Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

Post by zem » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #146

olooney wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong , I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in ordinary conversation as non-informative. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/570940/DARK_SOULS_REMASTE... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

I really thought ChatGPT would be able to tell me what this is called but it can't. I suggest "circular eponym". It's like calling a CRT monitor a really big flatscreen.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #138

Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fi…

Post by keiferski » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #246

keiferski wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the form of a story is the same as another story does not imply that the content is interchangeable. I could write you a story right now about being an expat living in Poland in 2026. It’s unclear to me how an LLM would have the cultural knowledge or experience to write such a story that is actually accurate and up to date, without already having something like my story already in its dataset.

Yeah but you would just be doing the same thing: mashing up some known information about humans and Poland. You would pick plausible names like Marek or Piotr, plausible places like Warsaw or Gdansk, and some random flavour of story that is either completely general across cultures (hero's journey) or some local tale from Poland. Shakespeare did the same, so I wouldn't blame you for it.

Post by Nevermark » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

dncornholio wrote: post #160

Nevermark wrote: post #95

I don't think we would have AI slop, if they were just trained on high quality media. Less relatable AI, maybe, but not sloppy AI. AI trained on other AI (i.e. distilling), can be better than the AI they were trained on, likely because of this reason. Each iteration can raise the bar. As apposed to the deep spiral of generating shiny attention crystals for humans, and then training on that.

Training AI on AI will most likely increase slop. LLM's add randomness in their outputs, books usually don't.

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Jul 24, 2026, 3:51 AM UTC

joeguilmette wrote: post #94

marcus_holmes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a tiny e-reader [0] and carry that as well as my phone. When the temptation to doomscroll triggers, I pull out the e-reader instead and read a book. I tried attaching the book to the phone as their marketing suggests, but that didn't click somehow. Having both out means I would check the phone and then not look at the book. Working so far, but it's only been a couple of weeks, so let's see. [0] after reading…

Yea, for me my Kindle just didnt work. I always have had one since they were first released, but it was always hard to keep the habit between book. Having a nice library of paper books, for whatever reason, has worked a lot better for me. I think it’s passively seeing them around the house and in the background always considering what is next. This last round I couldn’t decide what to dig in to after I’d finished Tru…