[idle_zealot]

> I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference

There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.

In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers what you have isn't just a culture you exist outside of, you have a common faux pas. One of many, many rude and inconsiderate acts that are nonetheless common, like sticking gum under a table or catcalling. Something about the environment prompts antisocial behavior, and shame is one way to shift the environment and reduce the behavior. There are almost certainly more effective ways to change the environment and curb the behavior, but establishing a consensus on whether the behavior is acceptable or not for those in the know is an important step.

In case it was unclear I'm on the "it's not acceptable" side. Do share if you've observed someone appreciative of being grenaded in the wild, though.

[handoflixue]

Anecdotally, LLMs are apparently good enough at writing to routinely make the front page of Hacker News. Twitter has a plague of bot comments. From all these up-votes, we can infer there is an audience and this is good faith.

Partly, I admit, I just tend to be wary of shame as a tool. "Someone said something I dislike" has a long history of being abused. Conversely, even something like your gum example, one can point at concrete harms like littering and forcing others to clean up after you.

[grey-area]

Many people don’t read the articles before upvoting they tend to just read the headline. So I don’t think this proves much.

[21asdffdsa12]

And the "We should shame them!" crowd has a long standing inability to tell fiction and facts apart, even if previously informed. There was this example of a polish writer who killed one of his characters off- and the people held mournings and church services for her.

If you take the scripture for holy, then the holy scripture talking back to you making you a prophet, will condemn other fiction as blasphemy.

[imperfect_blue]

Using LLM as a writing assistant to properly format your ideas, while lazy, is not the same thing as a slop bomb. They're highly rated because the original ideas are good, even if the writing quality is sloppish, and it genuinely contains human input that you can't get simply by asking LLMs a question.

[adastra22]

If the AI has enough editing input that your article comes off stylistically as AI-written, it is lazy and your writing is not as good as you think it is.

[imperfect_blue]

Lazy is not bad, and bad writing doesn't mean it's not valuable or insightful.

[exe34]

Lazy writing is disrespectful. Although nowadays we should assume the entire article is slop unless we have reason to suspect otherwise.

[saurik]

> There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.

The people I know -- including myself -- who do this with each other actually don't mind it when people do this and even go so far as to read through the so-called slop... so, either I know a bunch of people who in fact are listeners, or the definition of the complaint needs to be refined?

FWIW, it isn't really that different from "here's a random Google result I found on the topic" or "here's a random comment I found on Hacker News"... if you don't paste it to the other person you can't have a shared discourse around it, as if we both ask the LLM we will get different answers.

And like, that is definitely something that is rude in many contexts: if I did not respond to your comment but just replied with a link to some other comment I clearly didn't read or bother to understand, that should make you angry. But, if I link you off to something I agree with, that's saving time.

[JimDabell]

> can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.

Head over to Reddit and look for the obvious AI-generated engagement bait. There are usually a bunch of people earnestly responding without even realising they aren’t talking to a real person. Sure, some of those are also bots, but a huge number of them are real people too.

Average people aren’t good at noticing this stuff. They might not deliberately seek it out, but when they are exposed to it they like it enough to voluntarily spend their time on it.

> In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers

I think it’s quite likely that the people who appreciate receiving slop outnumber the people who don’t.