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What is slop? (jeferson.me)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago (7 children)

That's the point of the blog post. Discuss that LLM (or any automation tool in this case) have different level of quality/usage and having a binary view on the topic makes only a very specific class profit from it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

    The blog article says it's using Photoshop's background removal tool and autocomplete... But that has nothing to do with LLMs, does it?

    (Edit: And they make a point about letting an LLM come up with a first draft... Though I'd argue letting AI come up with your structure / architecture / library choices is kinda slop times 10?!? I mean the basis of something is the most important aspect. And requires most of the effort. The rest is just writing it down.)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    But this is automation. And some tools use AI, not LLM.

    Another point that we need to be better. We need to call the tool LLM, not AI. Like I said in the post, spellchecker is a kind of AI, a decision tree is a kind of AI, and so on.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

    Kinda wrong title, then? So don't use chatbots, do use background removal, markov chains and text to speech and speech to text? I'd agree with that...

    Still, none of that has anything to do with large language models. And automation is a different thing as well. It's your webshop automatically validating payment and preparing and invoice and shipping label... Managing your webservers. Or an Amazon fulfillment center which automatically fetches the products from the shelves... That's automation. And it may or might not contain 'AI'. That term only means a programmer didn't program in every step to do, but we give the machine a goal and let it figure out how to do it.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

    Which title? Because, from what I can see I did use LLM on this. And in the text I was trying to avoid the usage of the LLM as AI and AI as LLM, but I may have left a few wrong uses....
    Edited since the original comment was edited.

    Kinda wrong title, then? So don’t use chatbots, do use background removal, markov chains and text to speech and speech to text? I’d agree with that…

    Not sure, some of the tools fits in the AI bucket, some may not. Still I did try my best in the post to avoid the usage of LLM as AI and also AI as LLM. But I may have left some wrong usage.

    Still, none of that has anything to do with large language models. [...]

    But they have with automation and AI.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    I meant the title here on Lemmy... But I mean the entire article is talking about everything from image filters, autocomplete, to drafting code and LLMs. It also contrives some percentages, tries to differentiate between the different forms of AI... And the ends in a conclusion which again lumps everything together. We just talked about how background removal tools are acceptable and now we're generating scaffolding with LLMs. Those use-cases of AI aren't the same! We just tried to establish that...

    (Also, I don't think inventing definitions for words is of any help. LLMs are LLMs. Automation is automation. And machines are machines, less so entities with agency or "intelligence".)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I meant the title here on Lemmy [...]

    Here on the piefed (or lemmy how you prefer), I'm using the LLM usage and asking the quesiton of: "it's ok to call anything LLM touched as slop", and more important, who benefits from this view.

    (Also, I don’t think inventing definitions for words is of any help. LLMs are LLMs. Automation is automation. And machines are machines, less so entities with agency or “intelligence”.)

    Inventing? I think slop right now is binary and means a low level of quality. The problem is, if LLM touches anything, it's getting the tag of slop. And (ignoring the other problems of the LLM), I don't think that just by touching it, it get slop immediately.

    I'm not denying the other issues with LLM, and I'm fairly critical and vocal about it.

    But calling everything slop isn't helping, worse it's benefiting a very small group of people.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Sure. I can agree with that. Though I think it is a bit besides the point. The real problematic part isn't how people call something or if they're agitated and oversimplify things. I mean that's not great either. But I think far more interesting issues are de-skilling, changing the industry for the worse, open-source projects now hooked on AI subscriptions by nasty companies... People letting their coding-agent draft something and they don't understand it's now not them anymore who constructed the basis of the project, chose the tooling and made the important design decisions... Or the same with drafting a book or letter. It seems like that's a simple and tiny step... But it's the most important one. Some people are afraid the next generation of people will sound like ChatGPT, start every dialogue with a reaffirmation and say lots of "it's not X, it's Y" because that's what they grew up with...

    Also: I see far too much slop these days. We get several people each day advertising for shiny new projects they "wrote" (or they let their bot do it) and turns out a few of them actually compile and 1 in 10 doesn't get abandoned after a month... It's just way too much spam to me. And this isn't some rare exception... A lot of stuff currently gravitates towards that. Everything gets flooded with more stuff and everything is about attention. And it regularly isn't following the open-source spirit either. I can't contribute because the codebase is a huge mess, garnished with a massive amount of redundant documentation but all the important stuff is missing. And even if I do there's no one reading my PRs anyway... Which is kind of a letdown.

    And then every company tries to replace quality with quantity. I get half-assed products with weird quirks, art which isn't art, "articles" with just incoherent ramblings...

    I mean sure, I know there's like 10 people out there who do useful stuff with AI. I happen to use some of that. But still... That's far and in between. If you call something slop if it reeks of slop, you're kinda right 99% of the time. At least in my experience. And it usually bears consequences as well.

    But calling everything slop isn’t helping, worse it’s benefiting a very small group of people.

    Yeah, I think pretty much none of what we do is helping in any way. It's a decision of some big companies and powerful people to flood the world with "AI", fake stuff and whatever they like. And it's a trillion dollar business. Only thing that'd help is for example if the European Union mandates watermarking or forces people like Elon Musk to stop their nude generators... It's not really something we can do. And even in the realm of computer programming, it's really, really hard to convince management to adopt any kind of sane approach towards LLMs or quality of the product.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is: I understand names are important and how we call stuff. But it's even more important what's actually happening out there, right now. And most of it isn't really concerned with how I for example handle it. All the bad stuff is pretty much forced upon me. And there's just an uncomfortable amount of it. And it doesn't even matter if I call your 22% coding-agent drafted project slop or not... What difference does it make? It's still the same thing.

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