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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#241

Post by Cyan488 »

hinkley wrote: post #132
ravirajx7 wrote: post #93

AI has kind of ruined internet for me. I no longer feel joy in reading things as almost most of the writing seem same and pale to me as if everyone is putting thoughts in the same way. Having your own way of writing always felt personal in which you expressed your feelings most of the time. The most sad part for me is I no longer am able to understand someone's true feelings (which anyway was hard to express in writi…

I used to daydream of a 'dark web' but for humans not criminals. But at this point I don't know how you'd keep slop out, given how high human collusion has gotten of late.

Small private discord or slack servers meet this definition. I'm part of a few interest related ones and I'm glad to know members are more likely to be human than not

Re: ai;dr

#242

Post by K2h »

I am thrilled that my type-ohs which I haven't been bothered to fix for years now positively indicate I am a human...... PERFECT.

Re: ai;dr

#243

Post by Cyan488 »

phito wrote: post #22

I roll my eyes every time I see a coworker post a very a long message full of emojis, obviously generated by a LLM with 0 post editing. Even worse when it's for social communication such as welcoming a new member in the team. It just feels so fake and disingenuous, I might even say gross. I don't understand how they can think it's a good idea, I instantly classify them as lazy and unauthentic. I'd rather get texts fu…

Some people legitimately have no idea that others recognize and are offput by llm output.

Also, i know a lot of non-native English speakers that use AI tools to "correct things". Because of the language barrier these people especially are less likely to ever be able to recognize the specific llm tone that precipitates.

Re: ai;dr

#244

Post by rendaw »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

I agree, and I feel like this happened more vaguely before but it's coming more acutely into focus now.

E.g. music artists would happily post their music with unattributed cover art. I've seen graphic artists post video slideshows with unattributed music. Authors (books, blog posts) who think cover art or header images are a necessary evil.

I was talking with a lawyer who said that AI legal drafting would never happen because legal work requires high level reasoning and quality is critical, then told me that AI written software would be fine if you just sandbox it.

Edit: I think it's true, there is some amount of slop/coasting in every field, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to avoid that. But people take that too far and decide that everything in (adjacent field) is trivial when actually many fields today are just very complex.

Re: ai;dr

#245

Post by msephton »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #231
manuelmoreale wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second. Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write. [0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes

That's not really how it works. Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism? I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mi…

When you say "show it to people" I guess you don't mean the people in India, Japan, etc who still use the symbol for its original purpose?

Re: ai;dr

#246

Post by ashton314 »

> I need to know there was intention behind it. That someone wanted to get their thoughts out and did so, deliberately, rather than chucking a bullet list at an AI to expand.

This! This is my feeling exactly. I wrote about encountering work slop last year: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2025-08-04_artifical_inanity/

Re: ai;dr

#247

Post by jama211 »

acedTrex wrote: post #133
jama211 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code _can_ be expressive but it also can not, it depends on its purpose. Some code I cobbled together to pass a badly written assignment at school. Other code I curated to be beautiful for my own benefit or someone else’s. I think the better analogy in writing would be… using an LLM to draft a reply to a hawkish car dealer you’re trying to not get screwed by is absolutely fine. Using it to write a birthday card for s…

All code is expressive, if a person emitted it, it is expressive about their state of mind, their values and their context.

Phooey.

Re: ai;dr

#248

Post by jama211 »

elxr wrote: post #207
jama211 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generating art is worse than generating code though IMO. It’s more personal. Everything exists on a spectrum, even slop.

Code can be art. Art can be formulaic and lazy and disposable. The context in which both the code or art is used matters more than whether or not what you're AI-generating is "art".

I agree context is most important. But, I was talking in general.

Re: ai;dr

#249

Post by rgrs »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #231
manuelmoreale wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second. Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write. [0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes

That's not really how it works. Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism? I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mi…

Hooked cross is Nazi, historians apropriated it to diffent culture to save 'cross'

Re: ai;dr

#250

Post by ziml77 »

gordonhart wrote: post #153
threetonesun wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely see LLMs generate code that is less readable than the rest of the codebase it's been created for. I've seen humans who are short on time or economic incentive produce some truly unreadable code. Of more concern to me is that when it's unleashed on the ephemera of coding (Jira tickets, bug reports, update logs) it generates so much noise you need another AI to summarize it for you.

The main coding agent failure modes I've seen: - Proliferation of utils/helpers when there are already ones defined in the codebase. Particularly a problem for larger codebases - Tests with bad mocks and bail-outs due to missing things in the agent's runtime environment ("I see that X isn't available, let me just stub around that...") - Overly defensive off-happy-path handling, returning null or the semantic "empty"…

All of these bother me, but the null/default-value returns drive me insane. It makes the code more verbose and difficult to follow, and in many cases makes the code force its way through problems that should be making it stop. Please, LLM, please just throw an exception!
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