[madrox]

> If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses

I find this fascinating, honestly. It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y"

Because it's probably not actually about the content but the sense of connection. People want to feel like they're connecting to people. That they're being worthy of someone's else's time and attention.

And if that's what people are seeking, slack and social media are probably not the platforms for it (and, arguably, never were).

[Aurornis]

> It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does.

If the LLM output is concise and efficient I don’t actually care that it’s LLM output.

My problem is that much of the LLM prose feels like someone took their half-baked idea and asked the LLM to put a veneer of quality writing on top of it. Then you waste your time reading it to parse out the half-baked idea hiding among the wall of text.

[californical]

Yes exactly

If a person has a shitty idea that sounds good, they start writing about it. If they exercise some care in their writing, the act of writing itself is enough to make them realize that their idea is shitty.

By the way, it happens to me all the time! Even just on HN, I’ve bailed halfway through writing a comment because I realized that I didn’t know what I was talking about, lol.

But an LLM will gladly take that shitty idea and expand it into a very plausible article/message/post, that seems reasonable if you don’t think very critically about it. And it’ll be done with such a high-seeming level of care that any human author would’ve been fact checking themselves the whole time.

So it forces the reader to think even more critically, rather than letting our subconscious try to judge authenticity of the writer through the language they use.

For example, someone who says “my WiFi is broken” when referring to the fact that their computer is dead, we can quickly judge them as “not an expert at computers”. But if they say that “my M.2 drive has gone bad”, we inherently assume they have some understanding. —- when the first person uses LLMs to write, they sound as informed as the second person even if they are completely clueless and wrong

[eucyclos]

In my case, it's because it doesn't address my ask, which is why I didn't ask an ai in the first place. The only person I know who does sloppypasta is my brother in law. I know he means well, but when I ask his opinion I want the perspective of someone in his demographic. If a generic ai response met my needs, I wouldn't be asking him.

[valicord]

> It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask

But it doesn't? I'm more than capable of using Google and chatgpt myself. If I was looking for a machine generated answer to my question I would have already found it myself and never made the post in the first place. If I went to the effort of posting the question, it means that either the slop answer is not sufficient for some reason or that I want to hear from actual humans that have subjective experiences that an LLM cannot.

Posting an AI response verbatim basically says "I think you're too stupid to click a couple of buttons, so let me show you how it's done". I think it's very reasonable to get upset at the implication.

[toraway]

As an example of this, I am currently comparing two different models of Android e-readers, from a Chinese brand where the tech specs are all published but there aren't a lot of good comparative reviews. Plus, the specs like battery life are close to the same mAh, but for e-readers especially with Android optimization/drivers/etc make a gigantic difference.

So I have been Googling for "Reader X vs Reader Y review"(/comparison/etc) hoping to find Reddit comments or non-spam blog posts from people who actually own both to compare screen and battery life. I found a reddit thread comparing them directly and lo and behold the first comment is someone saying "I own both but honestly you could just ask ChatGPT for this". Fortunately a couple other people responded...

When I ask Gemini or ChatGPT, all I get is regurgitation of the tech specs (that are all mostly identical) plus summarized SEO spam reviews (that were probably written by another LLM based on those same tech specs) and it's totally unhelpful. So for this, I absolutely do NOT want an OpenClaw bot to respond as if they've physically used the devices and it would be actively enraging to learn a "helpful" comment "answering" the question was actually just an LLM impersonator.

[madrox]

I think it is reasonable, yes, but I don’t think it’s ever been reasonable to expect reasonableness on the internet. We have a difficult enough time showing each other decency.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Then why even have this discussion in the first place? You weren’t expecting any reasonable responses to it, after all.

[coldtea]

Do you only do stuff where you expect the outcome to be good?

Perhaps they did it for the off chance of a good response.

[the_af]

But then it'd be false that the internet is the wrong place. This person's account is from 2011, which shows they don't believe what they claim.

I think they are playing devil's advocate in the most irritating way. Good things, and good venues, are worth preserving against enshittification.

Let's not blandly accept this. Fight against it, even if it's a losing battle.

"It was always like this" is false, anyway.

[the_af]

> I think it is reasonable, yes, but I don’t think it’s ever been reasonable to expect reasonableness on the internet. We have a difficult enough time showing each other decency.

This is a disingenuous answer. You don't truly believe this. How do I know? Because you're having this conversation here and not with ChatGPT. So you do think the internet is reasonable enough to engage in this conversation.

Also, Sturgeon's Law applies. "The Internet" is as reasonable as humans are. Of course 90% of it is going to be garbage, but that's no reason to discard the other 10%.

I know you're playing devil's advocate. I wish people stopped doing this, and instead acknowledged human connection is worthwhile.

[heavyset_go]

I'm purposely talking to a person and not a chatbot.

So it does not meet the bare minimum of addressing my ask, the premise of the ask hinges on a discussion with a real person.

[taosx]

I think it should matter. When you ask the AI something you are in a frame of mind, you have a specific context, the question also holds value and context that might completely change the parsing of the answer or at least the difficulty of it.

What I'm asking and the response from AI through an intermediary lose some context (the prompt), it's like the telephone game where the data becomes more and more distorted, that's why people don't have an issue with their own AI generated answers.

Another issue is that when I'm talking with someone and parsing through what they've said I'm considering them, as a person, taking all available context (some of this might happen unconsciously).

In any case I don't think there is an easy solution to the problem.

[JumpCrisscross]

> shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y”

The people copy-pasting slop almost never excerpt the relevant response. As a result, you get non-concise text you have to triple check. This is functionally useless to the point of being fine to skip.

[hombre_fatal]

Exactly. If you can find the answer for someone with AI, then by all means use it. But at least filter, curate, and verify it into an answer.

[MagicMoonlight]

We can tell by your fury that you’re a slop poster.

I don’t want a random person’s use of an AI to be slopped at me. I don’t know what they asked it, a lot of the words are made up, and I have to go through the effort of decoding it.

If I wanted an AI answer I would ask an AI. AI slop is made up. It’s like handing me a paste of google search results. It’s creating work for me.

[madrox]

I agree with you. No one wants this.

But the internet has had slop long before AI. It's in the same class as clickbait. AI just made it worse and given the slop a distinct flavor. You can be furious about this if you want, but to me this seems like a waste of energy, which is the whole point of my original post.

We need better tools for managing our attention. Perhaps the effort of decoding it can be offloaded to AI.

Is that lame? Yes, but at least it's somewhat effective.

[the_af]

> AI just made it worse

Understatement of the century.

[mpalmer]

> People want to feel like they're connecting to people. That they're being worthy of someone's else's time and attention

They are achieving the exact opposite. I don't connect with the person who sends me slop. And they send me content that is a waste of my time and attention, because I have to vet it. Why would I trust someone - how can I ever connect with them - when the only thing I know about them is they take shortcuts?

[coldtea]

>I find this fascinating, honestly. It shouldn't matter as long as it addresses your ask, yet it does. I also wish I could filter social media on "it's not X. It's Y". Because it's probably not actually about the content but the sense of connection.

It's also about the content. Generic slop I can get on demand from an LLM myself, vs a novel insight.