I think the problem is calling all AI output “slop”. If people genuinely like the content then is it still “slop”?

And, playing devils advocate for a moment, does it matter if a robot or a human authored it if people like it? People loved Magic Eye pictures in the 90s and they were computer generated too.

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bambax 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is also with the creator. You learn nothing when AI produces things for you. When it's art, to each their own, I guess.

But when I ask my realtor questions, he doesn't know anything. I get the same answers by typing into ChatGPT.

When I ask the Claude team at work about why this or that, they don't have a clue. They "will get back to me", which means they'll forward the question to Claude and Claude will output another 500-words email with a lot of things that are obvious and not part of the question, another couple of assumptions that are plainly false, and in the middle of it, sometimes, yes, an interesting insight. But the insight doesn't come from the people sending the email, they didn't produce it, they don't see it, and they never act on it.

This is all just exhausting.

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hnlmorg 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

> But when I ask my realtor questions, he doesn't know anything. I get the same answers by typing into ChatGPT.

Not going to comment on your workplace specifically, but I’ve found this to be an issue with other industries like real estate long before ChatGPT were a thing.

The problem is the people who pickup the phone, greet you at the shop door, or take the photos, they’re the lowest paid juniors and thus know nothing.

So in most industries, you were always lucky to get through to someone with knowledge on the first attempt.

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mrheosuper 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

>someone with knowledge

The problem with AI is that "someone" may not exist.

	▲	hnlmorg 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's highly unlikely because then the company wouldn't exist. At some point in a (to use our example: a real estate business) you are going to need skilled professionals. I think the bigger risk is what happens when they retire if we are not training the next generation of professionals.

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autuni 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"slop" is less so about if something is a popular product or not, it's more about the quality. You can think that AI can produce high quality outputs, but it's unreasonable to think that this applies to the majority of it's use. There has always been corner cutting, and using AI to cut corners/safe money in product design/production inevitably results already, and will more so in the future, in a ton of bad products. That does not mean that there can't be good ones too.

	▲	hnlmorg 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> "slop" is less so about if something is a popular product or not, it's more about the quality. But we are talking about popular culture here. That was never an industry where quality was measured by artistic excellence. It's an industry that is entirely motivated by mass appeal. Thus something being popular IS the measure of success. So if AI is slop, then so is 99% of the human-made content it's replacing.