logoalt Hacker News

mrobyesterday at 5:18 PM1 replyview on HN

Even if you can reject the aesthetic argument for non-fiction works (although read some of Dijkstra's papers for a good counterargument), it is still a problem because it breaks an important quality signalling mechanism.

Pre-LLMs, a paper with no spelling or grammar errors showed that somebody had put effort into writing and editing it. If they cared about the presentation, they probably also cared about the content. LLMs routinely produce nonsense that looks superficially like high-quality work.

There are far too many papers to read all of them. LLM slop is evidence that something is probably low quality. As the saying goes, "if you can't be bothered writing it, I can't be bothered reading." The rare outliers will get enough citations and recommendations to overcome this filter.


Replies

chungusamongusyesterday at 5:21 PM

This is fallacious. The fact that someone used LLM to write their paper does not negate its findings.

show 3 replies