A post on X last week:
"The fact that people can't even reply to posts without AI anymore says a lot more about them than they think."
The replies agreed. Nobody asked the obvious question: says what, exactly?
Here's what I think it says: nothing new.
People have been hollow online since the forum era. "So true!!!" didn't become meaningless when GPT launched. It was meaningless in 2009. Copy-pasted under blog posts. Typed by hand. Fully human. Fully empty.
What changed isn't the emptiness. What changed is the cost to produce it.
That's a different thing.
AI is reportedly writing and reading more of the internet than people are at this point. I haven't chased down the study, but it tracks with what everyone's noticing.
But the conclusion most people draw from that — that authenticity is dying — assumes there was a lot of it before. There wasn't. There was friction. Friction isn't the same as authenticity. It just made the emptiness more expensive to ship.
Autocorrect didn't make people bad texters. It made bad texters faster. The badness was already there.
The tell is whether anyone is actually home behind it. The tool doesn't matter.
Someone typing "this resonated with me 🙏" isn't more present than someone who generated it. They just did more work to say nothing. That's not a virtue.
It does cost something. It costs attention. It costs the willingness to say something specific, something you actually think, something that could be wrong. Most people online weren't paying that cost before AI, and they're not paying it now.
The gap was never intelligence. It was performance. It just wasn't visible when the performance required typing.
Generation got cheap. We never built good filters for the expensive stuff — actual thinking, actual specificity, actual stakes.
Slop has always existed. In dev work, in blog posts, in comments. The skill was always knowing where slop belongs and when to clean it up. Fast parallel experimentation? Slop is fine. Shipping to production without understanding it? That's the problem.
Same principle applies to replies.
Use the tool. Own what comes out.
The people performing outrage about AI replies are doing the same thing. Pattern-matching to a moment. Not thinking it through.
AI helped me research, structure, and edit this piece. The arguments, the examples, and the opinions are mine. So is whatever's wrong with them.
Top comments (10)
Authenticity still exists and it existed before. And slop existed before AI for sure, it's what AI got trained on: clickbait, marketing, bullshit. Also known as Sturgeon's law stating that "ninety percent of everything is crap."
Ingo, hadn't run into Sturgeon's Law before your comment . looked it up mid-reply. Older, sharper version of the whole piece: 90% was always crap, AI just automated the 90
An author feeds their whole article to AI, skips fact-checking, skips the soul. The comments roll in, all paint-by-numbers schmaltz:
All probably AI. Does the author scroll past? Nope.
They reply to every single one with another soulless glow-up. Now you've got a full-blown mutual admiration society where literally nobody's home. Bots complimenting bots, farming engagement like it's a competitive sport, while actual humans scroll past slightly more stupid than before.
is it even a comment section anymore? It's like an echo chamber that finally learned proper grammar haha
Adam, the mutual admiration society is worse than the lone hollow reply tho. at least "so true!!!" only wastes one person's 5 secs, a bot-complimenting-bot thread wastes 2 and calls it community....
At the end of the day, we can decide on whether or not we put our own name on a post and then accept the consequences of what we posted. This is valid whether you used AI or did it by hand.
When I use AI to post something, I will read it again and again, then adversary and fact check the hell out of what I am posting, the reason, I am putting my stamp of approval and my name is behind it.
Back in the early 2000's, I used to be more active on this kind of forums, and I enjoyed debating and arguing points. Whether we choose to use AI or not, it does not really matter, as long as it feels genuine.
Writing this comment for example, no AI, for me it felt like a sort of meditation, I felt calm and enjoyed the experience of writing this.
My blog articles on the other hand, I use AI for the research, fact check, I can tweak and play around with tone, register, humor. I like adding my personal experience and express personal opinions, and I do my best to make it my own work, something that reflects my current state of mind, my values and principles. Most of the time it takes me 4 to 5 hours to have an article ready (between 1500 to 2500 words). I sometimes decide to not publish what was just wrote altogether because i was not satisfied with any of it.
Then the question that comes to some people, why write or publish anything at all if no one is going to read. From my perspective, I use it as a way to express my ideas, even if my audience is just a couple of people, I am mostly doing this for myself. I also want to share my experience of what I have been building, what I have learned.
At the end of the day, it does not matter, people are able to see through genuine versus slop, whether done by hand or AI. The intent, the effort, is often seen in the work that is published.
I wasn't going to comment again — Daniel's article is basically a trap, and I didn't want to play. But your comment is genuinely worth responding to.
On that point about "people are able to see through genuine versus slop" — here's how I see it. When we write something with real intention, a piece of our mind — or maybe our soul — gets embedded in the work. And when a reader approaches it with the same intention, they can actually touch that piece. That's something slop can never replicate.
Maybe reading isn't really about the words at all. It's two souls finding each other across the page.
"Trap" assumes the piece wanted a specific answer . it didn't, it wanted people to notice they hadn't asked the question yet. Two souls finding each other across the page is a nicer sentence than a testable claim, tho....
Conny, scrapping drafts you're not satisfied with is the filter the piece said we never built . most workflows skip that step entirely, AI or not. The ownership question was never the tool, it's whether anyone's willing to kill their own work before it ships.
What's the actual tell for you that a draft isn't ready — something in the writing itself or a feeling you just sit with until it passes or doesn't?
Well said (how's that, emotional value maxed out, hollow feeling, lol🤣). Actually it's not just the internet — extend it to real life, most of what we say is just noise, and it's become a habit. If you say too little in certain situations you might even miss an opportunity. I don't think talking too much is the problem. The key is whether your mind stays quiet and centered. Everything else is just floating clouds.
xulingfeng, "everything else is just floating clouds" is the whole piece in reverse . mine says the noise was never new, yours says don't bother naming it. Different exits from the same room.