AI Slop and AI Hype in Chess

Blogs/Articles (On Lichess as well)

Amount of articles written by AI is unreal. One can say, why is it wrong to use AI, same letters, put into words, they become sentences and so on. Well, one thing is using AI as a tool, another is generating everything, that's just slop.

It's disingenuous, it makes your readers dumber. They want to read your thoughts, but instead get AI-generated slop, no emotions, no insight from you, personality behind text dies.

It makes author dumber. Writing is a skill that can be trained, if you don't train it, you lose it. There is a reason why children in school learn how to calculate numbers, they are not given a calculator. Brain is a muscle that should be trained.

Any possible creative is gone as well. Better to write badly but in your own style than to give some generated, absolutely boring template.

To end this section, I've seen other people ranting about this issue, but it is always better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. So, I write sometimes myself and give feedback when I see something interesting.

Chatbot chess championship

Recently Kaggle organized chess matches between few popular LLMs, Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini etc.. You may not know about it, but it was covered by Nakamura, Carlsen, GothamChess. And honestly, this is another example of artificial hype.

Chess has engines. Like Stockfish, Leela, Berserk, Integral etc. They are programmed to play chess well. For example here we have little unusual king march from ongoing TCEC

Also, people play chess between each other too (surprisingly), tournaments with strong players are always running.

So how these LLMs playing chess can be of any interest? They have a different purpose, what is the point? Point is that hype is created out of thin air if you pay people to cover events that are pure brainrot. I find AI hype to be stupid.

To conclude, I am not a neo-luddite, I like AI, it's a great technology and you should look into it, think, how it can it be useful to you. Chess engines also became much stronger thanks to NNUE, Deep Learning etc. We have LeelaOdds and maia bots on Lichess. Maia recently had an update on their website

BUT, internet is still filled with slop and brainrot, and it may lead to the situation where we have artifiticial intelligence around us but no intelligence of our own.

Broadly speaking, artificial hype is leading people to believe that AI is something that it actually isn't. Everything in the media about AI is overblown, and because of that, different businesses are making stupid choices, like implementing AI where it shouldn't be used or thinking that AI can replace serious programmers and other employees etc.. No, mostly, it can't. AI isn't making anything worse, shortsighted decisions do.

Thanks for the reading.