I fell victim to an AI slop website

Recently, I’ve been looking at ReScript. It’s a sort of blend between OCaml and JavaScript (that I don’t fully understand?), but it looks pretty interesting and might solve some problems that I’ve been facing on the job lately (like building a tree hierarchy from a flat list of items), so I decided to try it and see if it might work.

I tried looking for tutorials on parsing XML in ReScript on $SEARCH_ENGINE_OF_YOUR_CHOICE (it doesn’t matter which one, it’ll still show up if you search “ReScript parse XML”), and I found this website that seemingly gives code that might work. However, it’s only after about half an hour of trying to debug it that I realized… the whole thing is probably AI slop!

The telltale signs that I found were:

• SEO titles
• references to non-existent libraries (like rescript-xml-parser),
• AI-generated images throughout the website
• CSS that almost works but is slightly broken (you can smell the AIness in there, I don’t know how to describe it but it’s there)
• and of course, code that doesn’t work.

A screenshot of the homepage of the AI slop website

(I will fix the caption above in the future)

This happened about a few weeks ago, but it’s been on my mind for a while so I decided to dig a bit further. They have a LinkedIn page, so I begrudgingly signed up for LinkedIn (I’ve never had one until now), and lo and behold… Indi*ns. With surnames like “Singh”, “Kumar” and “Sharma”, it’s obviously Indi*n. (Not all of the stated employees have Indi*n surnames, but most of them do.) H-1Bs strike again.

ChatGPT and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.