I recently made a Firefox Extension to mark authors as Slop for the same goal but not the same reason.
I don't think disclosing helps here. If the article wasn't obviously generated, why would that affect you ?
The only issue I have is being half-way through the article and realizing I am reading hallucinated text. If I can mark the author once, I won't see them again. This works fine for me. You could argue that disclosing would fix this issue, but the issue is not that AI was used, but that it was not curated.
Because it's a trapdoor function. You generate heaps of content with AI with 1:10 or 1:100 amplification of time/attention invested, but your readers spend their time reading it at 1:1.
Also, what are we doing using AI to write our blogs? Surely that's the final domain of human writing outside of our local circle?
I think the need to jump through hoops to disclose anything and anything that might offend someone’s particular sensibilities is a losing battle. What if I want a disclosure on if the content is being hosted via AWS vs some non-magacorp that agrees with my sensibilities more? Or that the power being used by the data center is renewable? Or a disclosure for the author’s every political position so I know if I agree with them and if I should amplify their message and/or generate ad revenue through their site?
At the end of the day, the ideas within the content are what matters. An idea has or does not have merit regardless of if it was produced entirely by a person, or by a person using AI as an editor, or 100% generated by AI. If you need a disclosure on if an idea was produced by AI, you are saying that you have no interest on debating the content on the grounds of the arguments it is making, while simultaneously ceding you can’t tell the difference between someone using AI and someone who isn’t (which undermines one of the primary arguments against AI, that it makes for inferior outputs).
Because I would've completely avoided the article if I knew that I would be served slop. I was interested in the content, but I was immediately thrown off by the writing style, which closely resembles what I've been getting from Opus 4.8 lately in my dev work. Filler language and useless metaphors everywhere.
> Booleans look tidy until somebody adds a third case and exhaustiveness silently doesn’t kick in. Strings narrow honestly.
Like, nobody truly writes like that. It wouldn't get past any competent editor.
Strings narrow honestly? What does that even mean? This kind of 3-word precision is useless and they appear everywhere in the article. We get the point with in the first sentence, no need to add more.
This is a great example of the latest "LLM tell" I'm seeing in prose.
It's so terse with its "power-verb" that I have to read it multiple times. It's a clever compaction of English, not something I want to read outside of a headline or motto.
Here's another example from a Claude convo I had open: "Alerts flag mirrors". It's agreeing with my proposal that the alert system should be expanded to consider duplicates, and it came up with a cutesy phrase for it that ends up reading like three unrelated words.
Makes me appreciate how helper words help make the structure of a sentence more obvious.
More examples: "Errors surface drift", "Tests anchor scope", "Guards screen input". That's probably what it is: when the verb is also the form of a noun (flag, surface) or adjective (narrow).
I just flag like I would terrible writing by a human and move on.
It’s frankly depressing when (2018) oldies-but-goodies get reposted here for the Nth time. The clarity of thought and obvious effort that went into communicating that thought was expected for top-voted posts at the time. Now those posts appear exceptional in this era’s standard of “the LLM just cleaned up my notes” slop.
I recently made a Firefox Extension to mark authors as Slop for the same goal but not the same reason.
I don't think disclosing helps here. If the article wasn't obviously generated, why would that affect you ?
The only issue I have is being half-way through the article and realizing I am reading hallucinated text. If I can mark the author once, I won't see them again. This works fine for me. You could argue that disclosing would fix this issue, but the issue is not that AI was used, but that it was not curated.
Why should they disclose how much AI was used to write an article?
Because it's a trapdoor function. You generate heaps of content with AI with 1:10 or 1:100 amplification of time/attention invested, but your readers spend their time reading it at 1:1.
Also, what are we doing using AI to write our blogs? Surely that's the final domain of human writing outside of our local circle?
If the author hasn't bothered to spend time writing the article, why should I spend my time reading it? Let agents do it for me!
If nothing else, it should be done as a courtesy to those who would like to avoid such content.
If the result is better for having used AI, why wouldn't an author want to disclose it?
Should they disclose the use of a spellchecker? A translation app? Gramarly? A writing tutor?
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I think the need to jump through hoops to disclose anything and anything that might offend someone’s particular sensibilities is a losing battle. What if I want a disclosure on if the content is being hosted via AWS vs some non-magacorp that agrees with my sensibilities more? Or that the power being used by the data center is renewable? Or a disclosure for the author’s every political position so I know if I agree with them and if I should amplify their message and/or generate ad revenue through their site?
At the end of the day, the ideas within the content are what matters. An idea has or does not have merit regardless of if it was produced entirely by a person, or by a person using AI as an editor, or 100% generated by AI. If you need a disclosure on if an idea was produced by AI, you are saying that you have no interest on debating the content on the grounds of the arguments it is making, while simultaneously ceding you can’t tell the difference between someone using AI and someone who isn’t (which undermines one of the primary arguments against AI, that it makes for inferior outputs).
4 replies →
Because I would've completely avoided the article if I knew that I would be served slop. I was interested in the content, but I was immediately thrown off by the writing style, which closely resembles what I've been getting from Opus 4.8 lately in my dev work. Filler language and useless metaphors everywhere.
> Booleans look tidy until somebody adds a third case and exhaustiveness silently doesn’t kick in. Strings narrow honestly.
Like, nobody truly writes like that. It wouldn't get past any competent editor.
Strings narrow honestly? What does that even mean? This kind of 3-word precision is useless and they appear everywhere in the article. We get the point with in the first sentence, no need to add more.
> Strings narrow honestly.
This is a great example of the latest "LLM tell" I'm seeing in prose.
It's so terse with its "power-verb" that I have to read it multiple times. It's a clever compaction of English, not something I want to read outside of a headline or motto.
Here's another example from a Claude convo I had open: "Alerts flag mirrors". It's agreeing with my proposal that the alert system should be expanded to consider duplicates, and it came up with a cutesy phrase for it that ends up reading like three unrelated words.
Makes me appreciate how helper words help make the structure of a sentence more obvious.
More examples: "Errors surface drift", "Tests anchor scope", "Guards screen input". That's probably what it is: when the verb is also the form of a noun (flag, surface) or adjective (narrow).
Slogans mask meaning.
1 reply →
I just flag like I would terrible writing by a human and move on.
It’s frankly depressing when (2018) oldies-but-goodies get reposted here for the Nth time. The clarity of thought and obvious effort that went into communicating that thought was expected for top-voted posts at the time. Now those posts appear exceptional in this era’s standard of “the LLM just cleaned up my notes” slop.