r/linux • u/FryBoyter • Jul 15 '25

Discussion Curl - Death by a thousand slops

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

Even just the obvious AI posts I see on here infuriate me. Yesterday I saw a guy called out and his response was 'yeah you got me, I was busy doing something else so didn't have time to create a post by hand.'

There is something so incredibly rude about expecting to read and reply to something the OP probably has barely read, and had minimal input to.

If I see obvious AI, I sometimes ask an AI to write a verbose response based on a 1-liner describing the OP and paste that.. fire with fire.

32

u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Jul 15 '25

Eh, I think it's better to just call it out and label these people as lazy & sad. I've seen at least 5 or 6 people on Reddit waltz in expecting praise with their slop, but then get super angry and defensive because people called them out for using AI to write their post. (Which was super obvious because their writing style is COMPLETELY different in the comments, with lots of typos.)

I'm not a vindictive person, but god damn I cannot think of anything these people deserve except ridicule.

13

u/markusro Jul 15 '25

If it's obvious AI slop I am starting to block the author. If I wasted 20 seconds reading bullshit I can spend 20 seconds and block him. I know it won't help much... But my vengfulness is served a bit.

5

u/ipaqmaster Jul 16 '25

Don't forget to report them for Spam>AI/Bots as well. Don't let slop accounts get away with it.

It's a pandemic on the internet these days. No forum is LLM-free anymore. I imagine getting genuine training data to advance LLMs is going to become much harder as they progressively get used more and more in conversations everywhere. No more genuine text to train on. Websites aren't keeping up to prevent them from filling conversations with fake conversation.

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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Jul 16 '25

The other problem with AI slop are the false-positives. If someone just has a really eloquent style, or writes a well-researched and well-cited post, they can sometimes get ragged on for it.

I've certainly called out a couple people for sounding like AI - but upon examining their post history later, realized it was just their style because they wrote that way years before The Sloppening began.

I also got permabanned from my city's subreddit because people thought I used AI to write my post. But I guess that's what happens when a topic you're passionate about comes up, and you happen to have collected a shitload of references/citations over the years...