I came across this X article titled Something big is happening - a classic vague title to pull a reader into clicking the link. It talked about how LLMs and AI have advanced so fast over the last few months and how you must start using them ASAP because they are going to replace most of the everyday tasks. It talked about how blue-collar jobs are slowly being replaced, especially after recent Codex and Opus models were released and that you should get access to the latest of the models to see the real powers of AI.
And like other such articles on X, this was widely shared and discussed.
Apart from finding the whole article driven by fear of missing out and the fact that the author runs an AI company and hence has vested interest in spreading this notion of "something big happening", I want to talk about a recent, frequent observation I've had in many AI-related content on social media.
If you go to this article, or any such similar article on X, you'd find that they are extremely lengthy. They stress on the aspect of fear and as you read through the piece, you feel yourselves increasingly anxious and the length of the piece ensures that you leave in a heightened state of anxiety.
X, among other social media, I've felt, encourages rage-baity, on-the-edge content and pushes it far more than "normal" content on feeds (a reason why I try to avoid this platform). But what authors like that of the article "Something big is happening" seem to play on is the popular tactic of inducing analysis paralysis. By throwing a large wall of text which is full of fear-mongering, the author paralyses the reader making them unable to think critically and hence leading them to believe what they are preaching.
We have entered the age of overwhelming slop. It's literally DDoSing human readers with AI-generated slop such that we lose the ability to think critically. You know those scenes from movies where a law firm attacks a poor independent lawyer by dumping boxes full of files and data to slow down/block them from progressing?
I don't usually write rants on my blog, but I felt the urge to do this as the article (which is partly AI-generated as per the author) talks about how AI has almost completely replaced the field of writing and content. Here's an excerpt from the article:
To me, writing is for putting down my thoughts and giving them a medium so that I can share them with the rest of the world.
LLMs are great at solving problems when you do not care about the process and want to arrive at the outcome as fast as possible. I use them extensively for such tasks. The outcome with writing though is the process of putting down your thoughts itself. If you skip that and use AI, you are no more writing - you are fulfilling a different outcome, either selling your product, your course, influencing people - not structuring your thoughts and sharing what you think.
It's very much like reading. I've tried to read N number of books a year only to fail in the end and not even complete one. I realised you cannot really "read" for the sake of reading. You must inherently enjoy the process of reading. Similarly, if you feel urged to write in a certain way because of some external factors, think why you are writing.
Recently I've had countable instances where people who read my posts mentioned how happy they were to see a non-AI post on their timeline. I want to encourage everyone to keep writing, it almost feels like a revolution. Keep writing, it's one of the best ways to massage the part of your mind that does critical thinking.
To the ones who are just starting and thinking about writing and are overwhelmed by the AI-slop, I congratulate you for not giving up. Type those words, enjoy the clarity of putting your thoughts down, celebrate that they are your own and share them proudly.
To the ones reading, think critically about what you read. We'll increasingly have to develop abilities to discard slop (think bot protection for your mind) and encourage writers who are sharing their own thoughts.
Happy writing!
