Comment by YZF
1 day ago
People keep talking about AI slop but then I go maintain our largely human written code base and it's like worse than any slop I've seen from my AI usage. This is with code reviews, tests, and a supposedly strong engineering team.
That said AI feels a bit alien.
My experience with frontier models is that in many areas of software engineering they outperform the average software developer. In some they blow everyone away. In others they're not as good. But they are getting better. The problem is often not the model's capabilities but rather what you ask it to do and are you able to understand what it does and give it guidance when needed.
Slop comes from food that is just mushed together to the point that the ingredients become indistinguishable. How that applies specifically to AI training should be obvious. It’s not a generic putdown.
Semantic diffusion? Not that I have high standards for hmm, curious but humans already X comments.
Online dictionary (Merriam-Webster) says: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence". So sure, semantic diffusion (I see you read Martin Fowler), I donno. Life is semantic diffusion.
In practice code gets worked and reworked and reworked. I work on code where every single line in a huge file was written by a different person. Even the initial implementation could often fit your definition of slop. Isn't human training also mushing things together?
But cool. I think the discussion mirrors the gap Andrej was talking about. Interesting times.