3 ms·

How do you trust anything written after 2023 or so to not be slop? Or even trust the claims that it was written before 2023?

apsurd 3mo ago
self-evident quality
Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not? You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.
- Planktonne 3mo ago
  We read books because the words convey meaning, not because they appear to.
  - titularcomment 3mo ago
    Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.
  - Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
    So you're implying AI is incapable of producing meaningful output? Have you not used models from the last few years?
    - WolfeReader 3mo ago
      They may have been implying it; I'll say it. Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output. It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data). Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.
      - Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
        In what way does a human author "understand the meaning" that AI does not? Just because a brain is made from organic material rather than silicon, doesn't make it less of a prediction machine.
        WolfeReader 3mo ago
        Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly. The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one. The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
        Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
        You're just describing different ways of learning concepts. Learning from lived experience and learning from reading the experience of the others are both valid. AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios. To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?
        WolfeReader 3mo ago
        Easy: counting letters in a word. There are tons of examples where AI confidently presents incorrect letter counts as fact. Search it up, really! Good example article: https://wonderfulengineering.com/googles-new-ai-search-thinks-google-has-two-ps-and-thats-the-least-weird-part/ https://wonderfulengineering.com/googles-new-ai-search-think... If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question. You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.
blakes 3mo ago
I wouldn't blindly trust a brand new author in 2026, but it's very easy to trust an author that has put out good writing in years past. Not hard to find, there has been plenty of great books written after 2023. New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think. It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.
- titularcomment 3mo ago
  I don't understand caring about 'slop' in creative media. Its pressingly more important in programming because there are a lot of bugs linters, complicated language models and even fuzzy sandbox searches can't catch. Even if they did, coding is collaborative work and maintaining vibecoded infra is a genuine hassle. However, none of these apply to music or books. AI or not, humane feelings always shapes a piece to its last form and its entirely up to you to determine if you like it or not. AI generally fails to capture this, and if it didn't - a fluke -, why not enjoy the piece?
  - kipchak 3mo ago
    There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
  - moate 3mo ago
    why not enjoy the piece>> The theft. I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic. Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?

apsurd 3mo ago

self-evident quality

Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago

Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not? You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.

Planktonne 3mo ago
We read books because the words convey meaning, not because they appear to.
- titularcomment 3mo ago
  Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.
- Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
  So you're implying AI is incapable of producing meaningful output? Have you not used models from the last few years?
  - WolfeReader 3mo ago
    They may have been implying it; I'll say it. Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output. It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data). Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.
    - Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
      In what way does a human author "understand the meaning" that AI does not? Just because a brain is made from organic material rather than silicon, doesn't make it less of a prediction machine.
      - WolfeReader 3mo ago
        Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly. The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one. The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
        Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
        You're just describing different ways of learning concepts. Learning from lived experience and learning from reading the experience of the others are both valid. AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios. To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?
        WolfeReader 3mo ago
        Easy: counting letters in a word. There are tons of examples where AI confidently presents incorrect letter counts as fact. Search it up, really! Good example article: https://wonderfulengineering.com/googles-new-ai-search-thinks-google-has-two-ps-and-thats-the-least-weird-part/ https://wonderfulengineering.com/googles-new-ai-search-think... If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question. You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.

blakes 3mo ago

I wouldn't blindly trust a brand new author in 2026, but it's very easy to trust an author that has put out good writing in years past. Not hard to find, there has been plenty of great books written after 2023. New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think. It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.

titularcomment 3mo ago
I don't understand caring about 'slop' in creative media. Its pressingly more important in programming because there are a lot of bugs linters, complicated language models and even fuzzy sandbox searches can't catch. Even if they did, coding is collaborative work and maintaining vibecoded infra is a genuine hassle. However, none of these apply to music or books. AI or not, humane feelings always shapes a piece to its last form and its entirely up to you to determine if you like it or not. AI generally fails to capture this, and if it didn't - a fluke -, why not enjoy the piece?
- kipchak 3mo ago
  There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
- moate 3mo ago
  why not enjoy the piece>> The theft. I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic. Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?