In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.
Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.
There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.
In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers what you have isn't just a culture you exist outside of, you have a common faux pas. One of many, many rude and inconsiderate acts that are nonetheless common, like sticking gum under a table or catcalling. Something about the environment prompts antisocial behavior, and shame is one way to shift the environment and reduce the behavior. There are almost certainly more effective ways to change the environment and curb the behavior, but establishing a consensus on whether the behavior is acceptable or not for those in the know is an important step.
In case it was unclear I'm on the "it's not acceptable" side. Do share if you've observed someone appreciative of being grenaded in the wild, though.
Partly, I admit, I just tend to be wary of shame as a tool. "Someone said something I dislike" has a long history of being abused. Conversely, even something like your gum example, one can point at concrete harms like littering and forcing others to clean up after you.
If you take the scripture for holy, then the holy scripture talking back to you making you a prophet, will condemn other fiction as blasphemy.
The people I know -- including myself -- who do this with each other actually don't mind it when people do this and even go so far as to read through the so-called slop... so, either I know a bunch of people who in fact are listeners, or the definition of the complaint needs to be refined?
FWIW, it isn't really that different from "here's a random Google result I found on the topic" or "here's a random comment I found on Hacker News"... if you don't paste it to the other person you can't have a shared discourse around it, as if we both ask the LLM we will get different answers.
And like, that is definitely something that is rude in many contexts: if I did not respond to your comment but just replied with a link to some other comment I clearly didn't read or bother to understand, that should make you angry. But, if I link you off to something I agree with, that's saving time.
Head over to Reddit and look for the obvious AI-generated engagement bait. There are usually a bunch of people earnestly responding without even realising they aren’t talking to a real person. Sure, some of those are also bots, but a huge number of them are real people too.
Average people aren’t good at noticing this stuff. They might not deliberately seek it out, but when they are exposed to it they like it enough to voluntarily spend their time on it.
> In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers
I think it’s quite likely that the people who appreciate receiving slop outnumber the people who don’t.
You know all those support sites for various products (Microsoft, etc) where people ask questions, and lots of folks eagerly give answers that really aren't helpful?
Throwing AI grenades generally falls into the same category.
I don't mind an AI generated answer as long as it's on point, concise, and answers my problem. If I have to read a wall of text in search of the answer, it's useless.
There's a reason I've blocked those types of "answer" sites from my Kagi search results. Kagi is awesome that way.
And friendlies don’t use countermeasures.
Today there might be people who can't extract enough juice from LLMs, so it is not entirely useless to say "I was able to extract this info from a LLM, because I am good at it and you seem to struggle", instead of throwing "just ask Claude!".
I've already used up the tokens, why donate money to Anthropic?
Also, LLM's answers can be good if the prompts are good, so can still be helpful.
> I'd prefer
This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect.
Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
The bait: here is a ton of text
The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it
The new normal: there is ZERO signal about the magnitude of human thought and effort that went into something on the basis of its length
... and what really pisses people off about that: when AIstas intentionally abuse that social contract to their benefit.
E.g. people who pass AI content off as their own, people who don't read their own genai before pasting to you, everyone on LinkedIn
Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it.
(Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)
The consultant mindset set this trend before AI made it all worse.
A lmgtfy link can be useful, even if rude.
It's teaching someone to fish.
Sharing an LLM output is simultaneously pretentious and unhelpful. To the OP's point, some might not consider it rude, but I'd rather someone be rude and helpful, rather than pretentious and unhelpful.
tl;dr -- No, it's much, much worse than an lmgtfy link
> If you encounter a slop grenade, share this page
Culture is cultured, it isn't the wilds, and requires pruning.
It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best.
If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.
I wish that was the case for people with insincere communication practices. On the contrary, they seem to embody the sociopath stereotype that ultimately climbs ladders.
Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”.
With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms.
Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area.
In this case, the notion that the slop grenade is intended to communicate "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help" is as far as we know entirely a fiction, possibly a favorable interpretation GP uses not to let themselves be annoyed. In reality, the intent could be any number of things or nothing in particular.
It seems more likely to me that these slop grenades are attempts at appearing to a third party to have weighed in on important decisions. It's a deliberate technique to become more visible in order to win favor with someone who can't tell reasoned responses from useless bullshit.
This self-aggrandizing trash was a normal part of professional culture before the current LLM sewage torrent, but tactlessly used LLMs are so awful at writing that it's never been so transparent before.
- A way to convince others of your position.
- A way to demonstrate that you did research (because experience is worthless)
- A way to soften harsh feedback.
At first I found this very dysfunctional but now I don't mind too much. It beats being ignored and/or offending someone.
And it's a bad culture. Yes, there are good and bad cultures. Cultural relativism has its limitations.
And of course I notice the people posting the massive slop screed don't seem to have thought critically about it at all. After all, if they had time to read it thinking critically, they probably would have had time to write it.
Its also usually the dickhead nobody likes that does it as well.
> Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
Conversational norms simply do not allow me to give grace or bridge the gap. It would be so, so rude for me to infer that they meant to say "I don't know" if it turns out that it really was a detailed answer they expected me to read in full. I respect that the people who do this probably mean well, but there's some conversations I just can't have with people who respond this way, in the same way that there's some conversations I can't have with people who aren't comfortable exploring contested hypotheticals.
“I don’t know” would be so much more productive and respectful than “here, this may be useful or completely useless, figure it out on your own time. Took me 30 seconds to produce…”
A bit asymmetrical by time, signal to noise, and frankly, bs metrics.
