In each thread like this, people are complaining that this is short-sighted because you can use AI for good. But this completely ignores the actual usage patterns: there's plenty of people who see hobby activities, such as contributing to OSS projects, blogging, or writing Wikipedia articles, as a competition. If you're unconcerned with quality - "Claude, make me a blog post" / "generate 10 improvements for this project" - AI allows you to easily produce content at a rate 100x higher than a human can. This inherent volume asymmetry means that if a sufficiently popular project doesn't reject AI, they will be spending most of their time dealing with AI, and most of this content will be bad in ways that are difficult to spot at a glance.

Why is it my responsibility to deal with that? So that your once-in-a-blue-moon high-quality AI contributions can filter down? All of these projects were doing just fine pre-AI, so most are not too concerned with that. If AI folks want to have the use of AI tools normalized, I'd posit they should really get more invested in promoting quality and ostracizing slop pipelines. They aren't doing that - I'm not seeing this on HN, not on LinkedIn, not in the open-source community.

This asymmetry is IMO the biggest problem with AI-driven output. Brandolini's law applies here. I don't know if anyone has figured out strategies on how to deal with these barrages and deluges of "slop grenades", and this loosely applies to event coherent and high quality LLM output. Sure LLMs are advanced now, but largely the output depends on the quality of the input prompts (as in how they're contextualized and guided).

Life has gotten to the point where completely non-technical people have gawked at me for still having a job related to software. In their minds, AI can it all, and in their minds coding is already obsolete. The sample size for these opinions will only grow and the ratio of people that rightfully apply skepticism will drop, either from fatigue or burn out or by virtue of more and more people adopting the "AI is roughly AGI" crowd. For me a good metaphor is the concept of the selfie. Everyone mocked selfies at first, and now you'd be deemed insane to negatively opine about selfie behaviour. The same will apply to AI slop grenades (even of high quality output) in due time. I think it's inevitable.

Endless hoardes of people can now unleash never-ending arguments and suggestions and it feels like it will become impossible to defend against them because one minute only contains 60 seconds of time that you can spend refuting a false or <100% correct suggestion.