This interesting essay by James O'Sullivan was shared by an academic friend who writes about AI in the classroom.

I am so f**king sick of AI slop

Extracted from it:

What is alarming, however, is the sheer willingness of people to put their own names to any old slop the machine produces.

Take the rise of ‘vibe coding’, for example, which most tech bros represent as some kind of futuristic workflow. Am I the only one who thinks that there is a peculiar arrogance in a ‘developer’ who takes pride in their inability to write or understand the syntax that underpins their own creation? We are seeing software deployed into the wild that is little more than a patchwork of pasted suggestions, a digital Frankenstein’s monster stitched together by someone who has no concept of the structural integrity of the code base. They might feel as though they know what they have built, but they can’t comprehend the gaping security vulnerabilities they have introduced because they never actually engaged with the logic of the system; they simply prompted a black box until the error messages stopped appearing, creating a technological infrastructure that is terrifyingly insecure.

And further down:

The internet was, in its most idealistic (and yes, maybe naive) conception, a sprawling parlour for human conversation and the exchange of genuine thought. That vision is effectively dead. Open LinkedIn or Reddit (or X, if you really want to wind yourself up) and you will see streams of the same beige, hallucinatory text bearing the chirpy, predictive cadence of ChatGPT, generated by users who could not be bothered to read the content they are putting their name to. They enter a prompt and paste the result, engaging in a pantomime of interaction that benefits no one but the platform’s engagement metrics. It is a hall of mirrors where machines talk to machines while humans look on, increasingly alienated from the very networks built to connect them.

He concludes "I can appreciate the technology for what it is, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to forgive the laziness of the people using it."

Amen.