AI Slop Meets Technical Manuals

I was expecting sooner than later for technical manuals to be generated via AI and some of it to be in the “AI slop” category because no one bothered to verify the AI output. Here is an example I stumbled upon today while going through the manual of a non-stick pan I bought from Amazon Germany. The company is a Chinese one, quite reliable in my experience from previous purchases.

The maintenance protocol looks a bit inscrutable right? But thankfully I had come across this format before in my experiments asking AI to generate mermaid-js syntax (for visualising character relationships in plots). Most probably the company had some AI write the manual but they ended up not checking the output, either because it was in English or because they were more focused on making good products and less on everything that goes around it. But this is most likely a temporary aberration as Chinese SMEs seem to be moving enmasse to Openclaw style AI assistants which would most likely have found and fixed such bugs (i.e. rendered the mermaid diagram) before it entered “prod”.

Here is the raw snippet as it appeared in the manual:

Cleaning Procedure Flowchart
A[Post-Cooking] --> B{Cool to <120°F/49°C?}
B -->|Yes| C[Hand Wash] --> E[Use Soft Sponge] --> F[Air Dry]
B -->|No| D[Wait 15min] --> C[Hand Wash] --> E[Use Soft Sponge] --> F[Air Dry]

And here is what it looks like once rendered as an actual Mermaid diagram (pretty useful!):

flowchart TD
    A[Post-Cooking] --> B{Cool to <120°F/49°C?}
    B -->|Yes| C[Hand Wash] --> E[Use Soft Sponge] --> F[Air Dry]
    B -->|No| D[Wait 15min] --> C[Hand Wash] --> E[Use Soft Sponge] --> F[Air Dry]

I do find mermaid-js to be a little drab (which is why I ended up dropping it for the plot visualisation experiment), an AI agent workflow could just take the mermaid-js output, send it to an image to image generator to spruce it up. For example this is what Chatgpt generated when I handed it the mermaid diagram and asked it to “Please make it look professional and ‘aesthetic’” :

But what if I just gave chatgpt (i.e. gpt-image-2) the raw mermaidjs code and gave it the exact same prompt?

Note to self: Giving images as examples to an image generation model can sometimes lead to worse outcomes!