I currently work in an organization that is very AI forward. It is common for individuals to forward AI generated documents, meeting notes, or etc, with no critical thinking or review, in lieu of actual work.

This practice is insanely counter-productive, as it means that any good-faith attempt to interact with the individual pushing such documentation, really just pushes the burden of putting together said documentation onto the receiver, except now they also need to edit and verify the document they were forwarded.

I need a shorthand way to refer to this practice, that calls it out as a bad practice.

A few months ago I found an article that explained that it was bad manners to reply into a conversation anything akin to the phrase "I asked ChatGPT and it said X", for exactly the reason mentioned above. Can anyone find a link? I can't seem to find it.

This article (https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/) seems to hit the nail on the head, though it does so so succintly and at such a surface level, I don't think it really gets the point across. The reason we use books as reference points for knowledge, is because they are difficult to make, and therefore we trust that the author put real work into ensuring their work was credible. If we knew they did not, their work would not be credit worthy. Neither is an unreviewed AI generated message. By this rule, the more obviously something is AI generated, the less likely it is worth reading.

I would love a law (like Conway's law is a law), that said something like: "It is never worthwhile to spend more time reading a document, than it took to write." that I could point people at when they send me AI slop, with explanations of the above.

Is anyone aware of such a thing or website?

I love writing, it's one of the most human things about humanity. It's communication, art and sharing all at once. It's been fundamental to culture and progress for 1000's of years.

LLMs are, in a way, really good at writing. They have the larger part of human creative output distilled into their weights. So it was inevitable that more and more people would start publishing articles and blog posts written (all or in part) by AI agents.

I don't like it but I accept it, there really isn't anything I can do about it. What I was hoping, though, is that high signal to noise ratio places on the internet (Tildes among them) would reject it and we could go on consuming 100% organic prose, at least for a while.

And for while that's exactly what happened. In techy places like Hacker News, AI posts were quickly flagged and downvoted into oblivion. At Tildes they mostly didn't show up at all, or if they did I missed them.

That seems to be ending though. Now I see agent written pieces on the front page of HN with 100's of comments. There's always a highly upvoted comment pointing out that the piece is slop, but you have to scroll to find it.

The reason I use HN as an example is that it's full of people with extensive experience using AI agents who are in a position to tell if something is slop. And it looks like the larger part of readers (or at least commenters) can't tell the difference anymore. If that's true at HN, it's going to be true everywhere.

It is getting harder to tell when something is slop, people are post editing, handwriting intros and getting better at prompting to remove obvious LLM tells. But if you have any practical experience with these tools, it's still pretty easy to tell. Somewhere during post training certain patterns end up getting heavily favored. Interestingly, many of them happen across all of the frontier models. Em-dashes are the most famous but there are so many more. Most are rhetorical tricks or formatting patterns rather than punctuation.

Reading LLM prose, many of the tropes don't stand out at first, instead they land as strong writing. But after you see them repeat enough times they start to become obvious. Even putting the tropes aside, the hallmark of a lot of LLM writing is that it's more rhetoric than substance. Low signal, lots of noise.

I don't have a solution, it's starting to look like many (maybe most) people aren't going to be able to tell when they're consuming something that required minimal thought by the "author" who prompted the AI. Which is sad because, up until now, we could assume that, when we read something, someone cared enough to put time and mental bandwidth into creating it. That's become increasingly less true.

I suppose this post is me feeling wistful for the internet we used to have, written exclusively by humans. I continue to hope that people will reject slop at places like Tildes, but in order for them to do that they have to be able to identify it. Maybe people will get better at that, there is definitely a point where you've consumed enough slop that you can smell it from a mile away. But of course the slop is going to keep getting harder to detect.

I don't want to go as far as to say that slop will take over the internet, I think (hope) that people will keep wanting to read organic, human, writing. And that as a result we'll come up with strategies and solutions to support that.

It's a weird time. Right now every LLM blog post and article that goes viral is signalling to the prompter, and anyone watching who can tell what's happening, that there is demand for slop. And of course with demand comes profit. I think we're at the beginning of a steep curve.