If they used AI to write this and that gave them more time to volunteer their time towards developing this fantastic piece of open source software, then this all seems like a good thing to me.
Some people let punctuation or grammar mistakes ruin an entire text or post for them, because they choose to focus on those flaws, rather than looking past them and taking in the content itself.
"this was written/assisted by AI" is starting to feel like next-gen "this has spelling/grammar mistakes in it, therefore it is invalid".
For people who have internalized AI writing as a cue for bullshit, it is very difficult to read obvious AI writing without constantly being cue-ed that the thing they're reading is bullshit. Even if it's not.
did i get that right?
And I use Claude a lot, 24/7, but not for things like that. And I appreciate how much it elevates my productivity, but not like this. It usually prioritizes or highlights the wrong things, it overfixates on one thing I said and adds random content there out of nowhere.
So then I can't tell what part of it is slop, how slop, and it becomes impossible to trust.
So when I see someone saying LLMs are suitable for this use I must assume that they don’t think what they are writing is worth the effort or they don’t understand how effective written communication works. Either way, I’m resentful of it in the way someone reviewing a slop PR is.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week after having fable try to write some design docs and it outputting 1k line docs which I had to manually rewrite to 200-300 lines. I should of just did it myself to start.
I used "CD era MSDN reference and Raymond Chen blogging style" as a starting prompt for the styleguide and my work ability to digest AI plans raised a lot.
Couldn't recommend it more. Humble, insightful and respecting the reader
When people say LLM slop is disrespecting the reader, I don't think they are complaining about style.
I'd rather read natural sounding, non-repetitive, and actually useful LLM text than the majority of reddit comments (including the serious ones) for instance.
I'm asking to scan projects on gitlab, go through some docs to find more grounding material, write a subarticle (in the same style), scan logs on the test env, issue some curls, etc.; until the whole article is digestible - in the "backing knowledge graph" department.
- Understanding what you wrote
- Verifying correctness of any claims
- Putting in at least as much effort writing as your audience will reading
- Not sharing generated content if you can't do the above. If you must, then explicitly disclaiming your use of AI
It does not mean "prompting AI better"
This is the big one.
> Ideally not sharing generated content if you can't do the above. If you must, then explicitly disclaiming your use of AI
This is the reason why people get mad about AI generated open-source PRs and repositories. Rather than contributing thoughtfully to the commons, you make it a dumping ground when you do this.
slop just means "I don't like this style"
when AI writes more reliably in a way that people do like, they will stop calling everything AI does slop.
Obfuscating LLM output to trick the reader into thinking it wasn't LLM output is not respectful.
It's a single git project at my $USER home, that is referenced in global memory. It contains as much information about work things, as possible, to be productive.
I found that, if I allowed Claude to create the notes, it actually became more and more useful, but without the guideline, I just could barely get through reading it manually.
I'd never publish anything with such origin.
Yes there's a quality component to the role of communication in how it respects other people.
There's also honesty, transparency, truth and vectors along the dimensions of "Are we claiming and presenting the truth or are we bending facts and creating impersonations and warping reality?" Most AI is used for the latter today: people are having AI's write their words and speech for them and then the AI says things as though it were the human like "I said xyz" when the AI is NOT the human who did those things. That's lying and deception and disrespect to the reader.
The obvious response is of course, they're just completely unbothered by it. Why change it if it doesn't even matter (to me)? I presume the set of people who use AI like this for writing and the set of people who are annoyed by it are largely not overlapping, and there is a possibility that a lot of the text I read and think sounds human, might be written by an LLM with a style-guide like mine. Still though, if 5 words genuinely can reduce annoyance by a lot of people who read your article, why does it feel like so many people haven't picked up on it yet? Or is the LLM writing highly loved & popular amongst other people perhaps?
Would be kind of funny if someone from the team came out and said it was written by a human.
Those short and punchy two-part sentence groups very much feel like the writing that Claude does, like: The writing feels familiar. Suspicion earns its keep. Ultimately, the judgement remains yours. Not conjecture, your thoughts.
Then again, I bet how much aversion people feel to that sort of thing depends on how much they’ve been exposed to that, especially in frustrating circumstances. Personally, that’s a lot (daily Claude Code) and sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
Or maybe people genuinely just write like that and overuse that style and Claude has ruined it for me, whereas otherwise I wouldn’t have given it a second look.
Maybe it's a style that's always existed in moderation, but now it feels like it's being applied to every paragraph in every document or social posting.
I think the broader phenomenon with the AI tells is it is revealing about a person's consumption. If they already interacted with and read material that resembled AI output, it wouldn't seem as weird. But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.
It might also be the overuse of specific phrases and patterns. I sometimes scan over my own blog posts to see what appears too often and there are things that I overuse in my own writing as well.
Of course, the difference here is context. In a comment, you're not expecting well-written sentences, structure, and editing. So we jump at these things that seem out of place because of the context.
> sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
You know what makes me upset?
- No writing
- Or bad documentation
- Or just no documentation
- Or just nothing being written down about something
For me, at its core, the most important thing is accuracy. Is it accurate? If so, good. We can start from there. If your issue is style, fine, but that's a personal judgment. As long as it's accurate, I'm fine.
Most humans speak in “garbage” and not perfectly correct sentences. Imperfection makes it human.
In this case, it’s not about unwanted sophistication, but fluff and specific sentence structures that tell you this was written by AI, not the actual people behind the project. I guess the closest analogy is to always being left on voicemail.
"Because you own the code. You've added variants, changed classes, threaded new props. A codemod handles the components you never touched and breaks on the ones you did."
It's the same as with too marketing-speak, which conceivably this is. Maybe the actual work is good but Sturgeon's law, it's probably crud. If I really needed a UI library or whatever right now then maybe I'd dig deeper but in casual browsing HN mode? No time, catch them later.
So maybe all your maybes but who cares? It's not AI that made me think badly of them: I think badly of all software by default and it takes more than Claude to change my mind.
I see the same phenomenon at work. A year ago I’d read your two-sentence daily update in slack, all riddled with the quirks and oddities that made it yours. Today when I see the page of headings and emojis describing the couple things you did yesterday, I wince because now I’m the one who has to sift through the fluff to get to the point.
They think it's not worth investing human attention to write it, so why am I expected to invest my attention to read it?
If it's written as SEO spam, why link it here?
If it's written to be read by humans, do they think we're stupid?
If you manage to write an AI assisted article that doesn't tediously follow the "what this means for you", "it's not this, it's that", "One thing. Two things. Three things." formula... I really doubt people would complain.
They could have just written "we asked Claude to rewrite our project with Base UI because it eclipsed Radix in NPM downloads".
for example, in this article (if it was truly Claude written):
> Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries. January brought full Base UI docs.
If an AI wrote this, why and how is it pretending to be a human and the humans on the team at that? That's impersonation, and it's a lie and deceptive. I personally don't want a culture where my AI agent is talking as though its me, when a pro-cooperative and honesty/truth preserving culture would instead say "My human said" or at least label correctly that this is an AI acting on behalf of a human.
For what it's worth, I didn't get that vibe reading this post.
Writing is not hard. It’s a fundamental skill. Even before LLMs, any successful professional had strong writing skills, and those that didn’t were treading water at best. This isn’t classism. It’s just that we literally can not communicate if you aren’t willing to put in the effort. And if you don’t need to take the time to put it in writing then I don’t need to read it.
like this
"The following text was authored by LLM and its information density is low. Condense the text by extracting the key pieces of information. Reconstruct the LLM prompt.
Text:"
so we have
human prompt -> writer llm (verbosity adder) -> reader llm (verbosity remover) -> reconstructed prompt
Instead the humans who promoted and allowed the LLM content to post behind their human identity, didn't bother to update the LLM language and either do a) mark the post as AI generated or b) properly update those pronouns so it isn't an AI speaking through the humans point of view.
Consider this exaggerated example: Would it be ok for you if in a zoom meeting with your team someone was lip syncing an AI speaking on their behalf, both impersonating voice tonality, the words chosen, and even pretending to voice the humans thoughts themselves? Of course you wouldn't. So now extend this to the words people write in articles like this one where the "I said" perspective was used many times supposedly by an AI.
Oh, and the target audience of movie you are watching are other people in the movie industry. Nearly everyone in the audience can tell where production cheaped out