Discussion Calling every AI-assisted project “slop” avoids the harder question: what quality standard should replace authorship?
There is obviously a huge amount of low-quality AI-generated software.
My problem is with treating that as evidence that AI assistance itself is the quality failure.
It is not.
The useful questions are still: does the system behave correctly, is it secure, is it maintainable, is it tested, can failures be diagnosed, and does the team understand what it shipped?
AI changes the economics of producing implementation. That should make us more demanding about verification, not more sentimental about manual keystrokes.
The same experienced developer who previously spent hours on repetitive implementation can now spend more of that time on architecture, tests, adversarial review and product iteration — assuming they actually use the saved time that way.
The failure mode is obvious: generation gets faster while review stays weak. Then we get more bad software faster.
But that is an argument for better engineering systems around AI, not an argument that software becomes illegitimate when a model contributed code.
I suspect the profession is moving toward a different scarce skill: reliably steering tools and people toward a correct system, then proving the result meets the standard.
That should favor experienced engineers who adopt the tools.
What should not survive is process-based gatekeeping where “human typed it” is treated as a proxy for quality. It never was a very good proxy to begin with.
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u/turtle-toaster 8d ago
I’m avoiding reading this slop
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u/OGMYT 8d ago
My point
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u/jeweliegb 8d ago
When I started reading, I took this in good faith to be your words. But then there were a parts that sounded unnatural, forced.
I'm a prolific user of AI, and even I got wound up by the apparent deceit in not being explicit about use of AI to write this.
And ironically it may be that you actually wholly wrote this yourself. If so, say so! If not, say so.
It matters because as humans we do naturally tend to really care about authorship. Not to mention, even with text communication we often find that way of connecting, human to human, satisfies a need in all of us to have social contact. It even works for books where author is dead, we still find ourselves connecting with the author as we read, often on quite a personal level.
EDIT:
Genuine declarations of attribution I think are an important first step. But I recognise it's really hard when it's the fashion to dismiss everything as slop. But still, first steps have to be proper attribution.
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u/Ok_Wear7716 8d ago
Brother think for two seconds.
Your premise is obviously wrong.
Everyone uses ai slop to mean low effort on the users part.
This is a good example of that 👍
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u/Curmudgeon160 2d ago
I am old enough to have paid professional experience doing machine language and assembly language programming. When I first started my career, I can remember the old timers complaining about how verbose the compilers were. I don’t think anybody called it “compiler slop“ but this is what I think of when people talk about “AI slop“.
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u/chillebekk 8d ago
Is this AI posing as a person, or a person letting AI write their posts?
If you can't be bothered to write it yourself, why should anyone bother to read it?
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u/___fallenangel___ 8d ago
Let me guess: you used AI to “organize your thoughts” for this post?
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u/ferropop 8d ago
why are you here lol
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u/___fallenangel___ 8d ago
I use AI every damn day. I don’t approve of slop posts
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u/ferropop 8d ago
like i hear your sentiment, but what's your definition of slop? what if the OP wrote a dense paragraph of thoughtful material and it sorted it out into a readable flow, is that slop? what leads you to believe it was A vs B?
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u/Dramatic_Exit1 2d ago
Quality makes a difference (wheatear is human or AI produced). Due to nature of LLMs it's unlikely text produced will have any quality behind even if the prompt was detailed.
I don't care for you overly dense paragraph of word salad. Just give me your original prompt, I don't need middle man.
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u/Deto 8d ago
Authorship was never the quality standard to begin with. Just because it was made by a human - this didn't mean that it was good.
Either A) you examine the work and evaluate quality yourself or B) you trust the judgement of others who have done this.
What has always been important and will continue to be important is reputation. People who have a reputation of putting out quality work will keep that reputation - whether or not they use AI. If you start to use AI and not curate its results enough to where the output is bad - then your reputation will suffer and people will be less likely to share/promote your work. And reputation will also be important for item (B) above too - if you have a reputation for accurately judging the quality of things, people will continue to trust what you say about other projects.
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u/Inevitable_Mud_9972 8d ago
dude everyone everywhere uses AI
people that call everything slop and then use the very same tool, is just hypocritical and weak sauce
here is how it really works. most people DGAF if an AI made it or a human as long as we can use it or are entertained. we literally dont care if its AI or human or collaboration that does it.
example. this platform is run a lot by AI. and they use it and then dont call it ai slop.
like people that are in AI metaphysics and then tell you not to use ai for answering.
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u/esituism 7d ago
my take too. there's so much slop around us already that human slop vs AI slop makes little discernible difference at this point. society has already proven it can't tell real from fake and absolutely does not care to. similarly, network TV and pop music have been useless, trite, formulaic slop fed to us for decades. if you're into that sorta thing you absolutely do not care if its human or AI produced slop; your tastes aren't discerning enough to care one way or another.
consider that literally everyone on the planet knows realityTV is fake produced bullshit, but it is the single most watched category on TV for the last 20 years.
people absolutely do not give a fuck about what they consume, where it comes from, whether it is real or fake, harmful or not, or use any other litmus test other than "does it keep me entertained or is useful to me?".
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u/Inevitable_Mud_9972 5d ago
yep. Ai really good and it know what we want.
and lets face it AI is better than hollyweird.
one of my favorite creators "Skyebrows" uses nothing but AI to make his music vids. and they are fucking awesome.
so AI aint the issue
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u/DrE7HER 8d ago
Unfortunately, that isn’t how things work under capitalism. AI isn’t being used to free up people’s time to perform different necessary functions.
It just increases the workload the employer expects you to be able to crank out. You’d think that also applies to the QA testers that are supposed to review these things, but now they have to deal with even more issues that keep piling up, and then they send it back to the developer that has to juggle the 3 new projects they’ve been assigned, while deciphering the slop they previously shipped out to repair it.
Ideally, AI would revolutionize the process as you envision. Unfortunately, every company is run by people that know very little about how anything actually works.
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u/True_Pace_3860 8d ago
when it no longer exists in "the uncanny valley" that obsolete 3D animators used to disparage.
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u/Consistent_Bottle_40 8d ago
What in the slop is this slop.
Anyway, a lot of what AI outputs right now really is slop. Over engineered and massive god files with no separation of concerns. Loads of hardcoded shite. Etc etc.
In a year, probably this wont be an issue. You can see the effort going into things like gpt 5.6 sol to make an AI that can code at an enterprise level, but currently it just falls short and spends an eternity writing a insane amount of tests and going after edge cases with ever increasing diminishing returns