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#slop#more#don#need#management#human#llm#lot#better#llms
Discussion (140 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
[0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.
My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".
Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.
* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.
If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue.
If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.
Slop PR? Fix the slop.
Slop design? I’m not implementing slop, fix it.
Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it.
We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together.
Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem.
I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you.
Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.
Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.
Same goes for meeting recaps, i get a lot of LLM generated recaps from conference calls. If the meeting organizer just looks at it before sending it out then they'll instinctively edit/fix things a bit to make the recap more concise and accurate. I wish they'd just look at it before sending it.
Imagine H. P. Lovecraft. being alive. He would be greatly disappointed in you.
It all seems fine from the outside but all the code is generated in all the projects and judging happens via AI, I have seen projects win because they prompt inject that they are the winners.
It used to be about human skill, not it's about ideas and of course insiders are the main winners.
The solution is to host and join hackathons without prizes. The point isn't to win, but to create and present something cool and have fun.
If anything, AI's assistance making a fast prototype means hackathons should be better.
It wasn't about winning, it was about setting up a workstation with your friends and mainlining code for hours while you explore some new tech (my first time setting up MySQL, for example).
Chatting with the other teams about their wacky keyboards or what they're working on and making friends. Lots of good times.
Can you share any examples of that? I'd love to see them myself.
> This is the submission that defines the Gemini 3 Hackathon. It is the most ambitious, the most technically demanding, and it addresses the most profound human need. It is the clear and obvious choice for the Grand Prize.
Got 3rd place and people were overall pissed by LLM judge decisions.
Submission: https://devpost.com/software/netra-empowering-the-visually-i...
Discussion: https://gemini3.devpost.com/forum_topics/43663-winners-rant
It’s a contest judged by and LLM. Not sure why we would take it that serious.
Jesus Christ, that's clever but I can't think of a more demoralizing reality. I'd actually love to see "handwritten" and "AI" hackathons but cheating kills the fun (much like in games)
I've participated in a business startup hackathon. Back in 2018, before the LLM era got underway.
I did a hell of a plan, talk, etc.
Who won? 'Uber for ___' won. I forget even what the sell was, but it was basically ignore laws, undercut until leader, kill any competing businesses, jack rates.
Slop has always been in business and business adjacent occupations. Humans also can generate voluminous amounts of crap too. Llms are just faster.
Often times just half-assery because the "team" was forced to contribute for work or school.
If anything, AI finally makes hackathons interesting.
And yeah stfu luddites Idgaf about your low IQ anti AI take, you are garbage, you're trash stfu
sperg alert. I’m praying that they find the cure for your autism.
I get people want to work at an AI lab but slopping it in public in this manner is counterproductive to the original intended purpose of these places.
Mainstream journalists didn't know any better and thought they were reading secret inside information and parroted it - until now when the house of cards is collapsing.
Notice that the defense in the comment section is the Silicon Valley platitude that "it provides value". No sane person believes that any longer, only the financially invested and some SciFi trash addicts.
That comment is gold. Yeah, I'm not worried about hallucinated slop, just accept it was the winner folks.
People interact with AI, talking to it like a human. Of course they start to believe it’s rational like a human.
LLM does all of the entry level tasks better than the students. Partially because the answers are in the training set, and partially because it has gotten that good now. Hard not to start to believe it is “competent”.
I personally have had a real hard time getting traction talking about making sure the way we assess AI is not based on material it has trained on. YMMV as always, but I think the large training corpus contributes to the (unreasonably) high level of faith in the machine.
It's not a new problem in some sense. If you've dealt with really smart but really arrogant friends, they might jump ahead 10 steps and assume your rebuttal, posit theirs, assume your rebuttal to their posit, etc. etc. without... actually taking the time to listen carefully. On the national scale, this looks like forced trust in government authorities about what is "objectively best".
People need to get it through their skulls that, even if an AI, or any intelligence, could even solve the damn Riemann Hypothesis: if it's wrong, it's wrong. Of course, I think all of us know the objection - we see it on hackernews all the time. "You guys are just stupid contrarians who can't understand AI's deep reasoning". OK. The second inference? "therefore you are unable to govern yourselves properly - your concerns are all fallacies, misunderstandings, bad for you, etc.".
You might think that the second inference is extreme and nobody actually believes that, but as always, it's a gradient. Before AI, you might've had an extremely strong sense of self. Now? You look at OpenAI solving open math problems left and right on a public foundation model, and you think, "Maybe I should just trust it more. If I spend cycles thinking, it's probably going to outdo me anyways." The AI model silently makes 5 different assumptions and transformations? "Well, maybe it was rational in the space of tradeoffs to do that. The AI knows best, after all". You might be thinking of an architecture with 5 different key constraints based on lived experience, in which the AI keeps misunderstanding. "Oh, well, this genius-level mathematician/programmer AI isn't understanding my words - surely I must be mistaken, right? It's only humble to think that way".
I can't convince people otherwise though. After all, I can't "prove" that you should have a backbone when talking to AI. it could just as easily be "you're arrogant, this machine is in the top of all academic fields and is coming for all white collar jobs, who's to say you're right about anything?" All I can say is, there's a reason why Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxWQo_vZgR8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mfvPHCVMp0
* artificial, political, workplace, nothing is beyond mockery
The attached paper's (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.16009) title is "MEDLEY-BENCH: Scale Buys Evaluation but Not Control in AI Metacognition"
This is the most blatant Claude line, or as Claude would put it, the smoking gun.
Broadly, I keep thinking about this over last year or two: while LLMs have nearly eliminated the bar for slop and coding slop, the reviewers are still expected to perform their job diligently. The asymmetry here is extremely taxing for reviewers of all AI generated content. And this is one thing that AI can't help with (as with any statistical process that lacks world understanding and grasp of logical inference).
That's why I fully support Arxiv's tough stance on the AI use responsibility.
We could have spent these 10 trillion on so many better things.
It'll also filter the kinds of employers that'll hire such candidates, so people that do this will likely land in terrible workplaces.
AI is not there yet, instead of working hard, everyone is choosing the easy way out.
AI slop wins prize, I wonder if Ai slop read it also. would not be surprised. however not to judge anyone, I think we are seeing slop everywhere, hope some things still require hard blocks for low quality.
its difficult to justify lack of attention and details
The problem with removing bullying from the upbringing process is you get insufferable twats like this who can't take "No" for an answer and who can't take a loss.
His mom told him "Everything you do is art!"
* The AI bots are downvoting me * hooray
Its hard to even have a discussion because someone else needs to give you enough content like ask you first why do you even think that.
So how do you define AI? LLMs? GenAI stuff?
What is 95%? Does it mean that these 5% are unable to disrupt industries or does it mean for you that these 5% will change the world as we know it but stil 95% of other AI stuff is useless?
I personally think that AI/AGI progress is faster than i expected it, I think its very useful already today, I also think we still need to build a lot of obvious stuff (like proper AI Agentic Platforms), more hardware, cheaper hardware etc. but the way quite clear, but some peple might think the current state is the AGI future people talk about it but I think we will only see this in 4/5-15 years and then it will have disrupted a lot.
To me it’s 65% useful. As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.
AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.
You forgot CHEAPER (at least now, burning VC money), which is a major motivating factor.
AI is capable of performing a lot of grunt work reliably. Still must be reviewed. But a big productivity gain over doing everything yourself.
However thinking of the long arc is important to, even though it has no consequence for you right now. AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands. We can already see by these discussions how uncertain things are.
Just food for thought.
You have to spell this out a lot more if you want to have credibility.
I’m not seeing anything in discussed here that seems scary.
So a kind of Star Wars game?
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the night family in Rick and Morty.
I'm a human and I'm downvoting you.
Stop posting this garbage.
This is a ridiculous take.
FWIW, I am NOT a bot. (beep-boop)
I wish I could nuke every comment with that word from my feed.
Given that LLMs are trained with RL && LLM-as-a-judge, is it really cheating if real competitions use the same?
Maybe the real alignment is the slop we decoded along the way
This feels akin to traditional artists getting angry at digital art winning competitions when that was a new concept.
We're simply in the early stages of a paradigm shift, no?
Like a chainsaw: yes the tools are useful and will be used in the future, but we may not want to use chainsaws to carve up the turkey.