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throwout4110yesterday at 10:38 PM1 replyview on HN

> With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's replacing anything for me aside from making google searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need a definitive answer for.

I think this is probably the disconnect, this seems so wildly different from my experience. Not only that, I’ll grant that there are a ton of limitations still but surely you’d concede that there has been an incredible amount of progress in a very short time? Like I can’t imagine someone who sits down with Claude like I do and gets up and says “this is crap and a fad and won’t go anywhere”.

As for generated content, I again agree with you and you’d be surprised to learn that _execs_ agree with you but look at models from 1, 2, 3 years ago and tell me you don’t see a frightening progression of quality. If you want to say “I’ll believe it when I see it” that’s fine but my god just look at the trajectory.

For AI slop text, once again agree, once again I think we all have to figure out how to use it, but it is great for e.g. helping me rewrite a wordy message quickly, making a paper or a doc more readable, combining my notes into something polished, etc, and it’s getting better and better and better.

So I disagree it has made everything worse but I definitely agree that it has made a lot of things worse and we have a lot of Pets.com ideas that are totally not viable today, but the point I think people are maybe missing (?) is that it’s not about where we are it’s about the velocity and the future. You may be terrified and nauseated by $1T in capex on AI infra, fine but what that tells you is the scale is going to grow even further _in addition_ to the methodological / algorithmic improvements to tackle things like continual learning, robustness, higher quality multimodal generation with e.g. true narrative consistency, etc etc etc. in 5 years I don’t think many people will think of “slop” so negatively


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zdragnaryesterday at 11:15 PM

Where you see exponential growth in capability and value, I see the early stages of logarithmic growth.

A similar thing played out a bit with IoT and voice controlled systems like Alexa. They've got their places, but nobody needs or wants the Amazon Dash buttons, or for Alexa to do your shopping for you.

Setting an alarm or adding a note to a list is fine, remote monitoring is fine, but when it comes to things that really matter like spending money autonomously, it completely falls flat.

Long story short, I see a fad that will fall into the background of what people actually do, rather than becoming the medium that they do it by.

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