Don't handwrite your next post and definitely don't start writing in your own back to front cryptic code.

The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.

It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....

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fidotron 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.

Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.

On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).

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fxwin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.

That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule

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AlotOfReading 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, it wasn't used to produce finished documents. Printed books had large margins and omitted initial letters to leave space for the manual steps of rubrication and illumination. Plus, the printing itself was a product of huge amounts of manual typesetting effort.

The results speak for themselves. Those early printed works are beautiful to a degree few other books have managed since.

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RetroTechie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.

The reverse: sometimes people care if you do. "Caring" and "effort" tend to be good indicators.

But imagine there's some yet-undiscovered <something> that has big implications, and conditions exist for its discovery. Then someone stumbles across it, puts out a hasty tweet, walks off & doesn't look back. Took no effort whatsoever, didn't care much about it. Or maybe some AI does that.

Would that reduce the value of the message? Imho: no.

I'm hoping we'll find ways to separate the gems from mountains of slop they're buried in, that don't require AI-powered tools to wade through that slop & pick the gems. Or establish incentives to not produce all that slop in the 1st place. Not sure if that's doable or how.

But I don't care that much about AI-generated or not (although I'd prefer if stuff were marked as such). Useful, well-written, interesting, exactly what you needed, providing a new angle on a subject, innovative: that's where it's at.

Btw I'm all out of soapboxes. Would a potato crate do, in a pinch? Not gettin' a tattoo!

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jvanderbot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return.

When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.

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bcjdjsndon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable sign

An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...

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jagged-chisel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And also has the hallmarks of "art." I suggest, however, if one were to actually implement this, that the 'excrement' should likely be a food-safe lookalike; maybe chocolate with granola and fruit hunks. Less likely to have trouble with child welfare authorities.

	▲	psd1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just a short jump from there to the concept of steganography over the back channel of aggregate child welfare enforcement actions. Typical HN

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dfgvfvbcv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.

We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.

E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.

If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.

	▲	RevEng an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Because I can't read all content to judge its value. I used to use other signals to help judge: literacy, reputation of the writer or publisher, the media they used to communicate. Now even governments are distributing notice of official policy through poorly written tweets, yet the Internet is flooded with whole websites of AI slop that looks on the surface to be professionally made. We lost the signals that used to help us filter out the signal from the noise. The alternative is not to read all content carefully because we don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to do so. This article is about other ways we can provide those signals. Even if the content is crap, the fact that someone has to sacrifice to produce it limits the amount they can produce, requiring them to prioritize what they produce, and signaling that this was important enough to them that it was worth the sacrifice.