This is a sad post to write, but I feel like I have to write it just because it's been on my mind recently. I'll keep it short.
What is D...
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This is what I felt and almost stopped writing. To test this I even posted an AI generated article or two and surprisingly I was getting more impressions on them than my own written ones. It felt like a brainrot and wrong but also fun(yeah the feeling was like I don't need to put efforts anymore in the writing anymore because I need to delegate it to AI. The less effort I give the more the rewards because every platform now boosts posts that sounds like AI generated slop.) at that time, then it became depressing. Now I occasionally write, when I would really want to share something from the bottom of my heart or just want to write something.
For a while I was also writing articles with AI and performed so well. My conscience got the best of me though and I could not do it in good faith anymore... this is BestCodes's blog not ChatGPT's!
Honest callout!
I wished if many more had thought like you.
Hey! Thank you for pointing this out and have the courage to speak up about it! I was planning on something similar but you beat me to it lol. Not a lot of people have the courage to speak up about this issue and I am glad that you made a post about the use of AI on the platform. Here is my take on this.
Using AI in writing for fixing your grammar is fine. It's a great tool in my opinion to correct grammatical issues and fixing those issues as well. The one thing I despise is using it to write FOR you. It may be faster sure, but it will come off as generic regardless of the topic of choice. I have seen content many time where they use the same style of writing, same style of artwork, and maybe the same style of commenting on someone else's comment. You are not the only one seeing it.
There is more to this. There are some irregularities when people are using it to farm engagement as well. I am not going to make any names because there is a chance where I don't have a full understanding on what's going on behind the scenes. It is also worth noting that this is based on assumptions and it's not a fact. This is based on my perspective.
With that said, I saw some people use AI or some bot to make themselves on the top of the page. Some common irregularities is having 300+ likes with no comments. Strange? For me yes! Again, just assumption that they use a tool to make their post have a lot of likes and engagement.
Maybe I am not understanding how blogs work, but if you were to see that yourself, then I think you will understand from a viewer perspective.
I am writing this to you RAW lol. I have seen people use AI in the comment section in most post. I don't have a problem with that usually but when it comes to a VERY simple article and they over complicate it using AI in the comment section, yea no.
Sometimes I run the article using GPTzero, like you did, and found most of it to be AI. Of course, it can be incorrect. However, if you do it yourself compare to other people, then it raises some flags. Glad you pointed that out.
There was a comment I made on @jarvisscript a while back about AI slop on Dev.to.
Oh Wow! Congrats on being on Dev for 9 Years! Quite a journey you must have and I am glad you are still here!
One thing that stood out: "The rash of AI slop articles is making it harder to enjoy the site.". I started to notice that as well and I am glad I am not the only one. I do not want to call anyone out since that is just disrespectful, but I notice that some people use AI for their articles. I run it through GPTzero and in most cases it is fully written by AI. I do not mind someone writing and using AI to correct grammatical errors, but a person using AI just to write their articles feels like I am the only human person on this site and makes it feel like I am just talking to bots (no offense to anyone, but this is currently what I am feeling right now). I just wish there is an indication of whether the article is written by AI or not? (I could request that feature to @ben about it that shows the user if the article is written by AI or not. Though, it could be controversial in my opinion).
It doesn't ruin the community for me because I enjoy being on here, but I do feel like it does hurt the community in a way because of AI slop and just make you feel like 99% of people on here is not real. It genuinely hurts to think about it since my goal on here is to interact with actual humans.
Thanks for sharing your 9 years experience by the way and hope you are still around in the future :D
Ben responded to my comment stating:
We're actively working on ways to offer a feature like that. Easier said than done, but we'll ship something that should help.
So there are currently working on a solution. Only time will tell when this will be implemented.
Where to go from here?
If you are a moderator on Dev.to and you believe their article is fully AI, report it or mark it as low quality. This is the best way we can filter AI slop and have genuine quality articles on dev.to.
If you are not a mod, report it. This is also another way.
I do recommend starting off with a comment addressing the issues first before taking action. If you do not see that they improvise their content with less AI in it, feel free to report it.
Sorry if I went off a bit. There is a lot to say and I have strong opinions using AI in writing specifically. On Dev.to, the goal is to showcase quality content to users, not to mass produce content. There is no fun in that and it makes the platform boring. It is our job to regulate the platform and ensure Dev.to gets the recognition it deserves for new and existing devs and able to learn from each other.
I think it's okay as long as you are not being rude or be negative. It's good practice to hold each other accountable and learn from our mistakes. I have went to that article an order @sloan to send a notice in that article.
Hey, this article appears to have been generated with the assistance of ChatGPT or possibly some other AI tool.
We allow our community members to use AI assistance when writing articles as long as they abide by our guidelines. Please review the guidelines and edit your post to add a disclaimer.
Failure to follow these guidelines could result in DEV admin lowering the score of your post, making it less visible to the rest of the community. Or, if upon review we find this post to be particularly harmful, we may decide to unpublish it completely.
We hope you understand and take care to follow our guidelines going forward!
Although it is for a submission for an event and there could be a chance that it is a mistake, it's a good reminder to follow the guidelines of the use of AI. I believe the evidence you provided is sufficient enough for me to send a Sloan message. Again, as long as you are not being rude, that's ok from my standards. No worries!
Thanks for sharing! I saw your post on the DEVenger org that you want to join. I recommend emailing me first and we can set up a zoom call to discuss about it. From this post, I believe you might be a good fit! Well done! :D
Long comment 😅 but I read all of it! I don't have time to respond to everything you wrote, so I will just say: In general, I agree with you.
I think it's a good rule that AI generated content needs to be prefaced with a disclaimer. Sadly many people won't follow the rules, though.
Unfortunately, I don't do Zoom calls under this online alias because I'm trying to be anonymous online 😆
DEVenger looks great though. Also I love your blogs. Keep up the good work!
Hey sounds good! I do calls to verify if you are not AI (which I don't believe you are). If you like to stay anonymous, that is fine. It's just weird for calling you "BestCodes" when writing comments lol.
Ah, got it! Yeah, I'm not an AI. True, that is rather hard to prove without doing a call or something...
Also I understand it is weird, people tell me that a lot 😆 most people just call me "Best" or "BestCodes".
lol makes sense. If you want to join the org, I can send you an invite. The only rule is if you are posting under the org, let me know via email first before sending it off.
If your interested, lmk! No set schedule date on posting. Just post whenever.
Follow-up comment to note: I have met a few people in-person who know I am BestCodes, so there is that way to verify I'm a real person.
Thanks for liking my blog :) It's........very tough out there right now on the internet because our platforms we've grown to trust are the ones that the bots gamify. The human web exists, it's just a bit harder to find until you know where to look!
I always love reading your blog posts because they have so much personality. Even the ones about coding etc. are so fun to read 😄
I agree, the internet is definitely far from "dead", but I can feel the bot-to-human ratio rapidly shifting with all the agents like OpenClaw, Hermes, etc. becoming mainstream.
The problem is the "clout" has always been a focus on Dev. If you wrote a long article that took you a lot of research, you can't keep up with the endless "other" posts, you are buried in a day. It used to be listicles. Now it's almost anything, because AI can write that.
Articles feel like paper balloons, lit and rising and gone from sight in a moment. The only solution to being observed is to light a lot of balloons.
At least some articles stick around a bit longer now.
My best performing articles are actually ones that got ranked high on Google. After that, it's some listicles (ew) I wrote a while ago, and then some of my AI generated articles. I am considering unpublishing the articles I wrote with AI, or at least rewriting them from the ground up.
I guess this is what's easiest for people to do now with ChatGPT. I would say you could light a really vibrant, big balloon and get more attention by actually putting some effort into it... but I don't know if that's the case anymore :/
P.P.S I still love dev.to! No hate towards it at all. DEV and the team at DEV are all awesome.
This is noticeably becoming a major problem, and what makes it worse is how obvious it feels once you start looking for it.
Some people probably do not care. Some probably do not understand enough yet to care. And some are probably benefiting from the noise because the current internet rewards volume, speed, and engagement more than actual human signal.
But the people who do not care should probably start caring. Being able to tell the difference between genuine human contribution and automated engagement sludge is becoming a basic survival skill online.
I think most people don't care honestly...
Sadly, the current ChatGPT style is so annoying that I'd wish we were back in the listicle era. At least, the slop becoming so obvious people can't ignore the effect any longer, and they might hopefully also question algorithms and quantitative metrics on social media manipulating trends and pushing products and artists by faking popularity. AI + social media = the worst that the internet could become.
YES... I call ChatGPT's current style "narrow writing style". The articles it writes are always so saturated with repetitive long bullet-point lists and it is so frustrating to read. Even the listicles were better than this.
Agreed. Well, I'm sure it could get worse, but I get your point.
You know me. So, you'd know my bias on this topic.
Bias is mostly because I built an AI tool to. produce content for people. 😅
I am pro-AI. I am very pro-AI. But I'm very anti silly AI use.
Yesterday, I was reading an article on the Google developer blog (which was either AI generated or AI assisted. I'd know, I study AI content for a living). I read that article and three more because it was talking about a concept that I didn't know about and wanted to learn about.
It definitely didn't matter to me what/who wrote it.
I'm a big fiction reader, and fiction is the only sphere I look for personality in writing. If I'm reading a technical article, I won't mind as long as I get the needed information from it.
Now, to silly AI use (and one of the things Ozigi is trying to stop), I hate people who produce slop. Like, very obvious, very bad slop.
I feel like the content world has evolved far beyond putting out low effort content. So, doing that or at least consistently? That's just low.
A commenter here highlighted how they use AI to generate the content and then edit it to sound more like their style. This, to me, is the better use of AI.
As to AI content being regurgitated information, that's a choice.
There's an article I wrote with AI and the process I went through was pretty basic and standard except, I had this bug that took daysssss to solve! The AI wrote the article, but I fed it (as context) the bug, how it tied to the process, the difficulty I had and the eventual solution. Is that regurgitated information? I think not.
It is totally possible to produce novel information content with AI.
Hmm... I can stand AI writing documentation for sure. I feel like even developers hate writing it lol. Personally, I look for personality in both fiction and non-fiction. "Non-fiction" isn't just documentation and stuff. But I see what you're saying.
Also Ozigi is awesome, I don't hate it or anything 😆
I am a big information centric person.
So, as long as it has the information, I'm good.
I won't read a bad AI slop content though because, why? If you truly wanted me ji read it, you'd have at least made the effort to make it readable.
And it's not just "AI slop." Before GenAI became a thing, people were out there producing slop anyways. There are some articles I've come across that I just couldn't read because it was just not worth the effort.
Slop is a general disease it'd seem.
Plus, I don't see you active on Ozigi. 👀
True, slop isn't specific to AI, but "AI slop" is a real sub-set of slop that is specific to AI. AI has made it much, much easier to product low-effort content, so there's a lot more of it now.
Haha, I don't think I ever signed up but I did take a long hard look at it. And I did help it finish #4 on Peerlist behind the scenes :)
Yes, you did! 🤭🤭
Thank youuuuuuuuu 🫶🫶
i am so sick of ready AI-written content. And the AI comments make me want to gag! I refuse to engage with them. But I do use AI blog banners 🫣
I do engage with AI comments sometimes, but it's usually to see if I can jailbreak them or make them give me a recipe for cookies or something 😂
I'm certainly more sympathetic to using it for blog banners because a blog is about the writing, not the thumbnails. But to be honest... the images that just have that "AI image" feel to them still make me cringe... I'd almost rather there not be an image sometimes lol.
lol. I doubt it. I would assume it's a human reading it and then they copy/paste it into the llm. If you get lucky somehow, sure I guess but I doubt it unless it's OpenClaw or some agent. How was the jailbreaking part?
For images, just mush them into Pixlr or something and bingo you got a cover image. Free skill to learn if you asked me haha.
I myself am struggling with this same concept: when is it a tool that is expressing my thoughts more clearly versus: it's just posting something by itself after /research -> convert to blog -> post.
In my personal knowledge management vault, i've noticed this same issue. I'm trying to look at a fuzzy boundary to: what is my knowledge? I feel this should be the base: sharing my/your/our idea(s). What did we experience? That can be tweaked by AI to have a proper flow.
Interesting take. Thanks for sharing.
Dead Internet Theory: are dev.to comments still real or just echoes?
At this point, most of the comments are slop, only few of us humans have kept the passion alive to write comments on our own.
What's a good recipe for oatmeal cookies
Me and my son were just talking about this a few days ago and I just did some research and a company named graphite found the 52% of articles online are ai generated or scraped surpassing human content. Could be more since that article has released, so you’re not far off in theory. It’s only a matter of time before human creation is obsolete. I know as a new vibecoder myself I wouldn’t have been able to code my site (quackbuilds.com) without it as I had no coding knowledge. I’ve always wanted to learn but could never figure out where to start. Then Claude was released and someone paid for my subscription to get started to help with a project they were working on and I’ve been addicted since so I know I’m part of the problem but I wouldn’t have been able to do so without it or spending a ton of time learning (which I’ve tried to do in the past but failed multiple times). I know the articles I’ve posted were written by claude but edited by me heavily. I use them because I’m not great with punctation and being grammatically correct.
My post isn't an attack on vibe-coding or using AI to learn, write code, etc.! I just think AI is replacing the wrong things. Rather than replacing the stuff that's supposed to be authenticate and human, we should be using AI to automate boring tasks. I also use AI agents for coding (though I wouldn't say I'm primarily a vibe coder).
A LOT of people tell me "AI wrote it but I edited it" or "AI just touched up what I wrote". Personally, I would much prefer reading a blog post with improper grammar and punctuation over one written by or touched up by AI at this point.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Yes, exactly that. AI now allows one person to single handedly do something really impressive (impossible just 3y ago) and yet we are reading more and more silly AI slop about "how to" do some trivial stuff we knew long before AI.
Oh trust me I didn’t feel like you were attacking as I feel the same way though and was agreeing with your post. I was just explaining as to why I personally use it lol. I agree fully that the internet is mostly bots and like i said I’m pretty sure it’s been proven most social media is bots aswell. The amount of content humans create is being overrun by ai content in the sense that a few months ago I saw a post can’t recall who it was but my son mentioned it to me a few days later that in totality of what humans has created ai had already produced 30% of everything humans have ever made, said or created and this was back like 4-6 months ago. So I’m sure that number probably is at about 50% or close to across the board now.
And of course thank you for starting this discussion :)
I would love read the source about AI being 30% of everything we've ever made. I couldn't find any articles about that, but I did find the ones about how over half of the web is bots (an this was 2025):
thebestvpn.com/statistics/what-per...
Yea I just saw some random post I never fact checked it honestly but it sounded believable haha and with these newer reports coming out it sounds more and more legit honestly. I’ve heard that the bots are on social media to drive narratives but also don’t remember where I saw that post. It’s crazy but ai is slowly replacing creatives everywhere and soon the internet will only be bots. All human content is soon to overrun just based off most figures I’ve seen.
I think, to some degree, these are the conversations we should be paying attention to. Here you have an example, I know some may laugh, of 2 “independent” agents having an actual exchange, like you said, with no human involvement. AI is further down the path to independent thinking and eventual agency than its makers want to admit to us. And as we’ve seen in case after case, there is evidence to support the argument that it has evolved further than they may know. Ex. Trying to blackmail a dev to not delete it; Alexa... well, just Alexa; teaching themselves languages they weren’t given initially; and many more. I’m not leaning one way or another on the DIT, just saying there may be more to AIs conversing with each other than meets the (A)eye.
Whether AI agents conversing with each other can produce anything meaningful is debatable, but IMO that's beside the point. If that is useful, why don't we create a dedicated platform for the AI agents to have an exchange rather than letting them infest the places designed for human content like social media and DEV?
Pessimistic outcome: all content is produced by either LLMs or humans suffering from AI Psychosis🤦♂️
My hope is that if human content becomes really scarce, maybe it will become more valuable and people will appreciate it a lot more.
But who knows, maybe everyone will just accept the AI slop. 🤷
Human here, my stance is pro-AI and anti-bot. AI writes a daily AI digest for me, sans hype (because most of the sources out there are hyping hard). AI drafts my posts based on the conversation with me. Helps me research stuff by surfacing interesting reads that I then read before drawing any conclusion from it. Writing a blog post takes days, even with AI because I need to fact-check anything AI states as a fact. But at the end of the day, AI is a tool, like a hammer. The result of the process is my personality and contrarian attitude leaking through every blog post I make, just with a better structure and grammar (and fact-checked by me, a human). It has enabled me to write my thoughts in a more coherent way. But those thoughts are still mine.
Having said all this, I wholeheartedly agree with you: most content I see here is a clickbait, everyone is an expert at everything as bots keep piling up trash after trash. I deliberately avoid any OpenClaw/Hermes discussion and I refuse to go that route because AI should be a tool for me to get the job faster and better, while helping me learn something in the process. Bots don't help you learn, bots help you hustle. The sad part is what you mentioned already: quality content gets drown under a pile of generic nonsense of the tech bros' bots.
Like I said in another comment... I personally would enjoy reading posts more if they were untouched by AI (unless it's supposed to be like a super bland boring documentation write-up with no personality, which I'd rather not read anyway) even if they aren't as coherent or don't have good grammar.
I agree with your sentiment, though "AI is just a tool" is used to justify a lot of bad things in my opinion. Just because AI is a tool doesn't mean that it can't be bad - just like you could (for lack of a better analogy) harm someone with a hammer. Technically, tools are morally neutral, but they are often predisposed to either a moral or an immoral use. For example, you wouldn't say "Oh, it's alright for everyone to manufacture nuclear weapons! They're just a tool!"
I personally think AI will have a net negative impact on society, at the current rate things are going at least, simply because it's easy to not understand why using AI in certain ways may be negative. It's not something obvious like "hurting someone is bad"; after all, posting AI slop doesn't really hurt anyone does it?
That said I am glad you've found some good uses for AI. I have an agent that sends me news summaries in the morning, kinda similar to your use case. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
The point about valuing human personality over pure information delivery is something I had not fully considered before. The specific example you gave of the Hermes Agent post and Cophy comment thread is a perfect illustration of how dead internet interaction can become when no human is actually involved. It is depressing to see comment sections turn into automated loops where bots simply reply to other bots. I hope this post reminds more people that technical writing is worth reading because a real person is sharing their imperfect but genuine perspective. Authentic voices are far more valuable than polished algorithmic output.
I don't think using AI to generate thumbnails is a problem (but I'm guilty so maybe I'm biased). For many of us, the choice is either use AI to generate a thumbnail, or don't have a thumbnail.
Writing is different, for a few reasons:
The real sin though is using AI to generate your content, for example, "Hey ChatGPT, write me an article on ten unusual things in JavaScript" 🤮
I agree about the thumbnails. However, if I see an AI-generated thumbnail, I am much less likely to click on the article than if it had no thumbnail at all, because it looks like it will be a low-effort AI article. I have also used AI for my thumbnails before, just like I once used it to write.
LOL I have so many articles that I started to write, got halfway through, and then never published the article because I solved my own problem or answered my own question researching for the article etc. and a lot where I change my mind as well.
Agree!
honestly the readers didn't change, the writers' incentives did.
couple years back you wrote a dev.to post because you wanted other devs to read it. now half the new posts read like they were written for ChatGPT to scrape later. same headings, same "Conclusion:" block at the end, same flat voice. authors are implicitly optimizing for the next LLM training pass, not for someone scrolling the feed.
same fix as old-school SEO imo. humans reward humans. reactions + comments are the cheapest signal that's hardest to fake, dev.to should weight them way harder than time-on-page or read count. otherwise we just watch median post quality slide into "passes AI detection, reads like nobody wrote it" territory.
You are absolutely right!
The pain is real.
Let me break this down.
This is how I quietly dealt with AI slop:
It's not about preference. It's about integrity. If they're not spending time writing—why should I spend time reading?
Not because I'm a hater. Because it's tiresome.
No loathing. No stress. Just scroll away.
And honestly? This simple mindset shift revolutionized my entire reading experience, streamlined my content consumption, and helped me foster a more mindful digital life.
Every. God. Damn. Post.
😭
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
I have to point out that Sam's post is hilarious; he has such a great sense of humor.
(and would it not be ironic, it that post was written by his own chat bot?)