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Notes -
Nate Silver just accidentally posted a link to an AI slop article. A quick delve into the article text makes it obvious that the contents were blatantly copypastaed directly from the output of ChatGPT. Various GPT detectors also agree, giving it a solid 100% confidence of being slop. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody in the replies even seems to have noticed or cared.
I'm of course already used to my google searches being clogged up by black hat SEO slop, but I expected it to just live in the shadows quietly collecting clicks and boosting pagerank. So it was sobering to see an aislop article just get posted like that by someone I regard as at least somewhat intelligent.
What does this say about the world? Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output? Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article? It's either a depressing anecdote about human nature and social media, or a depressing anecdote about the lack of intelligence of the average human.
Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.
Edit:
Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:
Here's the full recording of his talk and you can check the Youtube transcription: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MPt8V3MW1c4 And before you ask, the fake article specifically claims these fake quotes were said at his Harvard talk, not at some other time.
So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.
Alternative phrasing: are normie journalists, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of putting out articles better than even the most stinky smelly chatgpt output?
I mean, why is this a surprise development? Oh, the article has a bunch of made-up garbage, you mean unlike all the rest of journalism where everything is true and the media never truly lies?
Why should I give a shit if a journo "hand authors" his latest piece of crap or just pushes a prompt at an LLM? Text generation is their speciality, and at this point I'd be stunned if most of them weren't 90th percentile in general writing quality in comparison to humans. How many journalists do you even know of for their writing quality? Hunter S Thompson and ?? Hell, just prompt the LLM in the right way and I bet you could get to 99th percentile no problem.
Do you even have an argument here beyond just the words "aislop"? Can you articulate a point that taboos the phrase slop and similar terms?
Journalists, even partisan hacks, almost never lie. They produce propaganda through omission, and when they need to spread falsehoods, they will always hedge it though "anonymous sources." It's actually quite nice that they will explicitly tell you when you're about to read something made up.
As much as I hate journalists, they are quite good at writing. Some no-name journalist at AP has gone to school for writing and honed his craft for years. His writing is almost certainly in the top 99th percentile of writing skills, and certainly far better than yours or mine.
To repeat my previous comment:
Your opinion of journalists is too low. Journalists are rabid partisans, but they're generally not very stupid. But they pretend to be stupid quite often in order to serve their side.
Absolutely fucking impossible. Just try and give me a single example of LLM output that's remotely comparable to quality human work.
This is an absurd claim. We have to remember that at this point journalism has been a dying industry for decades. The aspiring novelist working on their book away from their day job at the paper is a relic of 50 years ago. Good and great writers nowadays will go to so many other places before they go to a paper.
There are only a tiny number of prestigious bylines at top newspapers. When was the last time you read a generic article at, say, some mid-tier US city paper? There are still plenty of positions rehashing whatever comes through from AP or Reuters, or working in industry publications or niche hobby stuff. And these are never noted for quality.
And even amongst good journalists, writing is not often a big selling point. How many people read Matt Yglesias for his quality prose compared to just finding his ideas interesting? Good investigative journalism can be performed independently of good writing.
Ok, pick a generic article that rehashes an AP article. Then have ChatGPT (or an AI of your choice) rehash it better.
But actually local rehashes are a dying thing, because most local papers just directly syndicate articles for US and world news, and only write local ones nowadays.
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Where?
PR and advertising are the obvious ones.
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Substack?
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