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> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.

then they get angry. very angry.

just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.

edit — these are the hidden requirements.

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.

until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.

now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.

I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?

It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex.

Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?

> lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements

This is what produced our high standard of living.

For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.

Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.

> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.

> For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.

For many reasons.

It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant.

It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out.

It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past.

It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care.

The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off.

and so on… … …

Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.

Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.

That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware.

Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.

> Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies.

> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.

This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?

> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

Absolutely no one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0

I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold Niebuhr.

Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.

Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc

It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.

Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.

People in power won't act out of foresight or ethics. They'll act when the cost of not acting exceeds the cost of doing something messy and imperfect

I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?

"People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they also protected from immigration?

>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.

Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.

>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

Nobody. They will try to channel it.

I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.

If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.

> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy

Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.

What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?

A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".

Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.

> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.

Welcome to capitalism!

> very many will struggle without work or prospects.

People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.

It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there

Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow, money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth. That's a big difference.

Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making

Cost of offshoring to ai isn’t zero. Chatgpt and such are businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost you’d pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.

The data center buildout feels obscene when framed this way. Not because computation is evil, but because we're burning planetary-scale resources to accelerate a culture that already struggles to articulate why quality matters at all

Very well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for yet.

Quality. Matters.

It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately, 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time, or never, because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]

Every successful software project reaches an equilibrium between utility for its operators and bugs, and that point very rarely settles at 0% bugs [1].

When software operators tolerate bugs they’re signaling that they’re willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts of the feature that work and that they need.

The idea that consumers will somehow not need the features that they rely on anymore is completely wrong.

That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of the negotiation: Coding agents doesn’t change that one bit. Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because it’s cheaper to do so.

I don't think LLMs are the root cause or even a dramatic inflection point. They just tilt an already-skewed system a little further toward motion over judgment

If it can enable very small teams to deliver big apps, I do think the quality will increase.

> brittle plywood furniture

If only it was plywood, at least it'd be solid and sturdy. These days it's particleboard, which is much worse than plywood. Similar concept, but now made out of sawdust and glue instead of woodchips and glue that are alternately laid down in different orientations layer by layer for increased strength.

Particleboard chips much easier, breaks down much faster with moisture, and can't hold screws in. But it's very cheap, can be made very smooth, and is light.

Agree with the general sentiment though.

Actually Louis Rossmann finding himself forced to convert his genuine advocacy for repair into textual convenience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

Speaking of slop..

We're pretty good at naming fear when it has a physical trigger. We're much worse at naming the unease that comes from watching something you care about get quietly hollowed out over time. That doesn't make it melodrama, just a different category of discomfort.

Step 1: Start looking beyond your code, as the stuff beyond your code is looking at you.

Its existential dread, of being useless and of not being able to thrive.

Its being compared to that of a slop machine, and billionaires claiming that its better than you are in all ways.

Its having integrity in your work, but the LLM slop-machines can lie and go "You're actually right (tells more lies)".

It all comes down to that LLMs serve to 'fix' the trillion dollar problem: peoples wages. Especially those engineers, developers, medical, and more.

I agree completely, and I’m doing the same thing. Good tools that help produce better outcomes will have a multiplicative impact as models improve.

What are you building?

I’m glad cheap stuff exists. Sometimes I really do need something quickly, and borderline-disposable quality is good enough. But I also want the option to buy better than that.

I installed some drywall a few years ago. I plan to install a room of drywall exactly never again. Not worth it for me to buy the best drywall tools.

But I have installed multiple wood floors, replacing old carpet, and would do so again if needed. I’d rather get higher quality tools there so I can keep them and reuse them for years.

And then you have to buy it again next time because it broke. I've never killed a power tool. I don't use them that much but neither do you. And when you have a library of power tools in your shed and don't have to go out and buy one, you can do more things more quickly.

Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.

This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash versions of better quality tools have always existed.

Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality, consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of quality around the mid- to late-2000s.

If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera, Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.

The bear case for Workday is not that it gets replicated as slop, but that its “user base” becomes dominated by agents.

Agents don’t care about any of Workday’s value-adds: Customizable workflows, “intuitive” experiences, a decent mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring databases.

I find working with LLMs much more fun and frictionless comprated to the drudgery of boring glue code or tracking down nongeneralizable version-specific workarounds in github issues etc. Coding LLMs let you focus on the domain of you actual problem instead of the low level stumbling blocks that just create annoyance without real learning.

Good luck, there are too many forces working against that.

Only big creative companies like Disney can play the game of making licensing agreements. And they are ok with it because it gives them an edge over smaller, less organized creators without a legal department.

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-openai-sora-agr...

Who's going to enforce that, exactly?

The future you describe seems closer to the "Carol from Accounting" future I am hoping for in the blog post. My worry is that cost of everything goes down just enough to price out of existence all of the artists the 0.1% used to commission, without actually letting all of humanity do the same.

>Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.

There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store.

I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the extra will be decent remains to be seen.

I kinda feel like we're at a point where it would be much more valuable to have higher quality software than more software.

This is just the outsourcing argument all over again. Maybe the degrees of difference matters this time?

Some of us have a perfectly good game plan for that. It's called Universal Basic Income.

It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.

Right. If the "slop" is truly "90% as good" and that 10% actually matters to people, then they won't use the slop. If the 10% doesn't matter, there's probably a reason for that.

This has been my experience. I tend to use chats, in a synchronous, single-threaded manner, as opposed to agents, in an asynchronous way. That’s because I think of the LLM as a “know-it-all smartass personal assistant”; not an “employee replacement.”

I just enjoy writing my own software. If I have a tool that will help me to lubricate the tight bits, I’ll use it.

I'm less afraid of people using LLMs for coding well than I am of people not caring to and just shipping slop.

This is the browser engine I was alluding to in the post: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender

I was disappointed that your paper devoted less than a sentence in the introduction to qualifying "slop" before spending many pages quantifying it.

The definitions you're operating under are mentioned thus:

> characteristic repetitive phraseology, termed “slop,” which degrades output quality and makes AI-generated text immediately recognizable. (abstract)

> ... some patterns occur over 1000× more frequently in LLM text than in human writing, leading to the perception of repetition and over-use – i.e. "slop". (introduction)

And that's ... it, I think. No further effort is visible towards a definition of the term, nor do the background citations propose one that I could see (I'll admit to skimming them, though I did read most of your paper--if I missed something, let me know).

That might be suitable as an operating definition of "slop" to explain the techniques in your paper, but neither your paper nor any of your citations defend it as the common definition of an established term. Your paper's not making an incorrect claim per se, rather, it's taking your definition of "slop" for granted without evidence.

That doesn't bode well for the rigor of the rest of the paper.

Like, look: I get that this is an extremely fraught and important/popular area of research, and that your approach has "antislop" in the name. That's all great; I hope your approach is beneficial--truly. But you aren't claiming a definition of slop in your paper; you're just assuming one. Then you're coming here and asserting a definition citing "the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023" and asserting redefinition-after-the-fact, both of which are extraordinary claims that require evidence.

Again, not only do I think that mis-definition is untrue, I also think that you're not actually defining "slop" (the irony of my emphasizing that in a not-just-x-but-y sentence is not lost on me).

I don't know which of the authors you are, but Ravid, at least, should know better: this is not how you establish terminology in academic writing, nor how you defend it.

Slop is food scraps fed to pigs. Folks trying to redefine it in 2022–2023 as "repetitive characteristic language from LLMs" should have chosen a different word.

A computer is a person employed to do arithmetic.

Words expand meanings all the time and frankly I don't think your narrow definition of slop was ever a common one.

You might install PipePipe or YouTube ReVanced, but they'd sooner ban you as a customer than improve their app quality.