Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations

https://noslopgrenade.com/

by napolux • 2 months ago

717 407 2 months ago

noslopgrenade.com

automatic6131• 2 months ago

"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."

Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.

renticulous• 2 months ago

The particular question in the blogpost can just be answered by a skill. Once you ask enough questions, the solution becomes obvious at the end.

5 Claude Code skills I use every single day

https://youtu.be/EJyuu6zlQCg?t=80

PunchyHamster2• 2 months ago

ugh

maplethorpe• 2 months ago

Where should they have put the comment?

HeartStrings8• 2 months ago

Nowhere since gpt wrote it. Normal humans dont talk like that. Normal actual humans with veins, arteries and a fully functioning endocrine system talk like ME

degenerate• 2 months ago

Replace "Them" with "Coworker" and the point of linking to the site is instantly understood (a LMGTFY-style shaming with a dash of humor to soften the blow)

With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...

hootz3• 2 months ago

LMGTFY definitely did not soften the blow, maybe it even increased the shaming factor lmao

amelius3• 2 months ago

Should we use Redis or Memcached?

Couldn't they have used an example aimed at a broader audience?

I'm in IT but even I barely know what Redis or Memcached is about (never used either).

0x696C6961• 2 months ago

90% of people here know what those are.

AlecSchueler• 2 months ago

And with a more broadly applicable example we could share the link with friends, family and coworkers who aren't on HN.

Mezzie• 2 months ago

And if we don't (like me), I think it can be assumed that we can find out.

A basic search tells me they're both ways to speed up applications/projects through memory management and storing of the memory/data in RAM. So the person in the article is asking a co-worker their opinion on which tool they should use for optimization/performance in their project, which is why an LLM response is less helpful than his co-worker's actual thoughts: comparisons of technical tools at a high or feature level are pretty easy to find and the decision of which to use often boils down to project specific variables, so what the author is asking of the co-worker relies on the co-worker's knowledge of their specific project.

I could also probably explain this just fine to non-tech people. It wouldn't be the most complete or technically accurate explanation, but it would be fine.

Most people write based on their experience and culture.

gitaarik3• 2 months ago

How do YOU know?

tailscaler2026• 2 months ago

I don't think redis existed back when this industry was called IT

amelius3• 2 months ago

I still think IT is more descriptive than Tech.

And the doctors at the hospital where I work still call us the "IT people".

rsynnott• 2 months ago

I mean, they're not exactly obscure. And if you're curious you can just read the wikipedia pages (or ask a magic robot, I suppose, if you _must_). What universal example that everyone would know were you thinking of?

naich• 2 months ago

Obviously you need to use an AI to summarise the wall of text generated by the AI. Duh.

lc9er• 2 months ago

There’s someone in this thread unironically suggesting this.

lioeters• 2 months ago

Pretty sure there's an implicit dynamic where the more someone uses AI, the more you require AI to understand and work with what it produced. If everyone around you is using AI, you are pressured to use AI to keep up with their level of "productivity". Like a cultural virus it multiplies in the space between people, I guess meme-like but far more virulent. Sure it empowers us, but at what cost.

Fogest• 2 months ago

I was getting a lot of overly verbose annoying emails at my one workplace and I swear they probably had started to use AI to generate a lot of it. Outlook had added AI summarization buttons built right into the email client and I must admit that I did make use of it for these kind of emails.

Sadly the answer to save time in these cases sometimes is to use AI. Sometimes the emails being sent weren't even AI generated. Just emails from managers/directors who don't respect peoples time enough and think we care about their long essays of nothing. You kinda have to check the emails to make sure this isn't the one time something important was being said, so that's where the quick AI summarization comes in.

reducesuffering• 2 months ago

A(P)I serialization and deserialization. With a healthy helping of telephone and signal loss

SwiftyBug• 2 months ago

Nobody writes essays in Slack

I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.

warumdarum2• 2 months ago

Introducing AI made markdown tags for conversations so others can only see what the wanty

21asdffdsa123• 2 months ago

Could add a <vitriol> tag to that - but yes, if that was auto assigned by LLM - i could see that.

Could even add a "Autistism" filter, preventing conversation digressing, filtering out only points that stay on topic and only the <summary>, that way.

paultopia2• 2 months ago

Hah, can we do that for recipes next?

donatj• 2 months ago

Honestly, speaking as a friend, and as someone who's been at this a very long time, maybe stop doing that?

It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.

It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity.

If there's something in the middle of a wall of text that invalidates something much further down, trying to communicate the problem becomes a pain in the butt. It's just not a good method for discovery.

21asdffdsa123• 2 months ago

The next step is to not talk with each other at all.

Just have a LLM that "knows you well" in all your position argue by points and values assigned to the points with the LLM of the opposition.

If value alignment exists, a actual conversation may be engaged.

gpvos2• 2 months ago

Some people, like me, have developed this communication style because it turned out that when they didn't they were very often misunderstood. When properly applied (i.e., not excessively, no actual walls of text), giving appropriate context helps focus the thinking of the receiver in the right direction.

strken• 2 months ago

Speaking as a random internet stranger, it depends entirely on context.

Sending me a message saying "Hi, I'm getting a Frobnizzle not found error" is a waste of both our time. Explain what you're doing so that I can reproduce it, even if it takes a few paragraphs. Maybe send me your user ID so I can check our logs. I don't care if you're declaring "these are the facts" because the facts are what I need to help you.

If it's a massive wall of text with a defensive tone during a discussion, yeah, sure, that's bad. Do you work somewhere where that's common?

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.

Sometimes, a back-and-forth is not needed, and the entire response is necessary for someone to understand to interact with.

This is when I open up a text editor, draft it, and paste that into Slack.

naravara• 2 months ago

How long have you been at it? Because some of us grew up writing letters with pen and paper, sending them to people in the mail, and getting something back a week or two later. You just have to actually sit down and READ closely what people are saying, sometimes multiple times, to make sure you are clearly understanding what they’re saying rather than skimming everything you encounter for information to extract.

It is actually quite easy to communicate a problem in the middle of a wall of text. You simply refer to the phrase and then explain why it doesn’t hold. It is also fine to simply present your perspective to people without invitations to “discuss ideas.” You can open a discussion if you want, but if I’m telling you something then you can rest assured that those are the things I believe to be true, and if I am uncertain about any conclusions I will include caveats to indicate uncertainty. You have free will and are perfectly capable of taking or leaving anything being said to you.

tristor• 2 months ago

It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity.

Not at all.

1. Someone is coming to me with the question. They're doing so because either the question is about my area of ownership and I have that authority or because I'm a subject-matter expert and I have that authority.

2. I don't know what the other person knows around the edges of the domain that the question is in, I don't know if they understand the constraints of the domain nor do I know what constraints their specific problem has.

3. Often the answers to any actually decent question at work are fairly nuanced, and to understand the nuance you need at least a level set of context.

It's a lot more dismissive and rude to answer with excessive brevity if you treat the question in good faith. For simple questions, sure I don't need to write an essay. Some questions I answer with "Got 10 minutes so we can chat about this?" because it just needs a conversation. Or I answer with questions of my own. But if the question is well-formed, answering it starts with providing the necessary context to understand my answer so we're on an even playing field and we can effectively communicate ideas.

dolebirchwood• 2 months ago

It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.

Sometimes just providing the context about an issue is itself enough to warrant a few paragraphs, let alone a few sentences.

Obviously, it's best to express a problem, its options, and its recommended solution(s) in as few words as possible, but it's unwarranted to hold an absolute position that every discussion must be an inefficient exchange of mere sentences at a time.

I'd rather have an outline-style essay given to me in one go for me to digest and research async rather than be subjected to a barrage of back-and-forth pings. That's the real disrespect of other people's time.

NickDouglas• 2 months ago

Exception that proves the rule. You know what context that specific recipient needs from you. GenAI usually doesn't.

bluGill• 2 months ago

Do you start every response off with "that is a great question"? I don't know any human who does. "that is a great question" is reserved either for really hard questions, or sarcasm. The majority of questions are not great, they are just things the asker needs a simple answer.

coder97• 2 months ago

I have only heard this phrase in american tv shows and movies

eyelidlessness• 2 months ago

Well before the LLM explosion I would often preface my answers with some form of praise for the question. It depends a lot on audience of course, but it’s amazing how many people tend to perceive direct answers to their questions as negative… and just as amazing how far a little strategic sycophancy goes to temper that. Even though everyone knows it’s half-sincere dead weight.

DamnInteresting2• 2 months ago

That's a great question! Ahem.

I remember being advised to do this ~20 years ago when I was going to be answering questions from a group of people. I was told that it's good practice to say something like "that's a great question" every time someone asks anything, as a form of social lubrication, to encourage others to ask questions. I can't say whether it works, and it was advice for a spoken context rather than written, but I don't know how to finish this sentence.

kwar13• 2 months ago

work at a crown corp and you'd change your stance on above...

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

I would probably reply with "that is a great question" only as a euphemism for "I don't know"

plorkyeran• 2 months ago

In a spoken Q&A setting opening every single response with "that's a great question" or "thanks for asking that" or whatever is pretty common as a way to fill a few seconds while you think about your response. This is obviously unnecessary on slack.

onraglanroad• 2 months ago

I didn't, but then I watched SICP and the guy kept saying it to utterly dumb questions.

And then, somehow, he kept turning the dumb question into a deep and insightful one.

So I've adopted that technique but if I say "that's a great question" think for a while and come up with nothing, it's probably a moronic question. I'm not perfect.

low_tech_love6• 2 months ago

And worse, you use it so much that when the question is actually great, you can’t convey that convincingly anymore.

e28eta• 2 months ago

I remember listening to this Freakonomics episode [1] on the phrase.

It covers a variety of times people might use it. Sometimes it's genuine, other times it's flattery. Some people use it all the time (and in the episode they talk about calling someone on it). One guest says it's a bridge, to go from the question asked to the question you want to answer instead.

I don't see it in this transcript, but I also thought I remembered hearing/reading that it can be a sign the speaker doesn't know the answer offhand, and needs to consider the question to formulate their answer. I think I'd classify that as a genuine usage: the question is something the speaker hasn't considered before, and thinks is worthy of consideration.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/thats-a-great-question-rebr...

pibaker• 2 months ago

It might be a difference in culture, but I definitely remember people saying you should say stuffs like that to encourage others to ask more questions. The rationale is if you are in a more powerful or senior position, like a college professor vs a student, other may be not feel comfortable asking questions because they fear appearing dumb or inappropriate and it hampers communication.

headcanon• 2 months ago

Came here to say this as well. I've written and read full human-written essays on slack before AI.

With that said, I don't disagree with the article. Don't use more word when few work.

BLKNSLVR• 2 months ago

Sorry for the long response, I didn't have time to write a short one.

But this should not be an excuse applicable to an LLM.

rib3ye• 2 months ago

Please learn to love bullet points for the sake of the reader.

SchemaLoad5• 2 months ago

When a person expands bullet points they add extra information from their own knowledge and research in the process of writing. When AI does it, it adds filler and repetition.

Long form writing itself isn't a problem, it's the empty fake long form we have now.

hephaes7us• 2 months ago

I do too, but it does seem like fighting the tool. I wish more people would use email.

SchemaLoad5• 2 months ago

There's a difference between a long text and an essay. You wouldn't spend hours typing a message and formatting it with headlines for example. You wouldn't insert loads of unessorasy creative writing techniques in to a message asking for help.

FatherOfCurses• 2 months ago

Your co-workers must love staring at the "SwiftyBug is typing..." prompt for 15 minutes

tyleo3• 2 months ago

That’s interesting. When I use AI to help me write chat messages it’s almost always, “make this shorter,” or “clean this up”

microtonal2• 2 months ago

Why do you use an AI to write chat messages?

Either you have to give the AI the points you want to convey, then just put those points in a message. Or you don't have anything to convey, then don't post a message.

I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say.

disgruntledphd22• 2 months ago

I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say.

Lots of people lack confidence around their writing, and many people (particularly in tech) are not english native speakers. I can definitely see both of those groups getting use out of AI assistance in writing.

That being said, I sometimes use AI to see if I've missed anything, but the last thing I'll give up to our future AI overloads is writing text, as I enjoy it.

tyleo3• 2 months ago

I said in my comment: shortening, cleaning things up.

You’re foaming at the mouth a bit about AI here rather than reading what I said. I don’t see how shortened or fixed grammar is slop. The article argues the opposite.

joenot4433• 2 months ago

This is slop too though, right?

Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.
It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.

It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write

Biganon2• 2 months ago

What makes you think this is AI slop?...

joenot4433• 2 months ago

You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.

These are particular sentences I find questionable. Would you write that way? I certainly wouldn't.

GPTZero is by no means perfect, but it agreed this was likely generated.

1shooner• 2 months ago

The heading " Why it's wrong" and the structure:

Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.

This is slop. What it's saying is not even true, it's just punchy.

foobarbecue• 2 months ago

I found the writing clear, concise, and human.

joenot4433• 2 months ago

It's certainly concise but I still remain unconvinced a human wrote it.

It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.

The source code is without a doubt AI (it's got a comment for the ""), so I guess one would have to assume they prepared the entire document beforehand, then fed it to Claude and instructed it to use that copy exactly.

...or they prompted "make me a site which tersely criticizes people who post AI slop on Slack, use the term slop grenade and style the site like nohello.net"

Eventually you just get a sense for these things.

jappgar• 2 months ago

I swear most executives can barely read so you're not doing your career any favors sending them more than 150 characters.

alexpotato• 2 months ago

The CEO of one firm I worked at wrote emails totally in bullet point format.

Made it much easier to read and you could just reply with:

bullet point

response

which made life much easier

jjice2• 2 months ago

I love terse text communications most of the time (Slack and email at least). So much clearer. And easier to respond to.

I think we've all worked with someone who (I imagine subconsciously) feels the need to make things longer without actually adding more information in there, and it just makes everyone's day a little harder.

el_benhameen• 2 months ago

I developed this habit when I worked in software support. It made me substantially more effective. Sometimes people are reading for the joy of the prose. Sometimes they’re reading because they want to get to the answer. In the latter case, writing that is easily visually parsable is quite valuable.

quietsegfault2• 2 months ago

In instances where context is important, I have been including a summary with call to action at the start of the message, then include details below to hopefully eliminate back and forth. It helps me be more clear with my point, and most people once they have an action only use the context for reference later.

mrguyorama• 2 months ago

It's called an executive summary because that's the only thing the executive will read of your carefully put together report.

shevy-java• 2 months ago

When real people use AI slop to spam me down, I instantly know that this person does not want to communicate with me. So I stop all communication with that person.

What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs.

For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people.

I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.

andai2• 2 months ago

What did he say? I'm very curious about his perspective. Presumably he wouldn't knowingly be harming his own project. So he must think it's actually good.

misswaterfairy• 2 months ago

Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it.

If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:

1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;

2. The message gets deleted.

I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.

Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.

[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.

crimsontech• 2 months ago

I usually respond with AI;DR so they don’t expect a response.

time0ut• 2 months ago

The best are the Jira tickets with a huge wall of AI slop requirements. Usually full of nonsense of course including implementation recommendations in the wrong language or framework. Questions for clarification met with blank stares from the author. Ah well, copy/paste into claude code and say “do this. make no mistakes” and get back to browsing HN…

mmasu• 2 months ago

I am so tired of these people, but it’s so sad they don’t understand themselves how ridiculous they are

zaphar• 2 months ago

I have begun using the acronym TL;DP (Too long didn't prompt) For when someone sends a wall of text and I didn't want to waste tokens having an agent summarize it for me when the sender could have done that for me with their own agent.

captainbland2• 2 months ago

Just prompt them back: "that's a lot of detail, could you please summarise as briefly as possible what differences concern our requirements specifically?"

tensegrist• 2 months ago

"Why it's wrong"

hootz3• 2 months ago

Then at the end, "Use AI to make things clearer". NO! STOP USING AI AND JUST TALK!

maipen2• 2 months ago

I have had experiences where customers use AI to communicate and express their issues. Sometimes they produce walls of text like the website exemplifies, but overall it's a better alternative to not be able to explain the issue because you don't know the specific terminology and you are just a layman trying to do things.

Show some love for the layman, we are all laymen in areas we don't know about.

great_wubwub2• 2 months ago

I have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much effort into post-AI copy editing, it's just clear and useful writing. Sure, the occasional non-idiomatic phrase creeps in but those are hard to find.

That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.

hootz3• 2 months ago

Then a better recommendation should be to use specialized AI proofreading tools, such as Kagi Translate's proofread feature. Yeah, it uses AI, but the "harness" around it forces you to use it only to improve your text, not sloppify it.

https://translate.kagi.com/proofread

emsign3• 2 months ago

You do realize that when you have to find a special use case to defend something you are really giving an argument AGAINST casual widespread use of it.

maipen2• 2 months ago

I like how the website matches the message. Short and Simple.

It's a matter of having good taste. But AI education will help.

paultopia2• 2 months ago

Do people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.

jjice2• 2 months ago

I've never seen it, but I have a buddy who had a coworker like this. Would basically treat his slack as a manual copy-paste bridge to an LLM and it's was incredibly unhelpful because most questions were heavily context dependent.

I imagine this is the kind of thing you see at a large company where a good chunk of people are just coasting by doing nothing, Nelson Big Head style.

bni• 2 months ago

Yes all the time. Healthy conversations are shut down immediately with the "AI research" slop-wall.

Meetings are 55 minutes of speculating about what AI will be able to do in a few years. Then if you are lucky the last 5 minutes can be used to discuss a real issue.

LAC-Tech• 2 months ago

We desperately need some cultural norms and taboos to develop around AI usage.

pixel_popping• 2 months ago

Most of my friends are starting to talk like models (myself included), it's actually concerning to an extent, because we spend most of the time interacting with AI instead of humans, we are starting to mimick their behavior and speech.

quietsegfault2• 2 months ago

I love asking someone who sent me a Slack wall of AI text to join a huddle, then ask them deep questions about said wall of text while they struggle because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It seems to encourage folks to be a little more careful about their wall of texts in the future.

anuramat• 2 months ago

now I know what to call it, thanks

satisfice2• 2 months ago

“Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.”

I can reply. I can push back. I can clarify. I am not helpless.

PunchyHamster2• 2 months ago

"Sorry, I asked you, if I wanted to ask AI I'd do it myself, if you don't know just say"

satisfice2• 2 months ago

That's a good one.

krater23• 2 months ago

"TLDR?"

tonetegeatinst• 2 months ago

Darn and I was hoping we would see a new invention someone could form1 with the BATFE.

bdcravens• 2 months ago

The other day I found the worst podcast I think I've ever tried to listen to. AgentStack Daily, which apparently sums up AI stories (mostly focused on OpenClaw and the like), using computerized voices.

I don't even have an issue with it being AI-generated. However, the content is delivered so fast and monotone that it's impossible to listen to, and every episode is 40 minutes or more, every day.

A brief daily summary, perhaps using the creator's real voice (via ElevenLabs or similar; the creator has a real podcast on the same site), would be so much more valuable.

projektfu• 2 months ago

AI-generated podcasts are terrible. I came across one that was supposed to be summarizing FAA training material and it was unearthly and fast-paced, with pointless "humanization" umms and aahs, and in a weird conversation style. It's doubly bad because it's important to get things right, and if you just yolo the AI summary, you don't really know if it's getting everything right.

anonzzzies• 2 months ago

I find that the people who are the worst at their jobs, write the largest blocks of absolutely useless texts. In all disciplines. So yes, I see humans writing 2 A4 docs in slack; they have no clue what the question was about and just insert drivel.

boutell• 2 months ago

Slop is not data is not information is not knowledge is not wisdom.

paleotrope• 2 months ago

The stated problem is so context dependant that this is borderline useless and quite hostile.

emsign3• 2 months ago

I've noticed this happening here as well. The instance I realize it's not another human I lose all interest in argueing or conversing. If this happens too often I leave those sites.

Because nothing feels more like wasting my time than talking to an answering machine that is working against me. It's exhausting and demotivating.

nikeee3• 2 months ago

When I'm encountering some WoT like that, I'd like to have a button like "view source", but for "view prompt".

Most ai generated messages or docs are unnecessarily verbose and just reading the prompt would suffice. I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text.

It just wastes my time. And probably only makes it look like it took more effort than it actually did (it may be the exact opposite).

jtbayly• 2 months ago

Except often the prompt is just the previous comment. In the example, the prompt would be "Should we use Redis or Memcached?"

In that case, there is nothing beneficial about the prompt, but the answer could be boiled down to a useful recommendation (from an AI, not a person).

nikeee3• 2 months ago

In that case I still want to see exactly this prompt. Then I know that the person didn't even think about my question thoug I asked _them_ for their opinion and I could have asked ChatGPT myself (and already probably have).

fusslo2• 2 months ago

"WoT"

hmm.. Wheel of Time? never got into those books personally

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

Wall of Text.

mcphage• 2 months ago

Just, pull your braid and smooth your skirt for a few times, and you'll get into the spirit of them.

fragmede• 2 months ago

Wide open Throttle. Aka puttin the pedal to the metal, or twisting the throttle to the max on a bike, or pressing the lever as far is it will go on a jetski/quad.

digital_voodoo• 2 months ago

I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text

Probably people who have never wanted to put the required thinking effort in a simple, structured response to a question, and now think that "a lot of words" magically solves that skill issue.

nzealand• 2 months ago

We intuitively think large documents show significant thought.

I don't just mean the readers.

The generators of slop often think this is useful.

Things have changed.

Our intuition has not.

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time...

fmbb• 2 months ago

I just want a ”report to HR” button. Someone is actively inhibiting their coworkers’ ability to work.

tintor• 2 months ago

HR isn’t there to protect or help or serve employees.

harvey9• 2 months ago

HR will send you an ai-written reply

grey-area3• 2 months ago

...probably only makes it look like it took more effort than it actually did

I think you've hit on why people would do this in a work environment. It's a low-effort way of looking like they're engaged at work and know what they're talking about.

nikeee3• 2 months ago

I suspect that, too. But to me, it signals the exact opposite.

Balgair• 2 months ago

I mean, you can just point your LLM at the wall of text and ask it to dream up with the prompt that made that. Or ask it to summarize into a TLDR.

noobermin• 2 months ago

I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text.

Because they want to mislead you.

Aurornis• 2 months ago

I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text.

Simple: It looks like you did more work.

Before everyone had ChatGPT, a long document meant that someone sat at their computer and invested more effort than someone rattling off a list of partially formed bullet points. In the process of writing the doc they usually refined the idea.

Now anyone can dump the bullet points into ChatGPT and get and expand them into a document which gives the illusion of being well thought out. They can now occupy the same space as everyone who was doing a lot of work in the past, but without having to do the work.

recursive• 2 months ago

That's only going to work until people start absorb the fact that you can now generate unlimited amounts of grammatical text for free. Shouldn't be long now.

Terr_3• 2 months ago

Next, the recipient of the wall-of-text throws it into another LLM to "summarize" it to bullet-points, adding another hop of the game of telephone as it mutates what was already a fake artifact of thinking that was never done. *sigh*

SchemaLoad5• 2 months ago

But now I can use AI to summarise the wall of text back in to the original bullet points.

gofreddygo• 2 months ago

I very much dislike this behavior, personally dont do this and want it stopped.

people that I like to be nice to have done this to me. I dont have a good response that wont trigger them.

They chose to do this cz its easy. I now have to choose : read that garbage and make sense and ask questions or reject it asking for your opinions not claude's.

Former leads to more walls of text. Latter makes me come across as not-nice and get broad stroke painted as an AI hater (which I'm not). Not many where I work will voice any of their discontent about anything AI. Its the hotness.

The irony of that article having an AI smell is not lost on me

karmakaze• 2 months ago

I wish the copy button for a response included the prompt (unless it's code). So many times I'm reading a response that starts running assuming the context of the prompt and I'm left wondering what it's about for the first half.

yummypaint• 2 months ago

There is something about the asymmetry of effort that is particularly galling. If a person couldn't be bothered to write something, then I can't be bothered to read it.

If someone contributes a software component, they are responsible for it whether they developed it properly or slop coded. The difference is that I will refuse to look at the slop, much less debug it or help with troubleshooting.

People who blindly copy paste from agents are completely replaceable, and should be at the top of the list when layoff season hits. They drag the whole org down.

utopiah• 2 months ago

Yep indeed, if I discuss with you I want YOUR opinion.

If I wanted a generic opinion... I wouldn't bother you.

bandrami• 2 months ago

This is what I keep coming back to: I also have access to an LLM. Just send me the prompt you used

fontain• 2 months ago

I like the naming. I tackled this same pitch with https://writelesswithai.com but a "slop grenade" is better, more memorable, a nice brand. Good work.

ps. register slopgrenade.com too

Aeolun2• 2 months ago

I think what is interesting is that we keep needing these pages to teach people how not being an asshole works. I don't really understand why it is so hard to understand not to do (what I consider to be) impolite stupid shit.

mdmower• 2 months ago

Did you read your own post?

Sharlin2• 2 months ago

And the effect is always near zero because the people who need to read and learn from those pages the most are those who are the least likely to do so.

booleandilemma2• 2 months ago

Lots of stupid folks out there. All the technology in the world can't make them smart. Even if you strapped meta glasses onto them and they read the AI's output verbatim, the morons would probably stumble over the words. We'd get a society of stutterers.

dominicrose• 2 months ago

Outside of social media, I never saw a slop grenade except in places where it already existed without AI, like SAV responses or other scripted marketing/HR stuff.

Even a real person calling me on my phone to talk 5min about its company without allowing me to interrupt feels like a kind of grenade. Obviously I could interrupt the impolite way but that's beside the point.

BeetleB2• 2 months ago

I don't really understand why it is so hard to understand not to do (what I consider to be) impolite stupid shit.

Tip 1: Starting off by denigrating folks who do this is not a way to make people change. More often than not, it amplifies the behavior you don't like.

Tip 2: It helps to indicate you understand the perspective of why people do it before asking others to change. Reading your comment, I really doubt you understand their perspective.

People listen to those willing to understand them.

Aeolun2• 2 months ago

I really doubt you understand their perspective

I do not. That is rather the point of the original message xD

My problem is having to explain this stuff to adults in the first place. Somewhere in your first 12 years of live you should have learned not to do things like this (e.g. most people figure it out in elementary school)

halapro2• 2 months ago

The response should be "you're not a good fit for the company. Collect your stuff."

ho_schi• 2 months ago

My boss.

Generates entire websites with AI Slop. Instead of sending a single text mail with three links and the words please make that certificate.

No. He wastes the time of all personnel. Wastes energy. And hides the important message in a wall of text (I was the only person which recognized, that he requires the certificate…it was hidden in a side box).

Right now we re-implementing every frogging tool which was ever developed by more experienced people.

    Excuse the long letter, I hadn’t the time to write a short one.

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

I had a boss who was the opposite. He was so terse in his emails that if you just read one without context you'd have no idea what he was asking for.

master-lincoln3• 2 months ago

Communication is hard, but considering that it is an important skill for all managers one wonders how these people got into their position...

andai2• 2 months ago

Maybe these people don't understand the impact of walls of text because they're not reading in the first place?

hsuduebc2• 2 months ago

The sheer audacity of using generated slop like this is something that always amazes me in a bad way. You can always tell.

Every time someone uses answer like this it shows that he doesn't even want to discuss something with you and possibly knows nothing about the question asked. So the answer it self could potentionally be bogus or straightforward lie. It's just rude. It's even more rude that when someone tells you to google answer instead.

stek29• 2 months ago

reminds me of https://stopsloppypasta.ai/

hmokiguess2• 2 months ago

I prefer the brevity and branding of slopgrenade, to be honest sloppypasta itself has a slop energy to me. Maybe it's the UX and the density of the website though, it does have a similar messaging.

Rp8yXmdmr• 2 months ago

Reminds me about similar "manifestos" about netiquette, properly asking questions, searching web and answering emails. And I expect exactly the same impact - none.

sermah• 2 months ago

I actually saw nohello in some bios. About 2-3 times.

mr-wendel• 2 months ago

This is very reminiscence of the whole LMGTFY (let me google that for you) phase of things. At a job in a while back, when front-level support reached out to senior staff for help the two golden rules were:

  1. Do NOT answer right away. If they wait, there is a good chance the next message is "Oh wait, I figured it out" (e.g. they googled it finally)

  2. Send them a google link w/ the search term showing the first result.

Granted, this was a bit tongue-in-cheek and we did a LOT of trainings to help facilitate actual learning. Still, it was far too easy for senior staff time to get burned up by folks making minimal effort to think for themselves so friction remained.

While the site makes a good point, they miss the most important point, IMO, which is inferable by the example of a good response. The good response is better principally because it contains business-contextual information, which AI can never provide without proper prompting (and if you know to provide that, you prob don't need the AI answer):

  "We need pub/sub for the notifications feature."

I'm not anti-AI, but good answers include historical business context to explain decision making. Sometimes if you're lucky, code comments contain this in relevant sections :).

cbold• 2 months ago

Just post the prompt bro

HeartStrings8• 2 months ago

Just pack the fries

fudged71• 2 months ago

This is a variant of "Computational Kindness"

thih9• 2 months ago

But you can ask AI to summarize it. /s

kadhirvelm• 2 months ago

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot! Wrote a post on it a little while ago: https://productnow.ai/blogs/write-for-human-download-time

But I really agree with use AI to make your communication sharper. I think a lot of us, especially in corporate settings could use the help

booleandilemma2• 2 months ago

No no, let's just stop thinking entirely and paste conversations from LLMs back and forth to each other. Then we'll use an LLM to summarize the conversation to tell us what was said. Then we'll use an LLM to do what was said. Then we can ask an LLM if what was done works.

Kim_Bruning3• 2 months ago

You're ha ha only serious describing some of the agent swarm concepts that are currently being built.

CommieBobDole• 2 months ago

I think this touches on the core difference between good and bad use of AI; using AI as part of the process vs cutting and pasting LLM output.

Use AI as part of the research process, to help understand a concept or problem. Use it to format data, or as a part of the design or brainstorming process. Use it to build manageable portions of code that you can read and understand before committing. But if the output doesn't go through your brain somehow before you unleash it on the world, that's really no different from a seventh-grader Googling the subject of his homework and then cutting and pasting the entire text of the first result, headers and all, and turning it in.

charcircuit• 2 months ago

If they wanted an AI essay, they would have asked ChatGPT themselves.

This is not true in the least bit. The page even included an example of calling someone to ask when a meeting was instead of asking an AI assistant to check their calendar. There is a reason why so much of company support can be done using AI or via people following a flowchart. People do not know how to solve problems by themselves.

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

I usually find out when meetings are when I get a text from someone asking "are you coming to the meeting?"

ramesh31• 2 months ago

The only way to defeat a grenade is to toss it right back where it came from. Slop replies get 2x the slop in response. Most effective way I've seen to get people to stop doing it.

nlawalker2• 2 months ago

I've decided that I'm done being pissy about this kind of response, or thinking that it's something that can be coached away. I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference - something that you learn about, try to give some grace to, and work a little harder to bridge (unless you're defusing a bomb, performing surgery, flying an airplane etc.).

In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."

For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.

Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.

csbrooks• 2 months ago

To me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

I'd prefer just "I don't know." I can ask Claude on my own.

ungreased0675• 2 months ago

Even that is bad. It’s similar to “I don’t know, but these are the top three links when I searched Google.” It’s a useless response, verbal chaff.

And friendlies don’t use countermeasures.

mikeweiss• 2 months ago

Or just "I don't know, but researching quickly right now maybe 'xyz'"? Agreed that you need to at least read the response and summarize... Not just copy and paste

ahtihn2• 2 months ago

Copy/pasting a question to LLM and pasting back the output isn't an attempt ar being helpful. It's the equivalent of a lmgtfy link.

sweetheart• 2 months ago

But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).

zephen3• 2 months ago

Not at all.

A lmgtfy link can be useful, even if rude.

It's teaching someone to fish.

Sharing an LLM output is simultaneously pretentious and unhelpful. To the OP's point, some might not consider it rude, but I'd rather someone be rude and helpful, rather than pretentious and unhelpful.

tl;dr -- No, it's much, much worse than an lmgtfy link

andrewflnr• 2 months ago

In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."

It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best.

If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.

ruszki• 2 months ago

With lmgtfy, the point was to show that you can do that with Google, how you can do it, and you shouldn’t ask (not in the nicest way for sure). With replying with an LLM answer, you pretend that I cannot do the same. The equivalent would be a link to an LLM chat. There is a clear intent difference. The LLM answer version doesn’t want to teach the how.

robocat• 2 months ago

lmgtfy

https://google.com/search?q=LMGTFY

Foivos• 2 months ago

why should you be the one who has to work a little harder though?

BeetleB2• 2 months ago

In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."

You know all those support sites for various products (Microsoft, etc) where people ask questions, and lots of folks eagerly give answers that really aren't helpful?

Throwing AI grenades generally falls into the same category.

I don't mind an AI generated answer as long as it's on point, concise, and answers my problem. If I have to read a wall of text in search of the answer, it's useless.

There's a reason I've blocked those types of "answer" sites from my Kagi search results. Kagi is awesome that way.

vitally36432• 2 months ago

AI text dumps fall somewhere between "delete system32" and "run sfc /scannow".

conartist6• 2 months ago

I'm the opposite. Trust can only be given so long as it isn't used to facilitate rampant abuse. Open abuse is rampant now. I'll slam the door in your face if you try to slop on me because that's the only way anyone is ever going to learn at the scale a lesson needs to be learned.

And of course I notice the people posting the massive slop screed don't seem to have thought critically about it at all. After all, if they had time to read it thinking critically, they probably would have had time to write it.

toasty228• 2 months ago

Saying "I don't know" is 100x less shameful than asking a clanker for an answer and pretending it's yours. If they don't realise this they won't last long

efskap2• 2 months ago

Specifically a clanker that itself would rather hallucinate something than say "I don't know".

noisem4ker• 2 months ago

they won't last long

I wish that was the case for people with insincere communication practices. On the contrary, they seem to embody the sociopath stereotype that ultimately climbs ladders.

whattheheckheck3• 2 months ago

Using clanker kinda shows how racist you are. If you get defensive its true

SpicyLemonZest• 2 months ago

I try not to be pissy about it, but the problem is this from the source article:

Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.

Conversational norms simply do not allow me to give grace or bridge the gap. It would be so, so rude for me to infer that they meant to say "I don't know" if it turns out that it really was a detailed answer they expected me to read in full. I respect that the people who do this probably mean well, but there's some conversations I just can't have with people who respond this way, in the same way that there's some conversations I can't have with people who aren't comfortable exploring contested hypotheticals.

low_tech_love6• 2 months ago

I think you’re wrong in one thing: Reading through meaningless walls of text takes time and effort that I’m not willing to waste. So it’s not just accepting a different culture; it’s not “free”. Reading AI grenades is really stressful (at least for me).

ethbr12• 2 months ago

This. The central issue is the bait and switch.

The bait: here is a ton of text

The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it

The new normal: there is ZERO signal about the magnitude of human thought and effort that went into something on the basis of its length

... and what really pisses people off about that: when AIstas intentionally abuse that social contract to their benefit.

E.g. people who pass AI content off as their own, people who don't read their own genai before pasting to you, everyone on LinkedIn

idle_zealot• 2 months ago

I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference

There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.

In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers what you have isn't just a culture you exist outside of, you have a common faux pas. One of many, many rude and inconsiderate acts that are nonetheless common, like sticking gum under a table or catcalling. Something about the environment prompts antisocial behavior, and shame is one way to shift the environment and reduce the behavior. There are almost certainly more effective ways to change the environment and curb the behavior, but establishing a consensus on whether the behavior is acceptable or not for those in the know is an important step.

In case it was unclear I'm on the "it's not acceptable" side. Do share if you've observed someone appreciative of being grenaded in the wild, though.

handoflixue2• 2 months ago

Anecdotally, LLMs are apparently good enough at writing to routinely make the front page of Hacker News. Twitter has a plague of bot comments. From all these up-votes, we can infer there is an audience and this is good faith.

Partly, I admit, I just tend to be wary of shame as a tool. "Someone said something I dislike" has a long history of being abused. Conversely, even something like your gum example, one can point at concrete harms like littering and forcing others to clean up after you.

JimDabell• 2 months ago

can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.

Head over to Reddit and look for the obvious AI-generated engagement bait. There are usually a bunch of people earnestly responding without even realising they aren’t talking to a real person. Sure, some of those are also bots, but a huge number of them are real people too.

Average people aren’t good at noticing this stuff. They might not deliberately seek it out, but when they are exposed to it they like it enough to voluntarily spend their time on it.

In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers

I think it’s quite likely that the people who appreciate receiving slop outnumber the people who don’t.

saurik• 2 months ago

There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.

The people I know -- including myself -- who do this with each other actually don't mind it when people do this and even go so far as to read through the so-called slop... so, either I know a bunch of people who in fact are listeners, or the definition of the complaint needs to be refined?

FWIW, it isn't really that different from "here's a random Google result I found on the topic" or "here's a random comment I found on Hacker News"... if you don't paste it to the other person you can't have a shared discourse around it, as if we both ask the LLM we will get different answers.

And like, that is definitely something that is rude in many contexts: if I did not respond to your comment but just replied with a link to some other comment I clearly didn't read or bother to understand, that should make you angry. But, if I link you off to something I agree with, that's saving time.

andrei_says_• 2 months ago

“ I don't know, but here's my attempt to help.”

“I don’t know” would be so much more productive and respectful than “here, this may be useful or completely useless, figure it out on your own time. Took me 30 seconds to produce…”

A bit asymmetrical by time, signal to noise, and frankly, bs metrics.

raincole2• 2 months ago

In this person's communication culture

And it's a bad culture. Yes, there are good and bad cultures. Cultural relativism has its limitations.

mlinhares• 2 months ago

I usually go the other way, sometimes ignoring the wall of text completely or just exiting the conversation. I find it incredibly distasteful when people do this (i also have access to all the same tools), specially because its a lazy response where they copy the conversation, paste it at the tool and just vomit the response back.

Its also usually the dickhead nobody likes that does it as well.

andrewljohnson2• 2 months ago

This sounds like a broken culture to me. Teams shouldn't tolerate it... it is both harmful and contagious.

ineedasername2• 2 months ago

In this person's communication culture, they are saying

Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”.

With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms.

Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

boomlinde3• 2 months ago

A language game assumes mutually understood "rules" in the form of shared context that makes language that would otherwise be unclear meaningful. If the intended meaning is not conveyed, we're failing at playing a language game.

In this case, the notion that the slop grenade is intended to communicate "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help" is as far as we know entirely a fiction, possibly a favorable interpretation GP uses not to let themselves be annoyed. In reality, the intent could be any number of things or nothing in particular.

It seems more likely to me that these slop grenades are attempts at appearing to a third party to have weighed in on important decisions. It's a deliberate technique to become more visible in order to win favor with someone who can't tell reasoned responses from useless bullshit.

This self-aggrandizing trash was a normal part of professional culture before the current LLM sewage torrent, but tactlessly used LLMs are so awful at writing that it's never been so transparent before.

boomlinde3• 2 months ago

If I am explicitly asking for someone's opinion and they respond with a slop grenade that has nothing to do with their opinion, I'm indifferent to the moral question whether they're acting in good faith. The practical effects are the same: my time is wasted, I'm annoyed, I lose respect for them, I am less likely to consider their opinion in the future.

throwawaythekey• 2 months ago

In my workplace AI has more credibility than humans, so dropping a block of claude with attribution can be:

- A way to convince others of your position.

- A way to demonstrate that you did research (because experience is worthless)

- A way to soften harsh feedback.

At first I found this very dysfunctional but now I don't mind too much. It beats being ignored and/or offending someone.

saltyoldman• 2 months ago

Slop grenades are the new "let me google that for you"

m0llusk• 2 months ago

Yikes, first LLMs took my emdash away and now they are coming for my verbose qualifications.

hmokiguess2• 2 months ago

Another great one is https://dontasktoask.com/

HeartStrings8• 2 months ago

AI was used in writing that article. Know how I can tell? "You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."

" It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness" hello GPT

"Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it." holy slop goddamn

BoneShard• 2 months ago

Isn't it ironic? don't you think?

danabramov2• 2 months ago

it’s like raaayeyeeeaaaayeeeain

_dain_• 2 months ago

That "weapon" quip from TFA really pisses me off. It implies actual malice on the part of the person copypasting GPT. But people aren't being malicious, they're mostly just clueless. "Weapon", "weaponized" etc sound punchy so they're a safe choice in the AI's slopertoire.

And on the subject of weapons, consider the example of a delayed-action fuze. They're designed to penetrate through the outer defenses of a target, before the warhead detonates deep inside. What might this look like in written form?

Well, you'd start by getting on the reader's side, with shared loathing against some outgroup. Get them to let their guard down. And then at the end:

Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it.

You, yes you, the very clever and sophisticated person reading this who is exasperated by slop-grenades, should use AI more. You should use AI to "sharpen your thinking". You use AI, but in a good way. Not like those rubes, who use AI in a bad way.

Use AI. Use AI. Use AI.

Bang!

gwbas1c• 2 months ago

I think the bigger issue is the motivations for posting AI slop.

To me, a lot of these responses aren't made in good faith; instead, they come from bots that are some kind of training experiment. (Like when a bot responds to one of my HN posts.)

Even if the response isn't a bot, if it's just someone copying and pasting AI, how can someone reasonably think that just shuffling a comment into AI is adding any value?

Terr_3• 2 months ago

I agree that between humans the example given is laziness and disrespect.

That said, I want to make it clear that if people are going to regurgitate LLM results either way, I'd rather get the longer slop than trust a concise "Use Redis" conclusion from a system that doesn't think the way we wish/assume it does.

Ultimately we're using a statistical language algorithm to predict what kinds of words usually come next in a short story we've constructed.

* If you train it for short outputs (or stories where a fictional computer character has short dialogue) you're prioritizing text from places where someone answered without explaining.

* If you run its output through a hidden "summarize yourself" path, you're adding additional potential for error and dropping details you could have used to detect it.

syllogistic• 2 months ago

Had AI help me write a blog post last week. Most of the process was deleting verbosity. I guess it solves the blank page problem but once you get going the noise is worse than doing it yourself.

arjie• 2 months ago

Huh, just strikes me how we're all on the Internet seemingly inhabiting the same world, but really this never happens to me and I'm in a pretty AI-forward world.

tty46• 2 months ago

I love this. We also need a ChatGPT version of LMGTFY :D

tsss• 2 months ago

Speak for yourself. I do write essays in Slack. Just because you, the author, are too dumb or too lazy to put some effort into written communication, doesn't mean that we can't do it either.

Theodores• 2 months ago

A while ago I worked with a guy that did not put effort into written communication and he was doing the marketing for the company. I would have words with the boss about this and, initially, I struggled to explain why spelling, grammar, punctuation and use of paragraphs was important.

After some thought I was better able to explain the not-so-obvious. It is all about respecting the time of the reader.

Some people don't respect the reader since they think they are important. Notably with the Ep*tein files, we have this clique of wealthy people, with few of them able to string two sentences together. Writing standards were those of an eight year old at best.

Personally I write fairly long form because I don't have ideas that I can express in glorified grunts. However, this LLM stuff is encroaching on my turf, since the likes of the guy I used to struggle with can now churn out better English than I can. That is the problem for those of us from the pre-internet, pre-grammar-checking age when written communication mattered.

hax0ron3• 2 months ago

Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.

I could easily write essays in Slack if I wanted to. The reason why I don't has nothing to do with whether I'm capable of it or not.

The_Fox• 2 months ago

I view this use of AI as a type of denial of service attack. Alice sends Bob a wall of text (low effort) and Bob must parse it (high effort, yet probably no value received for the effort).

ge96• 2 months ago

Annoys me when somebody thinks helping is sharing an LLM dump

I get that the solution is in there but it's like you didn't really help me if I have to go through and read something myself. Just tell me your conclusion if I'm asking you the human. Context is a 7 page word doc output or pdf.

shervinafshar• 2 months ago

Baudrillard shaming McLuhan on Slack. :chef-kiss:

danabramov2• 2 months ago

Do people actually do this? I’ve been on a sabbatical when the whole AI thing happened and I might start working again soon and I’m not sure what to expect in the Slack mines.

redwood• 2 months ago

The response to the question in the example image should have been "what's the question behind the question?"

tamimio• 2 months ago

The sad part of our reality is now any well written text is assumed an AI. The other day I wrote a funny long text in some group chat, took me some time to do and proofread, only to be ask if it was AI generated! I like details and I am sure a lot do, now people will be inclined to write shorter “dumber” text to counter signal the AI slop, which in the long run might actually make people dumber.

torben-friis• 2 months ago

You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.

Did you slop grenade the slop grenade warning?

pmontra• 2 months ago

The point of OP could be right but I decide to provide a counter example.

This morning I asked Claude to find why locale = empty string slipped into some of our customers records. Of course it's something I used to do myself but it did it in less than a minute. I couldn't match that speed, ever. Then I verified the analysis and the suggested fix. Finally I pasted Claude's analysis in a slack conversation, with attribution. I could have summarized what claude wrote to me, but it would be a waste of time because it was already pretty terse.

We decided to solve the problem in a different way but I think that starting with Claude's analysis was the right thing to do.

bigstrat2003• 2 months ago

That's a best case scenario. My experience is that it's more common for an LLM to confidently predict incorrect solutions to the problem, and then you wind up wasting time chasing down wild geese. At those times, it winds up being more of a hindrance than a help.

jaredcwhite• 2 months ago

This page rather reeks of LLM slop itself.

If not…well I don't know what to call this style of writing exactly but I see it all the time on LinkedIn (or some annoying startup landing page) and it's very upsetting to me.

"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."

"Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness."

"Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it."

Why structure sentences like this? Maybe go read some well-written novels, a solid essay or two…or at the very least, write in a normal conversational style?

semitones2• 2 months ago

It is absolutely AI-generated.

gck1• 2 months ago

It's also possible that this will become (or already has) a 'standard' writing style of humans. A style has to come from somewhere, and it would be most influenced by the style that you consume often.

People read this style for every single question that they ask nowadays.

Who knows, maybe watercooler chats will also start having higher occurence of the phrase "You're absolutely right" in the not so distant future.

isityettime• 2 months ago

I actually don't care about the length so much. Short AI slop answers are also offensive, and people who act like reading a paragraph or two is a huge burden are frankly get no respect from me either. Idk why professionals should tolerate subliteracy among their colleagues.

low_tech_love6• 2 months ago

The sad thing is that the website itself is AI written, only made to be shorter and more concise. But still not human written.

submeta• 2 months ago

Not everything can be answered with yes or no. I used to give thorough answers even pre-LLMs. When someone asks about a project and its details, I am supposed to give a one sentence answer because LLMs give lengthy answers and that sucks?

This is like people hating on em-dash because LLMs use them a lot.

hungryhobbit• 2 months ago

AI conversations are like dreams: everyone has one they like and wants to share it with others ... but no on gives a crap about your dream/chat session, because it was uniquely appealing to you, and not them.

Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.

AlienRobot• 2 months ago

I was writing a comment after some code I wrote and Copilot autocompleted saying "This is hacky, but..."

I thought it was funny so I put a comment above saying "This is what Copilot said about my code:" and it autocompleted a line after it saying "Copilot was correct, but..."

rjh29• 2 months ago

Whoosh

raincole2• 2 months ago

I guess you're intentionally proving the parent comment's point?

jraph3• 2 months ago

I don't know, I don't mind someone telling me about a dream, if it's not too long. It can be interesting or funny.

As always, when one says something, they need to check that the public they have is interested and the public must give cues about how they receive the thing. Of course it doesn't always work well, but this could concern any topic.

Definitely don't share your AI chat with me though, I can sustain a poker face and politeness only for so long, after that I will probably need to complain, vent or practice sarcasm.

pravj• 2 months ago

I remember reading a book a long time back, titled something like "non-linguistic analysis of call center conversations".

One main takeaway from the book was that "you can just look at the ratio of turn-taking duration, and which speaker/participant is spending how much time" to decide "what happened in the conversation".

The same goes for AI-generated conversations; verbose responses are the default behavior, and models are incentivised to keep that output-token ratio. Too easy to catch/notice, pretty annoying.

PS - I work in the Conversational AI space, and it is quite an effort to keep the ratio right for people to stay long enough on the phone with AI agents.

MarkusQ3• 2 months ago

... or practice sarcasm

On the plus side, it gets easier with practice.

frays• 2 months ago

AI conversations are like dreams: everyone has one they like and wants to share it with others ... but no on gives a crap about your dream/chat session, because it was uniquely appealing to you, and not them.
Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.

This is a great quote, thanks for sharing.

ChiMan• 2 months ago

Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.

Beautiful. An ode and axiom for our new age.

protocolture2• 2 months ago

Its not just an ode, its an axiom for our new age.

akst• 2 months ago

I get what you're saying here but I do think an actual dreams are at least a bit more interesting then AI output.

But I do think such a comparison (to emphasis how unhelpful sharing tailored AI text with others is) would be useful.

gblargg• 2 months ago

I'm more interested in the prompt than the AI's response. If your prompt was just asking it the question, then neither is worth sharing.

oliculipolicula• 2 months ago

Dreams are usually predicated on info-dense stuff, like personality or prompts

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-026-00447-2

protocolture2• 2 months ago

I saw a post on the torment nexus that was about 12 pages long and kept stopping to say "Chat told me" or "So I asked chat"

And I asked why they kept saying it. I hadnt made the connection yet. I thought it was something about twitch.

THe bloke replied "Oh sorry about that I have recently acquired ChatGPT as my personal assistant"

And I just couldnt. He was basically explaining all the cool things he discussed with ChatGPT.

Why would he think anyone else cares? I dont understand.

kombookcha• 2 months ago

I legitimately would rather hear about my coworkers dream than their AI chatlog. At least the dream might be an interesting bit of their subconscious. The unwanted log is just a more annoying way to convey what would otherwise be a single sentence answer.

captainbland2• 2 months ago

I get the metaphor but to be honest I'd much rather hear the details of someone's dream than whatever an AI produced for them most of the time.

Edit: amusing LLM bloopers may be an exception

incognito124• 2 months ago

That's odd, I actually like hearing about other's dreams

Zopieux• 2 months ago

Same for AI music, images, videos.

I created a few songs that I enjoy, but I would never subject anyone from having to listen to it (or worse, deceive them into thinking it's a human creation).

low_tech_love6• 2 months ago

I’m still holding on to my hope that LLMs will destroy verbosity and usher in an era of concise and objective human-written works. Especially in academia. In my research area people write 10-page articles that could easily have been 2 or 3, for no reason other than that 10 page is the publication limit most of the time and if you write less it’s seen as lazy or something. Not to mention 20-page journal articles with humongous literature reviews that everyone skips, and so many meaningless diagrams and sections. I still hope that LLMs will make people so tired of reading slop that they’ll beg you to please submit shorter articles.

MagicMoonlight• 2 months ago

And yet this website is just AI slop. It has that classic Claude smugness to it.

connorboyle2• 2 months ago

The first several paragraphs of this article got a score of "100% AI-generated" on Pangram:

https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec...

squibonpig• 2 months ago

Yeah I noticed it myself, "You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."

semitones2• 2 months ago

Agreed, this article has a lot of tell-tale signs of AI writing... Which is so ironic

mybbor• 2 months ago

This was helpful to hear. I added Slackmoji and encouraged my colleagues to use it liberally on me.

https://x.com/RobbyMcCullough/status/2057570435936731273

vonnik• 2 months ago

If the poster cannot do the work of writing, they should not expect others to do the work of reading. People read based on trust and respond to invest in relationships. LLM verbiage breaks both dynamics.

SequoiaHope• 2 months ago

At work they recently added AI note taking to meetings. In interviews we have a panel of interviewers and everybody publishes feedback. I continue to take candidate notes by hand in the interview and write my own feedback. During the review process we read each other’s notes. Some people just take the summary of the conversation and use AI to convert that in to feedback, so now my coworkers are sharing sometimes paragraph after paragraph of slop when what I want is their own thoughts on the candidate! Very annoying.

threethirtytwo• 2 months ago

Easy solve: "ChatGPT, generate an explanation that's short and concise and won't be interpreted as a slop grenade. Also write it in a way where nobody can tell it's written by AI because everyone thinks they can spot AI, but really if you tell the AI to write it in a way where no one can spot it... it can."

This was a slop grenade btw.

winterbourne• 2 months ago

AI verbosity is similar to AI sycophancy: a dark pattern, disguised as earnest assistance.

hankbond• 2 months ago

1. I fully agree with this sentiment of not using AI to info-dump.

2. In person, as a human, I have a bad habit of doing this myself.

platevoltage• 2 months ago

This will be great to send to one of my clients who routinely pastes Gemini conversations into the Upwork chat to tell me how to do my job.

andrewljohnson2• 2 months ago

A lot of organizations right now are dealing with the "Claude says..." problem.

It's not that you should never include any AI generated text in a conversation with other engineers, but you mostly shouldn't.

AI is a tool to help you understand/debug/review yourself, but you shouldn't be conferring authority to your AI (because it doesn't understand anything and is often wrong in the text it spews), and you shouldn't be running an AI for other people, they should run it themselves.

ineedasername2• 2 months ago

This is unfair to those of us who’ve been writing walls of text to simple questions all our lives. I demand AI be the ones who start writing shorter things. Then I can go back to people ignoring my accidental wall building— accident because lots of times you’re a page in still going on things you see as relevant and— well, you see how things can get away from a person. But I want people to ignore me for what I write, not for thinking i don’t have anything worth ignoring in the first place.

albert_e• 2 months ago

What do we do about asymmetric warfare in corporate emails -- where one side has access to copilot and their emails are now three screens long.

plasticeagle• 2 months ago

Why, considering that this article makes a good point, was it written using AI?

zamadatix• 2 months ago

If one can make a good point succinctly it's not much of a difference how they did it. The good info is there and quick to parse through.

meander_water• 2 months ago

Other gems in a similar vein

https://github.com/narze/awesome-websites-as-answers

palisade3• 2 months ago

I'm verbose, and no one was ever interested in anything I ever had to say before. And, they certainly wouldn't be now if I used AI to do it.

These days I only bother commenting if I really feel I need to get something off my chest, but I don't assume anyone gives a shit. I frequently just delete my responses. I don't generally feel anyone needs what I'm saying.

It takes a bit of self-awareness to realize that no one is interested in what you have to say, so don't bother. And, I think it takes twice as much self-awareness to realize that they certainly don't care about what a bot has to say, unless they're the ones asking.

mvcosta91• 2 months ago

I have a friend/coworker that is verbose af (14min audios discussing something that could be compressed in 100 words) and is not that we’re not interested, but it gets annoying after years and years of text walls.

Being concise is an art by itself and it’s a really good way to express your thinking and convince people, it just needs practice.

palisade3• 2 months ago

I asked Claude to write a one word response:

Touché.

JimTheMan• 2 months ago

You write in the style of.. anime dialogue.

It's fascinating. I can almost hear the character speak it aloud.

palisade3• 2 months ago

Hm, I wasn't trying to. Baka baka baka, jim-kun!

Boxbot• 2 months ago

“Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

You decode the signals, and stumble: ... They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

The signal is an attack.

And it's coming from right about there.”

nly• 2 months ago

I just reply with "Is this AI? I'd rather you replied yourself"

master-lincoln3• 2 months ago

So if somebody wrote the same lengthy answer without AI you would not interfere? Shouldn't we criticize the issues of the text instead of it's creation process?

jgilias• 2 months ago

Sometimes writing a lengthy answer is absolutely necessary to convey stuff correctly and precisely. But if a human is writing it, every sentence has a meaning, and it might just be worth reading. Because a human is unlikely to waste their time drafting it unless they think it’s actually necessary.

ngcazz• 2 months ago

What kind of situation are we in that we need to didactically state this awfully trite point?

Andy_Donner• 2 months ago

The distinction that matters isn't AI or no AI — it's whether your thinking went through the response before it reached someone else. I'm building an app almost entirely with AI assistance as a non-technical founder. Half the time it leads me confidently down the wrong path and I spend my time course-correcting back to my original vision. I think that's the new way of working. I don't need to do the act of writing, but I do need to keep the assistant on track to where I want the project to go. The moment you remove that step by just pasting output directly, you've outsourced your judgment, not just your typing and you'll get coherent slop.

lomlobon• 2 months ago

Oh lord, you're catching the verbal tics. Save yourself, man.

ateles• 2 months ago

Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.

Also my main problem with many chat bots. Too many different aspects brought up at once. Short answers would be more eco-friendly too.

halapro2• 2 months ago

I think this varies by expectation. If you use voice, their response will be shorter and more human. If you write, you will get a whole article in response. This lets you get to what matters to you faster, as long as you're able to skim documents.

If I write and want a short response I preface it with "be brief." Sadly it doesn't work 100% of the time

impjohn2• 2 months ago

I find this to be my current number 1 challenge when working on a terminal and seeking explanations for why a problem was approached in that way. the terminal only holds so many lines at once. Let's not talk about current scrolling in terminals.

It's interesting that the LLM will oblige my succinctness requests for one or two replies then back to 7 paragraph answers that I can't reply to point by point in a TUI.

roland35• 2 months ago

I've found llms themselves get way more long winded in their responses once context starts to fill up. Fortunately it's not impolite to tell Claude to be more concise!

jonnyasmar2• 2 months ago

I bet if sites just added a "likely AI-generated" badge next to UGC, 99% of people would stop doing this. Problem is, without public shaming, many people will continue to take advantage of anything that requires them to do/think less.

Cthulhu_• 2 months ago

You're absolutely correct!

actually maybe not ⸻ a lot of people take pride in (re)posting AI generated content, their only human contribution being "I asked $AI".

Consider also (but maybe I'm projecting) that people do drive-by shitposts all the time, so they would post their slop grenade (I will use that term from now on lmao) and never see what the responses are. I've done that for years on various platforms (minus the slop) and I honestly don't know how well-known or well-received my shitposts are, I check some metrics every once in a while and numbers go up so it's not all bad I suppose.

jonnyasmar2• 2 months ago

lol @ at the uber-emdash. anything AI can do, we can do better!

"fair pushback". ez solution though that's enabled by this feature. "exclude AI-generated" filter. I'm actually incredibly surprised that isn't a thing, yet, tbh.

clbrmbr• 2 months ago

You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.

I’ve become so cynical that I cannot read this phrasing without thinking it came from… an LLM.

This cynicism also negatively impacts human communication. This constant doubt of whether there was a thinker on the other side of the text.

Ecys• 2 months ago

it was written by AI. search up speed reading. you can double or triple your reading speed in a day.

voidUpdate• 2 months ago

Consume 2-3x the AI slop in a single day with this one simple trick!

blharr• 2 months ago

I was surprised because the writing _seemed_ focused and It at least credits what they copied from "nohello.com" ... but when you compare the 2 sites it becomes obvious that the AI was definitely prompted something like "make a copy of nohello.com but for people posting AI slop" and that's all the actual human thought that went into this. The structure is the same as the source and has just been LLM-ified so it kept some of the same source tone.

connorboyle2• 2 months ago

Your cynicism appears justified here. Pangram rates the first few paragraphs as "100% AI-generated": https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec...

hypfer• 2 months ago

Nobody writes essays in Slack.

The author clearly has never worked with genuine hardcore nerds infodumping.

consp2• 2 months ago

That usually contains a lot more information with less text, thus limiting the slop scope.

h4x0rr• 2 months ago

There is also a specific kind of human that produce the slop on their own, without the need of an ai. Eg you ask a simple question and they talk for 5 minutes

casey2• 2 months ago

No one is forcing them to talk to you. Chances are there are benefits of laying out more information that you aren't considering. 15 minutes is the minimum amount of time you should spend considering a major architectural decision. And the reasoning should go a bit deeper than "cos we need this feature lol"

The actual recommendation: "I'd recommend conducting a proof of concept with your actual workload patterns to make an informed decision." is objectively correct with the context given. There are plenty of real world usecases where you can do polling in Memcached to emulate pub/sub.

impjohn2• 2 months ago

Maybe AI should replace some people.

Kim_Bruning3• 2 months ago

I wonder if more people have considered doing the opposite? You can just as easily use AI assist to compress a long rambling thought down to its essence. There's no reason you can't apply taste to the entire process.

That does seem rather more polite and respectful of people's time.

I do have this intuition though: some variant of Gresham's law or Akerlof's Market For Lemons may apply [1][2].

It takes more effort to put together a well compressed post or message; it'll drown in the sea of content which is easier to to type or generate; and it is hard to distinguish.

(Also: how many people think to eg. drop a post into an LLM to find the components expanded back out? )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

econ• 2 months ago

Generating a 1000 page book as a reply seems hilarious.

Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations

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