Tsoding: AI slop as deliberate vendor lock
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdT6OOzMiow
- Original title :: @Tsoding on how to fight evil AI companies
A stream clip in which Tsoding argues that LLM-oriented conventions (llms.txt, AGENTS.md) and LLM-generated documentation are not conveniences but a deliberate move to make information unreadable without an LLM — and that the counter is exposure, not confrontation.
The vendor-lock argument
If the models are as good as claimed, an agent should be able to parse the existing robots.txt or a README rather than demanding its own parallel file. Instead the ecosystem is being asked to publish notes written in natural language, which only LLMs can parse — pushing deterministic programs out of the infrastructure and leaving stochastic ones as the only way in. He calls this literally a vendor lock.
The same applies to documentation: walls of generated text no human wants to read. Flood the environment with noise and people are forced to buy the noise-reduction product. He notes he now sometimes has to use LLM search because LLM-generated slop has made ordinary search results useless — by design, in his reading.
The generation-loss analogy
Your actual information is the prompt. Running it through an LLM pads it with noise; the reader runs the output back through an LLM to compress it. Repeated expansion and compression is a JPEG re-encode — artifacts accumulate and the original signal degrades. A chat participant's phrase he endorses: a compute tax on information.
He refuses to believe the people pushing this do not understand it.
How to fight it
Not by attacking — destroying data centres is itself evil, and they hold compute that could be used well; fighting evil with violence makes you the evil, and baiting you into that is one of its tricks. Evil draws its power from people not noticing the trick. So the move is exposure: point out the mechanism, make people aware, and they stop engaging with it.
The end goal he ascribes to these companies: control all compute, keep you off personal computers, rent-seek your compute back to you.
(He was cut off mid-argument by a VPN drop, which he notes is only funny, not sinister.)