I generally avoid think pieces about AI because a) a lot of them are boring, and b) they rarely match the pragmatic posture of this blog.

But this essay on a new No One’s Happy blog was really interesting to read, and feels different in a few ways.

First, it examines what happens as AI slop spreads in the context that is less discussed – in a workplace:

This is a new form of slop, and it is more expensive than the public kind, because the people producing it are being paid a salary to do so. […]

The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about.

A lot in the essay feels pertinent to Unsung as real craft is not feelings or fluffiness. Real craft is deep expertise:

Generative AI can produce work that looks expert without being expert, and the failure arrives in two shapes. The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce, faster or more advanced than their judgment. The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. The two failures look similar from a distance and are not the same. Research has mostly measured the first. The second is what it is missing, and in my experience it is the riskier of the two.

The term for this new challenge is, apparently, “output-competence decoupling.”

Other parts of the essay come back to a topic – toxic velocity – we covered before:

The current generation of agentic systems is built around the premise that the human is the bottleneck — that the loop runs faster and cleaner without the awkward delay of someone reading what is about to happen and deciding whether it should. This is, in a great many cases, exactly backwards. The human in the loop is not a vestige of an earlier era; the human is the only part of the loop with skin in the game. Removing the H from HITL [Human In The Loop – eds. note] is not an efficiency. It is the abandonment of the only mechanism the system has for catching itself.

And one last thing that differentiates this essay from many others is the last “what to do about it” section.