For many years I have given anonymous feedback on people’s creative writing on Reddit. I always got good feedback showing that my notes were helpful for the recipient, plus it had the added bonus of being helpful for me to develop as a writer.
AI seems now to have ruined that forever. Slop writing seems to be at least two thirds of the output on Reddit. The ‘writers’ ask you to comment on obviously LLM-generated writing that has all the hallmarks of slop. Instead of messy, weird, creative and amateurish honest attempts, now you get completely unoriginal but impeccably spelt and perfectly formatted mediocroslop. I would rather five original sentences someone has actually written and felt than 1 million dollars of multi-llm megaslop.
The etiquette is also gone: these fake writers even respond in their comments with AI-generated comments to feedback people are giving them. Meanwhile, if you call out an em-dash-ridden monstrosity as AI, people ask you to prove its AI (usually actually pretty easy with AI-checkers).
There was even a recent post where someone intimated that the people taking time out of their day to give feedback should be grateful because they had chosen not to ask AI to give them slopcomments.
Art is a difficult ask. It needs people to spend many years working on a craft for an unknown and potentially unrealisable reward. But the journey itself and how it changes you is the reward. I can see how asking an LLM to do some slopography for you is tempting. But to me it’s the equivalent of those fake body builders who inject plastic into their biceps instead of lifting weights.
I’m not sure that dead internet theory is quite real yet, but it’s basically real for me. Something I liked is dead now and I’m sad.