On AI Criticism - Dennis Forbes

Dennis Forbes<br>On this page<br>AI Slop Sucks, But The Idealized Alternative Is Not Honest

A submission sarcastically titled Please Use AI front-paged on Hacker News a week ago.

It’s an interesting bit of poetry. I don’t want to make too much of the specific examples it presents, but use it as a kicking-off point because much of the anti-AI rhetoric uses these sorts of high-contrast dichotomies as their narrative foundation.

A sort of “the alternative to someone using AI generated slop is performing the most personal, heartfelt, involved, considered, thoughtful alternative, with full care, concern and attention”.

Is that really the experience of anyone, anywhere?

Coding, for instance, given that’s where I’ve spent my career: I can unequivocally say that Claude Code / Opus 4.8 generates solutions better than 99%+ of the code I’ve come across over my career, including important, lauded projects. Dramatically better code1.

More secure code. More “considered” code. Better commented code. Higher performance code. With a better separation of concerns facilitating future extensibility and maintainability.

Current coding tools are deeply imperfect and prone to faults, but so are most coders and coding teams. Assign programmers the output of other programmers, and almost to a `T’ they will declare it unmaintainable, unintelligible, and that the best course of action is rewriting from scratch. Yet suddenly when you introduce AI into the equation, an imaginary panacea arises.

Could good developers make code at the same level or better with the proper effort and consideration? Of course! But often we’re throwing together something as quickly as possible to solve an immediate problem or under tight deadlines (//TODO - fix this hack later!), don’t want to bother “premature optimizing” design or performance considerations until it reaches a critical problem level, etc. The real world conditions most developers generate code in does not promote top quality code.

The vast bulk of code on this planet is terrible, and it’s important that people are honest about this. It is sub-slop. It is insecure, poorly considered trash, and this is why enterprises having a large code footprint is very seldom an asset, and often is instead just a massive debt that grows with every line added.

This same observation holds across almost every field. Massive industries of people generating thoughtless, lazy trash.

The zero-creativity, copy-paste advertisement world, for instance, where the same ads are regurgitated countless times, just mixing up the product and demographics for what you’re targeting. For instance the classic silly, stupid husband does something dumb, and his rational, intelligent wife makes an “oh gosh” look at the camera and saves the day. I instantly despise any product that has this sort of trash ad, which means that I carry a lot of emotions for a lot of product given that it’s by far the most common advertisement template.

A large percentage of television and movies now are just remixed updates of stuff that was successful in decades past, albeit maybe with the creative direction to “put a chick in it and make her gay”. An entire field where the vast majority of content is worthless slop long before AI, armies of shameless “creatives” just doing the laziest possible thing.

This same thing can be seen everywhere. Wedding speeches are just a cliché. The whole idea of “genres” in art and music is an admission of follow-the-leader remix and repeat behaviour, sometimes taken to such hilarious extremes it seems like parody. And if people really think most kids wrote creative, thoughtful essays before LLMs came and corrupted the youth … were these same people born yesterday?

Sure, a small, tiny subset of students did, but the dominant, average behaviour was just cliché, maximum-lazy slop. The dictionary defines cliché as “1<br>: a trite phrase or expression”…

Large volumes of creative and intellectual output has been slop for decades.

Is someone individual if they put on the “goth uniform”, looking precisely like the genre of “goth” is supposed to look? Is it rebellious and tough to jack up your Dodge Ram and hang truck nuts from it and roll coal, just like the countless other “rebellious” guys pursuing exactly the same image and following an identical template? Or to buy a Harley, grow a beard and apply the “tough biker” template?

It goes on and on. There is perilously little that isn’t already lazy “slop”. There are entire industries where almost all of the participants are just slop purveyors, long before they asked ChatGPT to slop it up for them.

Most of us are just following a script and playing a role. Much of humanity has long been robotically stumbling through the motions with minimal effort.

I linked a video from someone who put it much better than I can previously, and that video is worth a purposeful, attentive watch from beginning to end. Don’t ask Gemini to summarize it,...