Your point #4 is whats wrong here.

Millenials have aged.

We dont care enough to be bleeding hearts - so there best be no political conversation, bc we don't want to care.

There is a slice of us that refuse to even like interact with AI -> bc they are afraid of it, either taking their jobs or becoming Skynet - I have no idea.

If more interacted with AI they would realize AI is - maybe we would have more startups again, more personal projects - the majority of people on this platform have access now to something that renders solo/small team projects much, much more plausible -> so, where are they?

That you think AI is such a limiting thing is exactly what I mean.

HN is not more close minded - the People here are. Slowly becoming the boomers for Gen Alpha/Beta to hate.

> the majority of people on this platform have access now to something that renders solo/small team projects much, much more plausible -> so, where are they?

I question the sales pitch from these AI companies, because this isn’t happening.

The AI built projects that are posted feel very much like AI toy projects.

The only real interesting thing I’ve seen so far was Glaze from a couple days ago, from the Raycast people. Though it does make me a bit worried about the future.

I understand where you are coming from but this is the primary misunderstanding - AI doesn't do anything on its own, if you have an AI 100% do something, that will likely suck. AI is a tool, a resource, and something that you can outsource all the tedious and monotonous stuff to.

Its also incredibly helpful if you dont know what you are doing. You can learn from an AI.

My biggest project I've used AI for was a book of poetry. AI can't write poetry very well at all - I don't think that I used a single AI written line (I had notebooks filled with writings from over the years) but in general I had absolutely no idea how to write poetry - I know exactly how to write it now - like as if I went to school for exactly that.

AI is also a better researcher than most people, so everyone ought to be using AI for search 100%.

I had 3 startups back in the day, none of them took off - I have not done any web development in over a decade, I'm in the early stages of starting a project that I should not be able to do and yet I am planning on doing it.

This is excellent. This is exactly what we get for trying to prevent progress.

You can't stay still, it doesn't matter that you think this is worse than it was - it just is.

We need to teach kids from like kindergarten how to use AI in their lives - not for specific tasks, but as a tool that is omnipresent in their lives.

I'm a millennial, I had my math teacher give me the "you won't have a calculator in your pocket" speech - but I do tho, 100% of the time, he couldn't have been more mistaken if he tried.

Why are so many millenials acting like my math teacher??

Your math teacher was wrong when he said, "You won't have a calculator" but he wasn't wrong when he implied "You need to learn this."

If children are allowed to use AI as an omnipresent tool, what do you believe students should learn? Lots and LOTS of people would be perfectly happy to outsource all of their thinking to AI as soon as it's possible to do so.

Yeah, Justin - we won't care until there is no "human operator" - you've created this AI this way, you set it on this path, you prompted it to arrive at conclusions, and you directed it.

When an AI can operate like this without any human agency involved

Thanks for sharing this - I need to give these guys more money - this is the journalism we need right now.

There are so many trials in the future for these 1,500 people.

Oh - so the kid went out and he got permission to do this?

Where is that? Who approved his request?

Who cares? The Treasury Secretary shouldn't have family profiting off fixing illegal policy the Treasury Secretary enacted. That should never happen. It is wrong, it doesn't explicitly spelled out.

Commerce* Secretary. Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce which implements tariff policy. Bessent is the Treasury Secretary.

What a week argument - your still making excuses for this nonsense. Ridiculous.

This is actually quite good and you ought to be proud of it!

You have an almost trigger attention grab - from a marketing/advertising pov, I'll repeat, this is quite good. I wish the content was different but only bc I think it will really strongly resonate with some people - which of course is itself a metric of success.

I really like the experience and the incredible potential for artistic expression with this framework.

I think you might be onto something significant - it could almost be like its own form. (I'm not on much of the internet - so just ignore me if this a style I ought to exactly know)

Regardless, well done!

You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads.

I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans.

The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve.

A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almost certainly still a racist, sexist, and ignorant community today.

Being able to name especially egregious forums is the point. AI slop isn't worse than preceding slop, but it is more widespread, partly because it's more socially acceptable than racism, sexism, and ignorance, and partly because it's harder to identify.

Similarly, email spam that is easy to automatically categorize is not a problem.

Making slop less sloppy makes the problem worse, not better. You could claim that that's only up to a threshold, but there's a pretty strong information theoretic argument against that.

I am making no claims about slop - I think that saying, "AI slop is going to ruin the internet" is something that itself requires further clarification.

I'm assuming you are advocating for AI to "go away" or be banned or something of that nature - that is most definitely not a valid argument.

AI doesnt do anything. People set the AI on a task. People have every right to ruin the internet however they see fit (within legal realms) and I dont even think you are actually upset about the actually more "unleashed AI" that post comments and participate in chats with specific agenda - you are annoyed with the websites that are mostly AI content...

The AI didnt make the website, select the topic prompt, and paste that onto the page -> a person did that. Your actually upset at people for not posting content up to your standards - which people have been saying the entire time the internet has been a public thing.

I honestly do not understand what part of this whole process, and AI content in general, appears so empowering for this.

Your argument is essentially akin to "people don't kill people, guns do" and all artuments framed this way, operate under an assumption that they are like some arbitor of quality - and simply by stating "AI Slop" it makes it so.

All of this is nonsense.

AI slop is ruining the current internet, including forums, email, blogs, announcements, and much of the remaining content. I say "current internet" because we will adapt as we always have, but many things that were formerly useful or interesting will be buried in so much crap that it will stop being something that people use the internet for.

At the dawn of email, I could and did cold email professors, and they would respond based on whether my query was worth responding to. I put effort into my messages (and had a reason, I wasn't just trying to elicit responses), and my success rate was very high. It wasn't scale that killed that, it was spam and greed. (There's overlap, but by spam I mean unsolicited commercial email, and by greed I mean people blasting out large number of low-effort messages in an attempt to gain something.) Professors are still interested in meaningful correspondence, but email is no longer a usable communication medium unless they already know their correspondent.

AI applies the same dynamic to many more forms of content. Individually, it doesn't do much harm. In aggregate, the meaning and value are rapidly being destroyed.

It's kind of ironic -- in the early days of online communication, there was endless hand-wringing over all the cues and subtext that we've lost from face-to-face communication. Now we take that loss as a given, and have collectively decided to attenuate the signal even more.

I wouldn't advocate for AI to just go away in all domains. It's a cool and useful technology. But I personally would prefer if representing AI output as your own writing were looked upon roughly the same way as having a secretary write all of your correspondence. Well, a little worse -- it's like have an arbitrarily chosen secretary from a worldwide pool write each item of correspondence. If I ruled the internet, that's where I would set social norms and expectations. People could still use it for translation, but it would be a major faux pas to not divulge your use of AI if there is reason to believe you wrote it yourself. Sure, there would have to be many judgement calls -- if you get an AI's advice on how to say something and then reprocess it into your own words, for me that'd depend on how real that reprocessing is. But that's nothing new, it's just another form of the plagiarism slippery slope.

Sadly, I do not rule the internet, and it's a lost cause.

Whether it's the person using AI or AI itself that is responsible? That's a non-sequitur. I don't care. Describe it how you like. I'm describing the effect, not assigning blame.

I have extensively used AI - its not as capable as you think it is. I frequently run into hard limits of its ability - I understand what recursive means in the sense of an AI, I can see it folding into itself pieces of this and that of what I've said or has been discussed to create the appearance of depth, growth or progress - none of that is real. The AI does not change.

I use AI as feedback - but only after setting almost 50 variables/conditions for that feedback, because AI is an automatic sycophant 100% - but it doesnt have to be that.

I occasionally use AI to transfer what I am saying to a person, into words that don't offend them - as I have absolutely no patience for people's insecurities when I find myself in a position where I need to teach them something, which happens often.

Let me be very clear - you are not capable of identifying AI content any longer, nobody is.

I extensively tested that by having a broad conversation with some of the smartest people on a platform (on earth in general really) whom all have very real credentials - I engaged with two sides of the AI coin regarding AI being self-aware or not, which is actually being debated, by some of the smartest people.

Half of my comments, I ran thru AI - or just completely generated from a prompt - my most liked comment was not mine - liked by people whose professional occupations is literally AI.

I'm sure this disturbs you - that an AI can create a Wikipedia page with more accuracy, better quality of writing, and in a more engaging way than 99% of human people - that is our actual reality tho.

Now all those little chat bots running around the internet, low level AI - they are creating slop, in exactly the same places and ways that humans do, their very words are modeled after the words people have literally written.

So, an AI can create a 100% perfectly written article for a major publication - and then AI can also fill the comments on that "perfect" article with absolute garbage - very similar to how things have always functioned online.

You need to interact with AI more , so you actually understand it and are not afraid of it, or imagining it with more ability than it has, or giving it human agency - AI is literally not capable of having agency at all.

Right now, there are tens of millions of millennials who are functionally identical to Boomers with smartphones.

You can't prevent AI from changing every aspect of human life - nobody can. You can be the boomers who refuses to adopt a smartphone - they all have smartphones now.

Where did I strawman?

And might be the 1st time in my life that I was strawmanned, with an accusation of pulling a strawman - thats pretty fantastic actually, I'll give you that.

Otherwise I wrote a book on the other comment on this - you should check that out.

Every time I open my phone and find myself back on this comment thread, I find new nonsense.

If you are "anti-AI" and you’ve never changed or evolved your argument - I suggest a pause, a step back and a substantial revaluation.

Some of these comments in this thread - have me wondering if they have actually interacted with an AI.

You are not correct on "principle" - this isn't a moral thing, if you have taken an ethical position - its bc you dont have a functional understanding of how to make it function.

If you were functionally interacting with AI, you would have a more substantial postion, with actual criticism that would have value.

I'm reading a lot of sloppy- written by people, about AI slop.