There's AI slop and anti-AI slop [LWN.net]

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 13:44 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: There's AI slop and anti-AI slop by Cyberax
Parent article: Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

I think we'll see good AI-based creations.

I'm sure we will. But that wasn't the question; the question was: "AI might just help some people to do great stuff..." AI is not going to help people at all. It will just do it for them and the human creativity aspect will be so small as to be nonexistent. And that is why the livelihoods of human creators will be destroyed.

But do you understand how the CPU does instruction decoding on the hardware level? Or how the silicon for the chips is made?

I do, actually, at least on a high level. I studied electrical engineering and took courses in both logic design and chip fabrication. I also spent three years working for a company that reverse-engineered integrated circuits.

AI is not simply moving things to a higher level of abstraction, in my opinion. It's a fundamental shift that will mostly eliminate the need for human creativity (at least, as far as AI-enamored managers are concerned.)

But this [AI harming cognitive development] is hardly a new thing

Uh... yes, it is. Can you show me other technologies that have harmed cognitive development, with the possible exception of social media which is pretty universally seen as harmful nowadays?

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There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 17:16 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Can you show me other technologies that have harmed cognitive development, with the possible exception of social media which is pretty universally seen as harmful nowadays?

Tetraethyl lead...

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 18:13 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Sure. And we banned tetraethyl lead (mostly... I believe it can still be used in aviation fuel, or at least it was allowed until recently.)

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 21:06 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> It will just do it for them and the human creativity aspect will be so small as to be nonexistent. And that is why the livelihoods of human creators will be
> AI is not simply moving things to a higher level of abstraction, in my opinion. It's a fundamental shift that will mostly eliminate the need for human creativity

Try AI. And give it a serious try with a sizeable project. You'll quickly find out that it's not going to replace developers. And that there is plenty of purely practical experience required to get value out of it.

You don't have to like it, but even if you're going to be anti-AI then it makes sense to know what exactly you're up against.

> (at least, as far as AI-enamored managers are concerned.)

Hah. I remember when VB/Delphi was all the rage and managers thought that you could just drag&drop things, connect them together, and have them do everything.

AI is the next level of that. But in its current stage it's not the end-goal.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 13:15 UTC (Thu) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] (4 responses)

> Can you show me other technologies that have harmed cognitive development

Books.

What is the difference between the bible and the collected works of The Incredible Spider-Man?
One proves god exists, the other proves spiderman exists.

Or does it?

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 14:50 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

That is obviously tongue-in-cheek. There are fantasy books like The Bible and Spiderman, but I doubt they harm cognitive development, though those who take them too seriously can be harmful to others.

And there are plenty of books that impart useful information and help with cognitive development. Whereas it is my belief that generative AI, as a technology, harms cognitive development by letting people outsource a lot of the thinking they would have had to do themselves before.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 17:38 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Whereas it is my belief that generative AI, as a technology, harms cognitive development by letting people outsource a lot of the thinking they would have had to do themselves before.

In that case, I'd put it as "social media". While there have "always"[1] been folks who outsourced their thinking to their preferred 24-hour news channel, social media "let" everyone do it more often and it inevitably became a habit for more and more people over time.

[1] Modulo 24-hour news being a rather recent development in the grand scheme of things.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 17:38 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

When writing was relatively new, we have people on record as saying that reading and writing harmed thinking abilities because instead of memorising the information you need to know for your argument and being good at expressing yourself clearly first attempt (which is necessary when you're making a speech off-the-cuff), you could have your sources in writing and do a second pass at writing down your argument.

The open question about AI is whether it will end up being like written language, where yes, we lost skills, but the force-multiplier effect of writing meant that we benefited more from the new skills that appeared over the next 50 years than we lost by no longer developing the skills that writing made irrelevant.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 21:45 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> the force-multiplier effect of writing meant that we benefited more from the new skills that appeared over the next 50 years than we lost by no longer developing the skills that writing made irrelevant.

Not to mention the increase in the number of people able to participate in the activities. While being able to orate Homer's epics from memory is useful, I think it is far better that everyone has the ability for their parents to share the stories with them from a book than having to wait for the traveling orator to come around (never mind having to sync up with the flashbacks to make sure everyone is up to speed). We've seen it before too: stage theater to movies; concerts to vinyl; TV and movie theaters to VHS; physical medium to the Internet.