I have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much effort into post-AI copy editing, it's just clear and useful writing. Sure, the occasional non-idiomatic phrase creeps in but those are hard to find.
That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.
I have had experiences where customers use AI to communicate and express their issues. Sometimes they produce walls of text like the website exemplifies, but overall it's a better alternative to not be able to explain the issue because you don't know the specific terminology and you are just a layman trying to do things.
Show some love for the layman, we are all laymen in areas we don't know about.
Honestly, speaking as a friend, and as someone who's been at this a very long time, maybe stop doing that?
It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.
It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity.
If there's something in the middle of a wall of text that invalidates something much further down, trying to communicate the problem becomes a pain in the butt. It's just not a good method for discovery.
Replace "Them" with "Coworker" and the point of linking to the site is instantly understood (a LMGTFY-style shaming with a dash of humor to soften the blow)
With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...
Do people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.
> Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it.
If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:
1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;
2. The message gets deleted.
I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.
Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.
[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.
In instances where context is important, I have been including a summary with call to action at the start of the message, then include details below to hopefully eliminate back and forth. It helps me be more clear with my point, and most people once they have an action only use the context for reference later.
Just prompt them back: "that's a lot of detail, could you please summarise as briefly as possible what differences concern our requirements specifically?"
I love asking someone who sent me a Slack wall of AI text to join a huddle, then ask them deep questions about said wall of text while they struggle because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It seems to encourage folks to be a little more careful about their wall of texts in the future.
The best are the Jira tickets with a huge wall of AI slop requirements. Usually full of nonsense of course including implementation recommendations in the wrong language or framework. Questions for clarification met with blank stares from the author. Ah well, copy/paste into claude code and say “do this. make no mistakes” and get back to browsing HN…
I have begun using the acronym TL;DP (Too long didn't prompt) For when someone sends a wall of text and I didn't want to waste tokens having an agent summarize it for me when the sender could have done that for me with their own agent.
Either you have to give the AI the points you want to convey, then just put those points in a message. Or you don't have anything to convey, then don't post a message.
I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say.
> Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.
> It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write
It's certainly concise but I still remain unconvinced a human wrote it.
> It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
The source code is without a doubt AI (it's got a comment for the "<!-- Canonical URL -->"), so I guess one would have to assume they prepared the entire document beforehand, then fed it to Claude and instructed it to use that copy exactly.
...or they prompted "make me a site which tersely criticizes people who post AI slop on Slack, use the term slop grenade and style the site like nohello.net"
When real people use AI slop to spam me down, I instantly know that this person does not want to communicate with me. So I stop all communication with that person.
What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs.
For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people.
I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.
Then at the end, "Use AI to make things clearer". NO! STOP USING AI AND JUST TALK!
I have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much effort into post-AI copy editing, it's just clear and useful writing. Sure, the occasional non-idiomatic phrase creeps in but those are hard to find.
That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.
I have had experiences where customers use AI to communicate and express their issues. Sometimes they produce walls of text like the website exemplifies, but overall it's a better alternative to not be able to explain the issue because you don't know the specific terminology and you are just a layman trying to do things.
Show some love for the layman, we are all laymen in areas we don't know about.
> Nobody writes essays in Slack
I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.
<context> <tutorial> <anecdata> <answer> <sumary> <funny hook>
Introducing AI made markdown tags for conversations so others can only see what the wanty
Hah, can we do that for recipes next?
Could add a <vitriol> tag to that - but yes, if that was auto assigned by LLM - i could see that.
Honestly, speaking as a friend, and as someone who's been at this a very long time, maybe stop doing that?
It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.
It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity.
If there's something in the middle of a wall of text that invalidates something much further down, trying to communicate the problem becomes a pain in the butt. It's just not a good method for discovery.
The next step is to not talk with each other at all.
Just have a LLM that "knows you well" in all your position argue by points and values assigned to the points with the LLM of the opposition.
If value alignment exists, a actual conversation may be engaged.
> Should we use Redis or Memcached?
Couldn't they have used an example aimed at a broader audience?
I'm in IT but even I barely know what Redis or Memcached is about (never used either).
90% of people here know what those are.
And with a more broadly applicable example we could share the link with friends, family and coworkers who aren't on HN.
Yes that was exactly my point :)
Replace "Them" with "Coworker" and the point of linking to the site is instantly understood (a LMGTFY-style shaming with a dash of humor to soften the blow)
With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...
LMGTFY definitely did not soften the blow, maybe it even increased the shaming factor lmao
Do people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.
> Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it.
If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:
1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;
2. The message gets deleted.
I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.
Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.
[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.
We desperately need some cultural norms and taboos to develop around AI usage.
I swear most executives can barely read so you're not doing your career any favors sending them more than 150 characters.
The CEO of one firm I worked at wrote emails totally in bullet point format.
Made it much easier to read and you could just reply with:
> bullet point
response
which made life much easier
In instances where context is important, I have been including a summary with call to action at the start of the message, then include details below to hopefully eliminate back and forth. It helps me be more clear with my point, and most people once they have an action only use the context for reference later.
Just prompt them back: "that's a lot of detail, could you please summarise as briefly as possible what differences concern our requirements specifically?"
I love asking someone who sent me a Slack wall of AI text to join a huddle, then ask them deep questions about said wall of text while they struggle because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It seems to encourage folks to be a little more careful about their wall of texts in the future.
Obviously you need to use an AI to summarise the wall of text generated by the AI. Duh.
There’s someone in this thread unironically suggesting this.
The best are the Jira tickets with a huge wall of AI slop requirements. Usually full of nonsense of course including implementation recommendations in the wrong language or framework. Questions for clarification met with blank stares from the author. Ah well, copy/paste into claude code and say “do this. make no mistakes” and get back to browsing HN…
I am so tired of these people, but it’s so sad they don’t understand themselves how ridiculous they are
I have begun using the acronym TL;DP (Too long didn't prompt) For when someone sends a wall of text and I didn't want to waste tokens having an agent summarize it for me when the sender could have done that for me with their own agent.
That’s interesting. When I use AI to help me write chat messages it’s almost always, “make this shorter,” or “clean this up”
Why do you use an AI to write chat messages?
Either you have to give the AI the points you want to convey, then just put those points in a message. Or you don't have anything to convey, then don't post a message.
I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say.
I like how the website matches the message. Short and Simple.
It's a matter of having good taste. But AI education will help.
AI psychosis is a mental condition, and as such requires a professional intervention.
Your best bet is simply saying "That is very nice {op_name}." and then carefully leaving that chat.
This is slop too though, right?
> Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.
> It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write
I found the writing clear, concise, and human.
It's certainly concise but I still remain unconvinced a human wrote it.
> It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
The source code is without a doubt AI (it's got a comment for the "<!-- Canonical URL -->"), so I guess one would have to assume they prepared the entire document beforehand, then fed it to Claude and instructed it to use that copy exactly.
...or they prompted "make me a site which tersely criticizes people who post AI slop on Slack, use the term slop grenade and style the site like nohello.net"
Eventually you just get a sense for these things.
What makes you think this is AI slop?...
> You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
> It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
These are particular sentences I find questionable. Would you write that way? I certainly wouldn't.
GPTZero is by no means perfect, but it agreed this was likely generated.
[dead]
"Why it's wrong"
When real people use AI slop to spam me down, I instantly know that this person does not want to communicate with me. So I stop all communication with that person.
What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs.
For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people.
I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.
"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."
Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.
The particular question in the blogpost can just be answered by a skill. Once you ask enough questions, the solution becomes obvious at the end.
5 Claude Code skills I use every single day
https://youtu.be/EJyuu6zlQCg?t=80
[dead]
[dead]