It's rude to show AI output to people

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can’t rely on proof-of-thought anymore. Any text can be AI slop. If you read it, you’re injured in this war.

I really feel this. I’ve read so much AI slop in READMEs on GitHub in the last few months that it’s had me raging on numerous occasions.

In fact, I think READMEs are a brilliant example of this point. As someone who’s written a lot of documentation over the years I really appreciate well written docs, so have always been mildly annoyed at GitHub repos with no docs and sparse READMEs.

The most bare-bones READMEs (of old) were often written by a human who really didn’t wanna write them, but took the time to think about the people using their software and the minimum docs they’d need to do so. Proof-of-thought.

I’d rather have a thousand sparse READMEs than the hundreds of emoji-filled monstrosities I’ve had to work through recently. Especially because 90% of them have less actual information than the sparce docs they replaced.

But then the docs for Astro Editor are mostly AI slop. But it’s very useful slop when AI coding tools are also the reader. In fact, I’ve started putting callouts at the top of markdown files to make it clear whether their contents is intended for humans or LLMs or both.

But in a much more pholosophical context, this his really hard…

We can’t rely on proof-of-thought anymore.

It made me realise that one of the things I love about the internet is that anyone who writes more than a few sentences here has intentionally decided to expend brain cycles and time to do so. This is true regardless of the quality (or sanity) of the thoughts being shared. Every long, batshit-crazy rant on reddit is a sign that the author cared enough to think and type it. Just as every “nah bro” comment underneath it is a sign of the opposite. Only now the “nah bro” is twenty paragraphs long and just as thoughtless.

So yeah… it’s rude to show AI output to people.