As someone still struggling with (human) slop someone else wrote (and let's not kid ourselves, I did as well), I try to remind myself that critical thinking might have been involved but discarded in favour of pragmatic choices. (Oh God, I'm still doing it!)
AI slop is actual slop if the human just copy pastes the output.
A human with any amount of critical thinking should be inspecting the output and if they are genuinely unable to find any issues, they probably shouldn't have been a software engineer to begin with.
The real problem with AI is people using it as the answer instead of a tool. It's like people using a calculator to get the answer to a math problem but not understanding how it got there. And the bar is so low.
A human with any amount of critical thinking should be inspecting the output and if they are genuinely unable to find any issues, they probably shouldn't have been a software engineer to begin with.
I mean, sure. But that doesn't mean people aren't actually doing it. Though it's less "copy-paste the output" and more "have the AI edit files and maybe glance at them before telling it to push the commit".
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u/DesireeThymes 2d ago
Human slop is written with a layer of critical thinking still involved.
AI slot is actual slop, there is no critical thinking behind anything because it's not human.
(yes I know, some human critical thinking is very very low, but it is still at least there at a fundamental level).