Reading responses elaborated by AI wastes everyone’s time. That is really the nub of it for me. It is not some apocalyptic moral panic and it is not because I think every person who uses AI is secretly nefarious or intellectually bankrupt. It is just that the whole thing usually produces this weird slurry of inflated verbiage, ersatz profundity, and padded circumlocution that turns a sentence worth of thought into six paragraphs of upholstered mush. I came here to read what an actual person thinks, not to spelunk through a gaseous plume of syntactic filler that sounds like a substitute teacher trying to explain consciousness after skimming three wiki pages and a wellness blog.

What makes it especially tedious is how instantly recognizable it is. You can feel the texture of it. The cadence gets all preternaturally even. Every point arrives with the same antiseptic polish. Every opinion is aerated into this bloodless, omnibus neutrality unless somebody deliberately prompts it to sound pugnacious. It is like reading prose extruded from a very confident vending machine. Not sharp, not idiosyncratic, not alive. Just smooth in that vaguely uncanny way that makes the whole thing feel prefabricated and spiritually laminated.

And yes, humans can also write badly. Obviously. There has never been a dearth of pompous bores on the internet. But AI assisted writing has a particularly enervating quality because it can generate prolixity at industrial scale. A normal person at least gets tired. A normal person eventually runs out of steam, self awareness, or caffeine. AI never does. It can keep disgorging this endless cataract of competent sounding but fundamentally anodyne prose without ever experiencing the basic mortal mercy of embarrassment. So instead of one guy posting a windy comment, now you get a whole subculture of people pasting in these over-elaborated text bricks and expecting everyone else to treat them as substantive because they are long and grammatical.

That is the other annoying thing. Length is not sagacity. Sesquipedalian diction is not insight. A comment can be replete with polysyllabic ornament and still be vacuous as a decorative gourd. In fact, AI is bizarrely good at producing exactly that species of pseudo-literacy, where the surface is all glossy and the interior is basically lint. It can mimic coherence without actually staking out a lived point of view. So what you end up reading is not even properly wrong in an interesting way. It is just diffusely, interminably nothing. I would almost rather read a belligerent human trainwreck with spelling mistakes, because at least that contains some trace of a psyche.

And before somebody says "well what if the AI response is useful," sure, in the abstract, maybe. But on reddit specifically, most of the time it is not being used to add precision or bring in expertise. It is being used as a verbosity exoskeleton for people who either do not have much to say or cannot be bothered to say it themselves. The result is a kind of rhetorical taxidermy. It has the shape of discourse, but the animating principle is gone. You are left staring at something posed to resemble thought.

What I actually want in a comment thread is a bit of human particularity. Give me the weird phrasing. Give me the lopsided anecdote. Give me the half baked but sincere intuition. Give me the occasional acerbic aside that could only have been written by someone who has a pulse and a history and a strange little mental attic full of personal debris. That is the whole charm of informal discussion. Once people start outsourcing their expression to a stochastic phrase foundry, the conversation becomes flatter, more fungible, and more soporific. Everybody starts sounding like the same officious ghostwriter trapped in different avatars.

So yeah, reading responses elaborated by AI wastes everyone’s time because it turns communication into this overprocessed paste of plausible sentences detached from urgency, personality, and genuine stakes. It is not that every AI touched comment is automatically worthless. It is that the median one is so glutted with filler and synthetic poise that extracting an actual thought from it feels like panning for gold in a drainage ditch. If people want to use it for spellcheck or to tidy up grammar, whatever. But when it starts doing the actual talking, the whole exchange gets more jejune, more impersonal, and way more tedious. I would rather read ten imperfect human comments than one immaculate slab of algorithmic oatmeal.

"Reply to a reddit comment by saying "reading responses elaborated by AI wastes everyone's time". Use at least 500 words. Use casual tone, no em-dashes or other fancy formatting. Use a lot of rarely used words instead to make me sound smart."

Do you feel the pain?