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Comments (150)

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  czhu12
  I’ve encountered an even more nightmarish version of this recently: ai generated tickets. Basically dumping the output of “write a detailed product spec for a clinical trial data collection pipeline” into a jira ticket and handing it off.Doesn’t match any of our internal product design, adds tons of extraneous features. When I brought this up with said PM they basically responded that these inaccuracies should just be brought up in the sprint review and “partnering” with the engineering team. AI etiquette is something we’ll all have to learn in the coming years.
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  sbinnee
  As a senior engineer, I am getting extremely tired of reviewing AI slops. Today at work I have decided that I just have to build a POC project from scratch. I spent 2 weeks to review the code, to log the process, and to build toy examples to make my argument clear that some (actually most) parts were not working.The funny thing is that I know my manager got this “working” within a week with Claude. I had to spend 2 weeks with 4 JIRA tasks, many commits for toy examples, and three reports.
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  galaxyLogic
  Shouldn't the etiquette be that if you send someone a response from AI, you start your message by telling the prompt that produced that reponse?That, would give the responder the chance to modify the prompt and get a perhaps better answer from the LLM?
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  madrox
  I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI. We need better tools as content consumers to filter content. Ironically, AI is what may actually make this possible.I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.I suspect the endgame of this is probably the fulfillment of Dead Internet Theory, where it's just AI creating content and AI browsing the internet for content, and users will never engage with it directly. That person who spent 10 seconds getting AI to write something will be consumed by AI as well, only to be surfaced to you when you ask the AI to summon and summarize.And if that fills people with horror at the inefficiency of it all, well, like I said, it isn't like the internet was a bastion of efficiency before. We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos.
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  artyom
  I find "sloppypasta" extremely useful. Since I've been in charge of people and teams for years, it's a clear signal of who I should get rid of.
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  merrvk
  I had a guy doing this to reply to PR review comments, copying in the comment to the LLM and pasting the response back.
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  rrr_oh_man
  It's ironic, because the site has all the hallmarks of an LLM generated website.
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  anonzzzies
  Talking with middle managers in fortune 100 companies, I often get 'send us the documents so we can make a decision'. It used to be that we carefully wrote things and no one would read them. Now we send 3000 pages of AI crap to make sure no one reads it and then we get approved to start working. Not great but the old situation was worse; no one would read anything and ask you to read it for them on a conference call with 36 people; now that does not happen anymore.
• ForgotMyUUID
  Do you also hear this regularly these days "But chat said ..." ?
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  uniq7
  This article's proposal for stopping sloppypasta is to convince the people who does it to stop doing it, but I am more interested on what someone who receives sloppypasta can do.How do I tell my colleagues to stop contributing unverified AI output without creating tension between us?I've never did that so far because I feel like I am either exposing their serious lack of professionalism or, if I wrongly assumed it was AI, I am plainly telling them that their work looks like bad AI slop.
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  ashwinsundar
  Related - On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. Also related - Gish-gallop During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.[3]
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  incognito124
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617172
• Rapzid
  This is one of my biggest pet peeves to the point where I'm often pondering how I can leave the industry now..People who previously couldn't put in the effort or quality, are now vomiting tons of slop I'm meant to read and review.PRs descriptions. Documentation. Plans. Etc.Walls of sprawling text, "relevant files", linked references, unhelpful factoids, subtle inconsistencies and incoherencies.It's oppressive like 95% humidity on a warm day.
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  namnnumbr
  Tired of people at work pasting raw ChatGPT output into chats, I coined the term "sloppypasta" and have written this rant to explain why it's rude and some guidelines for what to do insteadsloppypasta: Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves.
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  unsaved159
  Literally never in my life did I receive anything like that website suggests via email or DMs. Curate your social circle is the answer.
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  stabbles
  I wouldn't call "ChatGPT says" an equivalent of LMGTFY. The former is people in awe with the oracle, the latter is people tired of having to look something up for others.
• chewbacha
  When you must remind someone to “think” when using a technology because the least resistant path is to not think… it feels like the technology isn’t really helping.They are stealing our work, turning it into a model, and then renting our decisions to less intelligent people.They (tech companies) don’t want us to be smart any more. They are commodifying intelligence.
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  beloch
  Dealing with people who copy-paste unread slop into emails is probably not a huge issue for most of us. There's much more slop out there masquerading as blog posts, HN comments, etc.. It's not a huge issue yet, but there have definitely been times when I found myself midway through reading something and realizing it's just a LLM wasting my time.I'm starting to be reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age". He described a future in which people walked around with a nearly invisible defensive army of nanobots surrounding them whose job it was to counter the offensive nanobot swarms of their enemies. Characters in this novel would go about their business while an unseen nanobot war took place in the air around them.We're rapidly reaching the point where we will need AI to defend us from AI. i.e. We will soon need agents filtering all that we read and removing slop, just so we can preserve our time and attention for things that are human and real.
• harrall
  I find this problem self resolves when someone else sends them raw AI output.
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  parrellel
  Ah, AI slop trying to convince you to properly edit your AI slop, how depressing.
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  simianwords
  I've been thinking about this, what if AI runs autonomously and finds things to criticise that are factually incorrect?It is easy to do in social media because the context is global but in enterprises it is a bit harder.Something like "flagged as very likely untrue by AI" is something I would really appreciate.I see many posts and comments throughout the internet that can easily be dispelled by a single LLM prompt. But this should only be used when the confidence is really high.
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  OptionOfT
  It's very weird how many people take the output of ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude as gospel, and don't question it at all.It's also very impolite to dump 5 pages of text on someone, because now you're asking _them_ to validate it.When I ask a question in Slack I want people's input. Part of my work is also consulting the GPTs and see if the information makes sense.And it shows up the most with people who answer questions in domains they're not a 100% familiar with.
• anon
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• kshri24
  So tired of AI slop! Please use the tech creatively. This is not it!
• coldtea
  Brave of the author to imply the other person will spend time reading the slop they get sent.Instead, they'll use an LLM to send a slop response back.Instant karma!
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  0xbadcafebee
  If I was a bot I would probably write some perfectly punctuated garbage about how your site is a crucial testament to the ever evolving digital landscape or use big words to delve into the multifaceted tapestry of internet ethics. But honestly your website about stopping sloppy pasta is just so dumb and a complete waste of time. Your acting like somebody writing a fake story with ai is the end of the world or something. Literaly nobody cares if some random article was written by a computer so maybe stop pretending your the heroic saviors of the web. Get a real hobby and stop whining about people using chat bots because its really not that deep bro.- now the fun part: which AI did I use to write the above?
• api
  The solution is to have your bot read the sloppypasta for you!
• jaimex2
  I have a prompt thats basically the CIA sabotage handbook for replying to any co-worker that dares send me LLM generated crap.It includes 4 follow up actions and I automate check in messages to see how they are progressing with them.
• anon
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• lxe
  > ChatGPT, read this article and turn it into a AGENTS.md
• TZubiri
  >"I asked Claude about this! Here's what it said:" >"ChatGPT says:" My policy suggestion is that we need to completely people quoting ChatGPT. That's legit, that's not a bannable offense, not against any policy.The author wastes time talking about this case, and even does it first before talking about the much worse case:>"The sender shares AI output as their own work, with no indication a chatbot wrote it."This is 100 times worse, and is objective rather than subjective. If the author admits it's AI when confronted it kills their reputation, (if they don't admit it and turns out it is AI, it's fraud, fireable offense)Putting these 2 categories of AI use wastes breath and conflates the two, the message will not be clear at all.What's worse, such a policy actually has the effect of increasing undisclosed AI use. This is a specific case of the general case: banning all AI usage increases unregulated AI usage. Everyone who prohibited employees from using AI in 2024 knows that what you get is undisclosed AI use or content you are not sure is AI written or not. If you give a specific way to use AI, you can add features like auditability, supply chain control, and you can remove any outs from employees and users that do not comply with the policy.
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  GaryBluto
  > "ChatGPT says" is the enshittified LLM-era equivalent of LMGTFY [...] Recipients are left to figure out whether it's AI generatedHow?
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  singpolyma3
  This is what slop used to mean. Then people started using it for everything and LLM assisted with. Language evolving faster than the tools...
• tonymet
  "just google it" or copying from google is just as bad. It's passive aggressive and aims to shut down dialog.I wish there was a remedy. I block or mute the person when I can.
• boerseth
  This reminds me of why I despise certain works/styles of art and artists. I feel cheated if I'm made to spend more time and effort interpreting a work of art than the creator put into it themselves.
• asteinh
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• godelski
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  paseante
  [flagged]
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  djoldman
  What's interesting is that there are probably people who could spend a year happily working with an AI "coworker" without knowing it was an AI, but then get upset and change their viewpoint after learning the truth.