The epidemic
It's everywhere on dev.to, and it's everywhere else, too. I'm tired of it.
AI generated content.
You know, we can spot it. The generic, bland and boring articles, which are usually filled with inaccuracies. The image without personality. The creepy videos with no real meaning. But let me tell you: If you do not want to put in the work to research, to learn and be an expert, to struggle and get good at a craft you enjoy, then you don't provide value in any way. And if you do not provide value, what is the point? It's worthless to anyone out there who would be better off just reading the docs, or an actual book written by a human; and it is worthless to you, because you don't even seem to enjoy the process itself enough to actually do it. So, why even bother?
Yeah, I get it, it's all about those 'likes' and 'followers'... but let me tell you: even those are probably mostly bots.
I'm tired of it.
Pointless articles
And there it is again. Another article on dev.to. Not really interesting to read, and full of wrong things and stuff that does not even exist. As soon as you point it out the authors usually get pretty defensive. Just lying and trying to gaslight you into thinking they actually wrote the article by themselves, even though you can prove the opposite by simply using the the title of the article as a prompt to generate an article which sounds 99% identical. Sure, mate, you are allowed to just create a bland article using LLMs... but please, don't try to tell me you're actually providing value by doing that. And, please, pretty please, at least check if the info is correct. Do the code snippets work? Do the CSS properties even exist? And while you are on it: please check if you actually provide any value over me just reading the docs, or putting the prompt into ChatGPT by myself.
I don't really enjoy writing. I don't enjoy the process of getting good at it. I don't even feel like I have much to say. But still, if I think I want to tell something I'll write it myself, because I want at least try to add value. I want to do things I enjoy. I'm pretty sure just creating prompts is not fulfilling to anyone in the long run.
I'm tired of it.
Email decompression
I noticed an interesting thing lately. There are people on one side just using a simple prompt to generate an email. And then there are other people on the receiving end who take the email and paste it into ChatGPT to have it summarized. It's some sort of inverse compression: Make it longer before you send it and condense it again after receiving. Maybe we might try to do the opposite: Write a full email, let the AI condense it into the summary and send that. Or how about you learn to write concise emails to begin with? Or maybe digital communications is getting pointless anyways since there are only bots left on both sides. In any case...
I'm tired of it.
Be human
What should you do? Be human! Take the time to suck at something. I'll be way more interested in your crappy beginnings full of personality. I'll be way more interested in the craft you spent hours with. I'll be way more interested in your article with typos, grammatical inaccuracies and stylistic flaws, but full of your wit and passion. Your story matters, not the one AI compiled from the statistical probabilities of millions of other stories, because...
I'm tired of it.
Top comments (130)
Hang in there, dude. It will only get worse. Try woodworking, I found it fulfilling…
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it will get worse. I try to stay away wherever possible. Unfortunately we do have to function within the current environment. Woodworking sounds nice, I might also try physical painting or drawing... or anything else which has some actual physical output.
we are definitely shaped by the same algorithm, because I thought THE SAME, tried woodworking and then I want to paint. Everything is cyclic.
What's also pretty fun is 3D modeling in blender or some other 3D software and then getting started with 3D printing. :D
Great idea, the only fear I have is that we won't be able to escape from AI and its influence anywhere, not even in woodworking ...
I wrote in a comment here "maybe I wouldn't choose a career in IT or development anymore", but I soon realized that that's probably a delusion - in all likelihood there will be far more professions that will be invaded by AI than ones that are totally not impacted by it ...
"Escapism" might not save us in the end, we'll probably need to learn to live with this - echos from the previous 4 or 5 "industrial revolutions":
There was a time some two centuries ago when people were smashing the steam engines in factories because they feared mass unemployment - well, we know how that worked out ... I mean, you can't really stop "progress", you can only try to minimize the downsides of it.
That’s for sure, we won’t go away from it. It’s just that we all need some distractions from this AI fatigue from time to time. To feel sane (if not safe) again.
And yes, I wouldn’t (and I won’t if I won’t be forced to) ditch my software craft because of the AI invasion. Just like in aikido philosophy: we need to use the power of our enemies against themselves 😅
Well said ... it will be okay once we move away from the craze and the hype, and it becomes "just" a tool in your toolbox :)
True
I was shocked when I read this:
"Yeah, I get it, it's all about those 'likes' and 'followers'... but let me tell you: even those are probably mostly bots."
People are doing it because of likes and followers on Dev Community, tell them, anyone it's not Instagram, It's a platform to share your story or journey in words about something valuable to the community.
Lol I tried this too, I think we are ruled by an algorithm for sure. Our subconscious mind is modeled by it.
Wookworking is nice but get a good N100 half-mask plus a dust collector...expecially if you work with exotic hardwoods
You want another zen-like activity that I find satisfying as a dev even if I don't necessary manage to obtain something?
Gold prospecting in a river or a creek, you still have to use the brain but with an investigative mindset :)
Wow... I mean, are you really doing that? Kinda regularly? Which rivers/creeks, if you don't mind me asking? 😅 (I
honestlywilltry tokeep away from them to avoid competition 🤞)The problem is that new developers are forced by bootcamps to build their reputation by writing on dev.to or other platforms. So, the quickest way to do that is to copy and paste from ChatGPT or similar tools.
The issue is that they don't even read what they copy and paste. If you ask a question or add a comment, they copy and paste that too and ask ChatGPT to answer it.
If you are a mod on Dev.to, you can mark it as low quality.
Oh, great input. Did not think of that. Seems to be related to the influx of low quality PRs in open source projects.
"If you are a mod on Dev.to, you can mark it as low quality." Yes... am on it. Part of the reason for my rant was the observation that I feel like marking more and more as low quality and it seems to be pretty rare to see something deserving a "high quality" mark. I'd love to use it more often...
I wonder. If Dev.to uplift users who are not using AI but don't have "high quality" postings would this alleviate the problem? Let those users experiment with their content and nudge them towards making improvements. Eventually, they'll be able to post something high quality.
The problem of low-quality posts is a very similar one to AI articles. They take more effort to write and don't have as many mistakes, but they're still often just shallow rephrasings of content already available on sites like mdn.
The real problem might just be that, although the content is the same, people read dev articles proactively, while going to websites like mdn specifically to look things up as they need them, so even just copying the same information into a platform like dev might help by bringing it to people's attention. This is just a hypothesis, of course.
Regardless of how exactly, for many users these borderline-plagiaristic articles do still seem to provide some form of utility, so maybe the solution isn't necessarily to keep them away from people's eyes but, ironically, maybe just promote good explainers of that sort separately to prevent a new post listing off the
Array.prototypemethods with one paragraph explaining them from appearing every other week.Other than that, dev just seems to lack a solid concept for promoting creativity and expertise above repetitive content, so when people do write a short post about some cool thing they're doing, it usually just disappears in the sea of listicles and beginner tutorials.
Guys I've been reading your comments and posts for a long time and I'm sure you've read some of mine, too. @syeo66, @jonrandy, @darkwiiplayer and many more, each one with its own way to see the world and getting together discussing technical terms to find what's objectively best on a given use case, or what are the key points to find the best tool for a given job, or the preferred skills or go-to profiles for certain jobs or... plenty of other things.
I don't think AI could help us even half the way we can help each other, honestly. And I know cuz I've tried and GPT4 is no better than 3.5 in most things.
There's has to be a hard limit to it I'm pretty sure, and I'll be doing a specialisation in ML and Big Data starting on September because I really want to know all the details.
I agree on that the drama we have today -since a year and a half ago- is the broad availability of these tools plus the huge investment on marketing plus free tier... altogether did bring the tools to the wrong hands, and I don't believe that a dislike button would fix it in any way.
A proof of that is that we had the dislike button on youtube for ages and what people did? they liked the most dumb sh*t possible while disliking anything that's against their beliefs.
I am a defendant on the idea that kids shouldn't be on the internet. I would even bring it to the next level and say that you gotta have 25 years old -when the brain develops no more- before you can access the public Internet. In the meantime it's just direct messaging similar to Whatsapp without stories, and an educative secured network, wouldn't that be heavenly? Both because they won't get the head full of sh*t mixing social media and reality while growing up and because I doubt a 26 years old that has not been grown up in a toxic environment would suddenly begin to post copy-pasted stuff and insulting people 😅 (oh and big tech companies could not take advantage of kids and teenagers anymore nor shape their preferences, what a pity) but for that.. good luck finding honest politicians!
I wonder how many mods are actually trying to uphold the guidelines that the site has for AI generated content? Almost every comment I see that refers the 'writer' to the guidelines seems to come from a non-mod. I'm curious to know what guidance, if any, moderators have been given on this
Hey I am a mod here too, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing that is done... by me but that's a different thing, I read the dev.to mod guide, and they seem to focus on saying things but not implementing it. I believe they should not pick random people as mods, such as me, I also applied as a mod here just to see how exactly they select, and the funny thing is, they don't even seem to check on whom they are selecting, now this is my personal opinion, but let's be honest here, I applied just 6 months after I joined dev.to, and I had only 1 great article, yet they selected me as a mod, that's a crucifixion. And for the cherry on top, I some how(I have no idea how) deleted my dev.to account, and once I re-made one, I still have the mod feature, which might just be a normal save user profile thing, but who on earth really does that? It's an HTTP delete method, why don't just delete it?
I'm also a mod, and as @ezpieco has said, I have no idea why I was selected. I think it was something about "bringing positivity to the community". To be fair, I do like this idea; if you give a bunch of people moderator permissions instead of a select few, you're much less likely to have gatekeeping, and you generally get a more diverse group of mods. All that being said, there is certainly a bit of gatekeeping seeing that there's a discord server only for mods :p.
I got off topic. Anyways, as a mod, I've been told to flag posts that are AI generated and/or leave a template comment for AI generated content. Past that, we haven't been told anything else. I've had to come up with my own methods for proving that someone's content is AI generated or assisted (because sites like GPTZero aren't always accurate).
Hey, why didn't I get no discord? Well like it doesn't even matters it was just for testing and look, now I am a mod for absolutely no reason, the exact definition of javascript... yeah I sure love making fun of that guy theo and JS. No connection between the two just that both suck.
If you're getting the monthly (or bi-monthly, I forget) mod email, there's an invite link in there.
OK thanks for the info.
How can a bootcamp literally force them to do anything? to obtain a certificate?
The boot camp students are the customers, arent't they? The customer is king, is he not?
Ideally a bootcamp is more than "pay the fee, get a certificate". So, there should be some requirements to get a passing grade... I'm not saying requiring students to post on dev.to is a good requirement, but it sounds possible.
Why do boot camps issue certificates at all, that does not make sense after such a short period the alumni are not experienced yet, but that would be another discussion!
I get the point;
so the people use public collaboration platforms for practicing but they forget to clean up their garbage after they are done.
Yep, I've been thinking on writing about that but I am tired even for that 😅 I didn't mostly because I know it won't have any impact at all. I am aware of the reason behind; it's the same reason for people to share memes and jokes they've found on the internet: "look ma! Got 23 likes 🤡" (20 of which probably bots if we get realistic).
Oh and I've not figured out what could be a non-completely-utopical way of fixing this, either...
Yeah, I don't have any illusions about my impact. Honestly, I do not care about that. I'm not even on any (other) social media platform and could not care about "reach" or likes, or something. I feel like I had to write this just to not feel completely alone, to feel like I'm not crazy and everyone else is just fine. I don't know... something like that.
Yeah, and I don't know any solution. I mean, there seems not even to be a solution for all the problems of social media... and that has been around for about 2 decades now...
You're not alone by a long shot. This article (rant?) was cathartic enough to read that I created an account just to say thanks for writing it.
Personally I don't care if social media becomes 99% gpt by volume and chokes itself out. It might even solve a few problems. But, god, has it become tiring to have this nuclear wasteland of ultra low effort, ultra high volume content bleeding out everywhere else on the internet. Places one could typically go to get useful resources, information, or even opinion are becoming more of a chore to browse every day - unless they are religiously moderated.
I don't know that there ever will be a practical solution. But it's nice, at least, to know that other people are feeling the same way. Thanks for shouting at the void.
That's the spirit, I think it's time to take a break from the stars and the views and the clicks and all that ...
I don't hate social media, not at all - hey look at what we're doing here, this comments section is social media, and it's very much alright - but I want to be in control of how I use it, and not "be controlled by how it's using me" ;-)
I do like social media, to interact with the people and the content that I want to interact with - but I think it would be a good thing, for society and for our own mental wellbeing, if we could get off the craze bandwagon of clicks/views/stars and "going viral".
To be completely honest I feel quite uncomfortable with the amount of attention my little rant gets...
That's because this touches a raw nerve with many people - I don't want to sound dramatic, but I think it's really a philosophical or even an existential question which many people are grappling with at the moment.
The solution exists, and the reason not to implement it is less a matter of possibility and more about weighing its own impact on the community against the harm it would fix.
But whether you think it's worth it or not, a dislike button would quickly fix this problem.
A review process would also fix it, but that brings the inevitable accusations of gatekeeping - and is obviously labour intensive.
Automating AI content detection and flagging suspect content would also help.
Manually trying to help enforce the AI content guidelines appears to be a non-starter and can even get you threatened with 'action' by the site 😑
"Automating AI content detection and flagging suspect content would also help."
If only this would be accurate enough. It's something currently not even giants like Google are able to do reliably.
Yeah, it's not 100% but it might be a help to moderators. I find at least some detectors (zerogpt.com and chatgptzero.com) are fairly reliable indicators.
At least my article would go through. :-D
I've been waiting for a dislike button. Imagine the garbage it would take out.
Great article ... I have serious doubts if a career in IT or development will ever be as fun, delightful and rewarding as it HAS been (in my opinion) over the last few decades ... if were to start right now, I'm doubting if I'd even choose it again!
But, maybe we're all a bit too gloomy and we should let go off our "obsessions" (both negative and positive) with AI, and get on with our lives - focusing on the things we DO like, and ignore the rest.
Yeah, well, I started coding when I was 9 years old. I can't not do it (I think). But I'm very intentional with what I use, what I subscribe to and what I want to have in my life.
Oh, it could still be a hobby, regardless of AI and all that - point is, would it still be enjoyable as a career (to earn your bread & butter) ...
+100
I agree, it's disappointing that this epidemic is everywhere else like you said, not just on dev.to.
It also sucks the joy out of people who are actually interested in writing and enjoy being the editor of their own articles.
On the flip side, encouraging people to not care too much about things like grammatical correctness or typos makes it hard for people who genuinely care about those kinds of things (I was an English major, don't blame me) to express that what they write is written by an actual human being. For example, I want the series I'm working on to have a structure and be as grammatically correct as possible, but in this case it's hard to convey the human effort that goes into crafting those articles. There's this peril that they can be easily assumed to be AI generated content.
I don't know, it's a catch-22 situation, and unfortunately it's all the creative fields that are affected the most, not just writing.
I really think it'll get worse, so maybe the solution is to try woodworking indeed.
I get what you are saying. I just wanted to make clear I wasn't advocating people should write bad texts, but rather I prefer them to be genuine. Sure I enjoy a well written witty and passionate article... but typos and grammatical correctness (also, not everyone is native english speaking, I'm sure not) should not be what drives you to just resort to let AI generate everything.
Also, I have no problem with the opposite: Sure, use AI to get started, or improve what you have... just make sure you know what the article is about and at least check the content for wrong info and hallucinations.
I wrote series of articles about how to make your CV speak. I used various of open source tools as well as paid platforms with minimal investments.
I explained the big picture and went into details of a common issues people might be facing.
End result is a personal CV which can answer questions in your real voice based on your CV.
I have also asked people to give me feedback as I, well need it. To create sort of a loop. As I'm sure many people can do it on their own. It serves as a inspiration more than my a in depth instructions HOW TO.
Would you say something like this brings no value?
I also make sure examples works. Used LLM only for spelling issues. And like to think it's authentic.
And somehow nobody cares. Which is fine but I don't understand what can I offer now?
I have about 7 years experience working in (way too many) start-ups. And somehow I struggle with providing value to others in this form of an article. Any suggestions?
I don't think I'm the right person to answer this. Take a look at my history of articles. They mostly 'do not work' in terms of reach, and I never cared about that. Do I always add value? I'm not sure. I hope so, if the value is only my own perspective, that's seems to be fine. Usually I do not feel like I have much to say anyways... but when i do, I have certainly thought about it for quite a while already.
I struggled with feeling like not being able to add value since forever. Less as coder (at least there I can see the code), but most certainly when I look at the products I was working on. And the feeling was particularly strong when I was working as a music composer: "Why should people listen to my music, when there is so much out there already, and there are the big masters, who were already better than me a few centuries ago."
I think the only thing I can suggest: Your own perspective is unique, it adds value, no matter how little it seems to be.
I understand your view. After all the value seems to increase if quality is high and less people are interested. But quality is the name of the game. I think to add to your comment. Value, as you seem to suggest is each person interpretation of whatever is that the person consumes. But quality seems to be less of an interpretation and more of a fact.
Now what seems to be missing is people not seeing value in quality. Which is sooo strange to me.
This goes beyond dev.to.
But that's for another discussion I guess.
Have a good one 🙏
I believe people will appreciate quality, but if you take a look at anything happening on social media it's seems to be way more important to connect with the people (at least to gain traction). As Ludwig van Beethoven apparently once said "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable."
Edit: But, what do I know: I don't even believe I'm providing particularly much value or quality, and don't think I am good at connecting with people...
Why would I say this does not add value? You do something more than just lining up prompts and copy/paste. My point has nothing to do with the availability of tools, but has everything to do with the value a human can and should bring to the table.
Many billions have been spent on ai and the ROI is currently negative. It won't be long before the most free ai stuff disappears as the vc money dries up and companies stop paying 3rd party vendors for llm access.
It's not going away but people will realise it's a quality indicator that is locked lower than what a human could do. Most companies will be 100% fine with lower quality as long as it makes money (or saves money by firing humans that cost more than the API sub to the llm)
TLDR version;
AI-generated content on dev.to is bland and inaccurate. Let's value real human effort and authenticity over AI-created stuff. Using AI to generate and then summarize emails is silly. Be human, embrace imperfection, and share genuine stories.
On the plus side, the barrier of entry for new developers will be greater than ever, thus protecting our jobs. My career development was based on finding golden nuggets of articles online written by people who really know their stuff to bring my skills to the next level. It was extremely hard to sift through all the less in-depth articles to find these golden nuggets. Now with the help of AI, finding these golden nuggets will be like finding a needle in the haystack of low quality or even wrong information. Good luck to new developers!
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