AI Is Making People Lazy
An increasingly noticeable trend, especially in the Silicon Valley world, is how lazy AI is making people. There are two broad categories I think exemplify this phenomenon.
First is the proliferation of what might be called "company slop". This is not the same as the usual AI slop consumed on trough TikTok or YouTube (e.g. Tung Tung Tung Sahur), but the same style of content you would normally see with companies (e.g. press releases, white papers, etc.) but obviously low quality AI outputs. It is not that are merely using AI (as is all but mandated by their investors). It that the quality is so much worse than before, and it is clearly a result of exceedingly low effort AI generation. There have been a number of recent announcements (from companies with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of funding) that put out matplotlib style figures that have axes mislabeled, or text that overlaps with lines and is impossible to read, or other immediately visible errors (I won't link to these examples because I cannot definitively prove they are AI generated, but anyone who has the misfortune of seeing enough claude outputs will recognize it). As recently as this week, I've seen startups are launching with >1 billion dollars in funding, and releasing the most slop websites. To be very clear, this specific article is not criticizing the AI component of this. The problem is not that people are using AI to make their websites; it is that they are using AI to make worse websites (than pre-AI). Apparently nobody is even looking at the outputs, before immediately pushing it to prod. Like you have some text that overlaps with your plot, after you typed "plot this data" to claude, just type "the text overlaps with the line, move to the right". Perhaps these people are actually ahead of the curve in recognizing the web is an empty chamber of bots and people who like interacting with bots, so if it's just LLMs chewing up text and feeding it to occasional viewers, why spend any extra time on the quality of something when it doesn't matter?
The second category is specific to a different class of users. An increasing number of people do a lot of coding with LLM coding tools (although perhaps less than the token salesmen would indicate), and there is a strikingly common usage pattern. People take something that would be trivial to do, such as changing the color of a simple UI (you have the color hex, just use replace in VS Code, it is literally a single click). These are not people who don't look at files any more, but they are still typing out "replace color [x] with color [y]" into the LLM, waiting 30 second for 1k tokens, then it proposing an edit that is accepted without being looked at. For more complex tasks, when people code, even if it is slower, more expensive, and lower quality, people rather sit at an opencode screen and hit "accept" rather than actually type it out.
Now, this is not isolated to VC backed companies, there is an increasing number of academic papers that engage in this behavior as well. Not that the whole paper is AI generated (although an increasing number of meaningless ML papers are), but that the central plots of the work are clearly claudeslop (to be clear, I don't mean like the figures themselves are AI generated images, but they are the output of poorly programmed matplotlib files that were almost certainly written by AI). Like these figures, even for non-computer scientists, would've been unacceptable in a previous era. Now, even if they are socially/editorially acceptable, I can't imagine having so little care for a paper that you would do that. The point, again, isn't that it is AI generated, it's that it is so poorly AI generated. It's that people aren't even willing to put in the work, and when I say work I mean, typing into a computer "move the legend to the right to not overlap with the line", like 3 cycles (and a "cycle" is just like one sentence you write and waiting 2 minutes for AI) would make these things better!
There is a seemingly endless number of examples of this phenomenon, that effects a surprisingly large number of people, in which they would rather spend more time, effort, work, and money to produce something lower quality than they could've accomplished without it.
This blog was covered here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHpkJrCKytg