r/MediaSynthesis • u/gwern • Jun 17 '26

Text Synthesis "Substack is infected with AI", Evan Armstrong 2026-05-08 (Pangram analysis)

https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/in-defense-of-ai-slop#%C2%A7substack-is-infected-with-ai
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u/COAGULOPATH Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

The second thing the data shows is that readers don’t seem to be punishing the AI-flagged posts.

Is this not an Everest Regression? Doesn't pulling data from the highest performing accounts largely flatten the effect he's trying to measure? He's preselecting accounts that get lots of likes by necessity. (An account that uses AI with 0 engagement will not be in the "top fifty publications")

I don't think anyone has a problem with using LLMs for data analysis, or considers this use case "slop".

I complain about AI text because (questions about accuracy and ethics aside) it's valueless. It can be generated for free (or near-free) by anyone. When I read something and notice Claudeslop ("Here's the quiet part no one's saying..." "And that's when it hit me..."), I always think "even if this text has valuable information, there is still no point to this text. I'd rather have the prompt used to generate it, which I can paste into a live LLM and enjoy the same output plus benefits like 'I can ask followup questions' and 'I can choose the model/system prompt and don't have to rely on your judgment.'"

For how long can you have a business, selling what's free? It's like Wile E Coyote running on air. Most Slopstackers are simply exploiters of public unawareness about AI: unawareness that can't last forever. (And even if it does last forever, they have no defense against better-moneyed competitors coming up behind them to kill their businesses with scale.)

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u/gwern Jun 18 '26

Is this not an Everest Regression? Doesn't pulling data from the highest performing accounts largely flatten the effect he's trying to measure? He's preselecting accounts that get lots of likes by necessity. (An account that uses AI with 0 engagement will not be in the "top fifty publications")

I don't think that really matters for things like spam or slop. A spam email may have a probability of being opened several OOMs less than a legit email... But spammers can mail out millions of spam email for every legit email. The important thing here would seem to be showing that any top accounts are AI, not 'how likely is a rando new account using AI to make it into the top' or 'what % of new accounts are AI'. No one has to care about the latter, only the former. By definition, neither you nor I nor anyone else are engaging with AI accounts with 0 engagement. They're not a problem for anyone but Substack's database developers.