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Stop Sloppypasta

stopsloppypasta.ai

161–170 of 275 posts

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#161
post #4

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…

> How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us? Embrace the tension. Tension is human.

Out of work I wouldn't mind, but I spend 8h/day there and I am forced to work with these people, so I'd prefer to keep the drama out so that I can focus on solving problems.

The other person already demonstrated a lack of professionalism by sharing unverified AI slop so, in case of conflict, I wouldn't be surprised if they continued acting unprofessionally by spreading false rumors, unnecessarily escalating the situation to higher ups, secretly sabotaging the project, etc.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#162
post #96

I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just…

This is hilarious because I've seen the idea that AI should just take the Jira ticket and implement it automatically.

Everyone wants to hand off the real work to someone else.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#163
post #96

I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just…

Had a friend in a similar situation. She got a clearly LLM-generated ticket that didn't make any sense, and was directed to question anything about that ticket. Apparently, asking "why it doesn't make any sense" wasn't !polite~ If I remember correctly, she came up with ~200 questions for a 2-paged ticket. I helped write some of them, because for parts of the word salad you had to come up with the meaning first and th…

The first question should have been "Was this ticket AI-generated?".

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. You might also consider high-lighting some things you learned from AI's response. Summarizing it and perhaps critiquing it. AI, and different AIs, give different answers to the same question, so it may be useful if you can provide a good summary of the different responses you got.

Even better, what about piping the different AI responses through another LLM to provide the summary? That way you save yourself the time and effort of reading all the different AI responses. You could even pipe the final summary directly to your email/IM client and save yourself the copy-paste.

I actually use multi-LLM consensus as a part of my daily work, it’s pretty effective.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#165
post #123
post #96

I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just…

AI etiquette is a great term. AI is useful in general but some patterns of AI usage are annoying. Especially if the other side spent 10 seconds on something and expects you to treat it seriously. Currently it's a bit of a wild west, but eventually we'll need to figure out the correct set of rules of how to use AI.

I'm hearing nightmare stories from my friends in retail and healthcare where someone walks in holding a phone and asks you talk to them through their chatbot on their phone. Friend had a person last week walk in and ask they explain what he does to Grok and then ask Grok what questions they should ask him.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#166
post #96

I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just…

Some people use AI as they use anything else. Careless, without putting the effort in, making things somebody else's problem. This existed before AI, it just accelerated the stupidity.

Careless people never used to be able to create such absolute volumes of garbage that flood the system. Open source projects used to be able to just have an open PRs system, because the effort to create and submit something is quite hard, it's a natural filter. Now automated agents can flood a project with hundreds of useless PRs that disguise themselves as being real.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people use AI as they use anything else. Careless, without putting the effort in, making things somebody else's problem. This existed before AI, it just accelerated the stupidity.

Well said, carelessness of the user persists regardless of the tools they're using. The cracks may show in other ways though.

I think before, it was easier to spot. Before, the effort spent would often show in the volume or consistency of the writing. Now, one can create a big, wordy and convincing-sounding document (without any grammatical errors!) in mere seconds. It also provides for some convenient plausible deniability: you can always claim the LLM only helped you here and there with the wording.

So now, even figuring out that it was a careless or lazy job takes a lot more time, which drastically skews the economics in favor of the careless person.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#168
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…

>like they're being hoodwinked somehow

Because they are. It would be like if I bought some trinket off aliexpress and told you I made it by hand just for you. You wouldn't mind if you bought it yourself, but the fact that I lied about it to make it seem like I care is deceptive and immoral.

Sending someone AI generated text without disclosing so is incredibly offensive. It says you don't care about wasting the receivers time and don't care about honesty either.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#169
post #96

I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off. Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just…

That used to be my joke ! Given that most large organization spend (much) more time with the administrative work around code changes than the actual changes themselves (planning, deciding, meetings) then before we let Claude write our code we should let it write our Jira tickets. It was a great joke because while it was obviously absurd to many people it also made them a bit uneasy. Cue a similar joke about salary ne…

Tried that last year and the problem was, the tickets themselves were broken down well enough to make sense to the naked eye. The second problem was that it was all for a legacy codebase where practically everybody who had built it over the years had left, so it was a real don't-know-what-you-don't-know situation.

The second problem was always going to be there, even with human written tickets, but the problem really is that someone who relies on AI gets into the habit of treating the LLM as a more trustworthy colleague than anybody on the team, and mistakes start slipping in.

This is equally problematic for the engineers using AI to implement the features because they are no longer learning the quirks of the codebase and they are very quickly putting a hard ceiling on their career growth by virtue of not working with the team, not communicating that well, and not learning.

Re: Stop Sloppypasta

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a friend in a similar situation. She got a clearly LLM-generated ticket that didn't make any sense, and was directed to question anything about that ticket. Apparently, asking "why it doesn't make any sense" wasn't !polite~ If I remember correctly, she came up with ~200 questions for a 2-paged ticket. I helped write some of them, because for parts of the word salad you had to come up with the meaning first and th…

The first question should have been "Was this ticket AI-generated?".

Oh, it was! But the guy that generated it insisted that he triple-checked the prose after, and it should be treated as typed by hand

I'm pretty sure it would be okay to stop at 5-10 questions, because it was clear he couldn't answer any. But my friend is from a hateful branch, and so she went for humiliation angle of asking for as much clarification as the ticket itself allowed

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