Comment by taneq
6 days ago
That’s precisely the problem, though. The internet is already rapidly filling with AI-generated slop, and it takes a non-trivial amount of human brain power to determine whether the how-to article you’re reading is actually a reliable source or whether it was churned out to generate ad revenue.
The infinite number of monkeys with typewriters are generating something that sounds enough like Shakespeare that it’s making it harder to find the real thing.
Determining the quality of a how-to or any other kind of information you're looking for is the same job whether it was created by a human or by an AI. Check sources, read horizontally, patronize trusted producers and get your information from there.
We've got a tragedy of the commons whereupon we've grown complacent that search engines and wisdom of crowds (of nameless strangers) would see us through, but that was never a good strategy to begin with.
AI slop does little but highlight this fact and give us plenty of reason to vet our sources more carefully.
Tragedy of the commons was a thing to consider when we had sheep that grazed on the commons. It changed significantly when we invented combine harvesters.
The listicle-rot was already painful when the listicles were human-written and poorly researched. Automating the process has not improved the situation.
This exact kind of oblivious response always appears like clockwork on HN underneath any criticism of AI. “It was always like this… AI does nothing new but…”
I wonder if this is itself a form of AI generation LOL
> AI-generated slop
This phrase is kind of interesting to me because it implies that everything AI-generated is "slop". What happens when the AI is generating decent content?
Like, what if we develop AI to the point where the most insightful, funny, or downright useful content is AI-generated? Will we still be calling it, "AI-generated slop"?
Now that the machines are coming for the white collar, the Luddites those same people once mocked are starting to look more reasonable.
In the end the intelligence revolution will be a net benefit to society. In the short term there will be untold suffering.
Let me rephrase that: The machines are coming for bullshit jobs. They're so good at generating bullshit that anyone who generates bullshit for a living needs to be worried.
Only problem is that some huge percentage of white collar work is bullshit. It's no secret. We all know it and accept it.
How many of us have spent weeks or months (or years!) of our lives generating documents that end up going into a black hole (e.g. Sharepoint), never to be read by anyone ever? How many of us have generated presentations that only exist to explain to management what they're supposed to already know? How many of us put together spreadsheets, dashboards, or similar in order to visualize data that doesn't need to be visualized?
We spend our days reading and writing emails that ultimately end up being inconsequential. We waste endless amounts of our time in meetings. Days and weeks and months go by where we "did stuff" that ultimately didn't end up being practical for any purpose.
The people that actually get things done are paid the least and looked down upon. Yet they're the ones that are most likely to survive with their jobs after this "AI revolution."
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I can't speak for everyone but personally, that would be fantastic. It's already magical, having a mostly-accurate oracle on my laptop that takes up the same space as a TV series but that I can literally converse with and that knows a surprising amount of everything. If it could close the loop to apply the same self-reflection that humans can do, it'd be better than most of us at everything.
My beef is with AI slop, not AI content. Bring on genuinely good AI content, and send me to live on a farm in the country.
I deliberately wrote my comment in a way that would preemp this response. Yet here we are.
I honestly have little to no problem with finding and filtering the stuff I want to see. All the writers and creators I liked five or ten years ago? Basically all of them are still there and not hard to find. My process of finding new people has not changed.