We have been conditioned by the all mighty Algorithm to produce slop that will get views on their sites, because they "own" all the public attention. Platforms exploit both ways, up and down, like ISPs under non-net-neutrality rule. We need to force these platforms to prioritize their own selfish interests less. Why do you think we can't find a decent app in App Store? Because in-app payments make more money for Apple. So they tanked the whole App Store to milk us of money at every corner. Why can't we find what we look on Amazon? It's on page 7, first 6 pages are full with shit they want us to buy instead of what we are looking for, or the best deal. Same for web - why are the top 10 links junk? More money for ads.

In fact articles like the one posted here are how humans organize to generate human slop. Someone telling people what to think and do. Then they all parrot the party line.

It's AI slop even if it is written by a human, if it comes by algorithmic feed. Because people who get good positions in those feeds cater to the algorithm intentionally by making slop. Most slop is written by SEOs and professional writers fighting for the scarce public attention.

I think the majority of AI text people read is their own AI text. There are already 1B users. OpenAI alone has 800M. Seeing clear AI generated text in the wild is rare, seeing your own chat is frequent. I think most AI usage is a private affair. Almost all LLM text is read just once. If people complain of AI slop, then it's their own fault. You have to chip some original ideas in, can't expect the model to be original. But there are also times when the model surprises you with a really useful idea or connection. I see it like a jam session, your ideas influence its ideas, its ideas influence your ideas. Together they get in a place neither of them would have gotten alone.

> it's most of the time useless crap from start to finish.

Maybe.. you forgot to put any ideas in the prompt. That would explain it.

AI has no skin, can't be sued, punished, shamed, or imprisoned. But managers on the other hand ... hmm they are also safe. Never mind

AI will read the texts you provide, write generic text on any topic, if you don't bring anything original don't expect anything but slop. On the other hand, if you have plenty of original and useful ideas to communicate, why not use AI as your wordsmith?

That explains why management loves AI so much.

So you're saying AI consumes too much energy. GPT-4 training consumed as much energy as 300 cars in their lifetime, which comes about 50 GWh. Not really that much, could be just families on a short street burning that kind of energy. As for inference, GPT-4 usage for an hour consumes less than watching Netflix for an hour. If you compare datacenter energy usage to the rest, it amounts to 5%. Making great economies on LLMs won't save the planet.

What's the difference between having access (manual) and having access (agentic)? Probably just ads, dark UI patterns and more spam to wade through.

> With an unreliable tool that misses things and hallucinates? That seems like a really bad idea.

Have you tried Google Search? It hallucinates unrelated links 90% of the time. In fact if one out of 10 is good, you can consider yourself lucky. And humans have even worse recall than LLMs.

> Here's the thing. If nobody wants this, it will go away. But the reality is, many people do want this, so I'm predicting it will hang around.

Most people like it, even if it doesn't increase productivity, they still like using it. The penetration rate in education, science and software development is around 90%.

Joke's on you, FireFox already has AI integration in the sidebar.

"From now on, sexy flirtation will only be allowed with the other thousands of models from HF."

I used Perl for 15 years, loved it, switched to Python 10 years ago. Now I prefer Python, and the Perl advantage of compact syntax is none given that you use Cursor or some coding agent.