> To be clear, I fault no one for augmenting their writing with LLMs. I do it. A lot now. It’s a great breaker of writers block. But I really do judge those who copy/paste directly from an LLM into a human-space text arena.
When writing in my second language, I am leaning very heavily on AI to generate plausible writing based on an outline, after which I extensively tweak things (often by adversarial discussion with ChatGPT). It scares me that someone will see it as AI slop though, especially if the original premise of my writing was flimsy...
I hope the article didn't make you feel bad and discourage you from writing. IMO what you are doing is not slop, and the author saying "I really do judge those who copy/paste directly from an LLN to human-space text arena" is a pretty shallow judgement if taken at face value so I'm hoping it was just some clumsy wording on their part.
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When the AI hype started and companies started shoving it the throats of everyone, I also developed this intense reflex of a negative reaction to seeing LLM-text, much like how the author said on the first paragraph. So much crappy start-ups and grifters, which I think I saw a lot because I frequented /r/localllama Reddit and generally followed LLM-related news so I got exposed to the crap.
Even today I still get that negative reaction from seeing obvious LLM-text but it's much a weaker reaction now than it used to be, and I'm hoping it'll go away entirely soon.
The reason I want to change: my attitude changed when I heard a lot more use cases kinda like you describe, people who really could use the help from an LLM. Maybe you aren't good with the language. Maybe you are insecure about your own ability to write. Maybe you aren't creative or articulate and you want to communicate your message better. Maybe you have 8 children and your life is a chaos, but you actually need to write something regularly and ChatGPT cuts out that time a lot. Maybe your fingers physically hurt and you have a disability and you can't type well. Maybe you have a mental or a brain problem and you can't focus or remember things or dyslexia or whatever. Maybe you are used to Google searching and now think Google results are kinda shit these days and a modern LLM is usually correct enough that it's just more practical to use. Probably way more examples I can't think of.
None of these uses are "slop" to me, but can result in text that looks like slop to people, because it might have easily recognizable ChatGPT-like tone. If you get judged over using AI as a helping tool (and you are not scamming/grifing/etc.), then judge them back for judging you ;)
Also, I'm not sure the definition of "slop" has an exactly agreed upon definition. I think of it as low-effort AI garbage, basically a use of LLMs as a misdirection. Basically the same as "spam" but maybe with a nuance that now it's LLM-powered. Makes you waste time. Or tries to scam or trick you. I don't have a coherent definition myself. The author has a definition near top of the page that seems reasonable but the rest of the article didn't feel like it actually followed the spirit of said definition (like the judging copy/paste part).
To give the author good faith: I think they maybe wrote thinking of a reader audience of proficiently English-speaking writers with no impediments to writing. Like assuming everyone knows how or can "fix" the LLM text with their own personal touch or whatever. Not sure. I can't read their mind.
I have a hope, that genuine slop continues to be recognizable: even if I get 10000x smarter LLM right now, ChatGPT-9000, can it really do much if I, as its user, continue to ask it to make crappy SEO pages or misleading Amazon product pages? The tone of the language with LLMs might get more convincing, but savvy humans should till be able to read reviews, realize a SEO page has no substance, etc. regardless how immaculate the writing itself is.
Tl;dr; keep writing, and keep making use of AI, I hope reading that sentence didn't actually affect you.
> To be clear, I fault no one for augmenting their writing with LLMs. I do it. A lot now. It’s a great breaker of writers block. But I really do judge those who copy/paste directly from an LLM into a human-space text arena.
When writing in my second language, I am leaning very heavily on AI to generate plausible writing based on an outline, after which I extensively tweak things (often by adversarial discussion with ChatGPT). It scares me that someone will see it as AI slop though, especially if the original premise of my writing was flimsy...