Item — HN Reader

I’m so tired of reading LLM slop articles. I don’t mind someone using AI assistance but it should be embarrassing to put your name next to something you so obviously didn’t write.

I don’t remember who said it but I really like this summary: posting LLM slop as your own writing destroys the reader/writer contract. Normally you’d expect the writer to have spent more effort on a piece than the reader. But now the reader is the one who’s spending more effort, trying to interpret a chain of words from nobody’s mind.

This should be embarrassing to post.

2 comments

I am a former D-list tech blogger, and the thought of posting slop under my name horrifies me. But then again, I consider myself an author who has enjoyed the pleasant side-effect of minor notability. I never considered myself an influencer who happened to use writing to acquire more influence.

Anybody shipping slop around—whether written by interns and published under their name or written by machines—is not an author. They are an influencer, and reposting slop is what they do.

The article is certainly shallow, and its title is clickbait, and it says things that will make some web developers roll their eyes, and of course LLMs are now available to anyone — but what makes you think this particular article was written by an LLM? What are the telltale signs?

It’s more of a vibe, as they say :) Things that cumulatively feel off: overly descriptive headers, overuse of flowery language (“we’re entering a new age where A is B, where X coexist peacefully with Y”). Lots of “isn’t X but Y”, “not X, just Y”. In general the rhythm and the tone is a tell (authoritative and scoldy but vapid and bland at the same time).