Ask HN: What's slop? what's AI written text and why read/not read?

7 points by xlayn 12 days ago | 7 comments

Question, I check HN often, and noticed the trend towards "it's obvious that was written by AI so I didn't read it", or couldn't handle it, or hate the way the prose it's written.

And a similar behavior towards AI generated code, also mirrored by multiple AI policies around AI submitted patches/PRs.

Now question, say you have an idea about x product, or y improvement as a patch to a OSS, or whatever where AI can help you, then you

a) outsource to this team of people, local to you, same language, you can go and say hi to the person working on it, then don't review the output and put on github b) team is in your country, more difficult to go say hi, but you don't review the output and put on github c) same but the team is in another country d) same but the work is done by a contractor of a contractor, again you don't review and put it on github e) ask it to the free chatgpt version, don't review, post to github f) ask it to haiku on your 20$ claude account, don't review, post it to github g) ask it to claude mythos... the version that hacks stuff as has to be contained in a magnetic field air gapped... don't review the output and post it to github...

where does it start being slop and where is not? now, if instead of that, I review the output, read it, understand it, dogfeed it to myself to make sure it works, test it for 3 weeks, go through 100 rounds of polishing, and then post it to github... is it the same or not?

if not then AI is not the issue... the issue is hastily done stuff that's not reviewed, that you didn't guide, that you didn't test, that you didn't check EVEN if it has "the load bearing decision" 5 times.

IF the AI style writting is the issue, then polishing, ai or not, is not the problem.

NOT A PRO-AI DISCOURSE, if the thing dissapeared tonight, thanks GOD we will be able to buy RAM and gpus again at sane prices and stop the insane wave of quickly,hasted,PRs making it or not to the software we use.

bigyabai 12 days ago |

> where does it start being slop and where is not?

Github/Gitea issue with feature request; typically not slop

Github/Gitea PR with AI-implimented feature; typically slop

The issue is almost always drive-by contributions. A lot of programmers don't care about dependency creep, SLOC management, SDLC nicities, fragile CI/CD or multiplatform testing. Many FOSS maintainers and core contributors have a much higher standard for what they're willing to merge, and therefore reject slop judiciously. Same goes for one-man-band vibe coding outfits that want to ship a half-assed "native" app and charge money for it. Most of these people don't understand what the industry considers standard, even with AI helping them.

FWIW, there were slop PRs even before AI. Famously Paragon's NTFS driver was so bad that Linux refused to merge it because the costs outweighed any potential benefits. It ultimately came down to a difference in culture between FOSS and closed-source development.

dabinat 12 days ago |

Human writing can often be more concise because humans are lazier and don’t want to expend unnecessary effort. An LLM does not care about word count.

xlayn 12 days ago | |

So if you take any of the options above, and as part of the instructions mention to be more concise, push to github, and then the reader is lazy and don't verify, is it slop?

Hey option d, please create a website to sell stuff similar to ebay but with a vibe for old/vintage stuff, don't review and push to github... it's fine if it's the contractor of the contractor that just cares about closing tickets?

Not picking on you, I know biological processes/brains/humans are inherently "efficient"/lazy... but there is some irony in wanting things to be correct without wanting to spend any effort on the thing? is like reading a 100 char message and deciding it's true and take decisions around it.

ventana 12 days ago |

One good measure is that in pre-AI world the person creating a piece of information normally used more time to create it than the person consuming it would need to consume it. Writing used to be slow, reading is fast.

So, when I see an AI wall of text without any editing, I assume that the author did not bother spending their time on it, but they want me to spend more of my time on reading it than they spent on creating it, and I refuse. Everyone has access to the same AI, and if I want to read AI generated text with little to no human author involvement, I'll go ask ChatGPT or Claude.

Same goes for GitHub slop PRs which are faster to create than to review.

xlayn 12 days ago | |

So the issue it's then the lack of polishing, intention, drive, which again in every case of my list is the same irregardles of who does it.

On the other hand if there is no AI involved, but as another comment here mentions, before ai times, the ntfs driver that was not polished enough, then it's also slop.

ventana 12 days ago | | |

Yes, for the NTFS driver point, I guess "slop" is nothing new, it's just now it's much faster and easier to produce it in crazy amounts.

But also, even the NTFS driver passes my test of "more effort to create it than to review it", by the way.