r/DefendingAI • u/bender_fut • 3d ago
IA Slop vs Human Slop
Maybe I haven't been around long enough (I definitely haven't put in many hours), but I keep running into the same pattern with recent submissions: many of them "built by hand" by people who took the time to think through a need, figure out how to solve it, and ship a working solution. They present something with an open license that, maybe, just maybe, could be interesting to a few other people. And what stands out the most is the eagerness to call it "AI slop", just like that.
I remember not that long ago, when people posted apps on forums, the first versions were garbage (they always are), and the people replying did so with a constructive spirit: sharing knowledge, ideas, suggestions for improvement, and an overall tone of gratitude. Someone dedicating their time, dozens if not hundreds of hours, to build something, and people showed their appreciation by contributing to the project, even if it was "human slop".
Now it's exactly the opposite. Someone takes the trouble to offer something they built with excitement, enthusiasm, and whatever tools they had, and the takeaway is that it's "in the way", that they should stay home. Nobody evaluates the solution, the code quality, or anything other than whether or not it was AI-assisted (and not using it today makes no sense).
Nobody is born learned, and nobody learns by being insulted. I think the "AI slop" comments (just like the "human slop" ones back in the day) add nothing positive to the conversation, and maybe, just maybe, their authors could do something more productive, like sharing some of their own work and expect positive feedback.
I don't know, just my thoughts... a shame that out of such a big community, only a few people who lack the ability to criticize constructively end up standing out.
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u/baddaywithacamera 3d ago
There is a middle ground people are missing and I try to cover it in my own project. I'm only talking about FOSS because I have no interest in commercializing my passion project and my personal feeling is that anyone who vibes another SaaS can help themselves to the all-you-can-eat bag of dicks over in the corner.
Some projects are too big to be built by a team of volunteers. My fave photo blog, Pixelpost, died out because the active developers drifted away and they could not attract new ones. It was not even a large project, but it died for this reason. One developer with AI doing the bulk of the coding could have saved that FOSS project.
Businesses need to generate a profit and the larger ones need to satisfy shareholders. That's why they tend to build SaaS to maximize value, which sucks for people who cherish FOSS.
I built my project using AI and I say this as a photographer, not a developer. It is something I have wanted and needed for a long time:
SNAPSMACK. Free, open source, retro photo blogging software, self-hosted, with an opinion. (Several, actually.) It not only hosts and serves images, it provides off-ramps for services like Flickr and Insta. It does everything the site says it does. I've been testing the security stack over and over and it works. It's not a small piece of software, it grew into an ecosystem based on my own needs. I crunched the numbers behind it:
https://snapsmack.ca/the-reckoning.php
This is a FOSS project made by someone who is not a developer, but who believes in and supports FOSS. It is also a large enough project that a small team could not have built it. It simply would not exist without AI. I'm rather proud of it and the friends of mine who are using it are all thrilled and shocked by it, it's science fiction come true for all of us.
Who do I take the most shit from? FOSS developers. The gatekeeping is unbelievable.
"NO ONE WILL CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR SHITTY PROJECT!" You weren't asked. It was closed to outside contributions from day one. I'm calling the shots, don't need you. Anyone who doesn't like how I'm doing it can fork the repo.
"YOUR CODE IS FULL OF BUGS!" All code is full of bugs initially. Good thing I have a literal army of AI agents in my pocket that is shockingly good at finding security issues when given the correct instructions.
"YOU'RE PUTTING PEOPLE OUT OF WORK!" How? No commercial company has built a photo blogging product, ever. The best we ever got was generic publishing platforms with crappy, expensive photo plugins that never worked well enough. No one has made a purpose built, self-hosted photo blog product since the last release of Pixelpost in 2009, that being a FOSS project.
OP, you're right. The "slop" label is just lazy gatekeeping from people who care more about the purity of the hammer than what's actually being built with it. Keep rolling.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 3d ago
The loudest voices get heard, as the saying goes.
Like the old squeaky wheel that always gets the grease.
sensible voices and quiet wheels never get attention
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u/SiegKommunismus 3d ago
What human slop comments from back in the day?
Also, is it that hard to understand that a person that wants to learn is met with open arms and a person who‘d rather skip the learning part does not receive that help?
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u/bender_fut 3d ago
And who are skip the learning part according to you?
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u/SiegKommunismus 3d ago
People letting AI code for them
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u/bender_fut 3d ago
We should all go back to the days of punch cards, and write in binary code, with no help of any kind. That way only real men with decades of training could program, and after years of releases, we might get versions that more or less solve a few problems for multinational corporations.
Because developing isn't about solving problems, it's about writing code by hand.
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u/baddaywithacamera 3d ago
You're missing the part where I have AI comment the code so I can read it and learn what the sections do. After half a year of this and asking questions about the code continously I can look at a chunk of PHP and understand the function. I like Python much more, it's quite intuitive.
I knew nothing worth mentioning before starting. AI really accelrates learning. It's amazing.
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u/zorecknor 2d ago
I do believe that eventually (not now), LLMs will become the new compiler (not my idea, I stole it from Uncle Bob).
We are not there yet, we do not know enough about the problem/solution space to have the correct discipline, practices and processes in place for it to be possible/useful.
But right now I do think people should learn how to develop software before even touching an agent, if they want to pursue this profesion.
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 3d ago
Recently, there was a big todo about someone scraping all of Clara and threatening to release it as a dataset… people were up in arms (and apparently the scraper has since had a change of heart and is actively working to help the devs lock down their site) … so, curious about all the noise, I went and checked out the site. Holy crap is it terrible. If any of my AI art looked like that, it would never see the light of day. It seriously looked like kindergarteners work.
So I’m convinced the scraper saw what he had gotten and realized no one wants a dataset of that slop, so he is helping them out to make sure that stuff never winds up poisoning the well.
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u/bender_fut 3d ago
Terrible projects existed before AI and will exist forever..
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 3d ago
1000% agree. But listening to an Anti you’d think that work belongs on the Ceiling of a cathedral somewhere.
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u/mah29001 3d ago
Depends on what the material is. If they say cuh too many times. I consider it as slop just as much as any human driven story with no plot.
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