After reading this article, I can definitely feel how productivity rises inside organizations.

More precisely, this feels like a person who would be loved by management. The article almost reads like a practical manual for increasing perceived productivity inside a company.

The argument is repetitive:

1. AI generates convincing-looking artifacts without corresponding judgment. 2. Organizations mistake those artifacts for progress. 3. Managers mistake volume for competence.

The article explains this same structure several times. In fact, the three main themes are mostly variations of the same claim: AI allows people to produce output without having the competence to evaluate it.

The problem is that the article is criticizing a context in which one-page documents become twelve-page documents, while containing the same problem in its own form.

The references also do not seem to carry much real argumentative weight. They mostly decorate an already intuitive workplace complaint with academic authority. This is something I often observe in organizations: find a topic management already wants to hear about, repeat the central thesis, and cite a large number of studies that lean in the same direction.

There is also an irony here. The article criticizes a certain kind of workplace artifact, but gradually becomes very close to that artifact itself. This kind of failrue criticizing a pattern while reproducing it seems almost like a recurring custom in the programming industry.

Personally, I almost regret that this person is not in the same profession as me. If someone like this had been a freelancer, perhaps the human rights of freelancers would have improved considerably.

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ryandrake 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The article almost reads like a practical manual for increasing perceived productivity inside a company.

I think the truth is that at many (most?) places, perceived productivity and convincing is all that matters. You don't actually have to be productive if you can convince the right people above you that you are productive. You don't have to have competence if you can convince them of your competence. You don't have to have a feasible proposal if you can convince them it is feasible. And you don't have to ship a successful product if you can convince them it is successful. It isn't specifically about AI or LLMs. AI makes the convincing easier, but before AI, the usual professional convincers were using other tools to do the convincing. We've all worked with a few of those guys whose primary skill was this kind of convincing, and they often rocket up high on the org chart before perception ever has a chance to be compared with reality.

	▲	jdw64 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree. but,In practice, the important thing is that, whatever one thinks of management, you still have to speak in terms they recognize and want to hear. The target changes, but the mechanism is similar. This is often criticized, but it is also necessary even in ordinary conversation. The core skill is the ability to guide the agenda toward the place where your own argument can matter. I do not believe that good technology necessarily succeeds. Personally, I see this through the lens of agenda-setting. Agenda-setting matters. I am usually a third party looking at organizations from the outside, but when I observe them, there are almost always factions. And inside those factions, there are people with real influence. Their long-term power often comes from setting the agenda. From that perspective, AI slop looks like a failure of agenda-setting around why the market should need it. They encourage people to exploit human desire and creative motivation. But the problem is this: the market still wants value and scarcity. From that angle, this mismatch with public expectations may be a serious problem for the AI-selling industry.

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switchbak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Please explain what you would have preferred instead, I'm failing to understand your criticism here.

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jdw64 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What I see in this article is a kind of structural isomorphism: it sincerely criticizes AI slop while reproducing the same failure mode it is criticizing.

Intentional rhetorical repetition is not necessarily bad. I repeat myself too when I want to make a point stronger. The problem is the context. This is an article that sincerely criticizes the inflation of workplace artifacts. In that context, repetition and expansion become part of the issue.

As far as I can tell, the article provides only one real data point: a colleague spent two months building a flawed data system, people objected as high as the V.P. level, and the project still continued. The author clearly experienced that incident strongly. But then almost every general claim in the article seems to radiate outward from that one event. The cited papers mostly work to convert that single workplace experience into a general thesis.

If you remove the citations and reduce the article to its core, what remains is basically: “I observed one colleague I disliked producing bad AI-assisted work.”

That may still be a valid experience. But inflating a thin signal with length and authority is close to the essence of the AI slop the author criticizes. The article’s own writing style participates in that pattern.

Again, I do not think repetition itself is bad. Repetition can be useful when the context justifies it. But context has to stay beside the claim. Without enough context, repetition starts to look less like argument and more like volume.

p.s I’m a little hesitant to use the word “structural” in English, since it has become one of those overused AIsounding words. But here, I think it actually fits.

	▲	ryandrake 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, not every communication can be a PhD dissertation that provides dozens of examples as evidence and cites 100 sources. Sometimes, it's enough to have a single good, representative example and build a narrative around that through rhetorical devices like repetition. We are not holding the author to the standard of proof that academic papers are held to. I agree, though, that repetition, if that's all the author is leaning on, can get annoying.