Comment by olivierestsage

Hah, I was listening to a similar conversation that began with family members working in the school system complaining about AI slop that began (relatively) harmlessly in day-to-day email conversations padded with time wasting filler but now has trickled down into "professional" education materials and even textbooks.

Which led to a lot of agreement and rants from others with frustrating stories about their specific workplaces and how it just keeps getting worse by the day. Previously these conversations just popped up among me and the handful of family in tech but clearly now has much broader resonance.

As can be observed in my comment history, I use LLM agentic tools for software dev at work and on my personal projects (really my only AI use case) but cringe whenever I encounter "workslop" as it almost invariably serves to waste my time. My company has been doing a large pilot of 365 Copilot but I have yet to find anything useful, the email writing tools just seems to strip out my personal voice making me sound like I'm writing unsolicited marketing spam.

Every single time I've been using some Microsoft product and think "Hmm, wait maybe the Copilot button could actually be useful here?", it just tells me it can't help or gives me a link to a generic help page. It's like Microsoft deliberately engineered 365 Copilot to be as unhelpful as possible while simultaneously putting a Copilot button on every single visible surface imaginable.

The only tool that actually does something is designed to ruin emails by stripping out personal tone/voice and introducing ambiguity to waste the other person's time. Awesome, thanks for the productivity boost, Microsoft!

That's easy. If I don't use it I won't be competitive; however I and probably many others would prefer a world where NO ONE has it as it would be a better overall outcome. For a lack of a better term I would call these "negative innovations". Most of these inventions:

- Require you to use it (hard to opt out due to network effects and/or competitive/survival pressure) AND

- Are overall negative for most of society (with some of the benefit accruing to the few who push it). There are people that benefit but arguably as a whole we are worse off.

These inventions have one thing in common; overall their impact is negative, but it is MORE negative for the people who don't use it and generally they only benefit an in-crowd of people if any (e.g. inventors). Social media for me on many scales is arguably an obvious example of this where the costs exceed the benefits often, nuclear weapons are another.

It’s a bit cheating though particularly for Gemini. It’s been inserted into something that already had high usage numbers.

I just assume that at least half of those are bots on social media platforms. You go on Twitter and the quality of posts is so low, yet every post has a bunch of replies. The same is true for YouTube, it’s full of empty, inflammatory responses. And this has become more common with the appearance of ChatGPT. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have no incentive to come clean about it, since they provide both the source and the destination, which is very lucrative.

I can only speculate, but people can feel resentful toward a technology while still using it. "I need this shitty tool for work but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with its social/environmental/economic/etc. implications."

I think that most of the people who react negatively to AI (myself included) aren't claiming that it's simply a useless slop machine that can't accomplish anything, but rather that its "success" in certain problem spaces is going to create problems for our society

What percentage of those billion users that aren't bots are being forced to use it in some way? Does that figure count the AI Summaries at the top of Google search results or the AI review Summaries in Maps that you can't turn off? Or the millions of Gemini integrations that Google added to its products?

The very people that whine and bitch that "AI is bad" will enunciate their complaints via their phone's AI-driven speech recognition feature.

It's pure cognitive dissonance.

N of 1, I use Gemini a lot for research and find it very helpful, but I still loathe the creep of GenAI slop and the consolidation of power in tech conglomerates (which own the models and infrastructure).

Not all of these things are equivalent.

If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/

https://teamhuman.fm

When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.

>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.

Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.

There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.

Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.

Strange, I feel anti ai sentiment is kicking up like crazy due to ram prices.

You're confusing the final stage of grief with actually liking it.

I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.

Yeah that's laughable. There is a huge movement of gamers that want this shit to stop. stopkillinggames is one.

This is a perfect example of cognitive dissidence on the subject. You wont even see the retribution coming.

This backlash isn't going to die. Its going to create a divide so large, you are going to look back on this moment and wish you listened to the concern people are having.

This doesn't even make sense even if you believe it. Why wouldn't both sides of any argument use "a superhuman persuasion engine"?

Inevitably is such a tired argument. Everything is a choice, belief in inevitability is for the weak.

> You either surf this wave or get drowned by it

I don't think so. Handcrafted everything and organic everything continue to exist; there is demand for them.

"Being relegated to a niche" is entirely possible, and that's fine with me.

This is cope.

Why not just quit work and wait for AGI to lead to UBI? Obviously, right after chatGPT solves climate change, it will put all humans out of work as next step, and then the superintelligence will solve that problem one way or another.

People read too much sci-fi, I hope you just forgot your /s.