A guy wrote (allegedly) a blog post about “taste” in programming and how it gets lost when AI does all the work.
Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion of your own mistakes, sat with long enough to sting.
The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum. Every wall I cursed while climbing it was, without my noticing, teaching me which walls were worth climbing. The cost that rationed my output also educated my judgement, because paying the cost over and over is how you learn what is worth paying for.
The coders on Hacker News were certain the post was written by AI. Mainly because there were some stylistic giveaways that suggest an LLM wrote it.
But, the author makes a really important point:
A LLM writes that way too, because it was trained on the same essays I grew up reading, so me doing it badly and a machine doing it look about the same to you on the page.
The SEO chum has birthed the style we all know as AI slop.
But, here’s the thing: A) we’re all getting paranoid that stuff is AI generated. We automatically discount it if it comes from a LLM. B) It’s getting harder to tell the difference. In a year or 18 months, no one will be able to tell the difference.
Then what. Will it still be slop? Will it matter? Will Pangram be able to tell the difference?
Side note: Here’s a bit more on Susan Sontag and her essay, “Notes on Camp”. Here’s a link to the whole essay.