Comment by eadmund
> the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing
That’s neither fair nor accurate. That slop is ultimately generated by the humans who run those models; they are attempting (perhaps poorly) to communicate something.
> two companies that I already despise
Life’s too short to go through it hating others.
> it's very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own
That begs the question. Plagiarism has a particular definition. It is not at all clear that a machine learning from text should be treated any differently from a human being learning from text: i.e., duplicating exact phrases or failing to credit ideas may in some circumstances be plagiarism, but no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read to every document he ever writes.
Credits: every document I have ever read grin
This is just the "guns don't shoot people, people do." argument except in this case we quite literally have a massive upside incentive to remove people from the process entirely (i.e. websites that automatically generate new content every day) - so I don't buy it.
This kind of AI slop is quite literally written by no one (an algorithm pushed it out), and it doesn't communicate anything since communication first requires some level of understanding of the source material - and LLM's are just predicting the likely next token without understanding. I would also extend this to AI slop written by someone with a limited domain understanding, they themselves have nothing new to offer, nor the expertise or experience to ensure the AI is producing valuable content.
I would go even further and say it's "read by no one" - people are sick and tired of reading the next AI slop article on google and add stuff like "reddit" to the end of their queries to limit the amount of garbage they get.
Sure there are people using LLMs to enhance their research, but a vast, vast majority are using it to create slop that hits a word limit.