Comment by godwinson__4-8
15 hours ago
1. This doesn't make any sense. On this reading, most any work is "optional" in that you had the option to do something else. But few people have the option to not work at all. If creating slop generates a decent enough ROI, and you have to work, then why is it waste? It may be waste to you, but for them it is an income. Just like there are entire industries or products I might personally think are a waste and yet make tons of money. In the modern economy most work is optional then. So what point are you making?
2. Yes, people get replaced at work all the time. And actually most employees who figure out who to maximize their own ROI (and thus their companies) get rewarded, not punished. If your slop code is "good enough" and you are moving the metrics the C suite cares about, your colleague taking far longer to create far less is obviously going to be punished.
If some sea change happens that replaces a whole class of workers, that is beyond the scope of the individual worker to think about. The modern economy can be viewed as one long process of automation, where most workers have been subsidizing their own eventual replacement, given the privileged position of capital over labor. This is historically obvious. It does not mean it benefits the individual to go back into some state of nature, or not reap what benefits they may gain from the prevailing system while it is still the one at hand.
What I meant by "optional" work is that it's not being performed for a buyer; it's volunteer labor. Nobody's paying for individuals' awful LinkedIn posts. I suppose it could be framed as self-promotion aimed at a potential future payoff, but if it repels buyers, then it's pointless.
Perhaps it's worth looking at this issue from the demand side instead. Who is the customer or buyer of the AI-generated work; and if there is one, how much do they value it? I contend that there are few actual buyers who are actually asking for the AI-generated output, and thus the value is low. These buyers are usually asking for some other outcome that flows downstream from the work, and AI slop is either being misperceived as the actual ask, or is a step in the middle somewhere.
Next, I wasn't talking about slop code. I was talking about slop narrative work--the work preceding the coding phase that gets teams and goals aligned, and reports results to management. In a world in which code is increasingly machine-written, the focus turns to the planning and decision stages, and that's where communication skills are most important. If you're outsourcing that work to an LLM, you're providing little added value, and that makes you replaceable. Not by a machine, but someone better than you at writing.
As for your last paragraph, I'm having trouble understanding whether you're in favor of AI-written content (not code, let's put that aside). That's the question I'm more interested in discussing than how economies evolve. I know how economic progress works ;-)
As to the first part, if you mean the demand side as in who wants to read slop LinkedIn posts, LLMs haven't changed the fundamental nature of that. It's always been awful. Therefore the point is who cares if an AI has written it. As I said, it's all pablum anyway. But I don't agree with how you are describing the problem. Most marketing or self promotion is "optional" then? Why is not having a direct buyer asking for the work equal to "volunteer" work? Anyone who has been around marketing knows conversion rates are incredibly low. That's just the nature of it. It still often makes sense from a ROI perspective. There are many if not most cases were > 99% of people might readily say "who asked for this?" and it will still make economic sense to convert the fraction of a percent.
I similarly don't think your second point makes much sense. I think people going on about writing or domain experience as a skill are missing the obvious writing on the wall. If you are not an exceptional writer you will be replaced. Most people will be replaced then. Or at the very least, their diminished market power is inevitable. The end state of these models is in my view clearly aligned to less human in the loop and more automated self prompting. Most people's prompts are not that unique. If someone has a superior prompt that eventually gets integrated into the model. Eventually the model learns to ask itself the superior question, even if the spark is a profoundly lazy human invocation. The progress along code generation is then joined hand in hand by progress to full automation. Why is generating a prompt harder to solve than generating code? Why will both not advance in the next decade? Suggesting code will be increasingly machine written while saying humans will still need to be around to write instructions just strikes me as denialism of the scale of the change. If you think that in 10 years most of the back and forth is not going to be LLMs talking entirely among themselves I think you are in for a rude awakening.
As I said earlier, if a human cares a human will author. As for the rest of it, it makes almost no difference. Bad, lazy writing has always existed. Why would I take solace that a human has produced slop over a machine? The question is not "do I like it" but "do I care". The answer is no. Most things in the economy I don't care for or like. But certain things are inevitable as humans conglomerate. A well organized mind learns to get over it. Quite frankly if LLMs push LinkedIn over the edge and lead to the destruction of that platform I would be pleased. It was always a center of corporate slop and backpatting, something that in theory was optional but was more like a mandatory career chore, a step in the middle to actual work. It just is kind of amusing that your example of why AI writing is bad is because it is ruining LinkedIn, as if that place wasn't always trash. It just makes my point. In domains were humans care about human authorship, it's just not an issue in the same way. I've never heard someone care about LinkedIns viability as an ecosystem from someone who didn't work there. If LLMs are making the site unusable they are doing God's work.