"I just used it to clean up my writing" seems to be the usual excuse when someone has generated the entire thing and copy pasted it in. No one believes it and it's blatantly obvious every time someone does this.
Not sure what you're talking about. Quite often I've written out a block of information and have found chunks of repeats or what would be hard to interpret by other stuck here or there. I'll stick it in an llm and have it suggest changes.
Simply put you seem to live in a different world where everyone around you has elegant diction. I have people I work with that if I could I would demand they take what they write and ask "would this make sense to any other human on this planet".
There are no shortages of people being lazy with LLMs, but at the same time it is a tool with valid and useful purpose.
Sometimes I ramble for a long time and ask an LLM to clean it up. It almost always slopifies it to shreds. Can't extract the core ideas, matches everything to the closest popular (i.e. boring to read) concept, etc.
This has been discussed previously as "workslop", where you produce something that looks at surface level like high quality work, but just shifts the burden to the receiver of the workslop to review and fix.
GenAI largely seems like a DDoS on free resources. The effort to review this stuff is now massively more than the effort to "create" it, so really what is the point of even submitting it, the reviewer could have generated it themself. Seeing it in software development where coworkers are submitting massive PRs they generated but hardly read or tested. Shifting the real work to the PR review.
I'm not sure what the final state would be here but it seems we are going to find it increasingly difficult to find any real factual information on the internet going forward. Particularly as AI starts ingesting it's own generated fake content.
The P≠NP conjecture in CS says checking a solution is easier than finding one. Verifying a Sudoku is fast; solving it
from scratch is hard. But Brandolini's Law says the opposite: refuting bullshit costs way more than producing it.
Not actually contradictory. Verification is cheap when there's a spec to check against. 'Valid Sudoku?' is mechanical.
But 'good paper?' has no spec. That's judgment, not verification.
producing BS can be equated to generating statements without caring for their truth value. Generating them is easy. Refuting them requires one to find a proof or a contradiction which is a lot of work, and is equal to "solving" the statement. As an analogy, refuting BS is like solving satisfiability, whereas generating BS is like generating propositions.
It's not contradictory because solving and producing bullshit are very different things.
Generating less than 81 random numbers between 1 and 9 is probably also cheaper than verifying correctness of a sudoku.
> The effort to review this stuff is now massively more than the effort to "create" it
I don't doubt the AI companies will soon announce products that will claim to solve this very problem, generating turnkey submission reviews. Double-dipping is very profitable.
It appears LLM-parasitism isn't close to being done, and keeps finding new commons to spoil.
> Seeing it in software development where coworkers are submitting massive PRs they generated but hardly read or tested. Shifting the real work to the PR review.
I've seen this complaint a lot of places, but the solution to me seems obvious. Massive PRs should be rejected. This was true before AI was a thing.
In some ways it might be a good thing that shorthand signals of quality are being destroyed because it forces all of us to meaningfully engage with the work. No more LGTM +1 when every PR looks good.
The great disappointment is that the humans submitting these just don’t care it’s slop and they’re wasting another human’s time. To them, it’s a slot machine you just keep cranking the arm of until coins come out. “Prompt until payout.”
Sometimes when I notice friends drop off from attending things or talking in group chats, if it's because they have fallen in some pit of social media / internet addiction. I agree it's probably more common than we think because the people who have fallen in to this state are the least visible.
Cheeseburgers are not everywhere. I'm sitting at my desk, social media is here but cheeseburgers are not. Social media is always with me other than in the shower. Cheeseburgers are not.
I can get a cheeseburger delivered, or there's a dozen places within a 15 minute walk to get one. I can hardly leave the house without seeing an ad for one or some other fast food item on the side of a bus. I can't avoid being hungry, but I can leave my phone at home.
Sure it's a matter of degrees but I don't see a bright line between McDonald's and tiktok. Both want me hooked on their product. Both have harmful aspects. Both have customers they know are over-indulging. Why would only tiktok be liable for that?
If I had to walk for 15 minutes or pay a hefty delivery fee to access social media, my usage would be massively lower. If there was a cheeseburger in my hand all day every day I would be a lot fatter.
If people never felt full from food, food was always instantly available in your pocket, and food costed no money to obtain, I believe McDonalds and TikTok would be very equivalent. Likely McDonalds would even be far worse since people would probably be dying to it daily.
That's the bright line. The lack of any barrier to entry.
I asked a doctor friend why it seems common for healthcare workers to keep the results sheets to themself and just give you a good/bad summary. He told me that the average person can't properly understand the data and will freak themselves out over nothing.
My coworker is so far on this spectrum it's a problem. He writes sentences with half the words missing making it actually difficult to understand what he is trying to suggest.
All of the non critical words in english aren't useless bloat, they remove ambiguity and act as a kind of error correction if something is wrong.
And the most amazing part is that we got a mini PR review in the comments to a single line of code someone posted just to show an example of useless debates :D
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