The same person who ignores a crooked door frame or a CSS overflow now has a "mostly right" button to bring mediocrity to scale. We unfortunately aren't invested in teaching craftsmanship as a society.
I think without AI the effort of producing slop code or art that sort of looks like a real thing on the first glance is let's say 5% of the effort needed for the real thing that actually works flawlessly. LLMs and diffusion models bring it down to 0.5%.
They are also really good at faking comprehension and make recognizing real experise from phoney cosplayers harder for busy managers, officials, execs, politicians etc.
So while AI CAN be used for useful things, it very rarely is and it requires more discipline than most people are willing to invest.
Also, the way AI is trained on stolen and random low quality content is deeply disturbing.
So yeah, while I'd like anti-AI rants to be more precise and nuanced, in general AI in 2026 is mostly a missuse of a technology with great potential.
Still so many misconceptions about AI on HN, but I guess it’s just how techies are these days.
Yes, that VERY RARELY would work, but for most (and I mean 98% not 51%) people it doesn't. It's non symmetrical.
> bit sides can make slop, which is true but irrelevant
Idk, to me avoiding slop seems like the most ethical thing a professional can do these days.
Low quality (low precision) news, code, marketing, diagnosis, articles, books, food, entertainment (shorts, tik-tok), engineering is in my opinion the biggest problem in XXI century so far.
Low quality AI usage decisions, low quality AI marketing, retraining, placement, investments are accelerating the worst trends even more. It's like Soviet nuclear trains - just because nuclear is powerful and real it doesn't mean most of it's applications made any sense.
So as a pro-AI person and AI-builder in general, I want more anti-AI-slop content, more pro-discipline opinions.