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Stop Sloppypasta

stopsloppypasta.ai

81–90 of 275 posts

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#81
post #8

I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high qu…

I am sorry, but in what way is everyone letting the "We've been creating bait content for a long time" comment slide?

Did you even read the article? It is about person to person interactions. The three examples weer:

* Someone butting in to an ongoing discussion with a solution (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop)

* Someone being asked for their expertise and responding (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop)

* Someone comes with a problem thesis looking for help (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop)

The only one of these that existed prior to AI was the middle one, and the article very specifically calls out how transparent it used to be, because it had the shape of a google link.

The first one would be impossible because the person would have to either write an unhelpful response, and they wouldn't find the words at length. You could ignore them or pick it apart easily. The last one would be impossible unless if they were copy pasting from a large PDF, which would look nothing like a chat message.

What kind of workplace hellscape do you work on where people posting low effort bait on SLACK was the norm? The premise of this reply is entirely non-sensical.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#82
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask But it doesn't? I'm more than capable of using Google and chatgpt myself. If I was looking for a machine generated answer to my question I would have already found it myself and never made the post in the first place. If I went to the effort of posting the question, it means that either the slop answer is not sufficient for some reason or that I want to hear from…

I think it is reasonable, yes, but I don’t think it’s ever been reasonable to expect reasonableness on the internet. We have a difficult enough time showing each other decency.

Then why even have this discussion in the first place? You weren’t expecting any reasonable responses to it, after all.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#83

I've been thinking about this, what if AI runs autonomously and finds things to criticise that are factually incorrect? It is easy to do in social media because the context is global but in enterprises it is a bit harder. Something like "flagged as very likely untrue by AI" is something I would really appreciate. I see many posts and comments throughout the internet that can easily be dispelled by a single LLM prompt…

Why do you think an LLM knows what is fact?

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#84
Dealing with people who copy-paste unread slop into emails is probably not a huge issue for most of us. There's much more slop out there masquerading as blog posts, HN comments, etc.. It's not a huge issue yet, but there have definitely been times when I found myself midway through reading something and realizing it's just a LLM wasting my time.

I'm starting to be reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age". He described a future in which people walked around with a nearly invisible defensive army of nanobots surrounding them whose job it was to counter the offensive nanobot swarms of their enemies. Characters in this novel would go about their business while an unseen nanobot war took place in the air around them.

We're rapidly reaching the point where we will need AI to defend us from AI. i.e. We will soon need agents filtering all that we read and removing slop, just so we can preserve our time and attention for things that are human and real.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#85
post #8

I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high qu…

I acknowledge that those likely to copypaste slop aren't likely to find this article themselves, but I built the page to be shared or guide discussions around etiquette like nohello.net or dontasktoask.com. IMO a common understanding of AI etiquette would provide social pressure to halt some of these behaviors. I honestly don't mind someone else's AI as long as I can trust it/them . One problem I have with sloppypast…

There’s a certain very satisfying force to turning something into a static website that you can point people at. The Internet equivalent of “don’t make me tap the sign”; especially in an era of AI-slop.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledge that those likely to copypaste slop aren't likely to find this article themselves, but I built the page to be shared or guide discussions around etiquette like nohello.net or dontasktoask.com. IMO a common understanding of AI etiquette would provide social pressure to halt some of these behaviors. I honestly don't mind someone else's AI as long as I can trust it/them . One problem I have with sloppypast…

Couple of expressions from pre-AI culture: "RTFM", "Google is your friend". These were well-used because they are directed, pithy, abrasive. (n)amow(?): (not) All my own work ?

Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief.

But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#87
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses I find this fascinating, honestly. It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y" Because it's probably not actually about the content but the sense of connection. People want to feel like they're connecting to people. That they're being worthy of someone's else's time and attentio…

> shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y” The people copy-pasting slop almost never excerpt the relevant response. As a result, you get non-concise text you have to triple check. This is functionally useless to the point of being fine to skip.

Exactly. If you can find the answer for someone with AI, then by all means use it. But at least filter, curate, and verify it into an answer.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#88
post #8

I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high qu…

> The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.

Reading AI generated prose, even if it’s my prompt, always gives me the same feeling as when I read a LinkedIn post: Like a simple concept was stretched into an unnecessarily long, formulaic format to trick the reader into thinking it was more than it was.

Everyone taking their scraps of thoughts and putting them into an LLM likes it because the output agrees with them. It’s flattering. But other people don’t like it because we have to read walls of text to absorb what should have been a couple of their scattered bullet points.

Just give me the bullet points. Don’t run it through the LLM expander. That just wastes my time.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#89
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral. Isn't it obvious? If I'd wanted to see AI response to my question, I'd ask it myself (maybe I already did). If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses. I eat fast-food sometimes, but if I was served a Big Mac at a sit down restaurant I'd be…

> If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses I find this fascinating, honestly. It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y" Because it's probably not actually about the content but the sense of connection. People want to feel like they're connecting to people. That they're being worthy of someone's else's time and attentio…

> It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does.

If the LLM output is concise and efficient I don’t actually care that it’s LLM output.

My problem is that much of the LLM prose feels like someone took their half-baked idea and asked the LLM to put a veneer of quality writing on top of it. Then you waste your time reading it to parse out the half-baked idea hiding among the wall of text.

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