Haha yeah, it comes off as pretty insecure, from the looks of it the person writing has no reason to be insecure either.

second hand embarrassment in peak form.

You would, though, wouldn't you?

Why not attack the substance instead of the presentation then? It’s like code, I review it as if the person had written it by hand.

You can't get human output back by passing AI output through AI. You'll just get double the AI.

I don't mind AI output, AI is useful for getting you to "mediocre" fast, which is extremely useful for 75% of the population. The rest write well.

I'm very grateful that AI raised the floor to what used to be the 75th percentile.

Admittedly cringe, and changed!

Some of us are older—and use en dash all the time.

    would often see expedients like
    this -- or this--or even, most
    minimally, just this-

"AI slop" is following the same path as "Dunning-Kruger effect," "enshittification," and so many other terms. Someone introduces a term that's useful to describe an actual phenomenon, it rapidly spreads to dominate the discourse because it's topical and punchy, and pretty soon using it is such a strong signal of being one of the "cool people who hates all the correct bad stuff" that people use it to describe stuff they merely don't like or disagree with. Once everyone's using it, it becomes useless for both its original descriptive purpose and as a social signal, so all the trendy discourse addicts move onto the next linguistic innovation and you only see random people on Facebook or Reddit who are behind the times using it, usually inaccurately as they're just following the misuse they learned it from.

It's particularly scary watching "AI slop" follow that path because of the extreme moral polarization associated with using LLMs or generative art. There's people who will see some casual mention of a game or film or app or something "using AI" on social media without evidence and immediately blast off into a witch hunt to make sure the whole world knows that whoever involved with that thing are Bad People who need to be shunned and punished. It has almost immediately become the go-to way to slam someone online because it carries such strong implications, requires little/no evidence, and is almost impossible to fully refute. Think there's a lot to learn from observing this, and it does not bode well for the next few years of discourse.

My colleagues definitely thought it was a joke at the time.

We had this project (all public research) to classify buildings and identify their different subsystems (e.g. load-bearing structure, roof type, ventilation type) to figure out the expected casualties if there was a WMD event of some type. We could get decent data for much of the world, but for some places we had literally nothing beyond a tiny picture of it from satellite imagery.

I had been playing with using GPT-3 to try to have it autocomplete forms like the following. This was 2021 before we had good APIs for instruct models, so this was just straight up letting the LLM regurgitate after pretraining. Here was the type of prompt we used:

""" Engineering building report for building located at 123, X Street, Knoxville TN Prepared by Benjamin Lee, FE --- Building footprint area: 1200 m2 Roof type: built-up roofing Facade material: brick HVAC present: """

Surprisingly (at the time), this was a decent prior. You could also add all sorts of one-off points of interest and amenities like swimming pools and other trivia to help guide the conditional probabilities.

The Straussian read is fascinating: If LLMs get even marginally better at what they do, even people with perfect SAT and GRE reading scores who spend their entire adult lives working with these models won't be able to tell.

I definitely don't like it either. These people make themselves look like their have more skills than they actually do.

Not just writing, but reading and comprehension. LLMs are a life-changing technology for a very large proportion of the population. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate, but are forced to go through life in a world that at best wasn't designed for them and at worst is actively malicious towards them.

A lot of people will look at a credit agreement they're about to sign and have no way of knowing whether it's a fair deal or naked exploitation that will financially ruin them. Thanks to LLMs, they can now point their phone camera at it and ask "is this a fair contract, or am I being ripped off". The LLM will give you an answer in speech and happily go back-and-forth with questions and clarifications for as long as you need. Whether the LLM is 90% accurate or 99% accurate at that task isn't truly critical, because it's a vast improvement over the status quo. Modern life is full of tasks that are utterly trivial for people in the top 10%, but a fraught ordeal for people lower down in the distribution.

To paraphrase a very old adage: God created man and Sam Altman made them equal.

I would rather see a piece with grammatical and spelling flaws that I _know_ came from that person's original thoughts than a LLM-perfected read with no clue about its inspirations.

Also, you can't get better without practice. LLMs being so easily accessible will make it possible to never need to learn how to write, which is extremely dangerous given how Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are the companies driving model development in the US and that LLMs aren't available all of the time (like, when you're outside interacting with real people).

Do it, but just don’t pass it forward blindly!

There's no harm in asking the oracle!

I do know my writing style has problems. My writing teacher said my style was pretentious, and I try to tone it down.

I sort of take this as a compliment, because I've been writing like this my whole life and if it reads like LLM slop, then there's the implication that the result of all of OpenAI's A/B testing and post-training leads to something like my style which at least means it gets people to engage with it!

> holier-than-thou judgemental

Unfortunately that's rewarded a lot these days. It's basically the same thing as rage bait.

You can capitalize on fear of AI by throwing the word slop around, getting people angry, and getting those sweet clicks.

Can you explain what your product actually does? I looked at the Crowdbotics website, but it just seems like it's designed for nontechnical C-suite and EVP types.

I agree. My first thought when reading the post: "who do you think you are??" Oh right, you're the guy who... learned to read early? That's... great, congrats?

> If you are reading this, you were most likely sent here after you shared a document with me and I viewed it unfavorably.

"Did this peasant just talk to My Majesty? Ew, how dare they, I view their document unfavorably."

> Alternately, perhaps I really like you and think you have potential, so I am sending you this message prematurely so that you don’t accidentally trigger a peeve of mine.

"Yeah, I like that one, he's funny, I'll keep him as a pet. But don't you dare send me AI slop, you peasant!"

> My life is busy. I have children, a demanding job, and personal aspirations. When I want information to help you, enable you, or supervise you, I want it in the most efficient format possible.

"Look at me, I'm the busiest. Don't have time for nothing, can't you see? Ungrateful peasants, I enable them by the thousand, only to be sent AI slop."

> I’ll cut you a break. I will hold my nose despite all the text smells because I genuinely want to see your best work in the best light possible.

"Ugh, fine, I'll have a look at your slop, you filthy slave. But that's solely because I always see everyone in the best light possible."

Maybe I worded this more harshly than I meant. I value anybody who tries to communicate with me and I don't mean to try to discourage people from having ideas or communicating them to me, but - writing is thinking, the act of trying to actually use your language and your reasoning will improve your idea. How many times have I thought I had a good idea, then in the process of writing it out, I realize its flaws (many times)? If you pass this process off to an LLM, you skip a key step, and you leave it to me the receiver to do this work for you.

I did make a comment to that effect at the end

It feels like gatekeeping to me. An attempt to prescribe a way to convey information that the author happens to be genius level at.

As a developer when I first encountered auto-linters I felt threatened. When I saw coding agents my first reaction was to feel threatened. Maybe the author is going through something similar.