As do I... The “AI slop” line is just the latest spin on a very old habit. Before AI became the fashionable accusation, the same sort of people were throwing around “word salad”, “wall of text”, or “pseudo-intellectual waffle”. The wording changes with the times, but the trick is identical - criticise the way something is written so you never have to deal with what it actually says. Longer posts take a bit of effort to read and reply to. Not everyone wants to put that effort in. It’s easier to wave it away with a label and move on than to engage with the points being made. Calling it “AI” is simply the newest version of that shortcut. The irony, of course, is that the accusation reveals more about the person making it than about the person who wrote the post. You and I have been arguing back and forth for quite a while now - what, a couple of years? During that time I’ve we've exchanged plenty of long verbos posts. Some of them well researched, some of them imperfect, some making strong points, others containing mistakes. That’s what actual discussion looks like. And to confirm the accusations - Yes, of course I use AI tools when researching - Gemini, ChatGPT searches, Google, summarising articles to see whether they’re worth reading properly, pulling out statistics, checking sources. Used properly they’re excellent for saving time and sorting through large amounts of information. Used blindly they can also be wrong, which is why they’re only tools and not substitutes for thinking. But the words themselves are mine. AI doesn’t write my posts for me. Claiming otherwise is just another way of sidestepping the argument. My “word salad” is my own. It may be longer than some people care to read - TLDR is a familiar response. That’s the nature of the internet these days: a world increasingly reduced to one-liners, memes, and neat little binary takes - or, in the case of the anti-vax threads, an endless buffet of memes, Twitter pastes, YouTube clips, and assorted fringe sources, simply copied and dropped into a thread. The result, of course, is that responding properly takes far more time and effort than it took to copy and paste someone else’s material in the first place. Some of us still prefer to write things out properly. So if your criticism is really aimed at those who don’t write their own words, look no further than the author of this thread - copy-paste ad infinitum.
Create an account or sign in to comment