[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.

[dingaling]

> A lot of human writing was always trash.

Yes, several history authors come to mind who over several decades never broke out of the style of "this happened, then they moved to here, then this happened.". Their entire book could just be summarised in a table instead of prose.

LLMs seem to be stuck at the same stage, telling us 'what' but not 'why' and 'so what.'