This article's proposal for stopping sloppypasta is to convince the people who does it to stop doing it, but I am more interested on what someone who receives sloppypasta can do. How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us? I've never did that so far because I feel like I am either exposing their serious lack of professionalism or, if I wrongly assumed it…
Stop Sloppypasta
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Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#102Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#103Earlier 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…
Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#104I 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…
Everybody wants to use LLMs to produce things and absolutely nobody wants to consume the things that LLMs produce and this is the fundamental reason this is all going to collapse unless we find a way for producers to pay consumers to consume their LLM output.
Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#105Dealing 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 descr…
Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#106This article's proposal for stopping sloppypasta is to convince the people who does it to stop doing it, but I am more interested on what someone who receives sloppypasta can do. How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us? I've never did that so far because I feel like I am either exposing their serious lack of professionalism or, if I wrongly assumed it…
Embrace the tension. Tension is human.
Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#107Earlier 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…
> 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.
If a person has a shitty idea that sounds good, they start writing about it. If they exercise some care in their writing, the act of writing itself is enough to make them realize that their idea is shitty.
By the way, it happens to me all the time! Even just on HN, I’ve bailed halfway through writing a comment because I realized that I didn’t know what I was talking about, lol.
But an LLM will gladly take that shitty idea and expand it into a very plausible article/message/post, that seems reasonable if you don’t think very critically about it. And it’ll be done with such a high-seeming level of care that any human author would’ve been fact checking themselves the whole time.
So it forces the reader to think even more critically, rather than letting our subconscious try to judge authenticity of the writer through the language they use.
For example, someone who says “my WiFi is broken” when referring to the fact that their computer is dead, we can quickly judge them as “not an expert at computers”. But if they say that “my M.2 drive has gone bad”, we inherently assume they have some understanding. —- when the first person uses LLMs to write, they sound as informed as the second person even if they are completely clueless and wrong
Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#108Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#109 What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
Also related - Gish-gallop During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.[3]Re: Stop Sloppypasta
#110I had a guy doing this to reply to PR review comments, copying in the comment to the LLM and pasting the response back.