One good measure is that in pre-AI world the person creating a piece of information normally used more time to create it than the person consuming it would need to consume it. Writing used to be slow, reading is fast.
So, when I see an AI wall of text without any editing, I assume that the author did not bother spending their time on it, but they want me to spend more of my time on reading it than they spent on creating it, and I refuse. Everyone has access to the same AI, and if I want to read AI generated text with little to no human author involvement, I'll go ask ChatGPT or Claude.
Same goes for GitHub slop PRs which are faster to create than to review.
So the issue it's then the lack of polishing, intention, drive, which again in every case of my list is the same irregardles of who does it.
On the other hand if there is no AI involved, but as another comment here mentions, before ai times, the ntfs driver that was not polished enough, then it's also slop.
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One good measure is that in pre-AI world the person creating a piece of information normally used more time to create it than the person consuming it would need to consume it. Writing used to be slow, reading is fast.
So, when I see an AI wall of text without any editing, I assume that the author did not bother spending their time on it, but they want me to spend more of my time on reading it than they spent on creating it, and I refuse. Everyone has access to the same AI, and if I want to read AI generated text with little to no human author involvement, I'll go ask ChatGPT or Claude.
Same goes for GitHub slop PRs which are faster to create than to review.
So the issue it's then the lack of polishing, intention, drive, which again in every case of my list is the same irregardles of who does it.
On the other hand if there is no AI involved, but as another comment here mentions, before ai times, the ntfs driver that was not polished enough, then it's also slop.
Yes, for the NTFS driver point, I guess "slop" is nothing new, it's just now it's much faster and easier to produce it in crazy amounts.
But also, even the NTFS driver passes my test of "more effort to create it than to review it", by the way.
Absolutely agree, and yes AI is an slop-enabler tool.