[logicprog]

No, I didn't write the text itself. I'm typically significantly more verbose and elliptical, and more than that, the numbers and methodology changed often enough over the course of the last couple days I was working on this because I was trying to get it to be as accurate and fair as possible that trying to keep the whole thing up to date manually would have been problematic.

[jchw]

Sorry to say but I'm absolutely certain I would've preferred to read your worst attempt at a write-up over the grating utter shite LLMs output. It's not even a question, this is unreadable.

[logicprog]

That's interesting; IME, most people get equally angry and are as likely to disengage with a superior tone over my autism-infodump verbose essay prose as with LLM output.

[ok_dad]

At least when I write an autistic info dump people know I wrote it. Why give your voice over to a corpo slop factory?

Heck, I use LLM assistance for coding and I’ve even coded up whole features with the clankers, but giving it the right to speak for me is too much.

I should also add that I read and understand every line of clanker output that I publish for others, so I’m not a vibe coder either, just adhd.

[skeledrew]

I read it perfectly fine. I see content, not style.

[grey-area]

Style is also part of the content. Word choice, grammar, register, and tone all affect meaning and communication of that meaning. The medium is part of the message.

So your statement betrays a significant misunderstanding - there is no neat clean divide between style and content.

Also, LLMs often generate text that is plausible, but wrong, in ways big and small.

[skeledrew]

Well, I got the meaning in the article fine, and have no complaints.

> Also, LLMs often generate text that is plausible, but wrong, in ways big and small.

So do humans. Always have, always will.

[grey-area]

Humans acting with intention do it a lot less. The difference is that LLMs don’t act with intention.

[skeledrew]

No, the difference is in the education/experience of any given human, which is mostly gated by age. Like you'd generally expect someone young to make a lot of mistakes, and as time went on they'd learn and make fewer. Pretty much the same with LLMs, which have been around for... a bit over 5 years now? What would you expect of a 5 year old acting with intention? Or 10? Or even a 15 year old?

[jchw]

When you say, "I see content, not style," you are separating what is being said from how it is being said. While it is great that you can extract the core message, you are missing a fundamental truth about writing: style and content are rarely completely separate. Writing involves both.

Poor prose does not just make writing ugly — it creates friction, obscures nuance, and introduces ambiguity.

You can eat a gourmet meal out of a dirty paper bowl. You still get the calories, but the delivery mechanism definitely impacts the experience and the perceived value of the food. Same food, different response.

See? I can write slop too, I don't even need to burn down a forest to do it. If you are OK with every fucking thing being written exactly like this, good for you. I am not.

[skeledrew]

The internet is going to really suck for you if you keep that attitude, because LLM use will only increase. Though also maybe not too much as the LLM-isms will likely be fine-tuned out of them to the point that the only way you'll be sure something is done with one is if the author left a note saying such. But maybe that'll make it suck even more as then you'd be without a definite target most of the time, always wondering how much of the thing you're reading is by human and how much by LLM...

[jchw]

Uh... huh.

I waited a minute to make sure you weren't going to delete this post because frankly, if I had written it, I would have. Guess not, so... Here goes.

No. It is not the fault of my "attitude" that the Internet is going to suck. That is a complete reversal of the reality. The fact that even people without bad intent are already spreading slop everywhere should be enough evidence to essentially prove that there was never any hope. If this is what good actors are doing, what exactly do you expect from bad actors?

Also, to stress it yet again, I don't care if people use LLMs in general. I'll even say that I don't particularly care very much if people use them without disclosing it in most cases. If you're using it like a normal tool and not merely just dumping the output verbatim there is not any particular need to disclose it any more than you'd disclose other tools, though I think people would prefer if you did just for transparency.

My chief complaint is just how bad LLM slop writing is. It simply is not good at all. It would literally be much better for the Internet if they weren't so turboshit at writing. There is almost no writing style I don't prefer over garbage LLM writing. I'm dead serious. Early LLMs were worse at almost everything else, but they were a lot better at writing for sure. Something went wrong somewhere.

But I do also believe that it is inherently bad to dump prose as-if you are communicating as a human, but said prose isn't actually written by a human. If someone shows me a cool drawing that they made, that means that they sat there and went through the process of sketching, possibly multiple drafts, inking, coloring/shading/painting/etc. to create an expression. This involves many human skills that take years to hone, and every detail carries someone's explicit intention. I think that this is cool, and shows a great degree of skill and effort.

When you, of course, generate some crap from an image generator, it may very well look similar. It may emulate some actual defects that make it look like someone really drew it. But someone didn't. A model went directly from a text prompt and dumped out pixels on screen. No sketching. No layers. No thought processes about how to frame things or what details to include. That doesn't mean zero effort went in: I'm sure in many cases someone sat around and fudged with LoRas and inpainting for a couple hours and pulled the slot machine lever to get good seeds and etc. That doesn't mean that an AI model does not have some model for how to structure an appealing image: it does, that's obviously why the results can look decent to begin with. But when you dump out an image from an image generator and you wink wink nudge nudge present it as your own and people evaluate it as if you drew it, this is basically fraud. Everyone looking at it who doesn't know it is AI generated actually believes you went through the normal effort of drawing that image and all of the years of practicing skills and acquiring knowledge that takes. That's bullshit, and it takes away from the actual accomplishments of people who put in the work like cheating in sports does.

Like yeah, a lot of people are cheating at chess, by passing off engine play as their own, but does that really make it okay? When the entire point is using your brain and not just the raw outputs themselves, doesn't that hit you as a problem?

For generative AI, I personally draw this line at what I feel are expressions of creativity. If you use AI for drawing references, whatever. If you use AI to generate globs of repetitive code, whatever. Code can be creative but I do not view it as an expression of creativity and almost any tool is fair game. If you are using ML models for motion capture or some other data processing thing where humans had to do repetitive work before, whatever. Maybe these tools sometimes do devalue the work, but the LLMs are not doing the interesting part here, they're doing the boring part. (This is, in part, an admission that actually writing code is often pretty boring in and of itself, something that I realize programmers have been inconsistent with in an attempt to justify their value. But, I still believe it to be true.)

So okay fine. People are reluctant to disclose that they used AI to generate text because they fear the backlash that it will get them. This is understandable. What upsets me about this is that well-meaning people are apparently falling back to the idea that because LLM backlash is strong, what would be better than either trying to just simply write your own damn posts or be honest about your usage of LLMs... Is to just try to wink wink nudge nudge pass off more or less verbatim LLM writing as if it's a post that you wrote.

I am not ruining the Internet. There is literally nothing I or any group of angry mobs could do that would even remotely slow down the decay of the Internet even if we desperately wanted to.

So in fact, I'm not even trying to not ruin the Internet. I don't particularly care if my attitude is not helping or hurting. I'm not having an attitude as part of some grand strategy to save or destroy the internet. I'm having an attitude, because I am pissed off.

And I am pissed off because I am tired of reading posts the author probably only skimmed themselves.