Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

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> There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for.

Fair enough. But the real problem, it seems, is that people love slop.

My family is trying to sell a house in the South of France; the real estate people are sending us 500-words emails every so often, that are so obviously AI it hurts. Well written, and content free. Nobody cares. I'm the only one having issues with it.

At work, a new team let Claude do all their work and write all their status reports. Everybody seems to love it. It's so fast! And mostly correct! And so fast to correct when it's wrong! And here too, I'm the only one having issues with it.

A Canadian author wrote a book in French that turned out to be 100% AI ("C'était ça ou mourir"). Before that was revealed, every critic loved it, in Canada, in France and everywhere else (25 translations were started). The public loved it too: it's one of the top best sellers, and success continued even after the "scandal".

We are drowning in slop and nobody cares.

The quote is not a contradiction at all, it can both change the world and be low quality.

If that's true for every AI output is up for discussion, but it's reasonable that if someone is skeptical about the technology, they will also be skeptical about the quality.

That the tech is taking over many areas is not a stretch at all, that's just something that can be observed. Big companies (not just big tech) have been trying to get away with lowering (cost cutting) the quality of their products for a long time, AI lends itself to the same purpose, and will (and already is) obviously be used for it. Starts with customer communication as you mentioned, and customer service, and believe it or not I don't think every company should generate their own tech stack and software for their little products.

I think the problem is calling all AI output “slop”. If people genuinely like the content then is it still “slop”?

And, playing devils advocate for a moment, does it matter if a robot or a human authored it if people like it? People loved Magic Eye pictures in the 90s and they were computer generated too.

The problem is also with the creator. You learn nothing when AI produces things for you. When it's art, to each their own, I guess.

But when I ask my realtor questions, he doesn't know anything. I get the same answers by typing into ChatGPT.

When I ask the Claude team at work about why this or that, they don't have a clue. They "will get back to me", which means they'll forward the question to Claude and Claude will output another 500-words email with a lot of things that are obvious and not part of the question, another couple of assumptions that are plainly false, and in the middle of it, sometimes, yes, an interesting insight. But the insight doesn't come from the people sending the email, they didn't produce it, they don't see it, and they never act on it.

This is all just exhausting.

> But when I ask my realtor questions, he doesn't know anything. I get the same answers by typing into ChatGPT.

Not going to comment on your workplace specifically, but I’ve found this to be an issue with other industries like real estate long before ChatGPT were a thing.

The problem is the people who pickup the phone, greet you at the shop door, or take the photos, they’re the lowest paid juniors and thus know nothing.

So in most industries, you were always lucky to get through to someone with knowledge on the first attempt.

>someone with knowledge

The problem with AI is that "someone" may not exist.

That's highly unlikely because then the company wouldn't exist. At some point in a (to use our example: a real estate business) you are going to need skilled professionals.

I think the bigger risk is what happens when they retire if we are not training the next generation of professionals.

>At some point in a (to use our example: a real estate business) you are going to need skilled professionals.

This is exactly what we were saying with programming during early day of LLM. But that does not stop people from doing 100% vibe-coded projects.

Omarchy is one example, just ask the "developer" how stuff works in detail, without using AI, can they answer ?

> This is exactly what we were saying with programming during early day of LLM.

Yes I know. I was there too. ;)

> But that does not stop people from doing 100% vibe-coded projects.

And why should it? Let people "code" however they want to "code". Just like some people will find creative ways to play the guitar while others will just play covers.

By the way, you haven't addressed the core point posed: if people like AI output then is it still "slop" (in response to comments where people describe all AI output as "slop")

Well, people also like junk food, does it mean it's not junk food anymore ?

To me AI generated content is exactly like that. Cheap, fast and easy access.

It's fine for occasional consumption, and in some setting it's definitely not suitable to be served

That's a really eloquent way of putting it. I like that.

Here are they contacts: https://omarchy.org/teams/

You can try asking.

High chance i will just talk to a meat proxy.

The only way for them to prove themself to the mass is a live coding interview session, without AI of course

> Behind it all is the Omarchy Doctrine: ten principles for...

That's ridiculous... Let's vibe code everything, but with a doctrine and principles!

If I'm going to do vibe coding, I don't need principles. No rules! And no future.

"slop" is less so about if something is a popular product or not, it's more about the quality. You can think that AI can produce high quality outputs, but it's unreasonable to think that this applies to the majority of it's use. There has always been corner cutting, and using AI to cut corners/safe money in product design/production inevitably results already, and will more so in the future, in a ton of bad products. That does not mean that there can't be good ones too.

> "slop" is less so about if something is a popular product or not, it's more about the quality.

But we are talking about popular culture here. That was never an industry where quality was measured by artistic excellence. It's an industry that is entirely motivated by mass appeal. Thus something being popular IS the measure of success.

So if AI is slop, then so is 99% of the human-made content it's replacing.

Slop exists because the cost of creating content has dropped to zero, which made the signal to noise ratio crater as well. Concision and density used to be a virtue. Now it's the opposite: content is measured by weight.

People absolutely cared about "C'était ça ou mourir", his publisher ended up dropping him. The reason the success continued is that people denied that he used AI and had all sorts of shaky political reasons for this (e.g. claiming that Haitian writing trips up AI detectors). Even the reason it got popular in the first place is to do with the themes of the novel rather than its writing.

> his publisher ended up dropping him

That's not really the point. Critics the world over LOVED the book; they only distanced themselves from it when it became clear it was AI, but when they didn't know, they couldn't stop raving about it.

because of its politics. There were plenty of people who thought it was dreck from the beginning.

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