to copilot and their emails are now three screens long.
- plasticeagle 5mo agoWhy, considering that this article makes a good point, was it written using AI?
- zamadatix 5mo agoIf one can make a good point succinctly it's not much of a difference how they did it. The good info is there and quick to parse through.
- meander_water 5mo agoOther gems in a similar vein https://github.com/narze/awesome-websites-as-answers https://github.com/narze/awesome-websites-as-answers
- nly 5mo agoI just reply with "Is this AI? I'd rather you replied yourself"
- master-lincoln 5mo agoSo if somebody wrote the same lengthy answer without AI you would not interfere? Shouldn't we criticize the issues of the text instead of it's creation process?
- jgilias 5mo agoSometimes writing a lengthy answer is absolutely necessary to convey stuff correctly and precisely. But if a human is writing it, every sentence has a meaning, and it might just be worth reading. Because a human is unlikely to waste their time drafting it unless they think it’s actually necessary.
- master-lincoln 5mo ago>Sometimes writing a lengthy answer is absolutely necessary to convey stuff correctly and precisely. exactly, but that is independent from the creation process > But if a human is writing it, every sentence has a meaning, and it might just be worth reading. Because a human is unlikely to waste their time drafting it unless they think it’s actually necessary. Bullshit. My bosses wrote endless sentences without meaning that were not worth reading before the dawn of LLMs.
- 3vo-ai 5mo ago[flagged]
- palisade 5mo agoI'm verbose, and no one was ever interested in anything I ever had to say before. And, they certainly wouldn't be now if I used AI to do it. These days I only bother commenting if I really feel I need to get something off my chest, but I don't assume anyone gives a shit. I frequently just delete my responses. I don't generally feel anyone needs what I'm saying. It takes a bit of self-awareness to realize that no one is interested in what you have to say, so don't bother. And, I think it takes twice as much self-awareness to realize that they certainly don't care about what a bot has to say, unless they're the ones asking.
- mvcosta91 5mo agoI have a friend/coworker that is verbose af (14min audios discussing something that could be compressed in 100 words) and is not that we’re not interested, but it gets annoying after years and years of text walls. Being concise is an art by itself and it’s a really good way to express your thinking and convince people, it just needs practice.
- palisade 5mo agoI asked Claude to write a one word response: Touché.
- JimTheMan 5mo agoYou write in the style of.. anime dialogue. It's fascinating. I can almost hear the character speak it aloud.
- palisade 5mo agoHm, I wasn't trying to. Baka baka baka, jim-kun!
- Boxbot 5mo ago“Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others. You decode the signals, and stumble: ... They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack. And it's coming from right about there.”
- Ozzie-D 5mo ago[flagged]
- ngcazz 5mo agoWhat kind of situation are we in that we need to didactically state this awfully trite point?
- Maya_Andersson 5mo ago[flagged]
- Andy_Donner 5mo agoThe distinction that matters isn't AI or no AI — it's whether your thinking went through the response before it reached someone else. I'm building an app almost entirely with AI assistance as a non-technical founder. Half the time it leads me confidently down the wrong path and I spend my time course-correcting back to my original vision. I think that's the new way of working. I don't need to do the act of writing, but I do need to keep the assistant on track to where I want the project to go. The moment you remove that step by just pasting output directly, you've outsourced your judgment, not just your typing and you'll get coherent slop.
- lomlobon 5mo agoOh lord, you're catching the verbal tics. Save yourself, man.
- ateles 5mo ago> Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness. Also my main problem with many chat bots. Too many different aspects brought up at once. Short answers would be more eco-friendly too.
- halapro 5mo agoI think this varies by expectation. If you use voice, their response will be shorter and more human. If you write, you will get a whole article in response. This lets you get to what matters to you faster, as long as you're able to skim documents. If I write and want a short response I preface it with "be brief." Sadly it doesn't work 100% of the time
- impjohn 5mo agoI find this to be my current number 1 challenge when working on a terminal and seeking explanations for why a problem was approached in that way. the terminal only holds so many lines at once. Let's not talk about current scrolling in terminals. It's interesting that the LLM will oblige my succinctness requests for one or two replies then back to 7 paragraph answers that I can't reply to point by point in a TUI.
- roland35 5mo agoI've found llms themselves get way more long winded in their responses once context starts to fill up. Fortunately it's not impolite to tell Claude to be more concise!
- jonnyasmar 5mo agoI bet if sites just added a "likely AI-generated" badge next to UGC, 99% of people would stop doing this. Problem is, without public shaming, many people will continue to take advantage of anything that requires them to do/think less.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoYou're absolutely correct! actually maybe not ⸻ a lot of people take pride in (re)posting AI generated content, their only human contribution being "I asked $AI". Consider also (but maybe I'm projecting) that people do drive-by shitposts all the time, so they would post their slop grenade (I will use that term from now on lmao) and never see what the responses are. I've done that for years on various platforms (minus the slop) and I honestly don't know how well-known or well-received my shitposts are, I check some metrics every once in a while and numbers go up so it's not all bad I suppose.
- jonnyasmar 5mo agolol @ at the uber-emdash. anything AI can do, we can do better! "fair pushback". ez solution though that's enabled by this feature. "exclude AI-generated" filter. I'm actually incredibly surprised that isn't a thing, yet, tbh.
- clbrmbr 5mo ago> You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document. I’ve become so cynical that I cannot read this phrasing without thinking it came from… an LLM. This cynicism also negatively impacts human communication. This constant doubt of whether there was a thinker on the other side of the text.
- Ecys 5mo agoit was written by AI. search up speed reading. you can double or triple your reading speed in a day.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoConsume 2-3x the AI slop in a single day with this one simple trick!
- fg137 5mo agoUnfortunately, as the website has demonstrated, you are getting 50x amount of AI slop compared to non-slop. So in the end, you still lose.
- blharr 5mo agoI was surprised because the writing _seemed_ focused and It at least credits what they copied from "nohello.com" ... but when you compare the 2 sites it becomes obvious that the AI was definitely prompted something like "make a copy of nohello.com but for people posting AI slop" and that's all the actual human thought that went into this. The structure is the same as the source and has just been LLM-ified so it kept some of the same source tone.
- connorboyle 5mo agoYour cynicism appears justified here. Pangram rates the first few paragraphs as "100% AI-generated": https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec102fc984?ucc=7ahTNBfg1so https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec...
- hypfer 5mo ago> Nobody writes essays in Slack. The author clearly has never worked with genuine hardcore nerds infodumping.
- consp 5mo agoThat usually contains a lot more information with less text, thus limiting the slop scope.
- h4x0rr 5mo agoThere is also a specific kind of human that produce the slop on their own, without the need of an ai. Eg you ask a simple question and they talk for 5 minutes
- casey2 5mo agoNo one is forcing them to talk to you. Chances are there are benefits of laying out more information that you aren't considering. 15 minutes is the minimum amount of time you should spend considering a major architectural decision. And the reasoning should go a bit deeper than "cos we need this feature lol" The actual recommendation: "I'd recommend conducting a proof of concept with your actual workload patterns to make an informed decision." is objectively correct with the context given. There are plenty of real world usecases where you can do polling in Memcached to emulate pub/sub.
- impjohn 5mo agoMaybe AI should replace some people.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Kim_Bruning 5mo agoI wonder if more people have considered doing the opposite? You can just as easily use AI assist to compress a long rambling thought down to its essence. There's no reason you can't apply taste to the entire process. That does seem rather more polite and respectful of people's time. I do have this intuition though: some variant of Gresham's law or Akerlof's Market For Lemons may apply [1][2]. It takes more effort to put together a well compressed post or message; it'll drown in the sea of content which is easier to to type or generate; and it is hard to distinguish. (Also: how many people think to eg. drop a post into an LLM to find the components expanded back out? ) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- econ 5mo agoGenerating a 1000 page book as a reply seems hilarious.