I’ve been seeing lots about how AI, and the ever-growing use of LLMs, is creating slop that is killing the internet - making us angry and breaking our brains.
I wrote about how this might impact scientific publications in 2023, but I think we should revisit this topic in light of a quote that shifts how I think about content today.
In her video, My 17 Minute AI Workflow To Stand Out At Work, Vicky Zhao makes the point that, “in 2025, it will take you longer to read something and comprehend it than the amount of time it took to create it”. She goes on to share how she improves data in to LLM and thus, you can get better results from LLMs.
This is a sentient point. It also highlights what many are seeing - AI slop is rising to the top of our feeds. Where my views differ from others is that I feel this is the same concern you could have raised when word processors or spell checks were first on the market - “think of all the crap books we will now here l get!”1. Not only are there big overlaps here but both arguments should be treated with the same derision.
Where I might be willing to give some ground is that now, with automation, the speed of which this stuff can be pumped out across so many mediums is staggering. So what becomes of places like this, where pride is taken to share ideas?
The difference we need to cling to is quality and care. Quality can be the selling points that drives people to you and your work. The ideas for my posts, and most of the writing, come from me. They are then refined by using tools, including spell-check, langtools and, yes, LLMs.
This is the same as with any area where quality is seen as a selling point. Take sustainability, for many a product that claims it is sustainable is also one that is a quality product too. Indeed, it can be very difficult to separate the two ideas. That is not to say products are not manufactured to a price point and using modern techniques, just that care is taken to ensure quality is baked in.
People do not stop buying sustainable products because you can buy cheaper, indeed people maybe drawn to you because you can guarantee quality within a given market.
So we should be doing the same, use AI to enhance the quality of the thoughts you want to share and stop shaming people for using the em dash.2 Look at the words and the ideas being conveyed. Are they relevant to you? Then listen, regardless of the tool used to create.
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I’m a big user of the em dash and have documented proof that I used them prior to the LLM explosion. Sloths may point out that shows I use AI. They would be correct. I do. ↩︎