I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI. We need better tools as content consumers to filter content. Ironically, AI is what may actually make this possible.

I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.

I suspect the endgame of this is probably the fulfillment of Dead Internet Theory, where it's just AI creating content and AI browsing the internet for content, and users will never engage with it directly. That person who spent 10 seconds getting AI to write something will be consumed by AI as well, only to be surfaced to you when you ask the AI to summon and summarize.

And if that fills people with horror at the inefficiency of it all, well, like I said, it isn't like the internet was a bastion of efficiency before. We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos.

> I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral.

Isn't it obvious? If I'd wanted to see AI response to my question, I'd ask it myself (maybe I already did). If I'm asking humans, I want to see human responses. I eat fast-food sometimes, but if I was served a Big Mac at a sit down restaurant I'd be properly upset.

> The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.

Reading AI generated prose, even if it’s my prompt, always gives me the same feeling as when I read a LinkedIn post: Like a simple concept was stretched into an unnecessarily long, formulaic format to trick the reader into thinking it was more than it was.

Everyone taking their scraps of thoughts and putting them into an LLM likes it because the output agrees with them. It’s flattering. But other people don’t like it because we have to read walls of text to absorb what should have been a couple of their scattered bullet points.

Just give me the bullet points. Don’t run it through the LLM expander. That just wastes my time.

Everybody wants to use LLMs to produce things and absolutely nobody wants to consume the things that LLMs produce and this is the fundamental reason this is all going to collapse unless we find a way for producers to pay consumers to consume their LLM output.

>I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.

The problem is that getting an AI to answer a question is trivial. If I wanted to know what an AI has to say about the topic, I would just ask myself. Sending AI output has, as the author writes, the same connotation as sending a LMGTFY link. It does not provide me any value at all, I know how to write a question to an AI, just as I know how to use Google.

>I find that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior, even though I share the disdain for someone else's AI output. The people doing this kind of thing are not the kind of people to be reading this manifesto. We've been creating bait content for a long time, and humans have never been given the tools to manage this in any sophisticated fashion. The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI.

Which is irrelevant. TFA is talking about personal communication (and the examples are from a business setting).

And their concern is not the mere quality or lack thereof, but also its origin, and this is something new.

>I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.

No, many of us hate "our AI" content too, and wouldn't impose it to other people, same way we wouldn't fling shit at them.

I am sorry, but in what way is everyone letting the "We've been creating bait content for a long time" comment slide?

Did you even read the article? It is about person to person interactions. The three examples weer:

* Someone butting in to an ongoing discussion with a solution (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop)

* Someone being asked for their expertise and responding (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop)

* Someone comes with a problem thesis looking for help (but it's generic and misfitting AIslop)

The only one of these that existed prior to AI was the middle one, and the article very specifically calls out how transparent it used to be, because it had the shape of a google link.

The first one would be impossible because the person would have to either write an unhelpful response, and they wouldn't find the words at length. You could ignore them or pick it apart easily. The last one would be impossible unless if they were copy pasting from a large PDF, which would look nothing like a chat message.

What kind of workplace hellscape do you work on where people posting low effort bait on SLACK was the norm? The premise of this reply is entirely non-sensical.

I don't think that "it's more of the same" is a good way to think about it. The internet contained a lot of low-quality content, but even low-quality content used to be fairly expensive and time-consuming to produce. Further, you could immediately discern bottom-of-the-barrel content-farmed nonsense by the writing style alone. Now, LLMs make it practically free to generate unlimited amounts of slop that drowns out human-written stuff, and they can imitate the style hints we used to depend on for quick screening.

I acknowledge that those likely to copypaste slop aren't likely to find this article themselves, but I built the page to be shared or guide discussions around etiquette like nohello.net or dontasktoask.com. IMO a common understanding of AI etiquette would provide social pressure to halt some of these behaviors.

I honestly don't mind someone else's AI as long as I can trust it/them. One problem I have with sloppypasta specifically is that it reads as raw LLM output and the user isn't transparent about how they worked with the AI or what they verified. "ChatGPT says" isn't enough; for me to avoid inheriting a verification burden, I'd also need to understand what they were prompting for, if they iterated with the AI, and if/what/how they validated.

(the other problem is that dumping a multi-paragraph response in the midst of a chat thread is just obnoxious, but that's true even if its artisanal human-written text)

> I don't have a lot of sympathy for people angry at this type of behavior

I ignore it. But if that isn’t an option, this sort of writing can help you convince someone in power around you it’s okay to ignore it.

>like they're being hoodwinked somehow

Because they are. It would be like if I bought some trinket off aliexpress and told you I made it by hand just for you. You wouldn't mind if you bought it yourself, but the fact that I lied about it to make it seem like I care is deceptive and immoral.

Sending someone AI generated text without disclosing so is incredibly offensive. It says you don't care about wasting the receivers time and don't care about honesty either.

Talking about bait, good job getting 42 responses on hacker news! Your opinions are controversial enough to draw out people who need to correct them, yet genuine enough to not be passed off as a troll and downvoted.

> We smiled and laughed for years that all of this technology and power is just being used to share cat videos.

Well, cat videos make people happy.

I find your comment disingenuous at best.

> The internet was not a bastion of high quality content or discourse pre-AI.

I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of AI-related discourse, watched hundreds of videos since 2022, maybe even a thousand now on it. NEVER at any point in time did people opine for the "high quality" internet of before. They opined for the imperfect HUMAN internet of before. We are now seeing once pristine, curated corners of the internet being infected with sloppypasta.

This is quite a broad brush to paint the internet with. It's like saying The Earth is not a bastion of warzones/peaceful places to live. That is HIGHLY dependent on location.