I’ve been writing technical stuff for fifteen plus years and I am done writing for others since nobody is reading. The trend has been going for years, but now AI has put the final nail. We used to search the Web for precious resources, now an LLM vomits slop answers to unasked questions polluting the Internet and our brains. Ironically, all the things we wrote in the past fed these giant models that produce (when we are lucky) mediocre texts. The point is that people read such slop, it is easier, it is faster and it is sycophantic.
So this is what is happening. Professionals and skilled people spend their time and put significant effort into writing articles, essays, books, ... . During training, LLM’s ingest all this writings along with much lower quality material. To an LLM, a Nature article and a Reddit post have the same importance! When asked to produce text, LLM’s obey and respond to prompts averaging what they have learned, that is, AI slop. The icing on the cake is that search engines, nowadays, provide users a short, easy-to-read AI slop answer or a long hard-thought and well written article. Guess which text is the (average) user going to read?
In the meantime, companies that offer paid access to such AI foundational models, make huge amounts of money, while writers of all kinds get (if lucky) a few pennies. I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to give my work for free only to see it transformed into some mediocre summary.