Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your employees to produce PowerPoints about the TPS reports, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you get meaningless LLM argle-bargle in return.

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joe_the_user 2 days ago | parent [-]

Fair point,

The thing about companies asking for slop is that a middle manager maintaining usual stream of vacuous text is a proxy for that person paying attention to a given set of problems and alerting others. AI becomes a problem because someone can maintain a vacuous text stream without that attention.

So it's likely to become an arms-race.

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shash 2 days ago | parent [-]

> So it's likely to become an arms-race.

And this is my real fear with the current crop of AI. That rather than improving the system to require less junk, we just use AI to generate junk and AI to parse AI-generated junk that another AI summarises ad infinitum…

Like, instead of building a framework that reduces boilerplate code, we use an LLM to generate that boilerplate instead (in a more complex and confusing manner than using a traditional template would).

Or, when dealing with legal or quasi-legal matters (like certifications), 1. Generate AI slop to fill a template 2. Use AI to parse that template and say whether it’s done 3. Use another to write a response.

Lots of paperwork happening near instantly, mostly just burning energy and not adding to either the body of knowledge or getting to a solution.

	▲	paultopia 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think this may already be happening in job applications---companies using AI to parse them, applicants surely by now using AI to spew them out at increasing volume...