[fyredge]

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum.

Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words. The final product might not adequately reflect their thoughts, but word selection would expose it somewhat. With LLMs, sentences flow seamlessly from word to word, but the intention is nowhere to be found. Things happened and more things happened, to what end?

[piazz]

The term that I saw once, and now constantly land back on, is “meaning shaped”

At a quick glance, it looks like a thing that should contain meaning and substance. At any closer inspection, it falls apart completely.

[wmwragg]

This and the fact that you often read a sentence, paragraph or the whole article, and think this said absolutely nothing in lots of words.

[dspillett]

That is also true of a lot of pre-2023, so most likely human penned, writing.

LLMs seem to emulate bad (or even "meh") writing well but, without a human editor making significant tweaks, have yet to excel at good writing.

I've been incorrectly identified as an LLM before now because my writing is sometimes bad and falls into the tropes now associated with generative AI (“not this, but that”, being overly wordy, appearing to lack focus, etc).

[pjio]

For a limited amount of time I appreciated the level of detail in the article, hoping it would give me more insight, until it exhausted me. I think those two ideas are real takeaways: "Knowing is not doing" and "What can we trust AI to do?". Still, could have been said with a more concise text and maybe a follow up about the details.

[artpar]

The key takeaway pretty much applies to the authoring of the article itself. The LLM knew what all happened but couldn't put it into a readable article.

[sph]

> There is no insight to be gleamed.

AI-generated articles are the intellectual equivalent of empty calories.

I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out why someone decided to buy imgui.org, name-squatting an actual project, just to put a slop website on it mildly referencing the original project. It's not even trying to scam you.

I keep wondering whether these people that keep polluting the internet with their insightless slop even possess self-awareness. What motivates them to expend money and effort to contribute nothing to the world? Are they another example of a philosophical zombie?

[goatherders]

The answer is in your question. "Empty calories" is a multi trillion dollar business in the food world. It will be the same in the digital world.

[sph]

McDonalds serves a need: human tend to get hungry.

What need does filling the Internet with AI-generated slop serve? No one is ever going to read those. As I've shown, sometimes they're not even selling anything.

The multi-trillion dollar business is for hyperscalers, but I don't get what slop creators get out of this. What are they spending money for?

[soco]

I cannot tell what about domain squatting, but I've seen a "why" in seemingly innocuous Facebook groups about baking or such, which at the right time slowly transitioned to fake AI pictures and stories, and then to straight-out political propaganda. I'm talking Eastern Europe and russian "special operation" support propaganda. But a slop website won't have enough traffic to be worth such an action, so no idea.

[himata4113]

This problem actually surfaces in movies too, for A to happen B has to happen, but B has no reason to happen so you end up with non sensensical situations. This happens in llms as well since A is explained by B happening, but A doesn't need to be explained since A can't happen.

[ramon156]

It's weird because when you look at models that expose CoT, this does not happen. They switch up every second.

"But then X happened... Wait, didn't Y happen? Then why would X be there? I think the user's initial statement was correct, but then Y happened..."

[doppioandante]

I came to the same conclusion about AI generated code. When I read code written by a human, just by skimming it, I can get a sense of what purpose the code has, why it was written this way and not another way, what style and mindset the programmer behind it has. AI generated code may sometimes be extremely precise and following all the good practices, but I feel no intent behind it.

[teekert]

It's not this, it's that. And then what happened? This. I did that... This happened.

    It's a thing
    I don't know why
    But it's a thing

To be honest, it's not a thing.

Let that sink in.

Maybe we find most meaning in the least average language constructs.

[titanomachy]

It's surprising to me that the big labs haven't fixed this problem. Half the comments here are complaining that this article is egregious unreadable slop, and I agree. Surely with the trillions of investment they could at least figure out how to vary sentence structure a bit and nix obvious tells.

Maybe this is just an inherent problem with LLMs.

[xpct]

The following come to mind:

- either the problem is hard, or labs have no incentive to fix it for their main users

- being able to tell that something is LLM-generated, is good

- could be that structure is an emergent property as models get better

[dinfinity]

> Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words.

I think this is at least in part a combination of rosy retrospection and attentional bias: A lot of human writing was always trash. Absolute dogshit with regard to the quality of writing, but there was no "AI slop" label to attach to it. How would you, pre-LLMs, have placed a comment on the writing style if a post was badly written? From what I've seen it would be a "this is marketing/SEO-speak" or some similar comment, deriding the author for being uninformed or of ill intent.

We've now become so allergic to AI slop that anything that even smells like it triggers almost immediate disgust and attachment of that label to the content (even if it is the same old human written trash).

I guess LLM-assisted posts do change the dynamic a bit: the intent is more often benign with a desire to write something good, but the skill to do so lacking. If we limit the "pre-LLM authors" to people with good intent writing about stuff relevant to a HackerNews audience, you're probably right. Many more bad writers are now creating the same ostensibly fancy articles, decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio we were used.

[scotty79]

For me this reads like a report of things that were tried and observed. It was a very pleasant read for me because I'm interested in the subject. And the lack of underlying agenda, moral lesson, politics or, as you call it, insight, was quite refreshing. I became quite allergic to texts where author clearly tries to make me think a specific thing. To sell me something. I usually find the agenda pretty quickly and I know the rest of text is just a fluff around it so I lose interest. And when the agenda is not easy to find then I just get more annoyed because I feel it's intentionally hidden. Like a solution to a clickbait title.

This text reads great for me because as I read it, I clearly saw there's no agenda so I felt safe to just absorb the information that it contains.

[mrmarket]

well, this is a first. never seen someone say they prefer AI slop even when they know it's slop. fascinating.

[scotty79]

I tend to steer clear of the largest herd in many aspects. Often unintentionally. Also I'm not a native speaker so I might be not as receptive to some of the things that offend others in AI generated content.

Maybe AI is sort of anti-trump, where it's viscerally unbearable for native speakers even if the content is good, opposite to trump speech that somehow seems viscerally appealing to native speakers even though the content is complete garbage.

[shevy-java]

> There is no insight to be gleamed.

This is no surprise. AI slop is called slop for a reason. It is basically just spam-slop. The whole term "Artificial Intelligence" has always been a misnomer from the get go, stealing from biological systems without understanding them, yet alone being able to re-create them via non-biological means. Even synthetic biology, as cool as it is, has huge limitations e. g. leaky promoters (or CRISPR-Cas off-target cleavage, which is a major reason why gene therapy isn't yet there, despite the occasional promo article of how xyz has been totally cured forever).

What I don't understand is that people can find it useful. I understand some of the rationale, but I find AI slop just aims to try to steal my time. I can not tolerate this.

[neonstatic]

That's an interesting observation. For me the main takeaway is still the style.

(bigheading)The takeaway(/bigheading) The style? Terrible.

[threatripper]

Sorry, but this sounds exactly like a greentext you can read on 4claw. Are you a real human?

[roenxi]

I think it might be a training artefact of some sort - the current crops of LLMs have never been in a position where they can explore the world as an independent existence and so they might be struggling to model how to explain an interesting experience? The Go AIs had problems with ladders of all things (one of the most basic beginner shapes) back in the early superhuman phases after Alphago. There seems to be some similar and profound gap in the LLM understanding of how to communicate when storytelling.

The "But France was running two clocks at once" paragraph really set me off because I get the feeling something really interesting might be happening that the AI doesn't want to talk about and there is evidence that it is trying to say something. But the result is some amount of gibberish and some amount of vague allusion to something interesting in the prompt context while glossing over all the information that might matter while working hard to create an evocative feeling that isn't interesting. A tense atmosphere with no exploration of why there is tension.