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).
> ...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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect.
Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
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).
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.
As much as I prefer shorter output, I think the example given displays too much trust that LLMs are capable of solid logical thinking.
Ultimately you're using a statistical language model to predict what kinds of words usually come after a short story you've constructed.
If you train it for a short outputs (outputs 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.
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.
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.
When I go to research lectures, I sometimes hear that in response to audience questions, although not especially consistently. Some speakers do this more than others, I don't think anyone does it all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science says the opposite, sorry. People lose their language skills when they outsource their thinking to AI. You can believ what you want want but that doesn't change the facts.
Pretty sure the references you are referring to are about losing coding skills, which is a very different set of skills than language skills. The kagi link (1) a sibling comment left was an example of an AI that can improve writing while also informing about better writing style. As opposed to the slop grenade, which is outsourcing thinking to AI.
The point is, you don't have to outsource your thinking to use AI, if it's a good AI tool. But most AI companies are coming from a hyper-scaling mindset where addicting the user to the product is the same as substituting hard thinking for easy dopamine hits. The most ridiculous benchmark I have seen in AI is the tendency to say the longer an agent can work and some minimal accuracy is a good thing. That just means you have 30 steps to find an error in instead of 3, and you are much more likely to just abdicate thought instead of the hard work of proofing 30 steps yourself. AI companies and evaluators are losing the point.
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.
The problem with this logic, no matter the context where it’s deployed, is that you can always default to “you’re doing it wrong” no matter what case or situation is brought up. It’s an argument that is unfalsifiable no matter what because you can simply gesture to the person as the problem in literally any scenario.
If I build a car and it consistently gets into wrecks at a rate 500x that of other cars, you can’t just keep saying “operator error.” At some point you have to ask, ”why do operators keep having errors?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does, because it allows for quickly sharing a prepared response instead of saying the same thing over and over. It also works because the kind of person this link gets sent to is already used to trusting random websites over their human interactions.
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.
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.
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.
Just prompt them back: "that's a lot of detail, could you please summarise as briefly as possible what differences concern our requirements specifically?"
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...
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?
Reminds me about similar "manifestos" about netiquette, properly asking questions, searching web and answering emails. And I expect exactly the same impact - none.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Not to single out OP or anything, but the more we do things on our own, the more likely we are to build our confidence. Relying on something or someone to hold our hand risks slowing down personal growth.
I agree, but there's lots of stuff I'm pretty bad at (javascript, for instance) that AI is super helpful for. I feel like I'm learning a bunch of new stuff quicker than I otherwise would've.
So I probably wouldn't argue against this in all cases, except where someone is just outsourcing all their thought to the model(s), that feels much worse to me.
“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.
> 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
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 "<!-- Canonical URL -->"), 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"
We should instaban anyone who uses these patterns on ycombinator. If you talk like that for realsies, well too bad, try being more human and less linkedin next time
>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.
Right, recent youtube solo lecture vlogs ripe with these clever punchy finishers. Annoying. I know people aren’t smart enough to actually be that witty ad hoc. Makes the whole thing feel fake af
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.