What amazes me is that some people think I want to read AI slop in their blog that I could have generated by asking ChatGPT directly.
Anyone can access ChatGPT, why do we need an intermediary?
Someone a while back shared, here on HN, almost an entire blog generated by (barely touched up) AI text. It even had Claude-isms like "excellent question!", em-dashes, the works. Why would anyone want to read that?
In that case, I'd say maybe you didn't have the wisdom to ask the question in the first place? And maybe you wouldn't know the follow up questions to ask after that? And if the person who produced it took a few minutes to fact check, that has value as well.
It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or is fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory checking of AI-slop has effectively zero value.
Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities were flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The Godfather, only with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can generate those zero-effort memes myself, I also have access to GenAI.
We truly don't need intermediaries.
You don't need human intermediates either, what's the point of teachers? You can read the original journal articles just fine. In fact what's the point of any communication that isn't journal articles? Everything else is just recycled slop.
No, that's a false equivalence.
> Everything else is just recycled slop.
No, not everything is slop. AI-slop is slop. The term was coined for a reason.
Everyone can ask the AI directly, unlike accessing journals. Journals are intermediaries because you don't have direct access to the source (or cannot conduct the experiment yourself).
Everyone has access to AI at the slop "let's generate blog posts and articles" level we're discussing here.
A better analogy than teachers is: I ask a teacher a random question, and then I tell it to you with almost no changes, with the same voice if the teacher (and you also have access to the same teacher). Why? What value do I add? You can ask the teacher directly. And doubly so because what I'm asking is not some flash of insight, it's random crap instead.
There's blogs that are not meant to be read, but are just content marketing to be found by search engines.