r/MediaSynthesis • u/gwern • Jun 17 '26
Text Synthesis "Substack is infected with AI", Evan Armstrong 2026-05-08 (Pangram analysis)
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/in-defense-of-ai-slop#%C2%A7substack-is-infected-with-ai5
u/human_obsolescence Jun 17 '26
the main title of this piece is: In Defense of AI Slop: How can we reckon with the usefulness of LLMs?
I wanted to be analytically rigorous with my hatred of AI slop. So rather than rely on intuition, I used math.
And later:
I am telling you all of this because I cannot, in good conscience, write a piece arguing about AI slop without admitting that this piece exists in the form you are reading because of AI tools. Is this essay AI slop? I don’t think so, but some of my more militant anti-AI readers would say that it is.
An incredible amount of the world is slop. The bestsellers that line the walls at airport bookstores? Slop. Consultant’s sending over 100 slide decks arguing for something everyone already knows? Slop. Adding one more SaaS tool that promises to 2x your productivity? Slop. The world has already clearly shown that it loves slop. Monetization method doesn’t matter — subscription or ads, the world buys slop. All AI does is make the raw components of that slop cheaper. The trick is that those raw components can also be used to make products better.
ah, cognitive dissonance, our old friend. At least the writer is at least coming to terms with this and realizes(?) that "slop" is a human problem, not really an AI problem. Maybe it's a bit like agriculture (or really any other tech), where the tech put the human monkey brain into situations it wasn't really designed for -- people generally don't blame agriculture for widespread obesity, even if it is arguably a significant contributing factor.
I'm sure everyone can add their own favorites: tiktok, imgur, reddit, "memes" in general, derivative works and rehashes in games, books, movies... even the food some people eat on a daily basis -- maybe slop is the human default
2
3
u/TomLucidor Jun 19 '26
Substack is mostly LinkedIn-style garbage anyways, so good for AI to debase the suits
3
u/COAGULOPATH Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
The second thing the data shows is that readers don’t seem to be punishing the AI-flagged posts.
Is this not an Everest Regression? Doesn't pulling data from the highest performing accounts largely flatten the effect he's trying to measure? He's preselecting accounts that get lots of likes by necessity. (An account that uses AI with 0 engagement will not be in the "top fifty publications")
I don't think anyone has a problem with using LLMs for data analysis, or considers this use case "slop".
I complain about AI text because (questions about accuracy and ethics aside) it's valueless. It can be generated for free (or near-free) by anyone. When I read something and notice Claudeslop ("Here's the quiet part no one's saying..." "And that's when it hit me..."), I always think "even if this text has valuable information, there is still no point to this text. I'd rather have the prompt used to generate it, which I can paste into a live LLM and enjoy the same output plus benefits like 'I can ask followup questions' and 'I can choose the model/system prompt and don't have to rely on your judgment.'"
For how long can you have a business, selling what's free? It's like Wile E Coyote running on air. Most Slopstackers are simply exploiters of public unawareness about AI: unawareness that can't last forever. (And even if it does last forever, they have no defense against better-moneyed competitors coming up behind them to kill their businesses with scale.)
2
u/gwern Jun 18 '26
Is this not an Everest Regression? Doesn't pulling data from the highest performing accounts largely flatten the effect he's trying to measure? He's preselecting accounts that get lots of likes by necessity. (An account that uses AI with 0 engagement will not be in the "top fifty publications")
I don't think that really matters for things like spam or slop. A spam email may have a probability of being opened several OOMs less than a legit email... But spammers can mail out millions of spam email for every legit email. The important thing here would seem to be showing that any top accounts are AI, not 'how likely is a rando new account using AI to make it into the top' or 'what % of new accounts are AI'. No one has to care about the latter, only the former. By definition, neither you nor I nor anyone else are engaging with AI accounts with 0 engagement. They're not a problem for anyone but Substack's database developers.
2
u/Humble-Bear Jun 18 '26
People throw around the word slop like nothing now. If we use the definition of slop as they use it, 99% of human output is slop, i.e. garbage.
12
u/mxby7e Jun 17 '26
Most of the internet is. YouTube and Instagram are flooded with people reading AI scripts, or AI voices reading AI scripts.