> AI;DR (AI; didn’t read) is the solution for AI slop.

Maybe I'm the odd-one-out here and didn't plumb the worse-depths of social media, but I feel I need to defend good old TLDR as a slightly different, less-hostile animal.

It's rare for someone to invoke it as a moral condemnation of the poster. The spectrum is more like:

1. Wow, no, I'm not going to read all those pages, in this context you are disrespecting everyone's time.

2. I read it, but it's lengthy, I'd summarize it as X. (Hostile, sarcastic)

3. I read it but there was too much, please be shorter.

4. I read it, but it's lengthy, I'd summarize it as X. (Helpful, sincere)

>If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it...

>...then I’m not going to bother reading it.

Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but we've had copywriters and editors for generations now. Not reading something because AI did the post-writing work feels kinda weak. Skip stuff started from AI, fine, but this is just because it's AI, not because the author didn't do the task. And I do get the point is that if an AI did /most/ of the work, ok to that, too, but not post-write processing alone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991394

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933

- Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing? And how would you know if the /content/ is worthwhile, unless you read it...

- The ability to "detect AI" is imperfect at best. 90% AI written? 5%? How would you know, unless you read it....

- If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?

- If you are wrong, and you announce it to the world, how would it feel to someone who spent a lot of time and energy writing?

I already saw someone getting fired for only producing AI text as part of their entire output, after being unable to explain what they “wrote” in multiple situations.

And recently my company enacted a mandate that text made for humans should not be AI generated.

Sooner or later every company will start realizing that this is just people too lazy to actually work and coasting on a paycheck, at the expense of every other worker.

I think sometimes people have a big long thread with Claude where they feel enthusiastic about the back and forth being very productive -- and then they genuinely want to share the summary of the conversation with their colleagues so that they can feel it too. It's not just typing a short prompt and copy/pasting the response.

But, Claude, especially Opus is so unnecessarily flowery, and smug -- and it's so identifiably characteristic.

It somehow rubs salt in the wound: "I didn't take the time to write this out in my own words, so now you get to listen to this petulant asshole mansplain it to you".

If it would get to the point, and with some humility, it would be a much different proposition.

If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?

Sounds like this isn't everyone, but rather, it's people who have nothing to say, and -- even after they've "sourced ideas" -- they don't know how to reason about it, nor how to communicate it.

This isn't everyone. This is people engaged in generating noise, for the sake of noise.

Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.

I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass.

> I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Why? Because there is growing grumbling among everyone about AI writing. And it’s not just others; it’s me!

Classic AI "its not just, its..."