If it was written by an actual subject matter expert instead of a "performance marketing and paid social media director" it would probably be valuable, as then one could be assured there was some sort of quality control going on.
If someone had written it. It's well curated slop, but it's still slop. Consider this bit:
> A profession does not need to be eliminated to be mourned. It is enough for its center to fall out, leaving the people who built careers in that center with credentials that no longer map to a stable role. When AI threatens the work, it threatens the self, which is why the response looks less like ordinary job-loss fear and more like a form of bereavement.
I'm certain that section was mostly constructed by an LLM. It reads well, but when you actually focus on what it's saying there's nothing there.
I was not enlightened by reading that. No human sat thinking deeply about the situation, constructed their own mental model of what was happening, then put effort into transferring that mental model into my brain so I could be similarly enlightened. They had Claude (probably) express a conclusion that was attached to nothing more than what would statistically sound "deep".
Hacker News is surprisingly tolerant of slop these days. I expect to be downvoted for this, because comments highlighting slop are usually downvoted. So it goes.
I don't mean to make a personal attack here, but you're one of the names I most associate with being AI positive on this site. In fact that's pretty much the only reason I recognize your name at all. Maybe I've misread your previous posts and the stuff from your blogs that have been posted here, but that's the vibe I've had from you.
That said, slop is going to be a massive, natural, and utterly predictable consequence of AI. I think if you are generally AI positive then you definitely don't get to complain about slop.
I'm actually credited on the Wikipedia page for "slop" for helping spread the term - I wrote about it right as it was emerging https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/ and did some press interviews to push it around then too.
I consider covering AI misuse as part of my "beat" that I write about - there are so many bad ways to apply this stuff, and shining a light on those and explaining why they're bad seems like an important thing to spend time on.
The whole thing is unbelievable slop ! I think the whole article is llm-generated unfortunately (just reading the first paragraph I got an immediate smell).
Your contribution moved the debate forward not one jot. Whining about people whining is even less valuable than the whining. And given Simon was meta-whining as a response to me whining… Well, I just don’t know where that leaves you. But I’ve added even less to the debate, beyond my initial contribution.
However, to your point directly: Simon has a pretty valid argument. There’s a lot of slop posted on jere these days.
Personally I’m reading far less stuff from HN than I used to. That’s a shame because up unto the past six months or so I’ve found it a great place to expand my reading.
Now I increasingly click something open, realise it’s more AI slop and close it.
What I don’t understand is why these people do not realise how utterly, unmistakably, glaringly obvious their awful AI crap is.
I recently said elsewhere on here: I partly work with words. I find AI-“authored” content absolutely and unmistakably obvious.
The fact that people publish crap like this shows that they don’t know what good writing is, or what good expression of ideas is. Because if they did they would proof what their AI had written and realise how awful it is.
And that by extension means that the content is almost certainly worthless, because whoever prompted it read it and said “this is fine! I’m happy to publish it under my own byline!”
And in reality it just makes them look idiotic. No discrimination. No original thought.
So I don’t think my comment, - or Simon’s comment - was moaning about “Things These Days”.
It was a point about the erosion of the community this creates.
And if nothing else that erosion is silly arguments about the value - or otherwise - of AI slop.
I'm not disagreeing about the slop, which is a monumental waste of everybody's time, for exactly the reasons discussed - which is why I quite specifically did not quibble about that aspect. I thought it would be clear that I was obviously referring to the last paragraph only, that being that part that contains as it does one quite specific reference to These Days, and some minor froth about downvotes. But perhaps not.
I don't intentionally use LLMs for anything, but perhaps I should have run my post through one to optimise for clarity.