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pdpi • today at 3:05 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Can we please stop with the "AI = Slop" rhetoric? I'm fairly bearish about AI, and even I'm getting annoyed by it.

"Slop" just means something is low-quality and of poor craftsmanship, irrespective of who or what made it. If it's slop, you don't need to look for tells, you can just tell it's slop. Sure, AI is prone to specific types of mistakes, and humans are prone to other types of mistakes, and you can often tell whether a specific poorly-crafted UI is man-made or machine-made, but bad is bad is bad.


Replies

wongarsu • today at 3:09 PM

This blog post uses Slop correctly. In this case the specific slop type that results when you give AI a very generic prompt with no direction and then don't iterate over the result

The closing words of the post are "And it’s not even that I am against vibecoding. This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good."

scythmic_waves • today at 3:08 PM

Did you even open TFA?

> Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.

> This is seen in vibe-coded UI without a vision. Vibe-coded UI can look great when done right, but most don’t. And it makes the apps look cheap and unappealing to use.

Those are paragraphs 3 and 4.