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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return.

When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.

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> I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable sign

An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...

And also has the hallmarks of "art." I suggest, however, if one were to actually implement this, that the 'excrement' should likely be a food-safe lookalike; maybe chocolate with granola and fruit hunks. Less likely to have trouble with child welfare authorities.

Just a short jump from there to the concept of steganography over the back channel of aggregate child welfare enforcement actions. Typical HN

You can probably get VC money for that

What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.

We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.

E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.

If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.

Because I can't read all content to judge its value.

I used to use other signals to help judge: literacy, reputation of the writer or publisher, the media they used to communicate. Now even governments are distributing notice of official policy through poorly written tweets, yet the Internet is flooded with whole websites of AI slop that looks on the surface to be professionally made. We lost the signals that used to help us filter out the signal from the noise.

The alternative is not to read all content carefully because we don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to do so. This article is about other ways we can provide those signals. Even if the content is crap, the fact that someone has to sacrifice to produce it limits the amount they can produce, requiring them to prioritize what they produce, and signaling that this was important enough to them that it was worth the sacrifice.

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