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Slop Terrifies Me

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Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#21

Post by twoodfin »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #6

> You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't. Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between). Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replica…

The bear case for Workday is not that it gets replicated as slop, but that its “user base” becomes dominated by agents.

Agents don’t care about any of Workday’s value-adds: Customizable workflows, “intuitive” experiences, a decent mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring databases.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#22

Post by intrasight »

outime wrote: post #11

> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't. I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this. If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time…

If it can enable very small teams to deliver big apps, I do think the quality will increase.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#23

Post by temp8830 »

kubb wrote: post #19
beardyw wrote: post #10

I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…

I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?

They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of their power trips.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#24

Post by latexr »

beardyw wrote: post #10

I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…

> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

Absolutely no one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#25

Post by blaze33 »

As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.

As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.

Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#26

Post by satisfice »

lm2s wrote: post #14
beardyw wrote: post #10

I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…

Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.

That is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people. But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates you from the resentful poor.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#27

Post by Der_Einzige »

Our paper on removing AI slop got accepted to ICLR 2026, and it's under consideration for an IgNobel prize:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#28

Post by ted_bunny »

kubb wrote: post #19
beardyw wrote: post #10

I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…

I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?

This is what the service economy in the imperial core already is.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#29

Post by pydry »

beardyw wrote: post #10

I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…

>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.

Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.

>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

Nobody. They will try to channel it.

I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.

If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#30

Post by Havoc »

The slop is sad but a mild irritation at most.

It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing

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