“Don’t publish slop”. Everybody agrees. Every dev in sight pats each other on the back. Programmers high-five each other.
“Don’t build tools that generate slop.” The room is empty. One person left a note saying they felt personally offended by the accusation. The note was written by ChatGPT.
Working on generative model tools but then denouncing the slop they produce is utter hypocrisy.
The devs and tech “influencers” who have pioneered the technical work of putting “AI” shit in everything everywhere, and are – for the most part – the assholes who have enabled our brave new “AI” world by actually figuring out how to make it run, are also likely to be the people who get credit for criticising it after the bubble pops.
Everybody will latch onto their vague concerns and ignore the fact that they literally implemented the shit that got smeared everywhere.
Performative bullshit, like blog posts denouncing the use of LLMs to generate “slop” and similar generative model bullshit, while continuing to work on the very same tools the slop-generating systems are built with, is going to provide all of these assholes just enough rhetorical cover to claim to have been responsible all along.
So, we have an obligation to think of them as assholes today, while their hypocrisy is still obvious.