AI Smells on Medium
31 points by rmoff
31 points by rmoff
As the saying goes, it's called Medium because it's neither rare or well-done.
Was about to say, it is already pretty-far gone, unfortunately. It was a casuality of a time when everyone thought that writing an article or two constituted presenting oneself as a strong technical candidate for a job.
Maybe I'm too Zillenial brained but I think the "AI slop is ruining the internet" WordArt is unironically good. I would totally read an article with that at the top.
What’s this, I hear you cry! I use AI-generated headers and I’m not writing crap!
I have read some blogs with AI-generated images that had interesting points to make, but in general those images are a really strong indicator that the text is not worth reading. If you fall into this category, I highly recommend coming up with other ways to visually break up your writing.
Deep-dive content that’s only a few paragraphs long
I hate this but it also kinda predates widespread slop, just "A Deep Dive Into NFTables Firewalls" and it barely shows how to default deny all.
Good point. AI is not innovating in slop production, there was slop before the technology became widely available. The innovation is in dramatically lowering the barrier of entry into large scale slop production.
ASCII Art diagrams
This one is surprising, I wouldn’t’ve thought LLMs could make coherent ASCII art unless they regurgitate it directly from their training data. It’s highly dependent on being able to see the output format, and they only get a token stream. They shouldn’t even be able to detect patterns based on distance from the last newline, as the tokeniser will mess that up too.
Ironically this article unwittingly showcases the source material for slop style grammar: paragraphs that are one sentence long, bullet lists everywhere, rhetorical questions that are answered in the next sentence, headings that could be considered clickbaity as a title...
I don't think the author actually intended this irony, the other articles on the site have a similar style. This also isn't a claim that the author used LLMs to write it, absolutely not. The issue is that LLMs produce content in a style that is an amalgamation of their training material, which happens to be articles like these.
This prose style is not wrong or out of place for a blog, I don't condemn it, but human English authors had long coalesced onto a common style that produced engagement, even if subconsciously. LLMs just copied that. Maybe we should've always found it a little grating and favored essay style prose.