alt Hacker NewsThis is by far the best definition of AI slop I ever read, and the blog post itself is the contrary of AI slop: a short post where each word matters. The creation of an output that is at the same time large and lacks fundamental motivation/understanding is what creates AI slop, not the use of AI itself. This distinction allows us to have a mental model to don't blame AI itself but its continuous misuses. This also creates a formal model to understand why continuous AI steering during AI-assisted coding is so important. The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
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> The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
What are you driving at with this statement? I think there is value in both types of prompts so I'm unclear.
See also Hank Green's take on the definition of slop: https://youtu.be/dT5IJExTUR4?si=mjkHK024MUqCId0k
The tl;dr is pretty similar. Intent and care are the functional variables. A human can produce slop without AI and they can produce art with AI. AI just enables slop at an industrial scale.
I agree. I have gotten frustrated by a lot of recent anti-AI rhetoric, not necessarily because I entirely disagree with the premise but because it is too generic in its form. It has started to sound to me like the people who complain about "chemicals" in their food and water.
The real complaints are about specific aspects of AI and its use, and this essay does a really good job of articulating one of them. It is something we can actually discuss and address.