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Slop Cop

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121–130 of 169 posts

Re: Slop Cop

#121

Post by jampekka »

abustamam wrote: post #82
Aurornis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always judge an author by the length of their text. Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text. Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid…

Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.

How about not writing the name at all? It's already in the email header.

Re: Slop Cop

#122

Post by owenthejumper »

My biggest slop peeve is not necessarily using words like 'delve', it's the algorithmic structuring of headings.

Every single article out there is now structured as: - THE problem - THE solution - THE proof - Why it matters

Re: Slop Cop

#123

Post by seqizz »

A whole new generation is coming who learns how to communicate by llm-generated text, so I assume by time these used "catching" methods will be invalidated.

Re: Slop Cop

#124

Post by pocksuppet »

cientifico wrote: post #98

I find some parallelism between writing articles and Pull requests. We are moving to a point in time, where we don't care if the PR was written by AI. We care that the author understand what is about, that it tested it and in general, we want the ownership. With articles is the same. I don't care if it was written by AI, if the content is interesting, and ai make it easier to digest... That's a win win. The problem i…

If the prompt is interesting, why not just post the prompt?

Re: Slop Cop

#125

Post by jollyllama »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #70
jollyllama wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is not X. It's Y. Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.

Anyone over the age of 25 actually developed their writing style before ChatGPT came about. Getting all uppity about these surface-level LLM ‘tropes’ is just stupid. I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life. I’m sure that there’s a correlation. Take the “ew, em-dash” stuff back to Twitter.

I resent your em-dash reductivism and "stupid" insult. The LLM cliches got old very fast.

> I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life

I don't get it, you're so attached to certain cliches that to attack them in person would somehow be a detriment to you?

> I’m sure that there’s a correlation.

What are you implying?

Re: Slop Cop

#126

Post by jollyllama »

kstrauser wrote: post #118
mech422 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - writing styles have really changed over the years. Last time I ran a business document thru Grammarly, I was told it wasn't written at a 6(8?) grade level and was too complex :-P When I first started out, I was taught you use passive voice in proposals (eg 'a program will be written..' not 'I will write a program...') since you didn't know who was actually going to write it. I can't imagine how that would go o…

Strunk & White said not to use passive voice since, what, the 1920s? “We will write a program”, or “one of us will write a program” works without passivizing it.

I don't really even subscribe to the notion that things like passive voice can be bad, but if suddenly everything we read started to be written in passive voice, I'd decry it as obnoxious.

Re: Slop Cop

#127

Post by furyofantares »

IshKebab wrote: post #100
furyofantares wrote: post #26

Removing the aesthetic tells from LLM-generated text won't fix the fact that there's nobody home with opinions and experiences to express. It will just make it take more work for your unsuspecting audience to figure that out.

Yeah but there's a reasonable amount of content that has real information from a real human but they've used AI to help write it. Maybe they got a first draft from AI and then fixed it. Those can still be things that I want to read but the AI rhetorical style is so tedious and overused at this point it's really annoying to read them. So this tool would help with those cases. (Assuming people actually use it.)

I believe you, but I have yet to see any I want to read.

I've had 5 or 6 times where I've thought, OK, finally someone has produced something useful this way. And in the end I've always been bitten, by hallucinations or by an inability to work out what the author cared about or was trying to express.

Again, I believe you've had ones where you did want to read it, I'm not trying to contradict that. I'm still waiting though, and until then I'd really prefer the aesthetic tells to still be obvious.

Re: Slop Cop

#128

Post by goodmythical »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
Swizec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them? Always judge an author by the length of their text. Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad. Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just tal…

> Always judge an author by the length of their text. Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text. Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid…

“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”

Re: Slop Cop

#129

Post by goodmythical »

jampekka wrote: post #121
abustamam wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.

How about not writing the name at all? It's already in the email header.

support@domain, info@domain, purchasing@domain, sales@domain, etc

I can quickly imagine several situations in which one might speak to a public facing individual but still like to say "I was told by {sales rep} that {statement} was the case" or "{Employee} in support assured me this would be resolved in {timeperiod}" or "I had an excellent conversation with {employee} and want to ensure they'll be getting any commission due to them because they really convinced me more than your website"

Re: Slop Cop

#130

Post by cineticdaffodil »

chromacity wrote: post #22

Like the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because these tools help you get to the point. Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays, but if you're composing an email or writing a design doc, just optimize for reading time and clarity. But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such…

"Can you condense that down further without loosing clarity? " goes into every prompt.
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