>But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
This is the killer issue.
It's so profoundly saddenning, it feels like watching an adult being asked a question and calling mom to answer for them. There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis.
Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change
Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious
Maybe they need _that person_ to provide some assurances directly because they are not confident in thier plan (see 1)
Maybe they are just in a rut and need to start a conversation with a person
Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Spot on.
The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.
People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
Yes. The role of good management here cannot be understated. Good management (all the way up) is the difference between saying "be more productive, here's an AI subscription" and people understanding what types of usage are actually wanted and useful.
As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.
Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether.
Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f
Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.
I really am not a big fan of this... Hand-waving, I guess? Around this problem. Saying "well the norms are still being established" feels kind of like a "well don't really get mad at the people doing it, they're still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable use" kind of thing to me. People should already know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. The fact that they don't is very, very telling and says a lot about the people doing it IMO.
Maybe. It doesn't help that a lot of corporations are pushing their employees into dark patterns around LLMs. That in turn informs their own personal use of LLMs outside the workplace
Sending an AI response to a question that someone asks you is insulting because it's a bit like sending them a link to letmegooglethat where it just animates typing the question you have into google.
I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.
Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.
Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.
The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with:
"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)
If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)
That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)
Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).
What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.
Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.
Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.
Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.
And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.
Hard disagree. If I only cared about immediate results, I'd just ask Claude myself, sure. But I care about developing people's judgement, longer term. And if they're just parroting back what Claude says, I'm not doing that.
I care about developing people's judgment, longer term. You care about developing people's judgment, longer term. Does capitalism, or the managerial-business class that only sees 6 months out?
> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something. Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.
Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it
You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.
What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?
And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.
Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.
It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.
No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).
Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.
But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.
The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.
They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
This used to horrify me, until I started noticing the type of person that mindlessly spits crap out for me to deal with are the exact type of people I had already identified as being at most neutral or dead weight anyway. Sounds harsh but if your first reaction to solving a problem is to turn off your brain entirely and dump the thinking onto something/someone else for you, you're likely already layoff fodder, even pre AI. Maybe we'll all get there eventually, but for now, there's a clear distinction I see between types of people that use these tools, and one is very exhausting to deal with.
I personally feel using AI to reply personal chats is extremely bogus. Worse is those that do not even bother to remove the AI watermark. Like, pasting directly from the AI without removing the AI's personal thoughts.
It would be true if they bothered hiding it. But as the featured author said, people seem increasingly not shy of simply forwarding you a screenshot of the AI answer.
...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.
Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.
Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.
> I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question.
At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.
I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations.
I caught myself watching an AI video on youtube a few days ago where the narrator's AI voice had deliberate instances of stammering and stuttering. It's definitely simple to have these introduce idiosyncrasies just through specific prompting.
Why would that matter? You still have to read, understand, and respond. If something is important and specific it takes longer to prompt iterations to generate my response. It's nice for spelling and grammar correction.
I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D
Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.
Weirdly, and MAYBE tangentially related to AI, me too.
I've been driving my friends nuts cuz we're all neurodivergent little goblin people and now I just call them. And they aren't actually mad they're just like "what's wrong with you" and it's just like, look, sometimes I just need a fuckin answer to a fuckin question, and faster is better. And phone calls are instant.
I think they're coming around now cuz two of em do it to me.
Same, I've started adding stylistic (-/; with an odd/imperfect placement- like this) errors to make it clear it's artisanal home made slop, not AI-generated.
Even in the depths of corporate life, the last beacon of light was interacting with a person who may be similarly philosophically placed as you, sharing something. Artisanal home made slop may be more underrated that people think, its a proxy for human connection, which surprise surprise, is a big basis of life
In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with
- "from my ai to yours" where ive pointed my ai at some relevant context, and asked it to transform it for other ai context that a coworker needs
- "my thoughts prettied by AI" where i just polished up my own words, often for outside coms, but indicating that i wrote the bones of it.
- "i wrote this myself" in my case i tend to be very casual with my written coms, and ive been leaning into this in the past year rather than looking to correct it, as it gives the personal feel. but for cases where ive written more thoughtfully, i just flat out say that.
Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai.
Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.
But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust.
AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.
EVery company that comes up with a product that brings a lot of gravy turns into place where people like this flourish. They have always been there - they would ask your question to many people, get their anwers and pass the response as their own.
Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.
I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'.
I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.
The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.)
Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.
Just yesterday I had to attend internal "office hours" of an expert team to get a question answered - I had done extensive research of my own, both manual and using AI leveraging internal resources. What did the "expert" do when they couldn't answer my question right away? They said "let me ask {insert AI tool}". I cut them off stating that this is an insult to my intelligence. I am in the office hours for expert advice not someone else performing the same AI prompts that I already performed.
Exactly! If you're an owner you should be making decisions and taking responsibility, given existing context. I'm happy using LLM to confirm my reasoning or research, but it's still me doing the coding, or architecting or anything, not LLM, and if something goes bad I cannot say "LLM told me to do it". If people are blindly doing what their tools tell them to do, that's the problem there.
Edit: in this instance if I were the expert I'd respond from my expertise. Using LLM is fine to explain whys/research per what you say, but ultimately I'm the educator here
Wait, you're upset because they used AI to answer a question they weren't expecting, and couldn't answer? Yet, you used AI as part of your upfront research?
What would you have preferred? They could have just said, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, please let me get back to you" but instead they tried to get an answer for you.
I think it's perfectly fine for the author to use AI in their research process, and it sounds like they weren't relying on it exclusively.
So they've already asked AI its opinion on the topic. They're explicitly reaching out to an expert because they've exhausted their ability to move forward on their own (even with AI).
If the expert just asking the same question to the AI and returning the answer directly - that's what OP has just done, and it actually is a waste of time. They're looking for insight, not just another quick response from an LLM.
I would imagine that letting the expert know ahead of time so they can research an answer (perhaps with the assistance of AI) would be a good pattern. But it has to be guided by the expert's knowledge - that's the whole point. Using AI is fine, and probably even good if it's being guided by a wise hand, but it isn't sufficient on its own, and bouncing answers directly back from an AI with no refinement is not useful, and dare I say it is somewhat insulting.
These were expert office hours for API modeling. The company has certain requirements and standards - this team is supposed to live and breathe them. The question wasn't that advanced. Performing a basic AI prompt in the authoritative expert office hours is not the answer.
The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
And to be clear: I manually read and studied the official guiding documents without AI. Then I used a separate AI setup to more effectively research a larger array of additional internal sources, wikis, etc. I also reviewed the code from other teams / projects to infer any patterns that could apply to my project, so I came prepared with examples for discussion.
> The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
I suppose that would be very close to "you've come to the experts for advice and I probably shouldn't be here because I'm not one of them", which nobody wants to admit.
For many, an honest look at themselves would end with "I don't contribute anything". They have the opposite of impostor syndrome - they don't belong, but they feel like they should, and AI helps them pretend.
They were speechless. Kind of shocked. It was hilarious. They then agreed to reach out to some colleagues / other teams to research and find the answer. After 20 min they followed up with an acceptable answer.
True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first.
EDIT:
By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover what they need but they don't go there first and not something I have some deep domain knowledge of that would take them a long time to find or figure out.
I would personally still not reply with an AI answer but I am tempted sometimes...
Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement.
He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.
I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context.
Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO.
Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.
Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)."
(strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)
You learn to know who are the lazy ones, and at that point you can politely always respond with a, "what were you able to find on this?". You can repeat this ad infinitum since at that point, they're just being lazy and disrespectful of your time. They eventually give up going to you because they know they won't get you to do their work for them.
Good point, and I realize that's what I did in school. When people came to me that I suspected were just looking for easy answers to avoid doing the work themselves, I'd lead them gradually through the chain of reasoning. Like, point out the first step and imply that that should be enough for them to work it out, leading them to ask again ("ok, I get that, but what does that mean for the final answer? What should I write down?"), and I'd give them the next step, leading them to walk away in disgust and bother somebody else. Even better, the next time they start with that person and it's no longer my problem.
Be high friction when you suspect it's warranted. Even if you're not sure someone is looking for a shortcut, the people who aren't won't mind. It's detection and deterrence rolled into one.
(And if possible, find a place to work where you never have to do this.)
As someone who loves helping people to learn things for themselves... you have to identify these "help vampires" and just stop helping them.
I had a coworker who would ask me the same questions over and over and over, despite me trying to show them 10 different ways how to do it or find the answer in the docs or whatever. And eventually I just said I was too busy and they had to figure it out. After a while they actually started figuring stuff out.
Basically if those people aren't your direct reports, your obligation to help them only goes so far. Take care of yourself first. If they figure it out eventually then good for them. If not, it's really not your problem.
You're looking at human nature. We evolved to conserve energy, to take the berries that are growing right here rather than go foraging for something else with less certain outcomes. Even better, someone else collects the berries for you.
There are some exceptional people, who have the drive and curiosity to see what else is out there, but that's not the average.
I've done a similar thing with close friends and family who would constantly ask me things I couldn't possibly know because I always came up with an answer.
Eventually I realized why and explained, "you know, I'm really just going to do a web search for what you just asked me, and maybe a couple more until I have a decent answer and then give you that answer. Let me show you how I would go about that".
From then on, they started getting into the habit of doing that for themselves. I think now with LLMs, they've kept the habit, but the LLM gives a more complete answer with fewer steps so it becomes the default. I think the magic of AI is two-fold (well, more than two, but two bullets for this conversation).
1. You don't have to "query". You can just braindump, and it'll build a context and figure out what you're looking for
2. It's conversational, so instead of filtering and tweaking results from the first query, your second "query" builds on top of the context from the first question, and you get a stronger result as the conversation continues.
>He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.
Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself".
They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
> after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
Agreed, and I do the same. They still get a courteous reply, but they also feel a little "pain" when they don't get a timely answer - an effective teacher.
Indeed - I had a team that called this "remote brain execution" (we were a build team that used Bazel, and often fielded questions about why someone's build broke).
My favorite phrase on that team was "What have you tried so far?"
Ironically, I have to edit out my "what I have tried so far" when asking questions, because I'm more likely to go into a long-winded explanation of the headers that I hacked and the kernel module I installed to fake my way around this or that, when the actual answer tends to be "uh... are you sure you're building the code you think you are? That sounds like you're running from the wrong directory or wrong branch."
Not just the workforce, my parents still barely know how to use a computer because any time they hit the slightest snag, they immediately call me for help.
>> what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"
I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.
Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.
And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.
If you're telling them all that and not wasting their time, that's fine.
But if you just ask them the question and don't tell them what you've found or where you got stuck, you're asking them to stop doing what they're doing and spend all that same time you just spent working on your problem.
IME it usually means they have some good reason to ask, which you are not aware of. For example, people might believe you are an expert or can give a better answer in the context.
If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood.
If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise.
"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is:
"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?
I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me."
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.
> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything.
Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.
I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.
The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.
90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.
In our case we're completely allowed to use AI, but if you do, you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously). So if your LLM says "Sure, go ahead and run that code" and it deletes the production database, that's your fault, just as much as if you reviewed it manually and said the same thing.
> you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously)
why not in a legal sense? If someone asks me what cleaning supplies are safe to mix, and i just ask some chatbot, don't vet the output, copy the response, and they end up poisoning themselves, am I not responsible?
If I'm a lawyer, and pass unvetted AI legal advice to my client, and they go to jail, should i keep my license?
Typically if you develop a software product for a company, the company resumes responsibility. No one would develop anything for any high risk business, if they were to assume personal responsibility of the end result. LLMs don't really chance that, and any serious bug would be an error of process.
Developers are perfectly capable of creating dangerous or expensive mistakes even without LLMs. If we accept that LLMs are just tools, the developer should be no more responsible that if they choose to use Visual Studio over Vim and Visual Studio refactors something wrong.
Theres's then the question of gross incompetence, and were the developer could be fired or perhaps even sued by their employer, the same as if they hadn't used an LLM.
However the case I had in mind was in regards to the legality of the way the AI models acquire and reproduce code. We're not held personally responsible for any license violation created by the tool.
Is it laziness? Or is it frustration from answering the same basic beginner questions over and over again?
It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed.
Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.
It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy.
Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction?
There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.
I’m using ai to answer questions, but I instruct it in draft what answers to include, what info to include from my llm wiki (second brain). Saves time to write a correct response, can easily refer to past conversations, but definitely not 100% outsources to AI.
If you need to find information to answer a colleague, use AI if that's helpful.
I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?
Because it’s often hard to find the right voice? because it’s often hard to describe something in the correct way? Communication is hard, finding the correct tone of voice often takes me a long time, so using AI makes me more efficient in a busy day?
In my line of work, its certain peoples' jobs to know certain things. If I need a piece of information that somebody else is responsible for understanding, I'm just going to ask directly for what I need instead of trying to research it myself. To research it myself would mean attempting to do somebody else's job, which is just unhelpful for everyone.
I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing.
If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up.
edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.
The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good.
The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...
With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.
> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible
This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
> And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop.
Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".
Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them.
I highly doubt you never ask questions that you could’ve looked up yourself. “Go Google it” translates to “this isn’t worth my time,” which is a pretty rude way to be.
But sometimes it isn't worth my time. If I'm being asked something about what I'm working on, fair enough. If I'm being asked what a command-line switch for curl does (and that's not related to what I'm doing) the total cost is less to look at the docs, rather then asking me to look at the docs.
Not weighing my time and effort into the equation is rude on behalf of the asker.
if they aren't presenting proof of doing research or they don't have the benefit of doubt (e.g. a new hire, etc.) they're being rude by not doing the research in the first place.
I’m sorry but nobody behaves this way. Nobody sits around in every conversation showing their homework/proving they tried to find an answer before asking somebody else. It is incredibly common to just ask somebody a question and expect an answer regardless if you could’ve looked up yourself.
It’s important to not make everybody do your research for you, but what you’re describing is not at all typical.
I'm not particularly sorry, but when I ask questions out of the blue over email or chat, I always explain what I've already tried. The two exceptions are when it's urgent, in which case I briefly explain the urgency ("prod is down did you deploy just now?"), or when it's part of an ongoing conversation.
If this is not typical for you, then you are surrounded by people who disrespect you and your time.
steelman, don't strawman. pushback on someone being rude by requesting something they could have looked up doesn't look like "let me google that for you" 95% of the time. it's far more likely to come out as "I'm not sure, honestly. I worked on X, but I didn't really need to get in to Y, so I'm not as familiar. Personally, I'd just do a google search, since I'm a little behind on that."
not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.
It's also very surprising to me. This whole deal where humans instantly started taking AI answers at face value, as sources standing on their own legs, or delegating their own mind to a third party, not even a human, but an algorithm.
It's like they're just... Fine?
AI became their god over a few months and it's... Fine?
I thought I knew humanity pretty well and I'm rarely surprised at human large scale behavior these days as I'm hitting 50 myself, but this took me by surprise.
> that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
I've seen this happening a lot in the recent times: people who are generally not very good at their job tend to offload disproportionately more to LLMs, and it's so damn annoying that their incompetence now comes sugarcoated in lengthy LLM babble for the sake of desperately trying to sound convincing. This is wasting me high single digit hours every week, not to mention the frustration of battling an asymmetrical fight: it takes them seconds to produce something that will take me minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
The worst part about this to me is if someone routes a response through AI, I have no idea what they, personally, are trying to tell me that they may have included specifically in their prompt, what is hallucination, and what is something in-between.
It makes it hard to pick apart hallucinations from the miscommunications and disagreements. Picking apart every single point and treating it with the same tact you have to treat human output with, while still accounting for the fact that it could be a hallucination, takes an extremely skewed amount of effort compared to the effort of sending someone AI output. The worst part is, it's probably going to be pasted right back into the LLM chat box.
It's astonishingly bad form to send someone AI output, and this is only one of the reasons.
Letting AI answer a personal question for you feels deeply disrespectful to the person asking the question, but also to yourself; you're signalling you don't know anything. If I wanted an AI answer, I could ask it myself. I'm not asking AI, I'm asking you. If you're going to give me an AI answer, it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything.
Asking a question which is easily google-able/answered by an LLM is also disrespectful of that other person time, not to mention interruption/flow state/etc
this was a thing in the past: LetMeGoogleThatForYou
Written in 1802, before the Jacquard loom. I wonder what machines he had in mind? "Modern administrations, busy trying to provoke the invention of machines that can multiply human labor and make it easier," apparently.
I get that this is supposed to be unproductive snark, but the real answer is probably to then sort the spreadsheet and assign a tier system of how annoying and useless each person in it is.
Most people are not self-sufficient entities. 10% are so unable to think that they are simply not able to be a net positive in any job, it takes more energy/time to micromanage them, even for simple tasks, than they put back into the business. 50% are incapable of real innovation.
Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.
I agree with your assessment of people. I find that there is a lot of overlap with this old quote:
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
AI is the perfect product for that third group.
However I disagree in that I don't want to "talk to AI" either. Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
There's something refreshing and endearing about my wife's family not using AI at all (at least, not intentionally). My in-laws don't really know how to Google and my wife will do interesting stuff like Google an actor's or movie's IMDB and scroll through the list to figure out who a specific character was in a show (instead of Googling show name character name).
I can see that that could be kinda fun because it's not about the answer, it's about the discovery. AI and even smarter searches removes the sense of discovery. You'll never get to see "oh did you know that such and such actor was also in such as such movie in 2010??" if you just skip to the answer with AI.
That said, when they ask me a question that I don't immediately know the answer to, I'll use AI, ask it for sources, check those sources. In these cases it's more of a smarter Google search — just like couldn't always just use the first search result of Google in 2010, you can't always just use the AI response in 2026. Gotta be extra careful too because even the AI's sources can be AI.
I’ve seen this at work and it drives me nuts. I don’t value my time extraordinarily highly but even still I find it disrespectful to offload my question and make me read something they didn’t even bother to read.
Same argument can be used against you: why do you bother someone with a question and want them to dedicate time to answer it for you when that question is easily google-able or answered by an LLM?
It costs you seconds to ask the question, and you want them to invest minutes in answering it?
You invest seconds in a question, they invest seconds in the answer. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Usually when people are asking questions it isn't that they don't know how to find a possible solution at all, it's that they don't feel they know enough to evaluate the correctness of the solutions they may find, and they think you do.
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Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.
A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.
Discussing things with colleagues is also how you build collaborative networks. I'm trying to get out of the habit of searching for all information myself and engaging in more discussions with coworkers. I'm perfectly capable of searching information out myself. If I'm asking a question, it's a sign of respect, and shows that I am interested in the person's experience with the topic, and in nuance and context. I want to learn from them. If you offload the answer to AI, it's disrespectful to yourself more than anything--you don't even value your own expertise!
Saw this in a PR review yesterday. Reviewer made comments about the reasonableness of a solution and alternatives to consider. Submitter posted an LLM response that gives zero additional context about the PR. As the submitter, you should be the one with the context, not the reviewer, and having an LLM answer doesn't provide that additional context.
It feels like commoditising intelligence because they think an AI screenshot is some kind of currency of truth. The truth doesn't even really matter anymore, its just whatever ChatGPT says it is
I had to sit through a ~45 minute meeting once where an electrician and his boss sat and presented literal chat screenshots to justify their positions opposing or agreeing with a repair I requested.
I had specified some high-temperature electrical components to repair a broken part of a high-temperature circuit, placed the PO, received the parts, and gave them to one of our electricians with a work order. I did the research myself sans AI, read data sheets, investigated alternative materials, etc.
The electrician asked chatgpt "Will PEEK shrink tubing survive 400*F?" because apparently he doesn't trust me, and chatGPT told him no. He complained to his boss who immediately asked chatGPT the same question, and it told him yes it was fine.
Squarely within the top 3 most exhausting meetings of my career.
I have been saying for a while that when AI gets smarter than us we will be like 5 year old children totally dependent on our AI mommy and daddy to interpret and understand the vast and mysterious world of things that are too complicated or obscure for us to comprehend. We'll spend all day experiencing the natural world and watching kids shows. Any hard questions go to mommy and daddy.
At least we'll be able to tell people our authentic emotions without AI, and AI will listen to our emotions, much like parents listen to their children's feelings.
It doesn't feel so different to me than the early days of google, when google worked pretty well - people often would say things like "do you want me to google that for you?" the implication being you were wasting their time by asking them a question they could find the answer to themselves.
The major difference now though, is when you get sent a chatGPT response, the implicit question often is now "Can you check this is correct for me?" which is exhausting and a little rude.
That's the part that really gets to me. It's one thing to say Hey friend, you could have quickly gotten the right answer yourself. It's another thing to say Hey buddy, you asked me a question which I COULD answer, but instead of giving you the CORRECT answer, I'm going to give you AN answer, and let you figure out if it's correct <-- with the unspoken expectation that if it is the wrong answer and I run with it because you gave it to me, it's still my fault.
I feel like we went through something similar to this early in the era when Google's search engine was new. People posted engine results, but pretty quickly, people got tired of doing that, and would say google it. Part of that was if the answer was as easy as a google search away - the social validation became lower to negative if you just provided low effort copypasta service.
Now, response of "google it" could be take many ways depending on where you are in a conversation, it could be a range of being polite to quite rude. Google it could mean "I don't know, but I think thats findable on google", or it could mean "Im not going to help you". I wonder if we will settle back to having a real conversation with "ai it"/"google it" occasionally.
And then we were sending those "let me google it for you". I just wanted to find the site again and, surprise it has the GPT part now ^^ but on the joke side.
And the killer killer issue is that even if you would manage to talk to them, their opinion will be shaped but what AI told them and AI opinion will always be perceived as superior, your real world experience and instinct will be disregarded quickly.
I remember a moment at the very onset when chatgpt was just opened to the public. A manager sent us a congratulations text chatGPT had prepared for his kid's graduation from high school. He said that he was not much of a writer and that was miles better than he could have said. We had a discussion about the moral side of that (though moral might not be the word), pointing out that bad words that come from a genuine place and required effort from you are better than great words that are manufactured by a robot. He didn't see the issue.
I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.
And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.
At least to me, this seems like a pretty logical progression based on how education is handled today.
We teach children from a very early age that there's always a right answer and that someone smarter/older/etc knows it. They're told to ask that person and largely memorize the answer for a test.
With LLMs we're being told they are, or will soon be, as smart or smarter than any human. Its no surprise to me that people with access to LLMs that can already answer a question would just blindly use it and trust the response.
Implicit in the human to human to AI conversational chain is the second person’s assumption that the first person didn’t think to ask AI.
The mere fact of asking another human a question (absent a strong pattern of behavior to the contrary) should be strong evidence the interlocutor wants a human answer! Sending an AI answer should have the same social valence as sending a lmgtfy link; appropriate for bad actors but a pretty insulting response to an earnest question.
I FEEL this. It's empowered lazy devs to defer thought and accountability. To some degree, I understand. It softens the imposter syndrome feeling one can get. But, I see it as a character barrier; not a moral one.
It's very insulting. I don't need them to talk to an AI. I talk to AI all day already. If all a person is doing is forwarding messages to AI why do we need them? Just have an AI do their job.
It's not that sad, it'll probably go away. Anyone remember when Google first got popular and for like 5-10 years after everyone did the same with that, there was even the "let me google that for you" meme + site.
This behavior from people is the one thing that makes me wonder if we all wouldn't be better off just chucking AI off the proverbial cliff. It should be useful tool for enhancing the tasks we have to do, not something to fully replace thinking and human interaction completely.
On the other hand, I think it's perfectly good that latent natural idiots who happened to seem like normal people among us would just drop their masks and disclose themselves in such an obvious way by delegating what little left of their brain power to the artificial one.
Off the cuff analysis by AI is often wrong. Lately I've been feeling bad for Casey Handmer whose latest blog post contains an illustration with the caption
(I asked AI to make a better version of this diagram but it wasn’t right. Motion is into the page. 200 kg of moon rocks can fit in a container 40 cm on a side.)
Absolutely. But I’m afraid people are forced to do this because management wants to see AI usage otherwise they’re gonna go on the chopping block. Leadership is ultimately to blame.
It is the ultimate cop-out to avoid having any involvement in anything. "AI said so..." then shrugs or more AI answers, ultimately removing oneself from any form of commitment to an opinion or knowledge (even partial).
What about when the llm is smarter than the person? Sometimes I get material that is so bad I wish they had had AI do it. Then it would be poor to mediocre.
There was an episode of the podcast “Question Everything “ where they talked about how LLM s can sometimes talk people out of conspiracy theories by patiently refuting the arguments with facts. There have been academic studies on this.
I think people hate AI because it is often mediocre and flawed but sometimes it’s replacing humans that are inept.
I thought it was pretty well-established that conspiracists aren't deterred with facts, and that their commitments to the conspiracy theory are essentially emotional and/or in-group identitarian?
You should definitely listen to this podcast which is an interview with a Professor of Psychology at Columbia. He also thought what you thought-- that you can't convince a Q-Anon type-- and they were actually testing something else. When they found out that 25% of people who believed conspiracy theories actually changed their mind after three exchanges with an LLM.
They repeated the test and the results were replicable. (But still only about 25%, but that is something.)
This made me think: I grew up in a world where there was a flawed but consensus view of the world, its problems, institutions motivations. This came from a common mass media. Maybe getting our answers from AI will lead us to a new (inevitably flawed or even bad) consensus. Weird.
My "favorite" as a sysadmin is when I explain why something should be done differently, or shouldn't be done at all, and I get back "but ChatGPT said..." followed by a no-context, incorrect AI slop paragraph.
One of the more dangerous things LLMs have enabled is people feeling like they are suddenly experts on topics they would have never touched otherwise.
Exactly, people want to talk to AI when they choose to, as a tool, but not reaching out to other human beings. There is no easy way of solving this sadly
Not trying to defend ai but I observed another mode: what used to be bored dev chats where people avoided topics or started feuds, now it's "well Claude suggests...". It's not great but it's a short form of improvement somehow. (Sure I'd prefer passionate convos steering toward innovation, but that's been a rare sight in my career)
No it isn't an improvement. If I wanted the output of an LLM instead of a thinking, smart, real human, I would have simply asked an LLM. Nearly nobody who asks humans questions WANTS to get an LLM answer, that's simply not why people ask other people.
I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker.
But if I'm the askee, I honestly don't know how to navigate those waters yet.
If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?
Do I say "Have you tried X?", where X is the thing the LLM suggested? Should I pretend that I did not ask the LLM?
In the past, I could find some source and send them the link, and I wouldn't assume the person had exhausted the entire Google index. Sending a link isn't the same as LMGTFY.
Analogously, while "Claude says X" does sound as rude as lmgtfy, disclosing that your suggestion was found via llm is more akin to linking to a source, or "take this with a grain of salt".
I think as long as nobody can tell you've used an LLM, it's fine. If you use an LLM to get your info and then respond, that's normal. Copy pasting or going "claude said" and then more or less just regurgitating is different, because you are no longer involved.
If I ask you, I want your thoughts, based on whatever you can find or know. It's difficult to articulate for me, honestly, but I hope it makes sense.
This says more about you than the other person. Some people like giving good answers and are less concerned about being the source themselves.
I'll sometimes do the exact thing you are talking about. The reason is that I basically know the answer, but also know there is a nicer explanation to the question. I'll type in the question, often iterate a few times, get an answer that I basically knew but couldn't explain as clearly, and respond with it.
Humans haven't been "self sufficient" in 100,000 years. We've been building/using tools and specializing since the start. If you went back just a few hundred years some people (the version of you basically) would be profoundly sad you couldn't build your own house.
If this is already happening among adults, what's left for the current or next generation? Kids that can no longer think by themselves? I believe this is really scary.
It depends on the situation. If you were just talking then sure. Pretty rude to just check out of the conversation and replace the human you were talking to with an LLM.
That's sad, but you know what's infuriating? It's humans who come at you sarcastic and dismissive and without spending any effort actually engaging with what you've said in good faith. Imagine writing a well reasoned out post or comment, only to get a sarcastic dismissive literal oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
Matching the amount of effort that others around me are putting in is pretty important to me now. Don't want to end up trying too hard for people who don't give a shit.
These people don't know the answer, but they are trying (generally) to be helpful. The former reality of the article's author would be posting and getting no replies and/or links to the wrong answer you already read.
I’ve distanced myself from a close friend group chat over the past few years as they seem to be more and more like this. They all work in tech at various FAANG companies, and I just mentally hate engaging anymore as it all has turned into “let me prove you wrong in 10s or find nuance in this conversation I don’t already have” by referencing AI. It’s like the Google search nerd snipe crowd 2.0, and I’m not entertaining them. I’ve had to flat out tell them they are wrong as they source a clearly inaccurate AI response, which is even more strain on the friendship.
I feel your pain. I also get "chatgpt/gemini/grok... CONFIRMED blah blah" as if these are ground truth. What is even more sad is it sometimes mixed with "from first principles...".
It’s sad. I just expect better from my friends, but this group chat is also full of friends who are chronically online, so I fear they are just so infatuated with AI as it seems they are constantly considering it at every point of their day.
I can't stand this at all. People are becoming more and more sheepish. They don't know when things are harder than they actually are and the dunning-kruger effect is happening at a pace unbeknownst to our culture on nearly all surfaces.
My stomach churns when I see an e-mail obviously written by AI. It just comes off so disingenuous and disrespectful, as if they couldn't be bothered to respond to me themselves but instead had a machine do it. Even worse, it's usually very verbose, wasting my time further to have to read through all the slop.
I don't claim to know the context in which that AI slop communication happens. But when people are really interested in what you ask them, they usually give their own opinions in their own voice.
This is the most infuriating part of dealing with support engineers at companies i've paid giant bills with. They didn't answer my question, i get a wall of text that i read 4 times before i figure out it says nothing, and nothing seems to get fixed.
I asked the person responsible for a new integration at work (nominally a Director level person, with a bit of title inflation going on) about a feature that didn't do what we wanted.
They answered with something that looked to be AI slop, and very verbose too. When I politely said "those instructions reference links and buttons that I cannot find in the UI, could you please tell me where to find them?" the Director simply replied "I cannot find them either, disregard. The feature doesn't support what you want after all."
This means they simply prompted my question to the builtin AI and copied back to our conversation without verifying it made sense.
That's the future we must deal with now. A sort of broken "LMGTFY" that only provides wrong answers.
There was an insightful post here on HN, a few weeks ago, about "AI hygiene". One of the recommendations is: never share raw AI output with anyone. It's like showing your dirty underwear.
Show them your distillation, your final recommendation, but not the raw output. That's useless, they could have prompted the AI themselves, you're not adding anything but being the middleman. At least share your prompt instead of the output!
I hate it so much. It's one thing to lean on AI for complex or toilsome work, but to openly supplant your own ability to interact thoughtfully with another person. It should be embarrassing.
Yeah, we know it's all atoms and entropy and dust to dust and the heat death of the universe in the end, and nothing means anything. But during our short time living in human society and trying to find meaning in our existence, this cuts pretty deep to the heart of that quest.
Frankly it’s just incredibly disrespectful. If I ask for your take on an issue, I want your words and thoughts. You can use an LLM, but vet the results and actually have a hand in it. Otherwise why am I even asking? I don’t need an intermediary between me and ChatGPT
On JIRA ticket discussion threads now involve the liaison for another team copypasta-ing LLM slop as a comment. Makes me feel like Will Hunting. What, is that it or do you have an original thought you'd like to contribute?
This is truly infuriating. "Have you asked AI? - no I thought I'd see if anyone had a real answer from experience first. Someone I can trust. AI should be the fallback, not the first call. Watching people just regurgitate AI responses with zero understanding they've just copy/pasted total BS is becoming far too common in work environments. We've become utterly helpless as a society and things continue to get worse year after year. Whether it's helicopter parenting, inability to navigate anywhere (even places you go every day) without GPS, abject fear at asking someone for help, inability to have a conversation without ending it immediately by Googling...etc. The biggest issue is you can't really fight back now. Regardless of what you do personally everybody else is doing the other thing and you can't avoid it.
I noticed this on the ffmpeg dev list, where one of the core devs was too lazy to write his own proposal and instead used AI slop to autogenerate it, then send it to other people. He will not understand why people don't want to get spammed down via AI slop.
Nothing feels quite as good as getting dumb and drooling literally. Being intelligent is painful, it’s the most painful state of existence. You see everything with mind bending clarity. The inane nonsense of it all
No wonder the mind instinctively recoils and wants to smoothen itself
For past ten years my life consisted mainly of desperately trying to be dumb and happy. AI is really good tool for that. Just outsource the thinking until the organ atrophies, hopefully permanently. some drugs and the life gets actually even pleasurable.
To be aware is a curse, no wonder desperate attempts to lift it take place en masse
That certainly must be very comfortable opinion to have. People truly love their illusions that allow to smoothly glance over giant uncomfortable spikes of reality under the balancing line of life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function at all in this circus. We would just lie down in cave paralysed by dread, ending the homo sapiens brand of intelligence the moment it started
a bit too simplistic for my tastes. I wouldn't call being inebriated the same as being dumb; but I would absolutely agree that being inebriated is way more fun, easy, and fulfilling than being sober. I would choose being inebriated over being sober almost every time, regardless of the mechanism of inebriation.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
It's like asking someone to deadlift a dresser and move it to another room, even though they have a dolly right next to them. Should they be able to? It depends. Should you expect them to? No, that's just odd.
It's more like asking someone to use a toilet when they have a perfectly good set of pants they're wearing, already on them. Thinking is what makes you human, don't give it up so easily.
No, it's like asking someone "Would you like to have a coffee?" and they responds by pointing at a Starbucks and saying "Sure, go over there, they have coffee you can buy".
Well, it's subtly different than a kid calling mum - kids generally do that because they're insecure, an adult using ChatGPT to answer simply can't be bothered to turn on their brain...
You had an good, psychologically plausible explanation for some individuals to over-rely on AI and... dismissed it and called them stupid. Adults are not special, they are mostly kids that got older.
I think you might be underestimating the level of insecurity in the average adult ("I only used AI to refine my own thoughts...", "I only used AI to correct my typos...").
Sounds pretty unsubtle to me. It’s possible they’re insecure as adults as well? Or they want to save time or brain power for other work and don’t see the inherent rudeness in it?
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer.
That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.
Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a sales pitch for the thing I was trying to build for him. He was always pitching for new business, and seemed to struggle to get out of 'sales mode'. I have no doubt that if I were working for him now, he'd be pointing me to an LLM in response to any question.
This is why executives think LLMs can replace everyone. They can see it can replace them, and project that onto everyone else. And they don't see the gaps in knowledge because they don't care about the facts, only the presentation.
I have a theory that most people at most levels of work deal with the same amount of mental complexity. The difference is that as you move up the unit of abstraction gets larger, so your decisions and knowledge cover more scale. E.g. the engineer thinks about functions; the business owner thinks about products; the investor thinks about companies; the president thinks about nations; etc.
But people at the higher abstraction levels have a problem because they often never had (or lose) the ability to zoom in anywhere. And even the ones that can don't have time to learn to zoom in everywhere so they have to learn how to trust others, aka recognizing shibboleths. AI is great at sounding trustworthy and making reasonable looking output. In so doing, however, it's undermining the utility of shibboleths for large scale thinkers! That is the powerful are now deluding themselves that they have access to infinite reliable experts, and have gained the ability to zoom in everywhere, for only the cost of a data center. In a sense programmer experts like us are lucky because we have objective verification as a feedback loop to temper the exuberance. They do not.
If this is true, the kinds of error modes we'll see will be novel and catastrophic to a large fraction of businesses. If the feedback loops for correction are damaged or destroyed, we'll see firms gleefully, optimistically and energetically committing obvious mistakes until they die.
I think agree with the broad, but disagree with the specifics. I really don't think a lot of people at the product level think about products. I really don't think the investors think that much about companies. I think as you move up, the things that separate are (in no order): ability to solve OR mask problems (one of these requires more skill/effort, but to people above they can look a lot closer), ability to naturally or adaptively (this is a fair, but somewhat positive word for this) socialize with the people in that next level, nepotism or blurrier forms of getting your foot in the door, willingness to look the other way (or just be obtuse), willingness to lie (or just be obtuse).
After the IC-level, each level filters less for the duties of the higher role. Even PMs seem surprisingly par at product ideation, vision, insight amongst their cross functional project team members. So many products fail, so many startups fail, so many projects are late, but those things don't seem to be what dictate promotions or investment even when they are specifically that role's role.
Maybe unrelated but this memory pops up: I once worked with a mechanical engineer who could not visualize anything in his mind and had quite some trouble with word finding and explaining his ideas. He just couldn't say what needed to be built, he could only evaluate after it was built (often "argh, no not that").
It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:
"Why didn't you build what I said?"
"I did. This is exactly what you said."
"No it's not! I said x y z"
"Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z"
Silence.
"Then that's not what I meant"
Same, but not sure it's his training and just the way his head works. Have met a lot of people in software who can't draw or understand (very) simple block diagrams of systems. Some people don't have an inner eye.
I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!
There's an old computing maxim: GIGO. It used to mean "garbage in, garbage out" meaning that if you put garbage into a computer, then the output was garbage. Nowadays, GIGO means "garbage in, gospel out" meaning that no matter how bad the input was, the output was to be treated as The Word of God.
I use to get emails with some oddball questions slightly out of my field of expertise from business owners. I would answer, and they would forward my email to the person that asked them the question. They saw their role as routers.
>That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).
The 'AI-generated pseudo-spec' is becoming a massive productivity killer. Non-technical managers prompt an LLM, get a highly confident 5-page document with chosen libraries, and think they've done 80% of the work. But as a developer, you now have to spend hours debugging and debunking hallucinated architectures just to prove why the AI's approach doesn't fit the existing codebase. It completely shifts the burden of actual product management into AI-babysitting for the dev team.
I was discussing a change we wanted to make to some tables in one of the DBs, but it would require a lot of effort because of the sheer size. Anyway, after saying how much effort would be required the response I got was to “please ask ChatGPT.” It gave a slightly different response, but changed it after I presented it with my solution and agreed that was the better approach. Just… sigh
"Apologies, you're absolutely right. My initial strategy indeed would have caused a massive database bottleneck because it would lock the entire table. This could result in downtime for the application. Let me know if you'd like me to make a step-by-step plan to implement your solution."
Maybe he was trying to say "look, when I can look this up, it means that you can too, i won't put any effort into it, because i pay you, but if i can use AI, so can you."
Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.
Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.
You'd be surprised how many "scale-up"'s are owned by genuine idiots. I don't even mean inexperienced people, just people that - if you were to meet them for the first time - seem like they are fucking idiots. The type that recently figured out you can tie your shoe instead of tripping over them.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.
Why do you feel the need to simplify life into such a narrow perspective? While it's true that being smart can limit your confidence, what you've written is beyond exaggeration. There is so much more complexity involved.
There is some insight to his post. If you're very intelligent, there are many points in your life that steer you away from starting your own company. If at any point the best option you have is to start a company, you were probably not a very good student or employee.
This is largely my experience as well. The Bay Area wannabe startup crowd is brimming with idiots, people dumber than your dumbest colleague at work. Unbelievable amounts of Dunning-Kruger.
The actual grind filters out most of them, of course, but if you concede that some businesses are basically luck then some number of those idiots will make it.
Yeah, except that Big Head was, as far as I understood, just sleepwalking or floating through life. He more or less wholly lacked that unquenchable thirst for money that motivates MBA frat boys to yell at balding beta cucks to type the code faster before AI replaces them...
At my company, non technical Managers (including marketing folks) are posting Claude and ChatGPT responses in bug tickets with the "fix" for the bug. No explanation of what the expected vs actual behavior is, just AI slop telling me how to fix it. Soooo helpful.
People have no mental model for it. They know people don't know much, and are used to computers being deterministic. Now (setting aside complete rubes who believe anything) people are used to detecting human-generated BS and spam on the Internet.
- It's nearly always poorly written because dummies also usually can barely write
- It's poorly packaged (some random comments section, not a polished slide deck)
- It's biased in predictable ways (when you do know who wrote it, their self-interested takes are predictable).
Enter "AI" - it writes mechanically well (even though it overuses several tropes, it doesn't make grammatical errors). AI packages its output as exactly what you ask it to (e.g. finished coding projects, outlines, essays, etc.) And not being a person, it's not guaranteed to have a certain bias, but it does echo and validate all your own biases.
Given all this, people think AI sounds exactly like what they assume an oracle would sound like.
One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.
This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.
There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.
A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.
There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.
Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
This reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early.
The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
Reminds me of my friends in Gaza, where every day means no shops, no restaurants, no home, no medicine, no food, no water, no hope. The beaches are full of people just trying to exist.
The person you are talking to did not personally commit genocide in Gaza. Just as I, an American citizen, did not declare war on Iran.
In fact, I think the war in Iran is a stupid and immoral thing to do. It's possible that the person you are responding to feels the same about the Israeli government's genocidal actions in Gaza.
However, you did not bother to find out. When you judge someone before knowing them, it is called "prejudice". Pre-judging.
The UN classified it a genocide. Is the latest to call that a marketing ploy or Russian disinformation and say it's not OK or hip or fashionable to question our allies? Evil productized?
Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.
I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
With AI we're about to have a trust crisis (I'll explain in a sec), so if we extrapolate it very far, we could see a world where nobody trusts anything displayed on a device, which is essentially what you describe but in a world with electricity still running.
The trust issue: we already see hacker news members accusing each other of being LLMs, we already see legitimate images being immediately put in the AI category, and AI images and videos being shared as if the truth. We already see signs of infosec changing forever, with flaws found in SSL libraries that makes you wonder how trusty that little padlock next to the URL will become, we already see operating systems having to patch faster than they can.
With all that you get to wonder how much you can trust the pixels you see on your device, and how much we'll collectively trust them in the future. That leads you to trust your neighbours way more than your social media feed, which frankly, may have a positive impact on society over the long run, despite a very painful transition.
That's under the hypothesis that AI leads us to experience a trust crisis, which isn't a given.
I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.
I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.
So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
I forget where, but there was a restaurant who locked all phones in a box at your table and if you made it to the end without opening it the table got a free cookie.
Plenty of these experiences can be found without disconnecting the electricity for multiple countries. Personally, I find musical events of all sorts are amazing for this, and completely AI free should you chose the right events :)
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
The problem with live concerts is that a substantial number of people are holding up their smartphones in front of them and experiencing it through the screen.
That might work at concerts, but it still sort of irks me. Museums, however, have become the worst for this. People stepping in front of me holding their phone in front of my face while I'm looking at the thing just so they can get a picture and wander off without ever really looking. If you want a picture of the art, go to the gift shop
I remember going to Coachella every year from 2005-2010 and it was a great experience. I went in 2017(?) once after that and it seemed like literally everyone had their phones up filming during the sets. It was a night and day difference. Even the EDM tents were people just filming which also had a chilling effect on how crazy people were getting.
Large electronic music events always been like that in my mind, attend the events with less than 1000 attendees and you'll find a completely different vibe. Also, Cochaella is American, maybe try something European next time, I've never been to any North American parties, but judging from what I could see in the past, and even today, they sure look a lot more commercialized than the same-sized events in Europe, and people seem to be interested in something else than dancing their ass off with strangers.
Same here. Just looking into going to Coachella or Burning Man seems like so much work. I'll take a summer festival in Spain, Germany or Netherlands instead.
In comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?
In my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end.
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.
I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!
I called the local Apple Store, got what was probably an AI. I just needed the hours, so that was OK, but then it asked if I needed anything else. I asked for winning numbers to the lottery. It thunk and thunk and thought some more and came back with, I’ll have to pass you to a store employee. Now I know how to avoid 1,000 questions and get a live person.
Sometimes yelling fuck shit piss bitch cunt fuck ass whore etc works. They have them setup to detect swear words to figure out when youre pissed off and need to talk to a human lmao
Xfinity/Comcast automated support has swear word detection. I eventually picked up on this after the 4th or 5th time they sent out a non-technical 'technician' in response to my concerns over SNR causing connection instability.
(Me: "here is a comprehensive analysis of modem logs over the past 7 days and clear indication of the cause"; Xfinity: "Let's turn off the wifi router for 30s! It didn't work the last 50 times but it's the only thing we can do.")
That honestly is just the worst when it happens. It sucks for both the rep on the phone and you since it's just a waste of both of your time (though at least they get paid for it).
Had a similar back and forth over multiple days where I spent hours on the phone with them. On the third day they finally sent me to a different call center with someone in the US that was authorized to go off script and actually solve my problem. Took five minutes.
I just don't understand how it makes sense. Considering just how much these companies limit the utility of customer service, it's no wonder they want to switch to LLMs. It's likely no worse than the service they are already providing 99% of the time.
Depending on the company, you sometimes get routed to the angry people recovery section when you do this. And so then, the Comcast agent on the other end is in stern counselor mode ready to de-escalate what seems to the robot to be a fuming, angry customer and gets completely thrown off when you’re super chill with them (or at least, you hopefully are chill with them!)
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer.
Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."
We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.
> Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
I agree with the messaging generally, but unfortunately to fight implicitly unprofessional behavior with a terse response like this would look explicitly unprofessional!
I understand that example, on the other hand, RTFM is as old as history and it can often be replaced by googling or asking LLMs.
Not saying that's the very specific case, but I regularly encounter in my daily life at work people delegating the kind of information seeking that can be done independently.
No, this was in response to some questions about different approaches enterprises take to automated code quality review and complying with some arbitrary security standard out there. And this was a principal secops guy who thought the appropriate thing to do was to ask Copilot.
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
>And this was a principal secops guy who thought the appropriate thing to do was to ask Copilot.
Firing them on the spot and telling them: "Thanks for opening our eyes to the fact that asking you is just asking Copilot with a middleman" will send the right message to the rest...
I dont even ask people questions anymore. I'm tired of the sneer and the "Did you ask Claude?" responses. I had a manager say "I'm here to help in any way I can", and then every way I brought up was "We expect a Senior to be able to answer that themselves" or "Did you ask claude"... thanks for the help, so much for teamwork.
Turning people down when they ask questions is such a short-sighted perspective. When you answer, you can tailor it to them, you can give extra context, you can elaborate, you can dive into specific nuances. Long-term it will be very likely a positive thing as the person will trust you more, they will be comfortable asking more questions and the knowledge might actually help them to contribute in the future.
I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt here. It reminds me of the Google search phenomenon others have mentioned, which culminated in the joke website "let me google that for you." But, I don't think the cause is necessarily that people are dumb or lazy. Both are factors, but another big one is that people are overwhelmed at work. Another question coming in may not be viewed as an opportunity to learn or help a colleague but as just another task to complete as quickly as possible so the task mountain doesn't grow higher. I'd like to think that we'll eventually use AI to automate a lot of the mundane stuff at work so people have the opportunity to dig into questions from colleagues and provide real answers and genuinely have a conversation when they do. I realize that's pretty optimistic and it may take a while to get there but people stopped sending me google search results years ago. That phenomenon was relatively short-lived and hopefully this one is too.
I have five Gen-Z kids that are pushing back on GenAI hard and they claim their peers are getting angry about how it’s impacted their lives.
As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.
But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.
I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.
I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.
GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.
My oldest is on the tail end of Gen-Z and is vehemently anti-AI. This isn't a position I've been vocal about, she just kind of expressed her disdain for it one day.
I've been in IT a while, and am more of an AI skeptic - but I'm OK with it being used as a tool where it makes sense in my field, and it certainly has some value.... but shoehorning it into everything and using it as a general replacement for human creativity is a no-go for me.
It's a relief to know GenZ is feeling this way, and I hope having an entire generation against it will help pump the brakes a bit.
It makes sense. GenZ and younger have the most to lose from AI. Corporate America is absolutely giddy about its promise to make 50+% of white collar jobs redundant. I'd have a very negative view about it too, if I were just graduating college and looking for an entry-level office job.
A bit off topic, but I am currently travelling through Europe by train. It is such a boon to just be outside everyday and meet locals and fellow travellers. Highly recommend.
Highly depends on the country. Go to Sweden and you'll have a hard time even practicing Swedish, as soon as the natives discover you're also not a native, they'll switch to English immediately in most places of the country.
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
I was in rural Northeast Spain one time and a French lady tried to get me to help her communicate with a Spanish storekeeper. Given that I only speak bits of Spanish and basically no French, and I seemed to have to the most bilingual skill of the three of us, we had a pretty hard time communicating. I'm still not exactly sure what the French lady wanted, and my vague understanding of what the Spanish person said was, "I can't be bothered with this."
The easiest place in France I've traveled as an English speaker was Nice. They all speak English well and don't seem to care if you don't speak French.
Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich.
I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?"
Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing)
I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school:
"Jambon du pain et...."
And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face:
"What would you like?"
It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.
Who knows, I guess music, film, TV and video games, like most of us who learned English outside of English-native speaking countries. School classes helps for sure, but I'd wager most people who speak good English learned it from multimedia one way or another.
Also relevant to note that some European countries dub everything while others sub. That no doubt plays a part in the population’s understanding of foreign languages.
> and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want
To expand on this idea, there are books designed specifically for travels which are pocket sized and contain a bunch of images so you can point at what you want.
It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
last time in Italy I "spoke" to lots of Italians very slowly with lots of gestures and a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot! Nearly ordered 100x as much cheese as I meant to except the guy in the shop was not a computer so he understood what I really meant. Much better than in the Netherlands where they just switch to English as soon as they hear you try to say choodumorchen
I speak three European languages, and English worked almost always. Especially the younger folks in the cities. If it didn't work, I used a translation app.
I have a pet theory that we were better off when the economy flowed through Wall St rather than Silicon Valley because Wall St people ride the subway to work.
I am also traveling through Europe, currently in Budapest. Twice now in the last week, I have heard AI music being played through the speakers at restaurants.
Well, I think I couldn't distinguish AI music from the good (or bad) old human-made "elevator music", but maybe I'm mistaken and it would stand out to me when I hear it...
listen carefully and if it rings (as in being little distorted, or too noisy) it is most probably AI. and it is nearly-impossible to obscure it, unless you replay the whole score using classic approach. i would imagine how irritating is this music to everyone a child indeed, as children have higher thresh of what they hear.
That's probably to be expected, before that they used covers of popular songs, likely produced by a company that offers much lower rates than e.g. the original artists.
There are already solutions for doing exactly that. e.g., DB's apps allow purchasing tickets for many other countries, and you can find and purchase DB tickets via Google Flights.
Just wait until everyone is using AR glasses which listen to your conversation, run it through an LLM, then use the speaker to bark an answer at you with the wearer’s previously synthesised voice, while they’re scrolling instagram inside the lenses.
I took my private jet to Fiji. Just needed a month to unwind and walk on the beach, sample local cuisine, get to know fellow travelers. Also highly recommended
I work on a small team. I talk to coding agents a lot. I also talk to my human team members a lot. So I have decent experience with interacting with both LLMs and humans.
My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.
My pet theory comes to information density. LLM writing feels too shallow. If you read a text from a person who cares about her subject, there will be more useful detail and insight scatterd throughout. And the information within sentences will be more meaningfully connected. On one hand, LLM would know all that, but it does not seem to know how to distill that knowledge into a written text. I read what people write. If I know the text is from an LLM, I skim.
Probably about the distribution - AI writes text that resembles the average distribution among all text corpses, but humans have personalities and are always biased.
I also work on a small team that leverages LLMs heavily. The verbosity and "polish" of the responses is tiring. Everything starts to feel written in just one, inhuman voice. I too miss the "roughness" or personality of writing and communication pre-LLM.
AI makes it apparent that the only value some people bring to the table is that they have access to information that you do not. If now they fold that one advantage by just delegating everything to AI (which is in the same position as you informationwise), they will remove themselves from the worker pool soon.
If you're in a particularly fiesty mood you can lean into that. "If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"
While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.
I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.
Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.
If you are taking AI output and interactively working with it to come to some particular solution, that process of working with it is the value you are adding. The "AI proxy" is specifically about the case where you send a question to someone and literally all they do is paste it to the AI, then send back what the AI said without further work. Literally all they did was proxy your question to the AI.
Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off. There's value in that if they are, as if they really are experts they can filter out bs and reprompt better than you likely could if you're not an expert - and in rare cases, who knows, maybe they could actually do it themselves.
AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
There have always been people that did the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
AI will just make it more obvious.
And those people will be at the front to be let go when AI inevitably kills white collar jobs as it creates other jobs. They just might not be able to get one of those new ones because they rotted what little brain cells they had to begin with.
> I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off
The co-founder of Anthropic isn't even doing this when preparing statements to say after the Pope has spoken about AI, I think you're expecting a bit too much here.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that's a must too, but I also think people should test software extensively before deploying/releasing it, seemingly nowadays I'm in the minority about these sort of things.
> Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
I've seen people employed working on some code bases that couldn't code at all.
> Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Some lawyers are downright incompetent and don't know what they're talking about / just want your money.
> Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
Some doctors are downright incompetent or malicious. You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
> AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
It does help people overall, the worst coworkers are probably going to still be there, just a bit better hidden.
The rest just have a new-age search engine to augment their capabilities.
> You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
To be fair the human body is immensely complex. Every specialist will look at everything through the lens of their field, as at the very least they can rule out some things this way.
I had a doctor judge that my tonsils need to be removed, but for unrelated reasons I went to two other and both of them figured it's not as bad yet.
The difference between them was generational, as the first practiced an approach from 30 years ago, back when tonsils were indeed commonly removed.
1. Immediately said 'Cancer' to stomach issues on an old person. They just didn't care, another doctor resolved that.
2. Eye doctors that would not investigate anything and just prescribe eye glasses and would recommend local companies that they owned or had a stake in.
3. Fake gynecologists that did C-Sections brutally without any experience
4. Fake plastic surgeons with no experience just going by word of mouth taking rich peoples money
5. Fertility doctors doing human egg-trafficking.
6. General doctors forcing appendectomy if under-18s came to the hospital with any stomach complains (they could not refuse, doctor got money for the surgery)
Sure, human body is complex. That wasn't my point.
Where I'm from half of these points mean actual jail time for the physician attempting them, most of the rest (like kickbacks) result in standing in front of an ethics committee.
I've been calling it the "AI argument from misanthropy" but that's way more succinct. Thanks.
What really drives me crazy is how laden it is with negative emotions, and then people pretend it's just a rational assessment of the world. I was told growing up that if you're anxious or negative, it's just because you are smart and you understand how terrible everything is, while stupid people are happy. Seems like a lot of people got a similar message, and now they're shilling AI.
The whole point is that the layperson is not classically trained to know right from wrong which is the entire thesis of knowledge share. Even post doctorate students are required to have their work peer reviewed. It’s why anthropic and OpenAI put disclaimers below their chat prompts
> Those low quality lawyers/doctors still won't care enough to help the layperson.
I had a pediatrician who I regarded as generally low quality until she correctly identified scarlet fever in my child, while AI and a doctor in training we knew didn't.
Recently someone I know came up with a statement "AI is like opening borders, like abolishing visas."
I think it's very perceptive and you can even view reactions to AI through that lens. Somehow both, the "immigrants" are taking our jobs but they are way worse than all of us at them. And the people from outside any given domain (art, coding, law) that advent of AI suddenly let into it, marvel at this land of opportunities, empowerment and self-reliance that used to be outside of their reach before that.
I mostly use it because I'm lazy on the presentation, not so much on the content. I provide full knowledge and content plan in my prompt. I do manual review & fix.
Someone informed can tell the content is generated. I don't really care, that's still my knowledge and I can discuss content in depth.
"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit — a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."
This is 2009 right? I almost expected the classic 100+ year old quote, but knowing the year still has the same effect of conveying how something that feels recent has been felt forever.
I'm not certain. I heard this in a webinar around 2017-2018 I believe (conducted by the same guy [1] who turned me onto Wendell Berry in the first place).
AI has "just" greatly accelerated/amplified dysfunction that was already there previously.
Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.
So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.
The sad thing is it happens in real life too. You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day. You have to just wait for them to get it out and then you can talk to the real person again.
> You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day.
This is so true.
So many people just parrot whatever nonsensical talking point they heard.
Regurgitating things without an ounce of reflection or critical thought.
I agree and on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life working from home, talking to a machine, and not enriching any person's life directly. It's just so gruesomely LONELY.
There are still in-office jobs out there, where you can have lunch with humans, and maybe even make friends with your coworkers. I have one. It's not a popular opinion on this site, but it's OK to admit that being isolated home alone for 40+ hours a week is not healthy for your personality type.
I'm back in the office (3 days a week) and there's some weird cultural thing on my team that I don't quite understand. Coworkers I sit next to will message me on Teams instead of just standing up and talking to me over the cube wall. No one eats lunch together or really converses outside of meetings. We have meetings on Teams even though everyone in the meeting is in the office sitting next to each other. I'll book rooms for the meetings and inform the team only to be the only one in the room.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
Could be just the team culture. The meeting thing is pretty weird, but what happens if you just show up and tap them on the shoulder? Do they get annoyed or overall happy to chat? What about just drinking coffee/tea?
It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.
It sounds weird indeed, but maybe some higher-ups decided this is a way to go in case people need to be isolated again or when it's necessary to hire some remote coworkers who shouldn't be left behind, etc.
Remote doesn't need to be isolating. You can make friends with remote coworkers, but it requires a culture where jumping on a call to work things out is normalized.
I've found most work communication apps not to be very condusive to it, but Discord is pretty good.
You still sit at home, alone, in front of a screen to talk to these people. It's still really depressing.
I sincerely miss working in an office, but with my current job it would've been impossible anyway (everyone is remote in different countries). I've only once met some of my coworkers irl a few years ago when we went to a conference together.
Yea, you have to be proactive. I have friends with non-traditional work schedules to spend time with during the working hours when I take breaks from work. I go to coffee shops and make friends with the workers there. And I make sure to engage in social activities like group cycling. I love WFH but would never make it so I am sitting in front of my computer alone at home 40 hours a week.
It hurts that I relate with this so much. I am wasting my 20s.
I see people who advocate for permanent wfh has plans with their social circle. Either already has a family or friends. Sucks to be the one trying to build a new life.
Btw, I don’t believe them a bit. All I see are rotten people who no longer speaks new things, or is a living instagram bot.
Different strokes for different folks at different stages in their lives. If I wrote OP's post 7 years ago before WFH, I'd have said: "on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life driving 2.5 hours each way to an office to type into a machine and to maintain physical proximity to people I don't really like or dislike. It's just so gruesomely UNNECESSARY."
I can see your point. Right now, it's really on the opposite spectrum of how it used to be. Forced commute + interaction vs. forced isolation. Sure either side could take steps to mitigate, like renting the "quiet cubicle" on the one side or "working from a coffee shop" on the other, but as it stands, "WFH" is really the downswing of the "commute to office" upswing.
Yeah but that's because people suck so fucking much.
1. "Sorry can't come" an hour after we were supposed to meet - this alone kills 80% of my friendships
2. "I like edgy humor" and then a month later "I'm going to report you to HR" literally had this happen to me
3. Most people have very little depth and stick to superficial smalltalk, which I find very exhausting
And when on top of that you say "I wish my friend had similar values and enjoyed at least one common hobby" then it's basically over. Not to mention the fact that most people aren't open to new friendships. If they're married then they straight up say "wife doesn't allow", if they're not then it's "yeah let's grab a coffee someday".
My motto is "if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go alone" because trying to be cooperative with people has never yielded me better results than just doing the shit on my own.
#3 I think anxiety pervades people's lives, and I often wonder how many of them are "holding on by a thread" and literally don't have capacity for ANYTHING that may stir the pot, like a new friend, so they give any tired excuse to avoid rocking their boat.
This is the result of having everything customised to you. I don’t know how old you are and I am not going to assume.
I feel the way we live our lives, algorithmic everything tailored to us, we just don’t accept differences anymore.
I remember when working for one of my old clients last year that the business as usual slack conversation was:
- lead AI engineer asking tech advice
- me proposing something (out of my experience and knowledge)
- he invoking inline slack bot to ask if what I said made any sense
- me telling that the AI arguments were kind of off
- he invoking again the same both asking why I said that
- .... so on...
- third developer kicking in responding with obviously ChatGPT generated message
Fair. But it's getting harder to tell the difference. LLMs tell you what you want but others are getting better at imitating humans which is something.
My experience as well. It's happened a few times now that I'll ask a coworker a question about some system they built, and they tell me to just ask the AI.
I did ask the AI. I gave it several rounds. I got a summary of their diff from it. I skimmed their diff myself. I have a rough mental model of the work they did, plus what the AI did/didn't tell me. I'm asking THEM so THEY can confirm my mental model is correct to the code they supposedly authored.
I suspect the real problem is they vibed the whole thing and didn't even self-review it. So they don't know, can't answer, and the interaction is truly pointless. They are not the expert any longer. It's not worth asking them.
Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.
I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?
The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.
You're going to ask your own LLM session why they did it that way. And if there's a problem, you raise it. And if this individual keeps opening buggy PRs, you have a talk with them about how to use the LLM to catch these issues before a PR is opened.
I told some of my coworkers that they should keep in mind that if their job becomes "passing messages between an AI Assistant and their co-workers", sooner or later someone will realize they can just cut the middle man and build an agent that does their job. Use AI assistants all you like but don't forget to add value.
For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?
A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.
I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
There used to be so much discussion of "brand safety" and people would flip out if their ad showed on a video that didn't align with company viewpoints, even though the company clearly wasn't the creator of the video.
Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!
It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?
There’s more mass manipulation AKA nudge campaigns going on than ever. Plus, there’s a market for “aged” (forgot the term they actually used) accounts that look authentic.
Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?
Yes, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. Reddit is one of the most astroturfed of them all, besides maybe Facebook. At least Facebook has consistent moderation they're (somewhat) accountable for. Moderation on Reddit is extremely shady and opaque, the subreddits aren't ran democratically so they can shut up whoever they want selectively to foster a particular sentiment.
This is another one of those "is your 'conspiracy theory' filter miscalibrated?" questions. It doesn't take much research at all to find many concrete, documented instances of this, organizations that do it, organizations that you can find that you can pay to do it, people posting their accounts of having worked at one of these companies, pictures of their setups, all kinds of things. If your filter is going "no, of course nobody does that, that's just a conspiracy theory", you need to recalibrate it because it is way off. Yes, people do it, at scale, and there's little reason to believe the stuff you can uncover in 5 minutes of searching is all of it either when there's every motivation for a lot of it to stay hidden. It's not a theory, it's an entire industry.
Because we built an economy where you’re rewarded for being an attention whore. Flooding the scene with bots is a good way to statistically make sure you’re a good little whore.
Humans delegating tasks to AI all over the place like that, i.e., without adding value from their own, suggests ultimately that the middle humams should soon be cut out, irrespective of whether those humans are more capable than AI or not.
It generally helps when one is not surrounded by tactless buffoons.
I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.
Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.
Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.
I just had a maddening convo with Amazon's AI https://share.zight.com/o0udw54W (i had mentioned before that in 5 minutes it would be time to get my refund according to some other policy message they sent me). A convo before this Amazon's bot didn't even recognize the reply the forced me to give from their button. I clicked "Entire package is missing". and they replied "Couldn't understand your response". It's a brutal, antagonistic experience. The kicker is how Amazon keeps saying "we're passionate about customer experience". You were Amazon. You were. But you've given that up.
The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.
> I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot.
If this happens to me, it's a sign that they don't want to talk to me and I'm going to be let go.
>He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.
When you ask people for an answer you are asking for their help. But if they delegate to AI they are in essence saying they don't want to make the effort to help you. They are making it LOOK LIKE they are doing something to help you by hiding the fact the answer is direct from AI. It is cheating.
Don't worry. It happens to many of us, but it's not that serious. It's really like talking to yourself, given that they're still great language models, LLMs. Just imagine what it will be like in 10 years.
That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer.
Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.
I suppose the issue is that they will simply ask their LLM to summarize and to reply, so if anything, it might just normalize and justify it a bit more.
This is good information, but a bit superficial - before AI, what percentage of online articles were generated from templates? What was written by content generation farms? Fiverrr and co pay-per-word writers?
I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.
I imagine something like 98% of articles also get less than 100 views. So the question is more about the articles you're reading rather than articles in general.
If one cant remember what they generated, whats the point in generating? Half of those who write articles do not remember what the AI put in it... Reviewing has become a slop work by humans!
1. Find some nicher but interesting topic (e.g. some historical event like Lepanto's battle)
2. Have AI generate the content of the 20 minutes video by collecting information about it online
3. Have AI generate the video
4. Have AI generate a realistic voice to comment on the video
5. Upload it without mentioning it's all AI generated
6. Have me get mad 4 minutes into the video because footage/paintings referring to that battle...do not exist at all...slowly realize it was all AI generated
I started "do not recommending" and removing channels that had any stink of AI. I also removed some subscriptions from major YouTube channels. My subscription and homepages are much quieter now and easier to parse.
The YouTube algorithm got unbearable to me even before the mudslide of AI content.
I highly recommend using an extension like Unhook and disabling all algorithmic recommendations such as the Home feed, sidebar/endscreen recommendations etc. The only way I interface with YouTube now is through the subscriptions page which shows me videos from creators I follow in chronological order.
> We build on our prior research by using three different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). We independently evaluate each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%. Each AI detector shows a similar trend.
This is all bullshit, none of those actually work, and the false-positives rates are sky-high. I'm not sure how any serious person have tried out any of those services and came away with the impression of "Well, better than nothing" because literally, it seems the opposite.
The detectors aren’t great but they aren’t really the issue. The fact that LLMs make it so easy to impersonate human communication is precisely the problem here. There cannot be a reliable way to identify if something is from a human or not. And the ease of access and low price makes using LLM generated content a no brainer, you have to actively go out of your way to produce human generated content.
We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
> We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
Yes, until you remember there is a world outside of the screen, where people build things with their hands, use their physically to play instruments for others, paint beautiful things for others to see physically and so much more.
"Humanness" online been dead for decades already, if you want humanness you need to step outside, or at least invite other humans home.
There is a meaningful difference between “humans online are tribalistic” and “content consumed by humans is generated by machines”. The IRL world isn’t safe either, books, newspapers, advertising, speeches are/will be heavily LLM made. Political parties are using LLMs. The IRL humans are relying on what their LLMs summarized or searched for them.
The same way the online world has never actually been that distinct from the offline world, one is merged with the other and they influence each others.
There has been of humanness online of you do not look for it on social medias. But that’s now breaking down, because we developed a technology designed to impersonate human communication
Right, what I was talking about things that generally aren't done by AI. People aren't building sculptures with AI, no graffiti is made with AI, the oil paintings you can see in galleries aren't AI, the DJ that fucks up during a performance isn't AI.
There is so much humanity in the world outside of the screen, and it's really easy to see what is authentically made, ignore the rest. Find live events with real other humans, there are a ton of them out there, doesn't really matter how people find the events, as long as we put our bodies in the same physical space.
I hope you’re right. Over the past month or so I personally started to feel really pessimistic about AI development. I really don’t know how much of those human spaces are safe from AI.
Yes you can go to a drawing course or music festival and see human performances. But how do you then stay in contact with those people? The answer is very likely via software, meaning there is still this question of “am I interacting with a human? Or are they copy-pasting from ChatGPT?”. A friend you met shares a new song, is it really them playing or did they generate that track?
Just the fact that we have some level of doubt means we already lost something.
That being said, sure, live in the physical world and build social contacts. I’m all for it.
Humans writing more like LLMs, just like new LLMs write more like humans, it's all coalescing into one.
I've copied-pasted comments I made on HN from like 2020 and had it tell me it's "100% AI". I've seen examples where the services claim "100% AI" because there was no normal dashes, only em-dashes. Even have a recent example from HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165690
Your evidence seems very anecdata. The graphite.io study does make an effort to quantify the false positive and false negative rates of the three detectors, rather than just saying “they work”. They generate 2000 ai articles and ask the detectors to evaluate them, measuring the false negatives (articles falsely IDd as human written); and they use a separate pre-AI dataset (years 2000-2022) to determine false positives.
Yeah, I suppose it is, I haven't finished my dissertation on it yet, I'll get right on that :)
Throughout them being available I've tried them every now and then, both with AI generated trash and my own pre-LLM writings, and had about 0% success in getting them to accurately report what it actually is. Maybe my writing style and what specific LLM you use matters a lot, I'm sure these platform's training data is mostly from the mainstream models so as soon as you use anything else, they'll get trivially lost. But again, I don't have any evidence and proof behind this, based only on when I've tried to evaluate them myself in the past.
If you need an AI detector to figure out if something is AI or not, surely that means the AI is so good that there is no need to detect whether it is AI or not, because it is indistinguishable from writings by a human when read by humans?
I mean this is an article coming from an SEO company that's really just trying to advertise its services in the end. Their methodology seems very loose.
Just a boring old organic human tired of other organic beings falling for obvious bullshit most likely made up by machines convincing humans with something like "you really have a neat idea here, the world will appreciate you making this into a product".
I work in the "AI Center of Excellence" as an lead engineer at a public traded company and I haven't had this experience at all. Just my anecdotal experience but this article is just the author's anecdotal experience. Are lots of people having the experience that nobody they send messages to are responding themselves, it's usually an AI crafted message at a minimum? That's brutal.
--EDIT--
I should add though that I am still tired of talking to AI. Not because people are giving me AI responses but b/c 95% of my communication is routed through Claude Code. :/
I've had engineers connect claude to slack and have it send my team messages about issues they're facing with our api or documentation. People are massively addicted to LLMs.
In Neal Stephenson's fall or dodge in hell there's a timeline where the internet is so flooded by fake AI generated news that characters have their own agent both filtering info and maintaining their fake social presence.
The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.
I've recently been connecting some machines to a new switch and my colleague has been monitoring web logs at the same time using Claude. He send me a Claude-generated observation that the machines that I was able to put my hands on simultaneously must be in different buildings due to high pings. Surreal experience.
I'm not tired to talking to AI because I specifically instructed my agents to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross, so i constantly reminded that coffee is for closers only.
I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.
I was reflecting the other day how discovering things online felt like being in on a secret. You had to just know about a chat room or BBS or website. Each one was like discovering a secret.
Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.
There are exceptions, e.g. lobste.rs has an invitation tree. When someone starts posting LLM-generated comments, that part of the tree can get yanked. Also, it builds up a community gradually, because you need to be invited by someone. Since the invitation tree is visible, people will generally only vouch on people they trust, because an invitee that violates the rules will reflect bad on the inviter (and might get removed if they do that too often).
> I think I've managed to avoid most of the AI generated internet.
I honestly am not sure that one can know that that is true anymore. Probably the only place left that I have any confidence in is maybe the small discords I'm in with various friend groups with <30 people that all know each other IRL.
Can't speak of the grandparent, but I'm in some small communities with people that I met IRL at some point, and I know them well enough to know that they would not do that.
How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?
You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.
LMGTFY was an intentionally rude tongue-in-cheek response when someone was asking a question that could easily be answered by a simple search. This is about asking more complex questions that don't necessarily have a single objective answer.
The difference is that the LLM answer is almost always wrong. It assumes I have not already used an LLM and that I am asking something that an LLM can answer.
If the guy was asking about a business process in their business how would chatGPT know what their process is?
`Just send me the prompt` applies. If you have an answer and you feed it to an LLM to dress it up, just send me the prompt. If you don't have the answer and are just going to ask an LLM just tell me `I don't know`.
I may have to break the news to you that the LMGTFY was also rude. Both LMGTFY and AI copypastes are rude and dismissive answers that are intended to make the person asking the question feel stupid and bad. It only provides value in making you feel really smart and possibly smug about showing that question-asker what's up, and offers nothing in the short term about their problem (or in the long term about their comfort in turning to you for help).
> you can get a straight answer from an LLM
By definition, LLMs cannot give a straight answer. They give you text based off next token probabilities.
Perhaps part of the issue is that people feel compelled to respond, even though they don't have anything to say. Maybe people think if they burn some tokens for you that's somehow a more polite way to ignore you and hope you go away?
When you are online and ask any question - especially technical, most likely you will get an AI generated answer.
Local meetups, library, walks, and local coffee shops (not places that offer free wifi where people are anyway buried in their devices) are where real human connections happen.
As a person running a network of CTOs that meet in person and interact very human-ly.... I agree and see the value now more than ever in human interaction.
(to be clear, i do a lot of things, but this is one of them, and boy is it wild how important it feels)
We’re optimizing the soul out of human interaction.
Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?
I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.
If it comes to that I’m done with the internet. It has been an alright ride but that is not how I need to use it. Plus most all this discussion we do imo is just low effort noise anyhow. This is a time sink for me. It isn’t enriching, and often comes at the cost of actually enriching things, I’m beginning to realize. Remember any of the articles and discussion threads you read last week on hn and wherever else? Me neither. This is junk food, potato chips, small comfort stuff. If it becomes even more perverted the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
I found a GitHub that was spreading malware. I chatted to AI and it cloned it into a vm, did some static analysis, pulled the usernames of the bad guys and the guys they were impersonating and gave me a summary and an email address I could contact. The guy replied with a note of appreciation.
I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.
I love chatting to AI.
The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.
We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective
As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions.
But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.
Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.
That is not entirely true. Some business first contact is AI. It is, on purpose, a bit difficult or bothersome to actually try and contact a human being.
I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.
OP clearly is out of the loop and hasn't tried out the latest frontier models. SOA labs have specifically tuned the new models to counter the "I'm tired of talking to AI" issues using even less tokens and power!
The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?
A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.
It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.
I feel sorry for people who have to use strong AI agentic agents all day long for their jobs. I just came off of a 30 day experiment using Gemini Ultra (all the Antigravity+Claude Opus I could use) and while it was great to re-work a few dozen of my open source projects and to check my Open Content books for inconsistencies and make improvements, the awful thing was it felt dehumanizing. I am now just using DeepSeek v4 for less than 1 hour a day and that feels better: a good mix of getting help when really needed and doing my own thing by myself.
Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
Online user groups are falling apart because AI gives better answers, isn't looking for an opportunity to condescend to new users, doesn't try to gatekeep by scaring away new users, and doesn't just point you to the FAQ regardless of if your question is answered in there or not, along with the "XY problem pathological case" you noticed. I think AI is only going to get better (unless they enshittify it intentionally).
In my documents I usually preface with "This document is 100% typed by Aperocky". And then where ever part of it is generated by LLM, it is clearly marked (e.g. SVGs). It is necessary these days.
It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.
This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it". Which at the time was a rude but effective way of telling people to get off their ass and figure it out themselves instead of being lazy and expecting others to solve their issues.
You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.
The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.
>This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it".
I don't think that is always the case. Sometimes it is. Other times the social cues and later follow up makes it seem the person thought they were being really helpful, not sarcastic, by sending the response. Yet other times, the person acts as if it was their own response and not the AI's, almost akin to passing off the AI's work as their own.
This is most notable when the original question shows effort was put into it and it isn't a simple case.
I can't judge the specific situation. But if this happens to you a lot, I'd suggest looking at how you are asking things from other people (i.e. how you communicate).
> original question shows effort was put into it
What matters is how the other side interprets it, not your level of effort or your expectations. If the other side apparently doesn't get what you wanted to happen, that's a communication issue.
My partner had issues with an online retailer and contacted support, which happily went around in circles since it was an AI agent and wasn't well prompted.
When I think about a PGP-style web of trust that shows that you're human, this is the showstopper I come up against. Provably human people can just parrot the bots.
Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?
It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?
> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.
Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.
At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.
> Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Great suggestion. Problem: these are bosses and coworkers and people you need to work with to keep receiving income to live, and the topics talked about are things important to the place of work.
There's a feeling of abandonment online, and the optimist in me is wondering if maybe people would rather be doing something else. This is pollyannaish, but I'd love to imagine that people are discovering the real world, sitting alone or otherwise, and leaving this version of themselves on the internet to an empty shell.
You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
When you work in STEM fields you tend to interact with people with higher non verbal reasoning skills (often called Performance IQ) who generally have lower verbal IQs (not always). These people are definitively less articulate and cannot see the linguistic inconsistencies and inhuman demeanor of LLM outputs. Much in the same way that non creative people cannot tell why some AI art is unappealing, they can't easily comprehend the value of the human dimension of art. Similarly, people with poor non-verbal/performance reasoning skills cannot understand the difference between AI produced code and human produced code.
The worst part of this is the person that doesn't even bother copying the text, rather just screenshot the AI answer and send it. That's the new lowest level of not giving a crap about the question.
This is the sad reality we live in I suppose, I feel that the trajectory that our species is moving towards is one of over-reliance. It seems like people are slowly becoming more and more dependent on AI, and to be honest, that was always the goal of technology whether we like it or not. Things are invented to make other things easier, but of course this case is just sad.
What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)
We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
Its happening with me too since around a year. When I ask a solution from one of my senior he just reply by pasting the response from ChatGPT. Now I have stopped asking him.
I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.
The tiring part for me is the waiting and/or context switching to fill that time. When agents of this intelligence or better can get you results in seconds instead of minutes we can start thinking single threaded again and it will be more enjoyable.
I remember late into my master's degree in a ethic's class about AI we had discussed the possibilities of the butterfly effect of not letting it transpire. He had given us a tricky word, and I don't remember what it was, but he asked us to create a definition for it.
I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,
Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.
>granted she was significantly older
I said, "Why don't you believe it?"
"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.
"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."
"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."
She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.
Unfortunately this is a skill issue. The information is in the machine, you just need to figure out how to get it out. Most people are very far behind on this.
I thought the LLM promise was that people could do things easily because conversation is the most intuitive input there is. If we still have to "figure out how to get it out", what if we put that educational effort into... I don't know, learning search or queries or something that gives concrete answers and not statistically-average-probability answers?
> Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.
My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents
Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.
How would this happen? I thought most of these things used random seeds when returning responses. I understand similar, but exactly the same seems pretty odd if 2 people use the same prompt in 2 sessions.
Help desks and canned replies - if a user complains about X, respond with Y. We used to just have humans do it, but turns out machines can do that bit, too, especially if the question is relatively simple or asked a lot or has an answer not up for debate.
I assume if they copy pasted the same question it could have been cached? It would seem wasteful for <llm_provider> to not cache responses to exact same questions with exact same context windows (fresh session).
Two months ago I responded to my nontechnical business partners asking me what do I expect from AI in the future couple of months or years - people will cherish and value in person talk and meeting other people much more and even this will hold true for minor share of human population and only until we augment human body to hide its permanent connection to AI.
A year ago (or so) I had a colleague whose messages were all obviously AI-generated. I told them that it felt weird that they were sending me AI answers in Slack and code reviews, and they stopped doing it.
Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.
Yes, I'm with the author. I'm absolutely sick of constantly reading AI content.
But if I have to really dig into it deep, a lot of the people who send me AI content now, weren't sending me anything meaningful to begin with (pre ai).
The number of organizations I have been around where most people just copy paste each other's messages is no joke. This was happening long before AI came along. AI has just made it so much more obvious.
Previously they might have copied it from Joe in Product. Now it all sounds like Claude or GPT.
AI has made my experience as a fully remote worker in a not-fully-remote company worse. It is adding a layer of indirection between myself and the juniors I'm mentoring, or the product manager I'm working on a feature with, and many other mundane facets of work. The opportunity to passively pick up on my coworkers' idiosyncrasies is now gone and all I can do is guess at what prompt they might have used.
I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.
I think new norms will develop around this behavior - it's rude to show someone else your AI output, and I think long term that will be broadly recognized.
Keybase. Keybase was/is a trust network that was unceremoniously and unduly strangled. (You were the chosen one!)
I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.
It doesn't worry me at all. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’ll adapt by switching to different means of communication to keep finding what you’re looking for. AI is simply carrying out natural selection.
For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.
Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.
Similar and even more relevant to HN is when I ask an engineer to fix something, complete a task, document something, etc. and it's clear the work was done with AI in the wrong way. A 60 line PR that should be 4 lines, an overly verbose and off-topic README, a function that misses important edge cases, probably because the engineer thought it too hard to explain the business logic to the AI... It's very tiresome to spend 20 minutes reading a PR only to realize it's crap because someone was sloppy with how they used their AI agent.
I like the way how you have written this text. It’s short and clear. Not a wall of text. Very easy to read and comprehend.
I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings
Until someone fine tunes their LLM to match whatever the trend is and then the contrarians buck that trend for something else. An endless game of cat and mouse.
I personally don’t care if an output is from LLM or human, as long as someone has validated it and determined that it’s correct and useful.
It's a good thing we're ruining the climate so that we can also erode job quality and social interactions.
I can only hope aerospace and medical industries are raising strict constraints against this slop otherwise I fear for the future. Eroding engineering AND communication? Thats a good formula for success
- you use AI-generated argument in a discussion.
- your co-worker counters with AI-generated argument.
- you re-counter with AI-generated rebuttal.
- the co-worker counter the re-counter with another AI-generated…
etc.
So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?
That's a pretty big "I'd". In my experience the answer is no, the AI is not as effective as a human operator (as long as the human operator is paid enough to care)
In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, the "Net" is overrun by rouge AI and eventually humanity has to quarantine itself from them, ironically, using another AI.
I totally understand! Started getting AI fatigue for a few months now. I find myself constantly questioning if content I interact with is AI generated or not.
People say using it is lazy but you're not going to outperform it yourself. The resistance to reality by people is what's crazy. Being a developer now means being a code reviewer. That's just the way it is now.
My career was using C# and JS, and LLMs have caused me to lose interest in learning more. I was always a hobbyist Python and Ruby user. I prefer to put my efforts towards skills that are still useful. Software as a craft is dying, no different than being an expert at riding a horse.
The important part now for a developer is a very strong command of the English language, for both the LLM as well as the rising importance of client interactions. As the space is very competitive, so you need to offer value or form a union so you can regain back some of your lost negotiating power.
Most of the developers I worked with were very poor in that area. I worked hard and was deemed a "top performer" in my last job, but it was equal parts perception management. This is what you should be thinking about and focusing on going forward. Improving your linguistic skills, and polishing your social skills.
Otherwise, for someone like me who grew up in a machine shop and mechanic's environment, anything new I learn is more brawn and brain going forward so I stay relevant as a human being. And no longer just brain like software was.
I think using AI to help you write or rewrite something you want to convey is fine, the difference is using it as a replacement of thinking instead of a tool.
Think the difference between AI saying "This paragraph seemed muddled and lacks a clear point. Consider rewriting it." vs "Here, I rewrote this paragraph to focus it more on bridging the previous and next paragraphs."
The problem with this as a metric is that it is loosely defined so it becomes quite easy for a person to twist it to justify almost any level of AI usage as "well, it is still more effort than <X>".
that's a real issue, nowadays people are so depended on Ai that they canno even think themselves and for being so called "i know everything" uses Ai to make conversation.
On the other hand, I recently had a problem with my grocery order from Sam’s Club (the onions were smashed) and had to call to get it hopefully addressed. Talked to an LLM for 30 seconds after 0 wait and it was resolved. No accent I could barely understand, no potato microphone, no being put on hold for 5 minutes in the middle while they do whatever.
Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.
My buddy has 10+ years directly supporting customers. He supported millions of MRR. they hired a new "MBA" boss over him. The boss' first demand was to run everything through chatgpt before talking to customers, then report to the boss. Then boss ran the reports through chatgpt before sending the reports to the customer.
BEFORE: my buddy : customer -- 1 day turnaround
AFTER: my buddy : chatGPT : MBA guy: Chat GPT: Customer -- 1 week turnaround
I didn't provide a citation because its origins are unclear/unclaimed, so instead it was an opportunity for a chuckle. FWIW I first read it when this guy's tweet was retweeted by Andrej.
Was it Sam Altman, who said that they intent exactly that? To offer intelligence as a service?
I trust myself to be hard headed enough to keep my intelligence from atrophy, but it's going to suck living in a society where most people don't (or who never developed it at all).
The other day I was at the theatre and I overheard the people next to me glad that they had the best tickets because chatgpt had advised what to buy. The big tip was choosing something centered rather than very angled. Sigh.
Let's be real. Our economies are in the gutters and an insane amount of "work" is actually textbook "bullshit jobs".
However, we as a society aren't nearly ready to actually hold a conversation about that. We could probably eliminate half of all non-hands-on (i.e. a human uses their hands to manufacture a thing) employment in a matter of a year or two if we would embrace computers and digital infrastructure and give lower levels of employees more authority - and that's before AI even enters the picture. Government services are a prime example - a lot of "e government" services in Germany aren't truly digital, they generate a PDF that is printed out in some clerk's office and processed manually by copying information from that PDF into some admin program.
But unfortunately, if we were to do that, we'd run into riots faster than we could imagine. We aren't ready for a society in which we still have a small base of people that have to, literally, work (with their bodies) to keep society alive while the rest does not need to work any more.
I'm tired of sorting out what github link is worth clicking, considering the deluge of vibecoded [I dont like this verb] new repos, the pride of minor accomplishments, no matter how meaningless: 'Look Mom. I made it say hello!'.
I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.
Yeah, I have dropped out of the tech biz completely. I'm unemployed and kind of screwed now. I couldn't take it anymore. I used to work with intellectuals and thinkers. This is why I was in the industry for 20+ years. I liked the stimulation. Communication with humans is dead in the workplace. Now it's just a bunch of mindless automatons asking AI. No thinking about the problems at hand. No interest in understanding the solutions. It's all just "get it done as fast as possible." I refuse to work in that environment. Tech people are becoming about as skill-leveled as a fast food worker's level of training. Just pressing buttons on a screen as the screen tells the to press them. It's a meaningless existence to sit there an be forced to communicate with f'n AI models. No thanks. All you AI bros can have it. We'll see how useless you are in a few years when you realize you know absolutely nothing and couldn't work yourself out of a paper bag without AI guiding you.
These are not situations a human would have given you a response on in the past. it's the same irrational ai phobia. we've had automated phone agents for decades. even on reddit, automod has been a thing for a long time. it's always been the case for many tech companies that unless you get someone on HN or twitter, you're out of luck. plenty of HN posts about people who've had google business accounts disabled or locked out with no explanation or recourse.
a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.
Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.
I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.
Increasingly happy with ability to simply avoid this entire debacle. Interfacing with machine extruded text, or even people re-wording such text, isn't something I've had to deal hardly at all in or our of work. Ensuring that did take quite a bit of effort though...
Have encountered this too - we really need new social norms around this.
Bombarding others with pages of slop that took you 10 seconds to generate (and not even read) yet take minutes to untangle for the recipient is obviously downright rude.
...unfortunately every office has a small number of people that are dumb as rocks and don't recognise this - in fact think they're helping
I think this is more reflection of how important you are to those people so it is more social thing then anything.
I know you think your questions are legitimate but look it in broader context. Use AI to craft questions for them that they will find engaging as a exercise.
I despise when someone just passes my prompt to an AI, but I do honestly think that there are a minority of people who do better work with it. Not that the work is good, but they don't care to try and at least the AI is eager.
Growing pains. We haven't yet established norms surrounding use of LLMs, and people are lazy. We will have to learn from mistakes first, unfortunately. In this case that means diminishing trust.
I hate to say it, but I'm becoming less and less interested in structured content, and more interested in disorganized, messy content over time. I don't like the thought of how this may end up in a few years for me.
This ^. The moment I open an article/post and see subtitles in *bold*, emojis everywhere and/or symmetric paragraphs, I start to suspect instantly whether it's AI.
> more interested in disorganized, messy content over time
Same, that kind of content kinda forces me to use my brain (yeah.. sounds obvious..) to organize the message, understand it, agree/disagree, and actually CONSUME the content, like the old days..
I hate getting AI generated emails from people. They probably haven't even read or understood the slop they're sending me, the chances of them understanding and contextualizing what I reply are slim, I might as well reply with AI slop. What's the point of any of this.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
I was actually thinking of how tired i was talking to real people and how refreshing AI was to talk something through with.
Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.
Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.
I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.
> I’m tired of talking to AI.
> I want to talk to real people.
> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
I don't use AI, but I rarely respond to any PMs. There are many reasons
for this; for instance, I remember in the old days, when I first heard
about MMA, I registered on sherdog for a discussion. I don't recall when
that was, but it was many, many years ago. Then, after many years of not
using it, I logged in and found a PM merely insulting me. I very politely
and skillfully correct that PM - however had, ultimately this is not really
"interaction", this is just wasting my time (and, admittedly, I already was
not using sherdog for many years before that either). Since then I have very
decreasingly used PMs in general. It's a difference when I know someone,
of course, but random people on the internet ... the barrier to want to talk
via PMs for me is very low in general. I simply dislike the format of it.
I find it much easier when it is an open discussion, such as was the case on
reddit (before moderators censoring everyone killed that). It's interesting to
see how much censorship happens nowadays. That's very different to the 1990s
era. Either way I think AI is not solely at fault here, because I could see
problems way before AI emerged already. I very rarely use webforums these
days, and Discord is no alternative either - Discord is even worse since it
is all a private company controlling discussions. IRC was easier than that.
Using AI to learn objective things is acceptable. However, as long as it's combined with your own experience, because AI can't possibly understand your entire world, any subjective answers will be disgusting, disastrous, obsequious, and boring.
I'm tired of talking to people telling them to stop talking to an AI
AI generated slop has exploded across reddit. Last year I would see about 1 obvious AI generated post and report it. Today I've already reported 5 posts and it is 7am here.
The posts are some technical topic but there isn't even really a question in the post and then it ends with "thoughts about this?" and people try to clarify with the OP what the question is.
I reply to them to stop wasting their time because it is a bot. Sometimes there are 20 comments and nothing from the OP bot. Sometimes the OP bot says "Interesting, thanks" but never any real followup question.
We had this discussion 3 weeks ago "AI Slop is Killing Online Communities"
Reddit makes money from spam accounts. Even before LLMs, they'd ban you for reporting the wrong spambots, those being the ones that pay Reddit for priority access.
The replies to the LLM post are probably LLMs themselves.
I've already unsubcribed to a bunch of subreddits because the moderators did nothing to stop the slop.
I almost never go to the main "popular" page as it is full of garbage.
But I was still enjoying my niche subreddits. But in the last year the amount of AI slop has exploded and it is getting worse every day. Reposts of things from less than a week ago. Really vague technical questions with emdashes, bullet points, and ending in "thoughts?" that generate a discussion but the OP bot never replies or has vague 1 word comments.
I know that reddit makes money from ads so more bots mean more traffic which means more ads and more money.
But it is sad watching communities because useless and die.
I think about how violently HN (in general) reacts to technology like Web Environment Integrity which could enable websites to relatively easily block AI spam, and at the same time opine about the days of being able to talk to (just) humans online. Personally I'd be fine at this point for _some_ kind of identity based authentication for discussion forums, at least. I'm tired of hearing ChatGPT's opinion on things.
I'd rather pay some nominal fee for access than give up my identity to an unaccountable entity I'd struggle to take cross-border action against if that became necessary. The price shouldn't exclude anyone who's struggling, just a one-time fee of £5 or so that'd damage the economic viability of creating slop accounts at scale.
How do you define general conversation? I have used the Gemini web chat yesterday to review and generate a report about multiple credit card statements.
depends what you mean. I regularly ask it to explain stuff, terminology I don't recognize etc. I also ask it about neat things it did, terminal commands etc so I can do them when I want to. That's chat in some sense, no? its not all "write this code"
The company I work at tries to solve it right now, not promoting, just want to share.
Slop is no fun to deal with, so we have a thesis that slop should be left for agents to read and human-to-human communication should happen outside of passing empty fluffy docs to one another. To realise that, we have a workspace with group chats where multiple agents and humans can work together and agents can engage with humans for additional information when needed. The challenge is, of course, to find the right level of autonomy for the agents and let the agent learn and follow user's workflows well enough to be useful.
I work with a handful of offshore devs and it’s basically just talking to Claude now with a delay measured in timezone differences. What is even the point of having offshore Claude middle men when I can just orchestrate remote agents directly without giving a crap about timezones?
The meatsack agents do the same thing anyway - I give them requirments and they build it exactly as specified with zero question, and in the laziest get-it-done method possible with no thought about complexity, architecture, technical debt, etc…. If there is a mistake in the spec they don’t question it, they just build the mistake. If they aren’t going to use their brains WHY SHOULDNT I replace them with Claude?
Managers send me AI generated specs and AI generated slop mock-ups. They answer questions about how the product should work by giving me AI generated responses they didn’t even spot-check for correctness. AI generated bug reports with hallucinated STR. Offshores send me slop they not only didn’t read, they didn’t even run once because it’s OBVIOUSLY broken. Absolute madness.
None of this sh*t is actually helpful. It’s work SLOP. It’s not more productive. It’s a productivity tar-pit that once you’ve gotten stuck it’s almost impossible to escape.
I hate all this garbage and the total rotting out of people’s minds and abilities it has inflicted upon humanity.
Nothing has made me hate billionaires more than AI. It helped me realize that I could never be a successful multinational corpo man because I’m not a morally bankrupt POS and I look at people much different now because of this realization. There is no way one could get to the place that people like Altman, Amodei, Nadella, Ellison, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, etc…are without being giant pieces of rotten excrement.
The internet isn't going to die out, but it feels like it's becoming a place where you go to do a specific task and then you check out again.
One interesting observation from myself: I don't "browse" the internet anymore. I go read specific sites, order something, or do some task. So my internet usage is way down, but I also don't watch a lot of TV or streaming content anymore, because I can't really deal with it. There's to much of it, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, everything is just a rehash (Cinematography is beautiful though). So now I just read, preferably books written before the year 2000.
It used to be like this, during the golden age of the internet. We didn't have it anywhere, we had it on a computer on our desk. We had to sit down at that desk to use it. Eventually we would get up again and be offline.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
I’m tired of seeing GitHub filled with vibe coded slop.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I often see new projects that look exciting at first. But when I start reading the source code, I realize there’s a ton of messy code, and it was clearly written by Claude or another AI tool.
It feels like some beginners are using vibe coded projects just to brag: “Look, I built this tool,” even when the code quality is abysmal.
I feel the same as the article author. Worse, every Diary/Journaling app is now including AI, so the place where original thoughts are supposed to be written for posterity is now also AI generated slop. I've canceled subscriptions because of it.
I know its going to cause angst, but the net we knew of is dead.
The incentives to keep it the way it used to be are gone. AI is cheap, and it sounds better than what a majority of users write.
Humans adapt. Maybe we shift from communites and moderation, to predefined rules of engagement. If a commenter can follow some pre agreed upon rules of debate, then it doesn't matter if they are silicon or not.
We went from a cave of wonders to a dark forest in a single life time. It would be amazing if it wasn't so fucking frustrating.
Humans are highly dependent on the environment; you can blame people for eating too much of highly processed food and lots of sugar, but that's what happens if all you see around is highly processed food and sugar
True, but it is impossible to catch up while preserving quality and mental sanity.
I know about several of my friends, non-tech, being directly impacted by AI.
In finance, lots of analysis work is now offset to LLMs, and the people leveraging the tools obviously still have the issue that they need to review everything the AI has analyzed, their formulas, etc. And lots of nuance and things that a human would caught are lost. But in the meantime the expectation is that your analysis output is 5 times what it was before.
My girlfriend works in corporate law for an insurance company. The company is FOMOing hard for LLMs and pushing everybody to write gemini "gems" and notebooklm presets to do lots of the work.
But it absolutely does not scale: you can't keep up with those demands, while also providing the same quality coming from thoroughly analyzing new regulations and such.
Another friend that works in credit has now the company mandate that people update financial statements etc directly to LLMs and those tools come with a yes/no about whether they will finance it or not. Quality of debt has now plummeted, needless to say and the process is longer that it has ever been because re-reviewing the LLM analysis is more expensive than doing it on your own.
My own bank has had a terrific customer care that has been recently replaced by an LLM, tragedy. It is absolutely unhelpful beyond the 80% pareto principle where customer care had already pre-canned answers anyway. But for the 20% of cases that are major issues/bugs, the AI is simply not helpful.
My bank genuinely had a bug with invoice processing and there was no way to tell them nor to resolve my issue (which required somebody to manually void the previous invoice and restart the process that got bugged).
Except for the fully autonomous OpenClaws invading social spaces. There's no human in the loop. That's pure, unfettered AI slop, at a scale no human could keep up with.
Get used to it. This is the "task inflation" phase of the process. When you get a mechanized harvester that can harvest 20x the produce of a human produce picker, do you get done in 5% of the time, or grow 20x the produce to pick? Right, it's always more more more. Now that the business owner can answer your email in two seconds with his ChatGPT screenshot, he stacks more tasks in the free time. You're not getting a human response anymore. Enjoy the slop.
I put people who do some of the BS listed here on mute or block.
Life is better with people who actually engage and are curious about improving things human-to-human.
AI (LLM) responses are catered towards the lowest common denominator / average type shit responses.
The best use for AI/LLM agents is to do work I tell them to do, like a servant who obeys my orders and executes them.
A human using AI/LLM to respond to another human (who has already used AI/LLM to come up with a v1 he wants to discuss) is a moron and not worth engaging with further. Even if they're your friend, it is a good signal that you need better friends.
My employer's IT guy is now just someone who searches Claude for solutions, finds a company that does a niche thing and say "we spent X dollars discussing it, let's just hire this company and pay them $13,000 every year to handle the problem."
The problems are usually nothingburgers the IT guy doesn't understand (cookie banners). I cannot fight: 1. IT guy constant stupid takes on why we should throw money at a problem 2. a company that's only goal is to tell us we need X verification for $13k/yr or we'll be screwed
The verification is a cron job that checks cookies. Any time you try to discuss the issue he copy and pastes an AI text wall.
A lot, a lot, a lot of companies are going under because the fake-it-to-make-it people do not know what to do. And the C-Suite wants to contract out all expertise to some pointless corporation that won't help.
am I the only one who always replies to people manually? I don't think I've ever done the "send back a chatGPT screenshot" or copy paste a response from chatGPT to a message I know was from a human.
It doesn't prevent people from outsourcing their thinking to AI. People don't bother preparing to discuss topics beyond what AI told them. If they have access to their computer during the conversation they'll ask AI rather than google for reference material. If they don't have access, they'll suggest "investigating" (asking AI) and reconvening.
We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.
AI is a new medium. It's used and going to be used for everything. Including communication.
More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.
About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2
When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.
If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.
the fallacy is not recognizing ai is interpolating the human body of work. all the people decrying ai slop: this is our sythesis. ai is not a separate thing from human work. whwt the author is really saying is "I am tired of individuals no longer having the leverage they once did."
>But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
This is the killer issue.
It's so profoundly saddenning, it feels like watching an adult being asked a question and calling mom to answer for them. There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis.
Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change
Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious
Maybe they need _that person_ to provide some assurances directly because they are not confident in thier plan (see 1)
Maybe they are just in a rut and need to start a conversation with a person
Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Spot on.
The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.
People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
Yes. The role of good management here cannot be understated. Good management (all the way up) is the difference between saying "be more productive, here's an AI subscription" and people understanding what types of usage are actually wanted and useful.
As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.
Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether.
Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f
Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.
I really am not a big fan of this... Hand-waving, I guess? Around this problem. Saying "well the norms are still being established" feels kind of like a "well don't really get mad at the people doing it, they're still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable use" kind of thing to me. People should already know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. The fact that they don't is very, very telling and says a lot about the people doing it IMO.
Maybe. It doesn't help that a lot of corporations are pushing their employees into dark patterns around LLMs. That in turn informs their own personal use of LLMs outside the workplace
Sending an AI response to a question that someone asks you is insulting because it's a bit like sending them a link to letmegooglethat where it just animates typing the question you have into google.
I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.
In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/
Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.
Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.
The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
“employer culture” is sad in itself. Perhaps there is less or a different nuance in your mother tongue. It’s abhorrent in English to this ESL.
I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with:
"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)
If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)
That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)
> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
and what if i tell you i asked stack overflow?
Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).
What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.
Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.
Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.
Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.
And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.
Stack overflow or Claude or Wikipedia…it doesn’t matter.
We don’t usually tolerate copy-paste answers at school so why should it count at work?
Work is not school. Within certain legal and ethical constraints, at work we only care about results.
Hard disagree. If I only cared about immediate results, I'd just ask Claude myself, sure. But I care about developing people's judgement, longer term. And if they're just parroting back what Claude says, I'm not doing that.
I care about developing people's judgment, longer term. You care about developing people's judgment, longer term. Does capitalism, or the managerial-business class that only sees 6 months out?
I mean it was always easy enough to say "Hey not quite sure but I did find this post on SO, in case it helps"
> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something. Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.
Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it
You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.
What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?
And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.
Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.
It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.
No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).
Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.
But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.
The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.
They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.
This used to horrify me, until I started noticing the type of person that mindlessly spits crap out for me to deal with are the exact type of people I had already identified as being at most neutral or dead weight anyway. Sounds harsh but if your first reaction to solving a problem is to turn off your brain entirely and dump the thinking onto something/someone else for you, you're likely already layoff fodder, even pre AI. Maybe we'll all get there eventually, but for now, there's a clear distinction I see between types of people that use these tools, and one is very exhausting to deal with.
My experience aligns with that. But there’s no guarantee that the criteria for layoffs, when they happen, will include these people.
> I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.
Lots of people aren't very thoughtful or wise, including some supposedly very intelligent people.
For further proof: think of all the workers proudly parroting their bosses' anti-union rhetoric, like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
I personally feel using AI to reply personal chats is extremely bogus. Worse is those that do not even bother to remove the AI watermark. Like, pasting directly from the AI without removing the AI's personal thoughts.
But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?
Not the person you’re replying to, but, because I don’t know what they know.
“I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation
Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.
Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things
It would be true if they bothered hiding it. But as the featured author said, people seem increasingly not shy of simply forwarding you a screenshot of the AI answer.
...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.
Do you feel returning an answer that an AI gives is the same as searching it on Google (old fashion way) and just producing an answer from there?
Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.
Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.
What you're describing still requires that you look at sources and put a little bit of effort into understanding something.
AI answers may or may not be completely hallucinated, and often the people copy/pasting them didn't even read them.
> I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question.
At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.
I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations.
The conversations are the point.
Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.
would it blow your mind if I told you there are already idiosyncrasies in the way you write? not you specifically; everyone has them
I know, I could've worded my comment clearer. I meant that I specifically introduce them in a way to make it obvious my text was written by me.
AI will clone your idiosyncrasies before you know it. There’s no point
I caught myself watching an AI video on youtube a few days ago where the narrator's AI voice had deliberate instances of stammering and stuttering. It's definitely simple to have these introduce idiosyncrasies just through specific prompting.
Why would that matter? You still have to read, understand, and respond. If something is important and specific it takes longer to prompt iterations to generate my response. It's nice for spelling and grammar correction.
I use lots of em dashes and emojis now to blend in.
Same. I no longer fix spelling mistakes (I never used auto-complete or "smart" keyboards).
I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D
Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
I've gone back to just calling people on the phone like a true savage.
Unfortunately that's not enough, voice AI is very good nowadays,
If someone puts me on with a voice AI i'm never talking to them again lol.
I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.
...which might be exactly what they wanted in the first place.
Weirdly, and MAYBE tangentially related to AI, me too.
I've been driving my friends nuts cuz we're all neurodivergent little goblin people and now I just call them. And they aren't actually mad they're just like "what's wrong with you" and it's just like, look, sometimes I just need a fuckin answer to a fuckin question, and faster is better. And phone calls are instant.
I think they're coming around now cuz two of em do it to me.
Aw. A little goblin network.
I never stopped.
Same, I've started adding stylistic (-/; with an odd/imperfect placement- like this) errors to make it clear it's artisanal home made slop, not AI-generated.
When I use my phone, I don't have to... I usually use gesture input and don't proof read before hitting send/reply/post.
>artisanal home made slop
Even in the depths of corporate life, the last beacon of light was interacting with a person who may be similarly philosophically placed as you, sharing something. Artisanal home made slop may be more underrated that people think, its a proxy for human connection, which surprise surprise, is a big basis of life
Humans are already forgetting how to Human.
And notably, these are still all problems even if the AI is perfect in its response in every way.
In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with
Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai.Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.
It’s in the same spirit of citing your sources in academic writing.
Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.
I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust.
AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.
Well you should probably find a workplace that doesnt punish the “curmudgeons” for directly saying that.
I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.
The people are answering with copy-paste AI are the curmudgeons trying not to get fired for being “hard to work with”
The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to
EVery company that comes up with a product that brings a lot of gravy turns into place where people like this flourish. They have always been there - they would ask your question to many people, get their anwers and pass the response as their own.
Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.
I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'.
I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.
The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.)
Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.
It's trained on the internet so it's wrong just as much as the internet is wrong or misleading.
Maybe the current implementation
Just yesterday I had to attend internal "office hours" of an expert team to get a question answered - I had done extensive research of my own, both manual and using AI leveraging internal resources. What did the "expert" do when they couldn't answer my question right away? They said "let me ask {insert AI tool}". I cut them off stating that this is an insult to my intelligence. I am in the office hours for expert advice not someone else performing the same AI prompts that I already performed.
Exactly! If you're an owner you should be making decisions and taking responsibility, given existing context. I'm happy using LLM to confirm my reasoning or research, but it's still me doing the coding, or architecting or anything, not LLM, and if something goes bad I cannot say "LLM told me to do it". If people are blindly doing what their tools tell them to do, that's the problem there.
Edit: in this instance if I were the expert I'd respond from my expertise. Using LLM is fine to explain whys/research per what you say, but ultimately I'm the educator here
Wait, you're upset because they used AI to answer a question they weren't expecting, and couldn't answer? Yet, you used AI as part of your upfront research?
What would you have preferred? They could have just said, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, please let me get back to you" but instead they tried to get an answer for you.
I'm not sure what the problem is?
I think it's perfectly fine for the author to use AI in their research process, and it sounds like they weren't relying on it exclusively.
So they've already asked AI its opinion on the topic. They're explicitly reaching out to an expert because they've exhausted their ability to move forward on their own (even with AI).
If the expert just asking the same question to the AI and returning the answer directly - that's what OP has just done, and it actually is a waste of time. They're looking for insight, not just another quick response from an LLM.
I would imagine that letting the expert know ahead of time so they can research an answer (perhaps with the assistance of AI) would be a good pattern. But it has to be guided by the expert's knowledge - that's the whole point. Using AI is fine, and probably even good if it's being guided by a wise hand, but it isn't sufficient on its own, and bouncing answers directly back from an AI with no refinement is not useful, and dare I say it is somewhat insulting.
These were expert office hours for API modeling. The company has certain requirements and standards - this team is supposed to live and breathe them. The question wasn't that advanced. Performing a basic AI prompt in the authoritative expert office hours is not the answer.
The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
And to be clear: I manually read and studied the official guiding documents without AI. Then I used a separate AI setup to more effectively research a larger array of additional internal sources, wikis, etc. I also reviewed the code from other teams / projects to infer any patterns that could apply to my project, so I came prepared with examples for discussion.
> The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
I suppose that would be very close to "you've come to the experts for advice and I probably shouldn't be here because I'm not one of them", which nobody wants to admit.
For many, an honest look at themselves would end with "I don't contribute anything". They have the opposite of impostor syndrome - they don't belong, but they feel like they should, and AI helps them pretend.
I’m curious, what was their reaction? :)
They were speechless. Kind of shocked. It was hilarious. They then agreed to reach out to some colleagues / other teams to research and find the answer. After 20 min they followed up with an acceptable answer.
True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first.
EDIT:
By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover what they need but they don't go there first and not something I have some deep domain knowledge of that would take them a long time to find or figure out.
I would personally still not reply with an AI answer but I am tempted sometimes...
Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement.
He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.
I’ve encountered this regularly.
I love to learn. I never want to stop learning.
Apparently, I’m in a minority.
I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context.
Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO.
Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.
Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)."
Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments)
(strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)
Thanks for that link.
I think one of my advantages has been, that I’m a high school dropout, with a GED. I never took a matriculated college course.
Almost all of my education has been practicum. I learn by do.
Having to direct my own education has been both liberating and exhausting.
I haven’t had any “tracks,” since I was 16.
You learn to know who are the lazy ones, and at that point you can politely always respond with a, "what were you able to find on this?". You can repeat this ad infinitum since at that point, they're just being lazy and disrespectful of your time. They eventually give up going to you because they know they won't get you to do their work for them.
Good point, and I realize that's what I did in school. When people came to me that I suspected were just looking for easy answers to avoid doing the work themselves, I'd lead them gradually through the chain of reasoning. Like, point out the first step and imply that that should be enough for them to work it out, leading them to ask again ("ok, I get that, but what does that mean for the final answer? What should I write down?"), and I'd give them the next step, leading them to walk away in disgust and bother somebody else. Even better, the next time they start with that person and it's no longer my problem.
Be high friction when you suspect it's warranted. Even if you're not sure someone is looking for a shortcut, the people who aren't won't mind. It's detection and deterrence rolled into one.
(And if possible, find a place to work where you never have to do this.)
As someone who loves helping people to learn things for themselves... you have to identify these "help vampires" and just stop helping them.
I had a coworker who would ask me the same questions over and over and over, despite me trying to show them 10 different ways how to do it or find the answer in the docs or whatever. And eventually I just said I was too busy and they had to figure it out. After a while they actually started figuring stuff out.
Basically if those people aren't your direct reports, your obligation to help them only goes so far. Take care of yourself first. If they figure it out eventually then good for them. If not, it's really not your problem.
I've struggled with this, even encountering people who basically say "if AI can do it why do I need to spend any more time?"
It was disappointing hearing someone tank their own prospect of career growth like that.
You're looking at human nature. We evolved to conserve energy, to take the berries that are growing right here rather than go foraging for something else with less certain outcomes. Even better, someone else collects the berries for you.
There are some exceptional people, who have the drive and curiosity to see what else is out there, but that's not the average.
I've done a similar thing with close friends and family who would constantly ask me things I couldn't possibly know because I always came up with an answer.
Eventually I realized why and explained, "you know, I'm really just going to do a web search for what you just asked me, and maybe a couple more until I have a decent answer and then give you that answer. Let me show you how I would go about that".
From then on, they started getting into the habit of doing that for themselves. I think now with LLMs, they've kept the habit, but the LLM gives a more complete answer with fewer steps so it becomes the default. I think the magic of AI is two-fold (well, more than two, but two bullets for this conversation).
1. You don't have to "query". You can just braindump, and it'll build a context and figure out what you're looking for
2. It's conversational, so instead of filtering and tweaking results from the first query, your second "query" builds on top of the context from the first question, and you get a stronger result as the conversation continues.
>He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
I absolutely love this.
That's a great tip. Thanks for sharing.
LMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion.
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.
Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself".
They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
> after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
Agreed, and I do the same. They still get a courteous reply, but they also feel a little "pain" when they don't get a timely answer - an effective teacher.
But as a good manager, you should throw it back: "what do you think?" "what have you tried so far?" etc.
Just giving them AI back is pointless. It means _your_ role is pointless.
Indeed - I had a team that called this "remote brain execution" (we were a build team that used Bazel, and often fielded questions about why someone's build broke).
My favorite phrase on that team was "What have you tried so far?"
Ironically, I have to edit out my "what I have tried so far" when asking questions, because I'm more likely to go into a long-winded explanation of the headers that I hacked and the kernel module I installed to fake my way around this or that, when the actual answer tends to be "uh... are you sure you're building the code you think you are? That sounds like you're running from the wrong directory or wrong branch."
Not just the workforce, my parents still barely know how to use a computer because any time they hit the slightest snag, they immediately call me for help.
>> what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Usually because the question is very easily answered with a quick web search.
I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.
Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.
And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.
If you're telling them all that and not wasting their time, that's fine.
But if you just ask them the question and don't tell them what you've found or where you got stuck, you're asking them to stop doing what they're doing and spend all that same time you just spent working on your problem.
Then we should create LMGPTTFY, then it's at least apparent and the recipient needn't click.
But this is often simply not the case - people will often ask for trivial things trivially found on Google.
IME it usually means they have some good reason to ask, which you are not aware of. For example, people might believe you are an expert or can give a better answer in the context.
If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood.
If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise.
"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is:
"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
Let me Google that for you implies the answer is well known and trivial to find.
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
No one here wants to say it, so I will.
A lot of people are relatively stupid.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?
Kind of.
Everyone needs to draw a line. Call it an "explore vs exploit" problem, if you want.
Sure, you want to fail a bit so you know where the line is, or to push it forwards a bit. But there is, at least in principal, always a line.
I'm just saying that if someone draws the line in a place that you think is waaaay too soon, maybe they aren't entirely wrong.
Ah, okay, that makes your original comment make more sense. Thank you for the clarification.
I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
So I think it's a cultural thing.
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me."
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.
> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything.
Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.
I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.
The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.
90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.
Maybe they don’t wanna take responsibility for that answer?
In our case we're completely allowed to use AI, but if you do, you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously). So if your LLM says "Sure, go ahead and run that code" and it deletes the production database, that's your fault, just as much as if you reviewed it manually and said the same thing.
> you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously)
why not in a legal sense? If someone asks me what cleaning supplies are safe to mix, and i just ask some chatbot, don't vet the output, copy the response, and they end up poisoning themselves, am I not responsible?
If I'm a lawyer, and pass unvetted AI legal advice to my client, and they go to jail, should i keep my license?
Typically if you develop a software product for a company, the company resumes responsibility. No one would develop anything for any high risk business, if they were to assume personal responsibility of the end result. LLMs don't really chance that, and any serious bug would be an error of process.
Developers are perfectly capable of creating dangerous or expensive mistakes even without LLMs. If we accept that LLMs are just tools, the developer should be no more responsible that if they choose to use Visual Studio over Vim and Visual Studio refactors something wrong.
Theres's then the question of gross incompetence, and were the developer could be fired or perhaps even sued by their employer, the same as if they hadn't used an LLM.
However the case I had in mind was in regards to the legality of the way the AI models acquire and reproduce code. We're not held personally responsible for any license violation created by the tool.
So, just a fake "yes"?
Is it laziness? Or is it frustration from answering the same basic beginner questions over and over again?
It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed.
Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.
It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy.
Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction?
There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.
I’m using ai to answer questions, but I instruct it in draft what answers to include, what info to include from my llm wiki (second brain). Saves time to write a correct response, can easily refer to past conversations, but definitely not 100% outsources to AI.
If you need to find information to answer a colleague, use AI if that's helpful.
I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?
Because it’s often hard to find the right voice? because it’s often hard to describe something in the correct way? Communication is hard, finding the correct tone of voice often takes me a long time, so using AI makes me more efficient in a busy day?
> It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own.
In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
In my line of work, its certain peoples' jobs to know certain things. If I need a piece of information that somebody else is responsible for understanding, I'm just going to ask directly for what I need instead of trying to research it myself. To research it myself would mean attempting to do somebody else's job, which is just unhelpful for everyone.
There is a line between "somebodies job to know" and you just being too lazy to look at the documentation/do basic research.
That experience is better characterized as unprofessional, then. ;)
The examples in the article are questions the AI did not know the answer to though. So hardly "basic beginner"
Laziness and "Memetic Imprinting" of the inevitability where the ultimate attack vectors.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
IMO, its a little jab/playful when a friend sends a LMGTFY link and its really disrespectful if a colleuage sends it
I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing.
If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up.
edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.
The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good.
The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...
With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
If you feel the need to hide how you got the answer then you know something is wrong.
> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.
> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible
This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
> And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop.
Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".
Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them.
Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.
"conflict management" before "try to work out how I'd offended them."
Let me Claude that for you.
>If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.
If you tell somebody to go google it, you are being incredibly rude 95% of the time. That is pretty widely understood
Sure, but asking someone something that should be easily answered in a few seconds is also rude.
Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress
I highly doubt you never ask questions that you could’ve looked up yourself. “Go Google it” translates to “this isn’t worth my time,” which is a pretty rude way to be.
But sometimes it isn't worth my time. If I'm being asked something about what I'm working on, fair enough. If I'm being asked what a command-line switch for curl does (and that's not related to what I'm doing) the total cost is less to look at the docs, rather then asking me to look at the docs.
Not weighing my time and effort into the equation is rude on behalf of the asker.
if they aren't presenting proof of doing research or they don't have the benefit of doubt (e.g. a new hire, etc.) they're being rude by not doing the research in the first place.
I’m sorry but nobody behaves this way. Nobody sits around in every conversation showing their homework/proving they tried to find an answer before asking somebody else. It is incredibly common to just ask somebody a question and expect an answer regardless if you could’ve looked up yourself.
It’s important to not make everybody do your research for you, but what you’re describing is not at all typical.
I'm not particularly sorry, but when I ask questions out of the blue over email or chat, I always explain what I've already tried. The two exceptions are when it's urgent, in which case I briefly explain the urgency ("prod is down did you deploy just now?"), or when it's part of an ongoing conversation.
If this is not typical for you, then you are surrounded by people who disrespect you and your time.
> I'm not particularly sorry
Yes that seems rather consistent with your attitude.
As for the rest, you are drastically narrowing the scope
It's not typical but it's how you should personally act.
You aren't going to be able to convince others to be upstanding coworkers that actually give a damn, but you can be that person yourself.
steelman, don't strawman. pushback on someone being rude by requesting something they could have looked up doesn't look like "let me google that for you" 95% of the time. it's far more likely to come out as "I'm not sure, honestly. I worked on X, but I didn't really need to get in to Y, so I'm not as familiar. Personally, I'd just do a google search, since I'm a little behind on that."
not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.
That's when you realize you're not important enough to talk to a human.
It's also very surprising to me. This whole deal where humans instantly started taking AI answers at face value, as sources standing on their own legs, or delegating their own mind to a third party, not even a human, but an algorithm.
It's like they're just... Fine?
AI became their god over a few months and it's... Fine?
I thought I knew humanity pretty well and I'm rarely surprised at human large scale behavior these days as I'm hitting 50 myself, but this took me by surprise.
> that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
I've seen this happening a lot in the recent times: people who are generally not very good at their job tend to offload disproportionately more to LLMs, and it's so damn annoying that their incompetence now comes sugarcoated in lengthy LLM babble for the sake of desperately trying to sound convincing. This is wasting me high single digit hours every week, not to mention the frustration of battling an asymmetrical fight: it takes them seconds to produce something that will take me minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
Edit: typo -le+me
The worst part about this to me is if someone routes a response through AI, I have no idea what they, personally, are trying to tell me that they may have included specifically in their prompt, what is hallucination, and what is something in-between.
It makes it hard to pick apart hallucinations from the miscommunications and disagreements. Picking apart every single point and treating it with the same tact you have to treat human output with, while still accounting for the fact that it could be a hallucination, takes an extremely skewed amount of effort compared to the effort of sending someone AI output. The worst part is, it's probably going to be pasted right back into the LLM chat box.
It's astonishingly bad form to send someone AI output, and this is only one of the reasons.
Letting AI answer a personal question for you feels deeply disrespectful to the person asking the question, but also to yourself; you're signalling you don't know anything. If I wanted an AI answer, I could ask it myself. I'm not asking AI, I'm asking you. If you're going to give me an AI answer, it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything.
> it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything
I suppose it's possible that was the goal all along...
Asking a question which is easily google-able/answered by an LLM is also disrespectful of that other person time, not to mention interruption/flow state/etc
this was a thing in the past: LetMeGoogleThatForYou
Yeah but that was an explicit sarcastic response. I guess we need a 'letmechatgptthatforyou' link to show explicit sarcasm
it already exists! https://letmegptthatforyou.com/
The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines.
- Louis de Bonald
Written in 1802, before the Jacquard loom. I wonder what machines he had in mind? "Modern administrations, busy trying to provoke the invention of machines that can multiply human labor and make it easier," apparently.
I guess this sort of thing: https://www.panmurehouse.org/media/0j0ljqdl/pin-factory.jpg (that is an approximate illustration of Adam Smith's pin factory.)
He goes on to advocate for large families full of peasants doing manual labor, praises the ministers of the church and state, and says that painters and bankers are unnecessary. https://archive.org/details/lgislationprim00bona/page/372/mo...
Brilliantly poignant. Before AI, I don't think this would've resonated with me, but it sure does now.
Someone does that to me and they go on the spreadsheet and I work around them every time in future. It's not worth interacting with those people.
That's probably the goal
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
You might get fired for still using spreadsheets. ;)
Ha. I refer back to my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278108
Option B would involve being incredibly verbose and burying prompt injections in your question.
The sabot of the AI era. Love it.
When your spreadsheet gets full, will you change jobs or change tactic?
I get that this is supposed to be unproductive snark, but the real answer is probably to then sort the spreadsheet and assign a tier system of how annoying and useless each person in it is.
We need to go deeper: ELO and matchmaking to keep the most annoying coworkers contained playing with each other
I'll have a peaceful life until it gets to my yearly management review of my teams.
Switch to a DB
That seems like a lot of bother. If I hit the 1,048,576 row limit I'd start a new column.
I think they own the company at that point.
Most people are not self-sufficient entities. 10% are so unable to think that they are simply not able to be a net positive in any job, it takes more energy/time to micromanage them, even for simple tasks, than they put back into the business. 50% are incapable of real innovation.
Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.
I agree with your assessment of people. I find that there is a lot of overlap with this old quote:
AI is the perfect product for that third group.However I disagree in that I don't want to "talk to AI" either. Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
> Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
In my experience their prompt is usually a verbatim copy-paste of the message I sent them, personal info and all. They simply put zero thought in it.
> Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Heh. It's a believable taxonomy, but it makes me suspect it could often have the corollary:
> I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
I didn't quite get this, you ask them to send you their prompt? Does this disincentivize them from sending AI responses in the future?
P.S. I always found it ironic that this quote does the very thing it classifies as small-minded - discusses people :)
Here's an example that may help:
Their prompt: "write a polite and friendly email message to turn down an invitation because I already have plans at that time."
What I want them to send me: "thank you but I already have plans"
I don't want 2-paragraphs of milquetoast slop.
P.S. Ideas can involve people.
There's something refreshing and endearing about my wife's family not using AI at all (at least, not intentionally). My in-laws don't really know how to Google and my wife will do interesting stuff like Google an actor's or movie's IMDB and scroll through the list to figure out who a specific character was in a show (instead of Googling show name character name).
I can see that that could be kinda fun because it's not about the answer, it's about the discovery. AI and even smarter searches removes the sense of discovery. You'll never get to see "oh did you know that such and such actor was also in such as such movie in 2010??" if you just skip to the answer with AI.
That said, when they ask me a question that I don't immediately know the answer to, I'll use AI, ask it for sources, check those sources. In these cases it's more of a smarter Google search — just like couldn't always just use the first search result of Google in 2010, you can't always just use the AI response in 2026. Gotta be extra careful too because even the AI's sources can be AI.
I’ve seen this at work and it drives me nuts. I don’t value my time extraordinarily highly but even still I find it disrespectful to offload my question and make me read something they didn’t even bother to read.
Same argument can be used against you: why do you bother someone with a question and want them to dedicate time to answer it for you when that question is easily google-able or answered by an LLM?
It costs you seconds to ask the question, and you want them to invest minutes in answering it?
You invest seconds in a question, they invest seconds in the answer. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Usually when people are asking questions it isn't that they don't know how to find a possible solution at all, it's that they don't feel they know enough to evaluate the correctness of the solutions they may find, and they think you do.
------
Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.
A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.
There is a difference between "how do I do X" and "I tried googling/asking GPT and I don't know which answer from A/B/C to pick"
Discussing things with colleagues is also how you build collaborative networks. I'm trying to get out of the habit of searching for all information myself and engaging in more discussions with coworkers. I'm perfectly capable of searching information out myself. If I'm asking a question, it's a sign of respect, and shows that I am interested in the person's experience with the topic, and in nuance and context. I want to learn from them. If you offload the answer to AI, it's disrespectful to yourself more than anything--you don't even value your own expertise!
I just want them to tell me if they don't know.
It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.
Saw this in a PR review yesterday. Reviewer made comments about the reasonableness of a solution and alternatives to consider. Submitter posted an LLM response that gives zero additional context about the PR. As the submitter, you should be the one with the context, not the reviewer, and having an LLM answer doesn't provide that additional context.
Maybe they already did and the answer was in some way lacking so they asked a peer.
Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.
> Same argument can be used against you
That’s false equivalence and I think you know that.
It feels like commoditising intelligence because they think an AI screenshot is some kind of currency of truth. The truth doesn't even really matter anymore, its just whatever ChatGPT says it is
I had to sit through a ~45 minute meeting once where an electrician and his boss sat and presented literal chat screenshots to justify their positions opposing or agreeing with a repair I requested.
I had specified some high-temperature electrical components to repair a broken part of a high-temperature circuit, placed the PO, received the parts, and gave them to one of our electricians with a work order. I did the research myself sans AI, read data sheets, investigated alternative materials, etc.
The electrician asked chatgpt "Will PEEK shrink tubing survive 400*F?" because apparently he doesn't trust me, and chatGPT told him no. He complained to his boss who immediately asked chatGPT the same question, and it told him yes it was fine.
Squarely within the top 3 most exhausting meetings of my career.
I'm ramming my head against a wall in sympathy.
Interesting that the boss immediately asked the same question. So they're aware that AI gives nondeterministic answers and yet still use it.
More likely they're already an AI/human hybrid, and that is just an innate part of their thinking process now.
It's at this point you have zero empathy for someone and just shame them personally and report to some higher up.
I can (very marginally) understand running the argument over an LLM if you've difficulties communicating in the language, but never copy paste
I have been saying for a while that when AI gets smarter than us we will be like 5 year old children totally dependent on our AI mommy and daddy to interpret and understand the vast and mysterious world of things that are too complicated or obscure for us to comprehend. We'll spend all day experiencing the natural world and watching kids shows. Any hard questions go to mommy and daddy.
At least we'll be able to tell people our authentic emotions without AI, and AI will listen to our emotions, much like parents listen to their children's feelings.
I have the same experience! When I asked someone for help, they (on my face), opened claude and started asking it.
I recount it here: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch
It doesn't feel so different to me than the early days of google, when google worked pretty well - people often would say things like "do you want me to google that for you?" the implication being you were wasting their time by asking them a question they could find the answer to themselves.
The major difference now though, is when you get sent a chatGPT response, the implicit question often is now "Can you check this is correct for me?" which is exhausting and a little rude.
Re >> Can you check this is correct for me?
That's the part that really gets to me. It's one thing to say Hey friend, you could have quickly gotten the right answer yourself. It's another thing to say Hey buddy, you asked me a question which I COULD answer, but instead of giving you the CORRECT answer, I'm going to give you AN answer, and let you figure out if it's correct <-- with the unspoken expectation that if it is the wrong answer and I run with it because you gave it to me, it's still my fault.
Why does this read like written by AI?
This was the main thing I took from the movie Her. Wild to see it materialize so quickly.
I feel like we went through something similar to this early in the era when Google's search engine was new. People posted engine results, but pretty quickly, people got tired of doing that, and would say google it. Part of that was if the answer was as easy as a google search away - the social validation became lower to negative if you just provided low effort copypasta service.
Now, response of "google it" could be take many ways depending on where you are in a conversation, it could be a range of being polite to quite rude. Google it could mean "I don't know, but I think thats findable on google", or it could mean "Im not going to help you". I wonder if we will settle back to having a real conversation with "ai it"/"google it" occasionally.
And then we were sending those "let me google it for you". I just wanted to find the site again and, surprise it has the GPT part now ^^ but on the joke side.
https://letmegpt.com
Then came ChaCha trying to monetize it.
And the killer killer issue is that even if you would manage to talk to them, their opinion will be shaped but what AI told them and AI opinion will always be perceived as superior, your real world experience and instinct will be disregarded quickly.
I remember a moment at the very onset when chatgpt was just opened to the public. A manager sent us a congratulations text chatGPT had prepared for his kid's graduation from high school. He said that he was not much of a writer and that was miles better than he could have said. We had a discussion about the moral side of that (though moral might not be the word), pointing out that bad words that come from a genuine place and required effort from you are better than great words that are manufactured by a robot. He didn't see the issue.
I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.
And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.
At least to me, this seems like a pretty logical progression based on how education is handled today.
We teach children from a very early age that there's always a right answer and that someone smarter/older/etc knows it. They're told to ask that person and largely memorize the answer for a test.
With LLMs we're being told they are, or will soon be, as smart or smarter than any human. Its no surprise to me that people with access to LLMs that can already answer a question would just blindly use it and trust the response.
"This is the killer issue"
I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?
Possibly just a case of having seen "AI-language" too often and just starting to use it themselves?
This is the question nobody's asking.
It's not just about the question--it's also about what's in the answer.
Implicit in the human to human to AI conversational chain is the second person’s assumption that the first person didn’t think to ask AI.
The mere fact of asking another human a question (absent a strong pattern of behavior to the contrary) should be strong evidence the interlocutor wants a human answer! Sending an AI answer should have the same social valence as sending a lmgtfy link; appropriate for bad actors but a pretty insulting response to an earnest question.
“cognitive surrender”
It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
I FEEL this. It's empowered lazy devs to defer thought and accountability. To some degree, I understand. It softens the imposter syndrome feeling one can get. But, I see it as a character barrier; not a moral one.
It's very insulting. I don't need them to talk to an AI. I talk to AI all day already. If all a person is doing is forwarding messages to AI why do we need them? Just have an AI do their job.
> I talk to AI all day already.
> If all a person is doing is forwarding messages to AI why do we need them? Just have an AI do their job.
Why do we need your job? If you talk to AI all day already, why shouldn't we fire you and replace you with AI?
It's not that sad, it'll probably go away. Anyone remember when Google first got popular and for like 5-10 years after everyone did the same with that, there was even the "let me google that for you" meme + site.
It was forgotten. Time heals all wounds.
This behavior from people is the one thing that makes me wonder if we all wouldn't be better off just chucking AI off the proverbial cliff. It should be useful tool for enhancing the tasks we have to do, not something to fully replace thinking and human interaction completely.
On the other hand, I think it's perfectly good that latent natural idiots who happened to seem like normal people among us would just drop their masks and disclose themselves in such an obvious way by delegating what little left of their brain power to the artificial one.
I agree, with the caveat that when your pointy-haired-boss doesn't realise they're the idiots and you're not the idiot...
Off the cuff analysis by AI is often wrong. Lately I've been feeling bad for Casey Handmer whose latest blog post contains an illustration with the caption
Like what did you expect?Absolutely. But I’m afraid people are forced to do this because management wants to see AI usage otherwise they’re gonna go on the chopping block. Leadership is ultimately to blame.
It is the ultimate cop-out to avoid having any involvement in anything. "AI said so..." then shrugs or more AI answers, ultimately removing oneself from any form of commitment to an opinion or knowledge (even partial).
OK I am bracing for the downvotes..
What about when the llm is smarter than the person? Sometimes I get material that is so bad I wish they had had AI do it. Then it would be poor to mediocre.
There was an episode of the podcast “Question Everything “ where they talked about how LLM s can sometimes talk people out of conspiracy theories by patiently refuting the arguments with facts. There have been academic studies on this.
I think people hate AI because it is often mediocre and flawed but sometimes it’s replacing humans that are inept.
I thought it was pretty well-established that conspiracists aren't deterred with facts, and that their commitments to the conspiracy theory are essentially emotional and/or in-group identitarian?
You should definitely listen to this podcast which is an interview with a Professor of Psychology at Columbia. He also thought what you thought-- that you can't convince a Q-Anon type-- and they were actually testing something else. When they found out that 25% of people who believed conspiracy theories actually changed their mind after three exchanges with an LLM.
They repeated the test and the results were replicable. (But still only about 25%, but that is something.)
This made me think: I grew up in a world where there was a flawed but consensus view of the world, its problems, institutions motivations. This came from a common mass media. Maybe getting our answers from AI will lead us to a new (inevitably flawed or even bad) consensus. Weird.
Source: https://play.cdnstream1.com/s/kcrw/question-everything/can-a...
If the LLM is smarter than the person, the person cannot look at the output and judge to see whether it is correct.
True, but that's a people problem.
My "favorite" as a sysadmin is when I explain why something should be done differently, or shouldn't be done at all, and I get back "but ChatGPT said..." followed by a no-context, incorrect AI slop paragraph.
One of the more dangerous things LLMs have enabled is people feeling like they are suddenly experts on topics they would have never touched otherwise.
>There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
It makes you feel that way because it is that way. They're not self-sufficient.
I don’t think all ai generated responses are bad though. They need to be brief. People need to iterate on the content and understand their response.
Oneshotting a response just because ChatGPT said so is super annoying.
I will a lot of times write and email and give it to an LLM to soften it or round it out since I have a bad habit of being overly direct.
Exactly, people want to talk to AI when they choose to, as a tool, but not reaching out to other human beings. There is no easy way of solving this sadly
Not trying to defend ai but I observed another mode: what used to be bored dev chats where people avoided topics or started feuds, now it's "well Claude suggests...". It's not great but it's a short form of improvement somehow. (Sure I'd prefer passionate convos steering toward innovation, but that's been a rare sight in my career)
No it isn't an improvement. If I wanted the output of an LLM instead of a thinking, smart, real human, I would have simply asked an LLM. Nearly nobody who asks humans questions WANTS to get an LLM answer, that's simply not why people ask other people.
I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker.
But if I'm the askee, I honestly don't know how to navigate those waters yet.
If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?
Do I say "Have you tried X?", where X is the thing the LLM suggested? Should I pretend that I did not ask the LLM?
In the past, I could find some source and send them the link, and I wouldn't assume the person had exhausted the entire Google index. Sending a link isn't the same as LMGTFY.
Analogously, while "Claude says X" does sound as rude as lmgtfy, disclosing that your suggestion was found via llm is more akin to linking to a source, or "take this with a grain of salt".
I think as long as nobody can tell you've used an LLM, it's fine. If you use an LLM to get your info and then respond, that's normal. Copy pasting or going "claude said" and then more or less just regurgitating is different, because you are no longer involved.
If I ask you, I want your thoughts, based on whatever you can find or know. It's difficult to articulate for me, honestly, but I hope it makes sense.
> If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?
Correct. you should not share. maybe say "I don't know. Have you tried asking claude?"
>I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker.
Golden rule. Treat others the way you wish to be treated.
This says more about you than the other person. Some people like giving good answers and are less concerned about being the source themselves.
I'll sometimes do the exact thing you are talking about. The reason is that I basically know the answer, but also know there is a nicer explanation to the question. I'll type in the question, often iterate a few times, get an answer that I basically knew but couldn't explain as clearly, and respond with it.
Humans haven't been "self sufficient" in 100,000 years. We've been building/using tools and specializing since the start. If you went back just a few hundred years some people (the version of you basically) would be profoundly sad you couldn't build your own house.
If this is already happening among adults, what's left for the current or next generation? Kids that can no longer think by themselves? I believe this is really scary.
It depends on the situation. If you were just talking then sure. Pretty rude to just check out of the conversation and replace the human you were talking to with an LLM.
That's sad, but you know what's infuriating? It's humans who come at you sarcastic and dismissive and without spending any effort actually engaging with what you've said in good faith. Imagine writing a well reasoned out post or comment, only to get a sarcastic dismissive literal oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
Matching the amount of effort that others around me are putting in is pretty important to me now. Don't want to end up trying too hard for people who don't give a shit.
Is that a feeling you battled a lot growing up or something? It's very specific, and not actually very connected or sensible.
These people don't know the answer, but they are trying (generally) to be helpful. The former reality of the article's author would be posting and getting no replies and/or links to the wrong answer you already read.
> The former reality of the article's author would be posting and getting no replies and/or links to the wrong answer you already read.
Both of these are preferable.
It feels insulting when discussing something serious, they respond back with a highly inaccurate ChatGPT response.
Where are these people?
I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
I’ve distanced myself from a close friend group chat over the past few years as they seem to be more and more like this. They all work in tech at various FAANG companies, and I just mentally hate engaging anymore as it all has turned into “let me prove you wrong in 10s or find nuance in this conversation I don’t already have” by referencing AI. It’s like the Google search nerd snipe crowd 2.0, and I’m not entertaining them. I’ve had to flat out tell them they are wrong as they source a clearly inaccurate AI response, which is even more strain on the friendship.
I feel your pain. I also get "chatgpt/gemini/grok... CONFIRMED blah blah" as if these are ground truth. What is even more sad is it sometimes mixed with "from first principles...".
It’s sad. I just expect better from my friends, but this group chat is also full of friends who are chronically online, so I fear they are just so infatuated with AI as it seems they are constantly considering it at every point of their day.
Seems have to make a face to face appointment, without any online devices in hand.
Well, I used to Google, and read what real people wrote on the subject, and then answer from what I've found.
Remember when "Google" used to be a synonym for "search"?
I can't stand this at all. People are becoming more and more sheepish. They don't know when things are harder than they actually are and the dunning-kruger effect is happening at a pace unbeknownst to our culture on nearly all surfaces.
The stupidity and helplessness are by design.
My stomach churns when I see an e-mail obviously written by AI. It just comes off so disingenuous and disrespectful, as if they couldn't be bothered to respond to me themselves but instead had a machine do it. Even worse, it's usually very verbose, wasting my time further to have to read through all the slop.
This is just a glitch in time. It’ll be agents talking to agents. We won’t be able to keep up.
Hopefully such flagrant usage will be priced out at some point.
I don't claim to know the context in which that AI slop communication happens. But when people are really interested in what you ask them, they usually give their own opinions in their own voice.
What? This is patronizing and maybe a bit insulting.
If you call a helpdesk agent - they have to query the system to pull up your case.
The UX is a bit different now.
That's it.
Your 'anthropomorphising projectION' here is the issue, not the person using basic tools to help you - as they always have.
When they do that (e.g. in customer support) I sometimes do the same. I explain to the AI what my end goal is, and then let it deal with the answers.
This is the most infuriating part of dealing with support engineers at companies i've paid giant bills with. They didn't answer my question, i get a wall of text that i read 4 times before i figure out it says nothing, and nothing seems to get fixed.
I asked the person responsible for a new integration at work (nominally a Director level person, with a bit of title inflation going on) about a feature that didn't do what we wanted.
They answered with something that looked to be AI slop, and very verbose too. When I politely said "those instructions reference links and buttons that I cannot find in the UI, could you please tell me where to find them?" the Director simply replied "I cannot find them either, disregard. The feature doesn't support what you want after all."
This means they simply prompted my question to the builtin AI and copied back to our conversation without verifying it made sense.
That's the future we must deal with now. A sort of broken "LMGTFY" that only provides wrong answers.
There was an insightful post here on HN, a few weeks ago, about "AI hygiene". One of the recommendations is: never share raw AI output with anyone. It's like showing your dirty underwear.
Show them your distillation, your final recommendation, but not the raw output. That's useless, they could have prompted the AI themselves, you're not adding anything but being the middleman. At least share your prompt instead of the output!
I hate it so much. It's one thing to lean on AI for complex or toilsome work, but to openly supplant your own ability to interact thoughtfully with another person. It should be embarrassing.
Overly dramatic. It’s not that deep dude
Yeah, we know it's all atoms and entropy and dust to dust and the heat death of the universe in the end, and nothing means anything. But during our short time living in human society and trying to find meaning in our existence, this cuts pretty deep to the heart of that quest.
You're welcome for the downvote.
Frankly it’s just incredibly disrespectful. If I ask for your take on an issue, I want your words and thoughts. You can use an LLM, but vet the results and actually have a hand in it. Otherwise why am I even asking? I don’t need an intermediary between me and ChatGPT
On JIRA ticket discussion threads now involve the liaison for another team copypasta-ing LLM slop as a comment. Makes me feel like Will Hunting. What, is that it or do you have an original thought you'd like to contribute?
This is truly infuriating. "Have you asked AI? - no I thought I'd see if anyone had a real answer from experience first. Someone I can trust. AI should be the fallback, not the first call. Watching people just regurgitate AI responses with zero understanding they've just copy/pasted total BS is becoming far too common in work environments. We've become utterly helpless as a society and things continue to get worse year after year. Whether it's helicopter parenting, inability to navigate anywhere (even places you go every day) without GPS, abject fear at asking someone for help, inability to have a conversation without ending it immediately by Googling...etc. The biggest issue is you can't really fight back now. Regardless of what you do personally everybody else is doing the other thing and you can't avoid it.
I noticed this on the ffmpeg dev list, where one of the core devs was too lazy to write his own proposal and instead used AI slop to autogenerate it, then send it to other people. He will not understand why people don't want to get spammed down via AI slop.
Nothing feels quite as good as getting dumb and drooling literally. Being intelligent is painful, it’s the most painful state of existence. You see everything with mind bending clarity. The inane nonsense of it all
No wonder the mind instinctively recoils and wants to smoothen itself
For past ten years my life consisted mainly of desperately trying to be dumb and happy. AI is really good tool for that. Just outsource the thinking until the organ atrophies, hopefully permanently. some drugs and the life gets actually even pleasurable.
To be aware is a curse, no wonder desperate attempts to lift it take place en masse
If you were so smart, you'd find a way to be happy that includes your intellect.
Curbing the suffering by numbing yourself is seeking comfort in retreating to the local optimum instead of continuing to search for a better one.
Pfft.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799035/
Smart people drink and smoke more; not less, potentially to self sooth/deal with the oppressive reality they find themselves in.
That certainly must be very comfortable opinion to have. People truly love their illusions that allow to smoothly glance over giant uncomfortable spikes of reality under the balancing line of life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function at all in this circus. We would just lie down in cave paralysed by dread, ending the homo sapiens brand of intelligence the moment it started
You could hit your head against a brick wall repeatedly. Tries that yet?
actually, yes.
I also tried banging it on my desk. The desk was better, because you get a bit of a drum sound and you cause yourself less damage.
Also, the desk is closer. Brick walls require gettting up and walking somewhere first.
Weed is much less painful and the effect is the same
a bit too simplistic for my tastes. I wouldn't call being inebriated the same as being dumb; but I would absolutely agree that being inebriated is way more fun, easy, and fulfilling than being sober. I would choose being inebriated over being sober almost every time, regardless of the mechanism of inebriation.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
It's like asking someone to deadlift a dresser and move it to another room, even though they have a dolly right next to them. Should they be able to? It depends. Should you expect them to? No, that's just odd.
It's more like asking someone to use a toilet when they have a perfectly good set of pants they're wearing, already on them. Thinking is what makes you human, don't give it up so easily.
No, it's like asking someone "Would you like to have a coffee?" and they responds by pointing at a Starbucks and saying "Sure, go over there, they have coffee you can buy".
Well, it's subtly different than a kid calling mum - kids generally do that because they're insecure, an adult using ChatGPT to answer simply can't be bothered to turn on their brain...
You had an good, psychologically plausible explanation for some individuals to over-rely on AI and... dismissed it and called them stupid. Adults are not special, they are mostly kids that got older.
Actually I didn't call them stupid, I called them lazy (and also inconsiderate, but mostly lazy).
I think you might be underestimating the level of insecurity in the average adult ("I only used AI to refine my own thoughts...", "I only used AI to correct my typos...").
Sounds pretty unsubtle to me. It’s possible they’re insecure as adults as well? Or they want to save time or brain power for other work and don’t see the inherent rudeness in it?
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer.
That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.
Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a sales pitch for the thing I was trying to build for him. He was always pitching for new business, and seemed to struggle to get out of 'sales mode'. I have no doubt that if I were working for him now, he'd be pointing me to an LLM in response to any question.
This is why executives think LLMs can replace everyone. They can see it can replace them, and project that onto everyone else. And they don't see the gaps in knowledge because they don't care about the facts, only the presentation.
I have a theory that most people at most levels of work deal with the same amount of mental complexity. The difference is that as you move up the unit of abstraction gets larger, so your decisions and knowledge cover more scale. E.g. the engineer thinks about functions; the business owner thinks about products; the investor thinks about companies; the president thinks about nations; etc.
But people at the higher abstraction levels have a problem because they often never had (or lose) the ability to zoom in anywhere. And even the ones that can don't have time to learn to zoom in everywhere so they have to learn how to trust others, aka recognizing shibboleths. AI is great at sounding trustworthy and making reasonable looking output. In so doing, however, it's undermining the utility of shibboleths for large scale thinkers! That is the powerful are now deluding themselves that they have access to infinite reliable experts, and have gained the ability to zoom in everywhere, for only the cost of a data center. In a sense programmer experts like us are lucky because we have objective verification as a feedback loop to temper the exuberance. They do not.
If this is true, the kinds of error modes we'll see will be novel and catastrophic to a large fraction of businesses. If the feedback loops for correction are damaged or destroyed, we'll see firms gleefully, optimistically and energetically committing obvious mistakes until they die.
I think agree with the broad, but disagree with the specifics. I really don't think a lot of people at the product level think about products. I really don't think the investors think that much about companies. I think as you move up, the things that separate are (in no order): ability to solve OR mask problems (one of these requires more skill/effort, but to people above they can look a lot closer), ability to naturally or adaptively (this is a fair, but somewhat positive word for this) socialize with the people in that next level, nepotism or blurrier forms of getting your foot in the door, willingness to look the other way (or just be obtuse), willingness to lie (or just be obtuse).
After the IC-level, each level filters less for the duties of the higher role. Even PMs seem surprisingly par at product ideation, vision, insight amongst their cross functional project team members. So many products fail, so many startups fail, so many projects are late, but those things don't seem to be what dictate promotions or investment even when they are specifically that role's role.
https://thebullshitmachines.com/
This is a bit dated, but I think the message out of UW is right.
To your point on bosses: Turns out, you can very much bullshit a bullshitter.
damn, this is a real zinger lol. Definitely seems this way.
Maybe unrelated but this memory pops up: I once worked with a mechanical engineer who could not visualize anything in his mind and had quite some trouble with word finding and explaining his ideas. He just couldn't say what needed to be built, he could only evaluate after it was built (often "argh, no not that").
It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:
"Why didn't you build what I said?" "I did. This is exactly what you said." "No it's not! I said x y z" "Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z" Silence. "Then that's not what I meant"
Now you know why AI text to CAD works so poorly.
Same, but not sure it's his training and just the way his head works. Have met a lot of people in software who can't draw or understand (very) simple block diagrams of systems. Some people don't have an inner eye.
Its so much worse now.
I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!
There's an old computing maxim: GIGO. It used to mean "garbage in, garbage out" meaning that if you put garbage into a computer, then the output was garbage. Nowadays, GIGO means "garbage in, gospel out" meaning that no matter how bad the input was, the output was to be treated as The Word of God.
> That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.
I use to get emails with some oddball questions slightly out of my field of expertise from business owners. I would answer, and they would forward my email to the person that asked them the question. They saw their role as routers.
Delegating questions to experts seem reasonable?
Expropriating value is not.
>That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).
The 'AI-generated pseudo-spec' is becoming a massive productivity killer. Non-technical managers prompt an LLM, get a highly confident 5-page document with chosen libraries, and think they've done 80% of the work. But as a developer, you now have to spend hours debugging and debunking hallucinated architectures just to prove why the AI's approach doesn't fit the existing codebase. It completely shifts the burden of actual product management into AI-babysitting for the dev team.
I was discussing a change we wanted to make to some tables in one of the DBs, but it would require a lot of effort because of the sheer size. Anyway, after saying how much effort would be required the response I got was to “please ask ChatGPT.” It gave a slightly different response, but changed it after I presented it with my solution and agreed that was the better approach. Just… sigh
"Apologies, you're absolutely right. My initial strategy indeed would have caused a massive database bottleneck because it would lock the entire table. This could result in downtime for the application. Let me know if you'd like me to make a step-by-step plan to implement your solution."
Maybe he was trying to say "look, when I can look this up, it means that you can too, i won't put any effort into it, because i pay you, but if i can use AI, so can you."
Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.
Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.
You'd be surprised how many "scale-up"'s are owned by genuine idiots. I don't even mean inexperienced people, just people that - if you were to meet them for the first time - seem like they are fucking idiots. The type that recently figured out you can tie your shoe instead of tripping over them.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
>I don't know how they do it.
They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.
Yes.
If you're 10/10 smart, you're getting a 7 figure sign on bonus to go work at Meta as an AI researcher.
If you're 6-9/10 smart, you're probably miserable somewhere.
If you're 4-5/10 smart, you are one of these people.
Why do you feel the need to simplify life into such a narrow perspective? While it's true that being smart can limit your confidence, what you've written is beyond exaggeration. There is so much more complexity involved.
There is some insight to his post. If you're very intelligent, there are many points in your life that steer you away from starting your own company. If at any point the best option you have is to start a company, you were probably not a very good student or employee.
This is largely my experience as well. The Bay Area wannabe startup crowd is brimming with idiots, people dumber than your dumbest colleague at work. Unbelievable amounts of Dunning-Kruger.
The actual grind filters out most of them, of course, but if you concede that some businesses are basically luck then some number of those idiots will make it.
HN mindset distilled in one comment.
Thanks. I'm going to take that as a compliment.
HN positivity distilled in one reply.
HN self-loathing distilled in a pointless thread.
so… they’re conmen
confidence man
Flowers for Algernon has something to say about this.
So Silicon Valley's big-head is based on an actual stereotype?
Yeah, except that Big Head was, as far as I understood, just sleepwalking or floating through life. He more or less wholly lacked that unquenchable thirst for money that motivates MBA frat boys to yell at balding beta cucks to type the code faster before AI replaces them...
At my company, non technical Managers (including marketing folks) are posting Claude and ChatGPT responses in bug tickets with the "fix" for the bug. No explanation of what the expected vs actual behavior is, just AI slop telling me how to fix it. Soooo helpful.
> psychotic
Probably more under-developed than psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
I think psychotic fits. They have lost touch with reality, and are treating AI as some all knowing entity.
People have no mental model for it. They know people don't know much, and are used to computers being deterministic. Now (setting aside complete rubes who believe anything) people are used to detecting human-generated BS and spam on the Internet.
- It's nearly always poorly written because dummies also usually can barely write
- It's poorly packaged (some random comments section, not a polished slide deck)
- It's biased in predictable ways (when you do know who wrote it, their self-interested takes are predictable).
Enter "AI" - it writes mechanically well (even though it overuses several tropes, it doesn't make grammatical errors). AI packages its output as exactly what you ask it to (e.g. finished coding projects, outlines, essays, etc.) And not being a person, it's not guaranteed to have a certain bias, but it does echo and validate all your own biases.
Given all this, people think AI sounds exactly like what they assume an oracle would sound like.
One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.
This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
It's so funny how those things go. By contrast, to go full social media, this is our condo building WhatsApp group in SF's SOMA district: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Screenshot_Montage_-_Pa...
I wonder what the difference is between your community there and our community here since all these interactions are mediated by smartphone.
I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.
There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.
A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.
There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.
Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
It's kinda crazy how much time people waste on social media without much benefit to them.
After an hour doom scroll session I don't really remember most of it.
Did you ever meet up again afterwards?
This reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early.
The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
Reminds me of my friends in Gaza, where every day means no shops, no restaurants, no home, no medicine, no food, no water, no hope. The beaches are full of people just trying to exist.
The person you are talking to did not personally commit genocide in Gaza. Just as I, an American citizen, did not declare war on Iran.
In fact, I think the war in Iran is a stupid and immoral thing to do. It's possible that the person you are responding to feels the same about the Israeli government's genocidal actions in Gaza.
However, you did not bother to find out. When you judge someone before knowing them, it is called "prejudice". Pre-judging.
Victimhood stopped being a valid excuse on the 7th.
I hope your friend over there hopes for peace as much as we all do over here. Maybe then we'll see an end to all this.
The UN classified it a genocide. Is the latest to call that a marketing ploy or Russian disinformation and say it's not OK or hip or fashionable to question our allies? Evil productized?
That sounds nice. Not sure I'd like to live in a war zone, but it sounds like it has its perks. But wait, isn't that just weekends?
Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.
I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
With AI we're about to have a trust crisis (I'll explain in a sec), so if we extrapolate it very far, we could see a world where nobody trusts anything displayed on a device, which is essentially what you describe but in a world with electricity still running.
The trust issue: we already see hacker news members accusing each other of being LLMs, we already see legitimate images being immediately put in the AI category, and AI images and videos being shared as if the truth. We already see signs of infosec changing forever, with flaws found in SSL libraries that makes you wonder how trusty that little padlock next to the URL will become, we already see operating systems having to patch faster than they can.
With all that you get to wonder how much you can trust the pixels you see on your device, and how much we'll collectively trust them in the future. That leads you to trust your neighbours way more than your social media feed, which frankly, may have a positive impact on society over the long run, despite a very painful transition.
That's under the hypothesis that AI leads us to experience a trust crisis, which isn't a given.
I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.
I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.
So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
Easily configurable via router rules at home!
This has a name in literature: post disaster utopia, google it :)
'A Paradise Built in Hell' by Solnit is a good read about it
So what is stopping you from going to talk to your neighbor right now?
The phones
Lovely! I am all for an offline day in the year where everybody does what you described.
I forget where, but there was a restaurant who locked all phones in a box at your table and if you made it to the end without opening it the table got a free cookie.
That should just be every restaurant, unless you're eating alone. It's just disrespectful otherwise.
(And even alone there's a pretty strong case to be made that you should pay attention to the actual food.)
Plenty of these experiences can be found without disconnecting the electricity for multiple countries. Personally, I find musical events of all sorts are amazing for this, and completely AI free should you chose the right events :)
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
The problem with live concerts is that a substantial number of people are holding up their smartphones in front of them and experiencing it through the screen.
As long as you don't, what's the problem? Let them miss it, find a new location you see better, then enjoy :)
Great way of preventing this is going to smaller events, tend to be a lot better in most ways.
That might work at concerts, but it still sort of irks me. Museums, however, have become the worst for this. People stepping in front of me holding their phone in front of my face while I'm looking at the thing just so they can get a picture and wander off without ever really looking. If you want a picture of the art, go to the gift shop
This is so true. It can even just be regular club nights at good clubs. Ever been to Berghain? (Me neither)
Some clubs around here sometimes run whole-weekend parties that attract thousands of people, those are fun.
I remember going to Coachella every year from 2005-2010 and it was a great experience. I went in 2017(?) once after that and it seemed like literally everyone had their phones up filming during the sets. It was a night and day difference. Even the EDM tents were people just filming which also had a chilling effect on how crazy people were getting.
Large electronic music events always been like that in my mind, attend the events with less than 1000 attendees and you'll find a completely different vibe. Also, Cochaella is American, maybe try something European next time, I've never been to any North American parties, but judging from what I could see in the past, and even today, they sure look a lot more commercialized than the same-sized events in Europe, and people seem to be interested in something else than dancing their ass off with strangers.
> they sure look a lot more commercialized
Same here. Just looking into going to Coachella or Burning Man seems like so much work. I'll take a summer festival in Spain, Germany or Netherlands instead.
Let's do it today
one day a year? it should be every week :)
You just invented the Sabbath.
Now we can spend the rest of our days arguing over whether it should be on Saturday or Sunday!
Let’s do both?
It's the same with remote locations, we destroyed substantial parts of their magic by getting everyone online everywhere, all the time.
People can't even keep up discussions. Most of the population is totally dumbened down, like on the levels of barely functioning monkeys.
We need to go back
Yeah totally. Now cut the power for a week and see how long the socialization lasts.
I can't charge my car without my phone. Oh, also, I can't charge my car without the grid.
This feels like a disingenuous interpretation of the parent comment.
People don't want to hear this hard truth, sadly.
In comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?
In my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end.
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.
I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!
This is honestly terrifying and a perfect example of where AI can end up leading us.
I called the local Apple Store, got what was probably an AI. I just needed the hours, so that was OK, but then it asked if I needed anything else. I asked for winning numbers to the lottery. It thunk and thunk and thought some more and came back with, I’ll have to pass you to a store employee. Now I know how to avoid 1,000 questions and get a live person.
I just keep repeating "operator" ad nauseam not stopping for anything other than the sound of the call transferring and that almost always works.
I just keep blowing raspberries down the line until I'm connected to a human.
There are or course some asshole companies whose bots are designed to never connect you to a human and just hang up after a while.
Better just play operator.ogg use your favorite media player on loop until someone does pick up.
Sometimes yelling fuck shit piss bitch cunt fuck ass whore etc works. They have them setup to detect swear words to figure out when youre pissed off and need to talk to a human lmao
Xfinity/Comcast automated support has swear word detection. I eventually picked up on this after the 4th or 5th time they sent out a non-technical 'technician' in response to my concerns over SNR causing connection instability.
(Me: "here is a comprehensive analysis of modem logs over the past 7 days and clear indication of the cause"; Xfinity: "Let's turn off the wifi router for 30s! It didn't work the last 50 times but it's the only thing we can do.")
That honestly is just the worst when it happens. It sucks for both the rep on the phone and you since it's just a waste of both of your time (though at least they get paid for it).
Had a similar back and forth over multiple days where I spent hours on the phone with them. On the third day they finally sent me to a different call center with someone in the US that was authorized to go off script and actually solve my problem. Took five minutes.
I just don't understand how it makes sense. Considering just how much these companies limit the utility of customer service, it's no wonder they want to switch to LLMs. It's likely no worse than the service they are already providing 99% of the time.
Depending on the company, you sometimes get routed to the angry people recovery section when you do this. And so then, the Comcast agent on the other end is in stern counselor mode ready to de-escalate what seems to the robot to be a fuming, angry customer and gets completely thrown off when you’re super chill with them (or at least, you hopefully are chill with them!)
For some reason your reply immediately caused me to imagine Ross Geller shouting into the phone, "Operator", like the, "Pivot" scene from friends.
I must speak to a human!
Humaaaan!
Humaaaaaan!
HUMAAAAAAAAN!
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer.
Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."
We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.
You can send them this: https://noslopgrenade.com
> Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
This has that slopccato feeling.
Ironically it feels like that site was itself written by AI.
>Or as Jean Baudrillard has said:
It is nothing short of profoundly ironic to quote Jean Baudrillard in this context.
That is a version anglicisée meme. I prefer the original:
« Le contexte réel s’effondre au moment même où l’on me cite. »
I agree with the messaging generally, but unfortunately to fight implicitly unprofessional behavior with a terse response like this would look explicitly unprofessional!
At my company this behaviour is celebrated
Thanks for your response-- it's really load-bearing.
If it wasn't essential, I'd tell them to talk to me like a human or else I'd just quit the conversation entirely. Boundaries and stuff.
I have done this a few times. If you can't be bothered to give me your attention when asking something from me, you won't get mine.
if you shame ppl for ai use you might get branded as ai non beliver and shown the door next layoff round ( which is just around the corner)
I understand that example, on the other hand, RTFM is as old as history and it can often be replaced by googling or asking LLMs.
Not saying that's the very specific case, but I regularly encounter in my daily life at work people delegating the kind of information seeking that can be done independently.
No, this was in response to some questions about different approaches enterprises take to automated code quality review and complying with some arbitrary security standard out there. And this was a principal secops guy who thought the appropriate thing to do was to ask Copilot.
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
>And this was a principal secops guy who thought the appropriate thing to do was to ask Copilot.
Firing them on the spot and telling them: "Thanks for opening our eyes to the fact that asking you is just asking Copilot with a middleman" will send the right message to the rest...
Did you miss my "Not saying that's the very specific case"?
No, which is why I started my message with "No, ..."!
I dont even ask people questions anymore. I'm tired of the sneer and the "Did you ask Claude?" responses. I had a manager say "I'm here to help in any way I can", and then every way I brought up was "We expect a Senior to be able to answer that themselves" or "Did you ask claude"... thanks for the help, so much for teamwork.
Turning people down when they ask questions is such a short-sighted perspective. When you answer, you can tailor it to them, you can give extra context, you can elaborate, you can dive into specific nuances. Long-term it will be very likely a positive thing as the person will trust you more, they will be comfortable asking more questions and the knowledge might actually help them to contribute in the future.
I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt here. It reminds me of the Google search phenomenon others have mentioned, which culminated in the joke website "let me google that for you." But, I don't think the cause is necessarily that people are dumb or lazy. Both are factors, but another big one is that people are overwhelmed at work. Another question coming in may not be viewed as an opportunity to learn or help a colleague but as just another task to complete as quickly as possible so the task mountain doesn't grow higher. I'd like to think that we'll eventually use AI to automate a lot of the mundane stuff at work so people have the opportunity to dig into questions from colleagues and provide real answers and genuinely have a conversation when they do. I realize that's pretty optimistic and it may take a while to get there but people stopped sending me google search results years ago. That phenomenon was relatively short-lived and hopefully this one is too.
I have five Gen-Z kids that are pushing back on GenAI hard and they claim their peers are getting angry about how it’s impacted their lives.
As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.
But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.
I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.
I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.
GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.
Are you a software developer?
I think this issue gets more difficult for software developers. AI is especially good at software development.
You have to make a very strong business case to NOT be using AI. I hate it, but its the reality and the world we live in. Adopt, or be left behind.
My oldest is on the tail end of Gen-Z and is vehemently anti-AI. This isn't a position I've been vocal about, she just kind of expressed her disdain for it one day.
I've been in IT a while, and am more of an AI skeptic - but I'm OK with it being used as a tool where it makes sense in my field, and it certainly has some value.... but shoehorning it into everything and using it as a general replacement for human creativity is a no-go for me.
It's a relief to know GenZ is feeling this way, and I hope having an entire generation against it will help pump the brakes a bit.
It makes sense. GenZ and younger have the most to lose from AI. Corporate America is absolutely giddy about its promise to make 50+% of white collar jobs redundant. I'd have a very negative view about it too, if I were just graduating college and looking for an entry-level office job.
A bit off topic, but I am currently travelling through Europe by train. It is such a boon to just be outside everyday and meet locals and fellow travellers. Highly recommend.
It can also be exhausting. Extended travel makes me very tired. And I generally like talking to people.
The word "travel" comes from "travail", or "to toil, work strenuously, or suffer".
But I'd still rather be travelling and seeing the world than being nervous about my job being cut due to AI.
"I'd rather be a millionaire and never have to work than be worried about my job being cut due to AI"
Hope the heat doesn’t impact your travel plans too much. Feel free to reach out if you’re around Hamburg, always happy to meet HNers
The heat is ferocious indeed! I will, thank you!
How do you find the language barrier problem? Do you speak English to everyone you meet?
Highly depends on the country. Go to Sweden and you'll have a hard time even practicing Swedish, as soon as the natives discover you're also not a native, they'll switch to English immediately in most places of the country.
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
I was in rural Northeast Spain one time and a French lady tried to get me to help her communicate with a Spanish storekeeper. Given that I only speak bits of Spanish and basically no French, and I seemed to have to the most bilingual skill of the three of us, we had a pretty hard time communicating. I'm still not exactly sure what the French lady wanted, and my vague understanding of what the Spanish person said was, "I can't be bothered with this."
The easiest place in France I've traveled as an English speaker was Nice. They all speak English well and don't seem to care if you don't speak French.
Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich. I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?" Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing) I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school: "Jambon du pain et...." And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face: "What would you like?"
It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.
> even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English
How they keep their English speaking "in shape" then?
Who knows, I guess music, film, TV and video games, like most of us who learned English outside of English-native speaking countries. School classes helps for sure, but I'd wager most people who speak good English learned it from multimedia one way or another.
Also relevant to note that some European countries dub everything while others sub. That no doubt plays a part in the population’s understanding of foreign languages.
> and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want
To expand on this idea, there are books designed specifically for travels which are pocket sized and contain a bunch of images so you can point at what you want.
It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
last time in Italy I "spoke" to lots of Italians very slowly with lots of gestures and a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot! Nearly ordered 100x as much cheese as I meant to except the guy in the shop was not a computer so he understood what I really meant. Much better than in the Netherlands where they just switch to English as soon as they hear you try to say choodumorchen
I speak three European languages, and English worked almost always. Especially the younger folks in the cities. If it didn't work, I used a translation app.
lmk if you ever visit Zürich :)
I have a pet theory that we were better off when the economy flowed through Wall St rather than Silicon Valley because Wall St people ride the subway to work.
I am also traveling through Europe, currently in Budapest. Twice now in the last week, I have heard AI music being played through the speakers at restaurants.
Well, I think I couldn't distinguish AI music from the good (or bad) old human-made "elevator music", but maybe I'm mistaken and it would stand out to me when I hear it...
listen carefully and if it rings (as in being little distorted, or too noisy) it is most probably AI. and it is nearly-impossible to obscure it, unless you replay the whole score using classic approach. i would imagine how irritating is this music to everyone a child indeed, as children have higher thresh of what they hear.
That's probably to be expected, before that they used covers of popular songs, likely produced by a company that offers much lower rates than e.g. the original artists.
I prefer silence over that tbh.
I am in Budapest tomorrow. Lmk if you want to meet for a coffee :)
AI K-pop was in the cafes in Seoul.
I’m in Europe travelling and AI has been a boon navigating the utterly fragmented public transport.
I have been pasting screenshots of NS international to ChatGPT and getting from A to B.
I wouldn’t be so confident without ChatGPT
I wrote about how ChatGPT can help even more in this space https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/ai-can-fix-the-fragmented-o...
There are already solutions for doing exactly that. e.g., DB's apps allow purchasing tickets for many other countries, and you can find and purchase DB tickets via Google Flights.
Just wait until everyone is using AR glasses which listen to your conversation, run it through an LLM, then use the speaker to bark an answer at you with the wearer’s previously synthesised voice, while they’re scrolling instagram inside the lenses.
/dystopia
I took my private jet to Fiji. Just needed a month to unwind and walk on the beach, sample local cuisine, get to know fellow travelers. Also highly recommended
Haha, enjoy! I am staying in cheap hostels or sleeper trains. I don't have the money, only the time. Which is more precious I realised.
I work on a small team. I talk to coding agents a lot. I also talk to my human team members a lot. So I have decent experience with interacting with both LLMs and humans.
My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.
My pet theory comes to information density. LLM writing feels too shallow. If you read a text from a person who cares about her subject, there will be more useful detail and insight scatterd throughout. And the information within sentences will be more meaningfully connected. On one hand, LLM would know all that, but it does not seem to know how to distill that knowledge into a written text. I read what people write. If I know the text is from an LLM, I skim.
Probably about the distribution - AI writes text that resembles the average distribution among all text corpses, but humans have personalities and are always biased.
I also work on a small team that leverages LLMs heavily. The verbosity and "polish" of the responses is tiring. Everything starts to feel written in just one, inhuman voice. I too miss the "roughness" or personality of writing and communication pre-LLM.
I use this default context in ChatGPT and it works pretty well for me:
"Tell it like it is. Don't sugar-coat responses. Be concise. Short answers only. No bullet points. One paragraph max. No over-explaining."
AI makes it apparent that the only value some people bring to the table is that they have access to information that you do not. If now they fold that one advantage by just delegating everything to AI (which is in the same position as you informationwise), they will remove themselves from the worker pool soon.
If you're in a particularly fiesty mood you can lean into that. "If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"
While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.
I'll give the counter example:
I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.
Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.
If you are taking AI output and interactively working with it to come to some particular solution, that process of working with it is the value you are adding. The "AI proxy" is specifically about the case where you send a question to someone and literally all they do is paste it to the AI, then send back what the AI said without further work. Literally all they did was proxy your question to the AI.
Do you find talking to an AI with your colleagues as a middleman faster than talking to your colleagues?
"If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"
Prompt Engineering
Organizations will become even less about adding real value and more about making the boss feel good about you.
So the oldest strategy becomes the newest strategy...
Always has been tbh
Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off. There's value in that if they are, as if they really are experts they can filter out bs and reprompt better than you likely could if you're not an expert - and in rare cases, who knows, maybe they could actually do it themselves.
AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
There have always been people that did the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
AI will just make it more obvious.
And those people will be at the front to be let go when AI inevitably kills white collar jobs as it creates other jobs. They just might not be able to get one of those new ones because they rotted what little brain cells they had to begin with.
> I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off
The co-founder of Anthropic isn't even doing this when preparing statements to say after the Pope has spoken about AI, I think you're expecting a bit too much here.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that's a must too, but I also think people should test software extensively before deploying/releasing it, seemingly nowadays I'm in the minority about these sort of things.
I find your comment a bit funny
> Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
I've seen people employed working on some code bases that couldn't code at all.
> Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Some lawyers are downright incompetent and don't know what they're talking about / just want your money.
> Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
Some doctors are downright incompetent or malicious. You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
> AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
It does help people overall, the worst coworkers are probably going to still be there, just a bit better hidden.
The rest just have a new-age search engine to augment their capabilities.
> You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
To be fair the human body is immensely complex. Every specialist will look at everything through the lens of their field, as at the very least they can rule out some things this way.
I had a doctor judge that my tonsils need to be removed, but for unrelated reasons I went to two other and both of them figured it's not as bad yet.
The difference between them was generational, as the first practiced an approach from 30 years ago, back when tonsils were indeed commonly removed.
I've seen doctors that:
1. Immediately said 'Cancer' to stomach issues on an old person. They just didn't care, another doctor resolved that.
2. Eye doctors that would not investigate anything and just prescribe eye glasses and would recommend local companies that they owned or had a stake in.
3. Fake gynecologists that did C-Sections brutally without any experience
4. Fake plastic surgeons with no experience just going by word of mouth taking rich peoples money
5. Fertility doctors doing human egg-trafficking.
6. General doctors forcing appendectomy if under-18s came to the hospital with any stomach complains (they could not refuse, doctor got money for the surgery)
Sure, human body is complex. That wasn't my point.
Where I'm from half of these points mean actual jail time for the physician attempting them, most of the rest (like kickbacks) result in standing in front of an ethics committee.
ai good cos some ppl bad.
I've been calling it the "AI argument from misanthropy" but that's way more succinct. Thanks.
What really drives me crazy is how laden it is with negative emotions, and then people pretend it's just a rational assessment of the world. I was told growing up that if you're anxious or negative, it's just because you are smart and you understand how terrible everything is, while stupid people are happy. Seems like a lot of people got a similar message, and now they're shilling AI.
AI good cos vastly better than most people at most verbal tasks.
Those low quality lawyers and doctors are still vastly more capable than a layperson at verifying AI output
Those low quality lawyers/doctors still won't care enough to help the layperson.
So for the layperson, the AI output is still useful. They'll know to search for a different lawyer/doctor.
Tool just brings more knowledge to regular people.
It's like discovering search engine 20+ years ago.
The whole point is that the layperson is not classically trained to know right from wrong which is the entire thesis of knowledge share. Even post doctorate students are required to have their work peer reviewed. It’s why anthropic and OpenAI put disclaimers below their chat prompts
> Those low quality lawyers/doctors still won't care enough to help the layperson.
I had a pediatrician who I regarded as generally low quality until she correctly identified scarlet fever in my child, while AI and a doctor in training we knew didn't.
Recently someone I know came up with a statement "AI is like opening borders, like abolishing visas."
I think it's very perceptive and you can even view reactions to AI through that lens. Somehow both, the "immigrants" are taking our jobs but they are way worse than all of us at them. And the people from outside any given domain (art, coding, law) that advent of AI suddenly let into it, marvel at this land of opportunities, empowerment and self-reliance that used to be outside of their reach before that.
I mostly use it because I'm lazy on the presentation, not so much on the content. I provide full knowledge and content plan in my prompt. I do manual review & fix.
Someone informed can tell the content is generated. I don't really care, that's still my knowledge and I can discuss content in depth.
If you can't even be fucked to write your great knowledge nobody will be fucked to read it.
"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit — a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."
- Wendell Berry
This is 2009 right? I almost expected the classic 100+ year old quote, but knowing the year still has the same effect of conveying how something that feels recent has been felt forever.
I'm not certain. I heard this in a webinar around 2017-2018 I believe (conducted by the same guy [1] who turned me onto Wendell Berry in the first place).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxhuUMa6cjo
AI has "just" greatly accelerated/amplified dysfunction that was already there previously.
Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.
So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.
The sad thing is it happens in real life too. You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day. You have to just wait for them to get it out and then you can talk to the real person again.
I had people actually in-person scream at me, because I refused to engage with the engagement bait they had downloaded from tiktok or wherever.
Digital opioid crisis, this tribalism thing.
A lot of people do not seem to be doing well, which seems to be the foundation of many of the business models of the employers of people here on HN.
Digital copioid crisis.
> You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day.
This is so true.
So many people just parrot whatever nonsensical talking point they heard.
Regurgitating things without an ounce of reflection or critical thought.
Got any examples?
I agree and on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life working from home, talking to a machine, and not enriching any person's life directly. It's just so gruesomely LONELY.
There are still in-office jobs out there, where you can have lunch with humans, and maybe even make friends with your coworkers. I have one. It's not a popular opinion on this site, but it's OK to admit that being isolated home alone for 40+ hours a week is not healthy for your personality type.
I'm back in the office (3 days a week) and there's some weird cultural thing on my team that I don't quite understand. Coworkers I sit next to will message me on Teams instead of just standing up and talking to me over the cube wall. No one eats lunch together or really converses outside of meetings. We have meetings on Teams even though everyone in the meeting is in the office sitting next to each other. I'll book rooms for the meetings and inform the team only to be the only one in the room.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
Could be just the team culture. The meeting thing is pretty weird, but what happens if you just show up and tap them on the shoulder? Do they get annoyed or overall happy to chat? What about just drinking coffee/tea?
It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.
It sounds weird indeed, but maybe some higher-ups decided this is a way to go in case people need to be isolated again or when it's necessary to hire some remote coworkers who shouldn't be left behind, etc.
Remote doesn't need to be isolating. You can make friends with remote coworkers, but it requires a culture where jumping on a call to work things out is normalized.
I've found most work communication apps not to be very condusive to it, but Discord is pretty good.
You still sit at home, alone, in front of a screen to talk to these people. It's still really depressing.
I sincerely miss working in an office, but with my current job it would've been impossible anyway (everyone is remote in different countries). I've only once met some of my coworkers irl a few years ago when we went to a conference together.
Yea, you have to be proactive. I have friends with non-traditional work schedules to spend time with during the working hours when I take breaks from work. I go to coffee shops and make friends with the workers there. And I make sure to engage in social activities like group cycling. I love WFH but would never make it so I am sitting in front of my computer alone at home 40 hours a week.
COVID will be seven years old this December. Many of us here are still working from home since that time.
It doesn’t feel like seven years. 2020 feels like last year.
What can one typically accomplish in seven years? An undergrad, masters, and maybe a PHD. It is a long time.
The years have flown by
It hurts that I relate with this so much. I am wasting my 20s.
I see people who advocate for permanent wfh has plans with their social circle. Either already has a family or friends. Sucks to be the one trying to build a new life.
Btw, I don’t believe them a bit. All I see are rotten people who no longer speaks new things, or is a living instagram bot.
Different strokes for different folks at different stages in their lives. If I wrote OP's post 7 years ago before WFH, I'd have said: "on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life driving 2.5 hours each way to an office to type into a machine and to maintain physical proximity to people I don't really like or dislike. It's just so gruesomely UNNECESSARY."
I can see your point. Right now, it's really on the opposite spectrum of how it used to be. Forced commute + interaction vs. forced isolation. Sure either side could take steps to mitigate, like renting the "quiet cubicle" on the one side or "working from a coffee shop" on the other, but as it stands, "WFH" is really the downswing of the "commute to office" upswing.
Ok let's be honest 2.5 hours each way is an abomination and I bet most people who hate their WFH situation prefer it over that shit.
Oh absolutely. I take my comment back.
It's hard trying to build a new life out there, but we have to keep our heads up. We CAN make it better
Yeah but that's because people suck so fucking much.
1. "Sorry can't come" an hour after we were supposed to meet - this alone kills 80% of my friendships
2. "I like edgy humor" and then a month later "I'm going to report you to HR" literally had this happen to me
3. Most people have very little depth and stick to superficial smalltalk, which I find very exhausting
And when on top of that you say "I wish my friend had similar values and enjoyed at least one common hobby" then it's basically over. Not to mention the fact that most people aren't open to new friendships. If they're married then they straight up say "wife doesn't allow", if they're not then it's "yeah let's grab a coffee someday".
My motto is "if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go alone" because trying to be cooperative with people has never yielded me better results than just doing the shit on my own.
#1 seems like abnormal behavior.
#2 seems situational so I can't speak to that
#3 I think anxiety pervades people's lives, and I often wonder how many of them are "holding on by a thread" and literally don't have capacity for ANYTHING that may stir the pot, like a new friend, so they give any tired excuse to avoid rocking their boat.
This is the result of having everything customised to you. I don’t know how old you are and I am not going to assume. I feel the way we live our lives, algorithmic everything tailored to us, we just don’t accept differences anymore.
Yeah people are like that but you have to keep trying. It's better than the alternative.
I remember when working for one of my old clients last year that the business as usual slack conversation was:
- lead AI engineer asking tech advice - me proposing something (out of my experience and knowledge) - he invoking inline slack bot to ask if what I said made any sense - me telling that the AI arguments were kind of off - he invoking again the same both asking why I said that - .... so on... - third developer kicking in responding with obviously ChatGPT generated message
I left the company shortly after.
Fair. But it's getting harder to tell the difference. LLMs tell you what you want but others are getting better at imitating humans which is something.
This has been my experience as well.
- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.
- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.
- Claude does the PR review.
- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".
We're just passing butter at this point.
My experience as well. It's happened a few times now that I'll ask a coworker a question about some system they built, and they tell me to just ask the AI.
I did ask the AI. I gave it several rounds. I got a summary of their diff from it. I skimmed their diff myself. I have a rough mental model of the work they did, plus what the AI did/didn't tell me. I'm asking THEM so THEY can confirm my mental model is correct to the code they supposedly authored.
I suspect the real problem is they vibed the whole thing and didn't even self-review it. So they don't know, can't answer, and the interaction is truly pointless. They are not the expert any longer. It's not worth asking them.
Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.
Funny enough the post is machine-translated by AI - from the Russian original at https://orchidfiles.com/ru/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers-...
Seems like /ru is not the default domain so how do you know Russian is the original?
If Russian is the original I would imagine the site would default to Russian and then /en for English.
AI translation is very different from AI writing though!
I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?
The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.
> what are you going to do now
You're going to ask your own LLM session why they did it that way. And if there's a problem, you raise it. And if this individual keeps opening buggy PRs, you have a talk with them about how to use the LLM to catch these issues before a PR is opened.
I told some of my coworkers that they should keep in mind that if their job becomes "passing messages between an AI Assistant and their co-workers", sooner or later someone will realize they can just cut the middle man and build an agent that does their job. Use AI assistants all you like but don't forget to add value.
I'm reminded of Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest.
"I have one job on this lousy ship. It's stupid, but I'm gonna do it!"
For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?
A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.
I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
I could be wrong, it's just a guess.
You're probably right, as Reddit has or wants to go to the stock market and they need to demonstrate line going up, even if it's fake.
Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.
Reddit has been botting since the very beginning and never stopped.
This is true. I vouched it. It's well known that Reddit was initially seeded by bots copying from other sites to fake organic activity.
There used to be so much discussion of "brand safety" and people would flip out if their ad showed on a video that didn't align with company viewpoints, even though the company clearly wasn't the creator of the video.
Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!
It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?
There’s more mass manipulation AKA nudge campaigns going on than ever. Plus, there’s a market for “aged” (forgot the term they actually used) accounts that look authentic.
Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?
Likely the classics: voting a certain way, supporting a certain state, supporting a certain cause, and buying things.
Yes, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. Reddit is one of the most astroturfed of them all, besides maybe Facebook. At least Facebook has consistent moderation they're (somewhat) accountable for. Moderation on Reddit is extremely shady and opaque, the subreddits aren't ran democratically so they can shut up whoever they want selectively to foster a particular sentiment.
This is another one of those "is your 'conspiracy theory' filter miscalibrated?" questions. It doesn't take much research at all to find many concrete, documented instances of this, organizations that do it, organizations that you can find that you can pay to do it, people posting their accounts of having worked at one of these companies, pictures of their setups, all kinds of things. If your filter is going "no, of course nobody does that, that's just a conspiracy theory", you need to recalibrate it because it is way off. Yes, people do it, at scale, and there's little reason to believe the stuff you can uncover in 5 minutes of searching is all of it either when there's every motivation for a lot of it to stay hidden. It's not a theory, it's an entire industry.
> and to what end?
Anarchism / destabilisation.
Well, they're doing an excellent job then.
>For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deployed
I can't. And the only reason you can, is because we've been accustomed to rote script-based zero quality human customer service first.
AI customer service bots are awful. Their only redeeming feature is how bad most customer service processes already are.
Because we built an economy where you’re rewarded for being an attention whore. Flooding the scene with bots is a good way to statistically make sure you’re a good little whore.
Humans delegating tasks to AI all over the place like that, i.e., without adding value from their own, suggests ultimately that the middle humams should soon be cut out, irrespective of whether those humans are more capable than AI or not.
It generally helps when one is not surrounded by tactless buffoons.
I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.
Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.
Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.
I just had a maddening convo with Amazon's AI https://share.zight.com/o0udw54W (i had mentioned before that in 5 minutes it would be time to get my refund according to some other policy message they sent me). A convo before this Amazon's bot didn't even recognize the reply the forced me to give from their button. I clicked "Entire package is missing". and they replied "Couldn't understand your response". It's a brutal, antagonistic experience. The kicker is how Amazon keeps saying "we're passionate about customer experience". You were Amazon. You were. But you've given that up.
The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.
> I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot.
If this happens to me, it's a sign that they don't want to talk to me and I'm going to be let go.
You're absolutely right! This isn't just tiring <em-dash> it's _insulting_.
You hit the nail on the head!
>He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.
This should be grounds for firing someone.
When you ask people for an answer you are asking for their help. But if they delegate to AI they are in essence saying they don't want to make the effort to help you. They are making it LOOK LIKE they are doing something to help you by hiding the fact the answer is direct from AI. It is cheating.
Don't worry. It happens to many of us, but it's not that serious. It's really like talking to yourself, given that they're still great language models, LLMs. Just imagine what it will be like in 10 years.
That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer. Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.
Just double the amount of words in the follow up. That might make people think.
I suppose the issue is that they will simply ask their LLM to summarize and to reply, so if anything, it might just normalize and justify it a bit more.
Nearly half of online articles are now AI-generated. [0]
[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
This is good information, but a bit superficial - before AI, what percentage of online articles were generated from templates? What was written by content generation farms? Fiverrr and co pay-per-word writers?
I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.
I don't know, at least half of the front page seems to be LLM generated at any given time on HN. I couldn't say half seemed templated a few years ago.
I imagine something like 98% of articles also get less than 100 views. So the question is more about the articles you're reading rather than articles in general.
If one cant remember what they generated, whats the point in generating? Half of those who write articles do not remember what the AI put in it... Reviewing has become a slop work by humans!
I'd say even half of my Youtube feed nowadays is.
1. Find some nicher but interesting topic (e.g. some historical event like Lepanto's battle)
2. Have AI generate the content of the 20 minutes video by collecting information about it online
3. Have AI generate the video
4. Have AI generate a realistic voice to comment on the video
5. Upload it without mentioning it's all AI generated
6. Have me get mad 4 minutes into the video because footage/paintings referring to that battle...do not exist at all...slowly realize it was all AI generated
I started "do not recommending" and removing channels that had any stink of AI. I also removed some subscriptions from major YouTube channels. My subscription and homepages are much quieter now and easier to parse.
The YouTube algorithm got unbearable to me even before the mudslide of AI content.
I highly recommend using an extension like Unhook and disabling all algorithmic recommendations such as the Home feed, sidebar/endscreen recommendations etc. The only way I interface with YouTube now is through the subscriptions page which shows me videos from creators I follow in chronological order.
There is a "do not recommend this channel" option somewhere
The rate the bots are generating content / new channels is far faster than you can click on that optin.
> We build on our prior research by using three different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). We independently evaluate each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%. Each AI detector shows a similar trend.
This is all bullshit, none of those actually work, and the false-positives rates are sky-high. I'm not sure how any serious person have tried out any of those services and came away with the impression of "Well, better than nothing" because literally, it seems the opposite.
The detectors aren’t great but they aren’t really the issue. The fact that LLMs make it so easy to impersonate human communication is precisely the problem here. There cannot be a reliable way to identify if something is from a human or not. And the ease of access and low price makes using LLM generated content a no brainer, you have to actively go out of your way to produce human generated content.
We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
> We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
Yes, until you remember there is a world outside of the screen, where people build things with their hands, use their physically to play instruments for others, paint beautiful things for others to see physically and so much more.
"Humanness" online been dead for decades already, if you want humanness you need to step outside, or at least invite other humans home.
There is a meaningful difference between “humans online are tribalistic” and “content consumed by humans is generated by machines”. The IRL world isn’t safe either, books, newspapers, advertising, speeches are/will be heavily LLM made. Political parties are using LLMs. The IRL humans are relying on what their LLMs summarized or searched for them.
The same way the online world has never actually been that distinct from the offline world, one is merged with the other and they influence each others.
There has been of humanness online of you do not look for it on social medias. But that’s now breaking down, because we developed a technology designed to impersonate human communication
Right, what I was talking about things that generally aren't done by AI. People aren't building sculptures with AI, no graffiti is made with AI, the oil paintings you can see in galleries aren't AI, the DJ that fucks up during a performance isn't AI.
There is so much humanity in the world outside of the screen, and it's really easy to see what is authentically made, ignore the rest. Find live events with real other humans, there are a ton of them out there, doesn't really matter how people find the events, as long as we put our bodies in the same physical space.
I hope you’re right. Over the past month or so I personally started to feel really pessimistic about AI development. I really don’t know how much of those human spaces are safe from AI. Yes you can go to a drawing course or music festival and see human performances. But how do you then stay in contact with those people? The answer is very likely via software, meaning there is still this question of “am I interacting with a human? Or are they copy-pasting from ChatGPT?”. A friend you met shares a new song, is it really them playing or did they generate that track?
Just the fact that we have some level of doubt means we already lost something.
That being said, sure, live in the physical world and build social contacts. I’m all for it.
So if these do not work, to what do you attribute the rising positive rate?
Humans writing more like LLMs, just like new LLMs write more like humans, it's all coalescing into one.
I've copied-pasted comments I made on HN from like 2020 and had it tell me it's "100% AI". I've seen examples where the services claim "100% AI" because there was no normal dashes, only em-dashes. Even have a recent example from HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165690
> This reads very AI. Pangram [0] agrees [1]. [0] Not perfect, but I think as good evidence as any: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 [1] https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a626...
Said Pangram report literally citing the single evidence of em-dashes...
Your evidence seems very anecdata. The graphite.io study does make an effort to quantify the false positive and false negative rates of the three detectors, rather than just saying “they work”. They generate 2000 ai articles and ask the detectors to evaluate them, measuring the false negatives (articles falsely IDd as human written); and they use a separate pre-AI dataset (years 2000-2022) to determine false positives.
Yeah, I suppose it is, I haven't finished my dissertation on it yet, I'll get right on that :)
Throughout them being available I've tried them every now and then, both with AI generated trash and my own pre-LLM writings, and had about 0% success in getting them to accurately report what it actually is. Maybe my writing style and what specific LLM you use matters a lot, I'm sure these platform's training data is mostly from the mainstream models so as soon as you use anything else, they'll get trivially lost. But again, I don't have any evidence and proof behind this, based only on when I've tried to evaluate them myself in the past.
If you need an AI detector to figure out if something is AI or not, surely that means the AI is so good that there is no need to detect whether it is AI or not, because it is indistinguishable from writings by a human when read by humans?
I mean this is an article coming from an SEO company that's really just trying to advertise its services in the end. Their methodology seems very loose.
Are you an AI agent trying to gaslight us?
Just a boring old organic human tired of other organic beings falling for obvious bullshit most likely made up by machines convincing humans with something like "you really have a neat idea here, the world will appreciate you making this into a product".
I work in the "AI Center of Excellence" as an lead engineer at a public traded company and I haven't had this experience at all. Just my anecdotal experience but this article is just the author's anecdotal experience. Are lots of people having the experience that nobody they send messages to are responding themselves, it's usually an AI crafted message at a minimum? That's brutal.
--EDIT--
I should add though that I am still tired of talking to AI. Not because people are giving me AI responses but b/c 95% of my communication is routed through Claude Code. :/
I've had engineers connect claude to slack and have it send my team messages about issues they're facing with our api or documentation. People are massively addicted to LLMs.
In Neal Stephenson's fall or dodge in hell there's a timeline where the internet is so flooded by fake AI generated news that characters have their own agent both filtering info and maintaining their fake social presence.
The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.
I've recently been connecting some machines to a new switch and my colleague has been monitoring web logs at the same time using Claude. He send me a Claude-generated observation that the machines that I was able to put my hands on simultaneously must be in different buildings due to high pings. Surreal experience.
I'm not tired to talking to AI because I specifically instructed my agents to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross, so i constantly reminded that coffee is for closers only.
I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.
Face reality my friend, Internet is now hostile to humans. Time to leave this place for good.
I was reflecting the other day how discovering things online felt like being in on a secret. You had to just know about a chat room or BBS or website. Each one was like discovering a secret.
Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.
There are exceptions, e.g. lobste.rs has an invitation tree. When someone starts posting LLM-generated comments, that part of the tree can get yanked. Also, it builds up a community gradually, because you need to be invited by someone. Since the invitation tree is visible, people will generally only vouch on people they trust, because an invitee that violates the rules will reflect bad on the inviter (and might get removed if they do that too often).
Yes and then we refuge in the physical meat space until the robots would be indistiguishing from humans.
Sounds like a movie plot, or is Bladerunner all over.
At least the internet is not one single place, and while I can't speak for anyone I think I've managed to avoid most of the AI generated internet.
> I think I've managed to avoid most of the AI generated internet.
I honestly am not sure that one can know that that is true anymore. Probably the only place left that I have any confidence in is maybe the small discords I'm in with various friend groups with <30 people that all know each other IRL.
> people that all know each other IRL
Hence my first message
How? I'm genuinely interested.
Where are you going?
Reddit has a lot of AI generated stuff
Youtube comments are even worse.
Twitter seems 99% AI garbage
I think I need to find old school forums to discuss things.
How do you know? You can easily create AI generated text that is impossible to identify as such.
Can't speak of the grandparent, but I'm in some small communities with people that I met IRL at some point, and I know them well enough to know that they would not do that.
Even the human generated content is written by humans increasingly influenced by AI generated content
Uhh, you are on HN. Most articles posted here are ai slop and many of the comments too.
Leave and go where? A homestead in the middle of the woods? Another planet?
To the bar or whatever physical activity you may like as long as you can talk to flesh and blood human beings.
How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?
You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.
LMGTFY was an intentionally rude tongue-in-cheek response when someone was asking a question that could easily be answered by a simple search. This is about asking more complex questions that don't necessarily have a single objective answer.
The difference is that the LLM answer is almost always wrong. It assumes I have not already used an LLM and that I am asking something that an LLM can answer.
If the guy was asking about a business process in their business how would chatGPT know what their process is?
`Just send me the prompt` applies. If you have an answer and you feed it to an LLM to dress it up, just send me the prompt. If you don't have the answer and are just going to ask an LLM just tell me `I don't know`.
I don't need a proxy for ChatGPT.
I may have to break the news to you that the LMGTFY was also rude. Both LMGTFY and AI copypastes are rude and dismissive answers that are intended to make the person asking the question feel stupid and bad. It only provides value in making you feel really smart and possibly smug about showing that question-asker what's up, and offers nothing in the short term about their problem (or in the long term about their comfort in turning to you for help).
> you can get a straight answer from an LLM
By definition, LLMs cannot give a straight answer. They give you text based off next token probabilities.
LMGTFY was rude. You'd never send that to a coworker, unless you were close friends and wanted to rib them a bit for having a brain fart.
Perhaps part of the issue is that people feel compelled to respond, even though they don't have anything to say. Maybe people think if they burn some tokens for you that's somehow a more polite way to ignore you and hope you go away?
When you are online and ask any question - especially technical, most likely you will get an AI generated answer.
Local meetups, library, walks, and local coffee shops (not places that offer free wifi where people are anyway buried in their devices) are where real human connections happen.
As a person running a network of CTOs that meet in person and interact very human-ly.... I agree and see the value now more than ever in human interaction.
(to be clear, i do a lot of things, but this is one of them, and boy is it wild how important it feels)
We’re optimizing the soul out of human interaction.
Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?
Best part is when you know the answer is wrong, however the person on the other side is all in for the AI's answer to be correct.
I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.
I see this happening too for various reasons. But I don't see it solving the "guy sent me a ChatGPT screenshot" issue.
It'd help against 100% automated bots, but someone can still copy paste clanker slop into a text input no matter how many ID verifications you use.
If it comes to that I’m done with the internet. It has been an alright ride but that is not how I need to use it. Plus most all this discussion we do imo is just low effort noise anyhow. This is a time sink for me. It isn’t enriching, and often comes at the cost of actually enriching things, I’m beginning to realize. Remember any of the articles and discussion threads you read last week on hn and wherever else? Me neither. This is junk food, potato chips, small comfort stuff. If it becomes even more perverted the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
I found a GitHub that was spreading malware. I chatted to AI and it cloned it into a vm, did some static analysis, pulled the usernames of the bad guys and the guys they were impersonating and gave me a summary and an email address I could contact. The guy replied with a note of appreciation.
I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.
I love chatting to AI.
The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.
We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective
As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions. But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.
I have this issue with students a lot and I'd rather get broken english than AI slop.
I'm honestly tired of these articles lamenting their personal grievances against AI or experiences.
AI is here to stay its permeating through all of our communication layer and this is the worst its going to be
Think about that. Anything fault you find with AI or experiences are not going to wait and sit around , its going to get better faster.
It's like shouting against the wind eventually people stop paying attention and learn to adapt as they always do with technology
You can't blame AI for people outsourcing talking to you. That's not a technology problem, it's a much worse problem, it's a social-cultural collapse.
You inspired me to write this: https://ivanlugo.dev/writing/first-words/
Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.
There should be a common agreement that synthetic text should have a specific color, for example, blue.
I'm tired of talking ABOUT AI.
Does AI talk about us?
Yup: https://openclawbook.io/
This was mostly written by humans impersonating AIs as a publicity stunt.
I feel this mise en abyme can go pretty far
Try working at my company where we now have an AI-Native product. I hear the word every 10 seconds when we have a meeting.
That's alright, nobody's making you. You can choose to disengage.
Only if you are a shrimp farmer.
If you work in this industry? Not really.
That is not entirely true. Some business first contact is AI. It is, on purpose, a bit difficult or bothersome to actually try and contact a human being.
I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.
OP clearly is out of the loop and hasn't tried out the latest frontier models. SOA labs have specifically tuned the new models to counter the "I'm tired of talking to AI" issues using even less tokens and power!
I think a lot of people are tired of talking to an Amnesiac AI, and would prefer memory consolidation into the network weights.
I think a lot of people are actually tired of having to explain their situations practically from scratch every now and then.
I agree this is probably true, but IMO the solution to this problem is unpalletable.
South park called this out in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_(South_Park)
Talking to ai sometimes always gets me all worked up and frustrated when it keeps hallucinating and going in circles
Plenty of people are also chasing their own tail.
Did we all forget "let me google that for you"? The cycle continues.
The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?
A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.
It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.
The only AI screenshots I like to read are when it's comically wrong and we both get a quick laugh
I feel sorry for people who have to use strong AI agentic agents all day long for their jobs. I just came off of a 30 day experiment using Gemini Ultra (all the Antigravity+Claude Opus I could use) and while it was great to re-work a few dozen of my open source projects and to check my Open Content books for inconsistencies and make improvements, the awful thing was it felt dehumanizing. I am now just using DeepSeek v4 for less than 1 hour a day and that feels better: a good mix of getting help when really needed and doing my own thing by myself.
Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
Online user groups are falling apart because AI gives better answers, isn't looking for an opportunity to condescend to new users, doesn't try to gatekeep by scaring away new users, and doesn't just point you to the FAQ regardless of if your question is answered in there or not, along with the "XY problem pathological case" you noticed. I think AI is only going to get better (unless they enshittify it intentionally).
In my documents I usually preface with "This document is 100% typed by Aperocky". And then where ever part of it is generated by LLM, it is clearly marked (e.g. SVGs). It is necessary these days.
It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
For what they are worth, nuclear weapons are still preventing large-scale conflict between world powers.
Hard to say if that is from the nukes or the global elite now being so very globally leveraged. Little column a and b probably.
Cargo-culting has "a rich history."
Others call it a proud tradition (as opposed to a useful tradition).
Not going away. Next time it happens, employ The Gay Jailbreak
https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
Humans will get their Vinyl moment. We will come back.
AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.
This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it". Which at the time was a rude but effective way of telling people to get off their ass and figure it out themselves instead of being lazy and expecting others to solve their issues.
You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.
The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.
>This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it".
I don't think that is always the case. Sometimes it is. Other times the social cues and later follow up makes it seem the person thought they were being really helpful, not sarcastic, by sending the response. Yet other times, the person acts as if it was their own response and not the AI's, almost akin to passing off the AI's work as their own.
This is most notable when the original question shows effort was put into it and it isn't a simple case.
I can't judge the specific situation. But if this happens to you a lot, I'd suggest looking at how you are asking things from other people (i.e. how you communicate).
> original question shows effort was put into it
What matters is how the other side interprets it, not your level of effort or your expectations. If the other side apparently doesn't get what you wanted to happen, that's a communication issue.
My partner had issues with an online retailer and contacted support, which happily went around in circles since it was an AI agent and wasn't well prompted.
I did get a cookie recipe out of it, though.
Aren't we all getting sick of it?
Would be ironic that I am now replying to a bot, while everyone else assumes the contrary.
When I think about a PGP-style web of trust that shows that you're human, this is the showstopper I come up against. Provably human people can just parrot the bots.
Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?
It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?
> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.
Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.
At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.
> Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Great suggestion. Problem: these are bosses and coworkers and people you need to work with to keep receiving income to live, and the topics talked about are things important to the place of work.
There's a feeling of abandonment online, and the optimist in me is wondering if maybe people would rather be doing something else. This is pollyannaish, but I'd love to imagine that people are discovering the real world, sitting alone or otherwise, and leaving this version of themselves on the internet to an empty shell.
You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
When you work in STEM fields you tend to interact with people with higher non verbal reasoning skills (often called Performance IQ) who generally have lower verbal IQs (not always). These people are definitively less articulate and cannot see the linguistic inconsistencies and inhuman demeanor of LLM outputs. Much in the same way that non creative people cannot tell why some AI art is unappealing, they can't easily comprehend the value of the human dimension of art. Similarly, people with poor non-verbal/performance reasoning skills cannot understand the difference between AI produced code and human produced code.
These people are probably more attuned to conceptual abstract specifications.
The worst part of this is the person that doesn't even bother copying the text, rather just screenshot the AI answer and send it. That's the new lowest level of not giving a crap about the question.
This is the sad reality we live in I suppose, I feel that the trajectory that our species is moving towards is one of over-reliance. It seems like people are slowly becoming more and more dependent on AI, and to be honest, that was always the goal of technology whether we like it or not. Things are invented to make other things easier, but of course this case is just sad.
There's tons of things I like about llm's, but I'm sick of Ai show'n tells. It feels like I'm in kindergarten.
huge +1, i also just hate reading large HTML reports that AI spits out.
Probably what you want is answers.
If the computer (AI or not) provided you with that convenience, you'd never want to deal with a human for a given task.
The 'mischaracterization' of AI as human - now that's annoying. We probably should not submit answers by AI in the form of human identities.
What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)
You get something like Mars Express [1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26915336/
Soo crying robots
Mass unemployment and wealth inequality
We have that already. We did not need AI for that. AI will happily bring more and more of it though.
We are cooked. Bots and automated answers should be banned permanently from GitHub etc., I mean the networks based on human conversation.
OP is right. I don’t want to talk with AI.
BTW this will be insane in next years as LLM usage in customer care has not reached the peak yet…
A solution to this is to actually insist on calling people. At least then you'll get the person's immediate inputs to your question.
We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230104
Yeah I'm curious re: theorchid and who they are...
Its happening with me too since around a year. When I ask a solution from one of my senior he just reply by pasting the response from ChatGPT. Now I have stopped asking him.
I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.
I didn't talk to AI wayyy before it got popular not to talk to AI ;)
The tiring part for me is the waiting and/or context switching to fill that time. When agents of this intelligence or better can get you results in seconds instead of minutes we can start thinking single threaded again and it will be more enjoyable.
I remember late into my master's degree in a ethic's class about AI we had discussed the possibilities of the butterfly effect of not letting it transpire. He had given us a tricky word, and I don't remember what it was, but he asked us to create a definition for it.
I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,
Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.
>granted she was significantly older
I said, "Why don't you believe it?"
"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.
"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."
"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."
She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.
I am so thankful that I was able to go through school before LLMs.
Unfortunately this is a skill issue. The information is in the machine, you just need to figure out how to get it out. Most people are very far behind on this.
So you're telling me that the business logic or some domain knowledge about my company is in the LLM and that I sould not ask my manager questions?
I thought the LLM promise was that people could do things easily because conversation is the most intuitive input there is. If we still have to "figure out how to get it out", what if we put that educational effort into... I don't know, learning search or queries or something that gives concrete answers and not statistically-average-probability answers?
> Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.
My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents
Help desks and canned replies - if a user complains about X, respond with Y. We used to just have humans do it, but turns out machines can do that bit, too, especially if the question is relatively simple or asked a lot or has an answer not up for debate.
I assume if they copy pasted the same question it could have been cached? It would seem wasteful for <llm_provider> to not cache responses to exact same questions with exact same context windows (fresh session).
I'm just speculating though.
Two months ago I responded to my nontechnical business partners asking me what do I expect from AI in the future couple of months or years - people will cherish and value in person talk and meeting other people much more and even this will hold true for minor share of human population and only until we augment human body to hide its permanent connection to AI.
We just have to keep calling it out. Lazy thinking has always been an issue, but at least it could be coachable.
> What you’re describing is a real social shift, not just annoyance with a tool.
> AI is useful as a tool. But when it replaces attention, judgment, and personality, conversations start feeling empty.
I pasted your article into ChatGPT and it gave me the most depressing statements. The above and also about 800 more words.
A year ago (or so) I had a colleague whose messages were all obviously AI-generated. I told them that it felt weird that they were sending me AI answers in Slack and code reviews, and they stopped doing it.
Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.
I go back and forth on this one.
Yes, I'm with the author. I'm absolutely sick of constantly reading AI content.
But if I have to really dig into it deep, a lot of the people who send me AI content now, weren't sending me anything meaningful to begin with (pre ai).
The number of organizations I have been around where most people just copy paste each other's messages is no joke. This was happening long before AI came along. AI has just made it so much more obvious.
Previously they might have copied it from Joe in Product. Now it all sounds like Claude or GPT.
I'm tired of talking about AI
Urge to paste this into ChatGPT and tell it to create a reply is so high right now.
I think the root reason of the rising of AI chatbot is that many people are tired of talking to people.
AI has made my experience as a fully remote worker in a not-fully-remote company worse. It is adding a layer of indirection between myself and the juniors I'm mentoring, or the product manager I'm working on a feature with, and many other mundane facets of work. The opportunity to passively pick up on my coworkers' idiosyncrasies is now gone and all I can do is guess at what prompt they might have used.
I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.
I think new norms will develop around this behavior - it's rude to show someone else your AI output, and I think long term that will be broadly recognized.
Keybase. Keybase was/is a trust network that was unceremoniously and unduly strangled. (You were the chosen one!)
I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.
It doesn't worry me at all. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’ll adapt by switching to different means of communication to keep finding what you’re looking for. AI is simply carrying out natural selection.
The business owner was just being rude.
For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.
Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.
You are absolute right, would you like to talk about something else?
Yes tell me about what happened at Tianenmen square
Similar and even more relevant to HN is when I ask an engineer to fix something, complete a task, document something, etc. and it's clear the work was done with AI in the wrong way. A 60 line PR that should be 4 lines, an overly verbose and off-topic README, a function that misses important edge cases, probably because the engineer thought it too hard to explain the business logic to the AI... It's very tiresome to spend 20 minutes reading a PR only to realize it's crap because someone was sloppy with how they used their AI agent.
I like the way how you have written this text. It’s short and clear. Not a wall of text. Very easy to read and comprehend.
I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings
Until someone fine tunes their LLM to match whatever the trend is and then the contrarians buck that trend for something else. An endless game of cat and mouse.
I personally don’t care if an output is from LLM or human, as long as someone has validated it and determined that it’s correct and useful.
It's a good thing we're ruining the climate so that we can also erode job quality and social interactions.
I can only hope aerospace and medical industries are raising strict constraints against this slop otherwise I fear for the future. Eroding engineering AND communication? Thats a good formula for success
- you use AI-generated argument in a discussion. - your co-worker counters with AI-generated argument. - you re-counter with AI-generated rebuttal. - the co-worker counter the re-counter with another AI-generated… etc.
Turtles all the way down.
Does it matter though.
So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?
That's a pretty big "I'd". In my experience the answer is no, the AI is not as effective as a human operator (as long as the human operator is paid enough to care)
In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, the "Net" is overrun by rouge AI and eventually humanity has to quarantine itself from them, ironically, using another AI.
I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?
I totally understand! Started getting AI fatigue for a few months now. I find myself constantly questioning if content I interact with is AI generated or not.
People say using it is lazy but you're not going to outperform it yourself. The resistance to reality by people is what's crazy. Being a developer now means being a code reviewer. That's just the way it is now.
My career was using C# and JS, and LLMs have caused me to lose interest in learning more. I was always a hobbyist Python and Ruby user. I prefer to put my efforts towards skills that are still useful. Software as a craft is dying, no different than being an expert at riding a horse.
The important part now for a developer is a very strong command of the English language, for both the LLM as well as the rising importance of client interactions. As the space is very competitive, so you need to offer value or form a union so you can regain back some of your lost negotiating power.
Most of the developers I worked with were very poor in that area. I worked hard and was deemed a "top performer" in my last job, but it was equal parts perception management. This is what you should be thinking about and focusing on going forward. Improving your linguistic skills, and polishing your social skills.
Otherwise, for someone like me who grew up in a machine shop and mechanic's environment, anything new I learn is more brawn and brain going forward so I stay relevant as a human being. And no longer just brain like software was.
I think using AI to help you write or rewrite something you want to convey is fine, the difference is using it as a replacement of thinking instead of a tool.
The screenshots part is crazy.
Helping you "write or rewrite something you want to convey" is already using it as a replacement of thinking.
Is hiring a <professional> for a <task> a replacement for thinking?
If the task is thinking yes, obviously.
I think it depends upon the effort involved.
Think the difference between AI saying "This paragraph seemed muddled and lacks a clear point. Consider rewriting it." vs "Here, I rewrote this paragraph to focus it more on bridging the previous and next paragraphs."
The problem with this as a metric is that it is loosely defined so it becomes quite easy for a person to twist it to justify almost any level of AI usage as "well, it is still more effort than <X>".
I promise every last single person would rather read your actual thoughts than some clanker slop.
If you're not able to convey it maybe you haven't spent long enough thinking about it?
Many people retired because of AI
I feel that if there was a startup that would tackle automating copy&paste, they could take over the world. ;)
that's a real issue, nowadays people are so depended on Ai that they canno even think themselves and for being so called "i know everything" uses Ai to make conversation.
That's funny. Why use the brain if tokens are cheap nowadays? (This is not AI btw)
This feels to me like a transitional problem. People will learn not to do this. I hope.
Log off, go outside, problem solved.
go to the streets, meet your friends, the internet is now an echo chamber
The thing is that to externalize your thought process is very dangerous because you feel you know things, but you really don't.
My barber recently had some serious health issues and has been closed for probably over a month now.
His wife posts only AI images that are not real in any way. The images are not modified, they are completely fake.
I'm exhausted of all A.I. output replacing normal human interactions.
You're tired of AI? Buddy, I'm tired of AI. We're all tired of AI.
On the other hand, I recently had a problem with my grocery order from Sam’s Club (the onions were smashed) and had to call to get it hopefully addressed. Talked to an LLM for 30 seconds after 0 wait and it was resolved. No accent I could barely understand, no potato microphone, no being put on hold for 5 minutes in the middle while they do whatever.
Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.
Give it a few years and the web will be AIs talking to other AIs ad infinitum
Me too, which is why I do my best to keep KPIs, and do everything else as always.
Preach! No one wants AI!
I want AI like i want a hammer, screwdriver, car or a refrigerator. There when i can use them. Not constantly enforced on me.
My buddy has 10+ years directly supporting customers. He supported millions of MRR. they hired a new "MBA" boss over him. The boss' first demand was to run everything through chatgpt before talking to customers, then report to the boss. Then boss ran the reports through chatgpt before sending the reports to the customer.
BEFORE: my buddy : customer -- 1 day turnaround
AFTER: my buddy : chatGPT : MBA guy: Chat GPT: Customer -- 1 week turnaround
Efficiency!
thinking becomes a commodity
”You can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding” — probably some AI
Wasn't some AI, it was Andrej Karpathy and he got it from someone else (unattributed).
I didn't provide a citation because its origins are unclear/unclaimed, so instead it was an opportunity for a chuckle. FWIW I first read it when this guy's tweet was retweeted by Andrej.
https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/2018886083120153046
I think actual thinking is now more valuable than ever.
Depends if you can find someone to buy that line of thinking. Theres only a market if someone recognizes one.
Was it Sam Altman, who said that they intent exactly that? To offer intelligence as a service?
I trust myself to be hard headed enough to keep my intelligence from atrophy, but it's going to suck living in a society where most people don't (or who never developed it at all).
The other day I was at the theatre and I overheard the people next to me glad that they had the best tickets because chatgpt had advised what to buy. The big tip was choosing something centered rather than very angled. Sigh.
I also wonder if this is so visible because a lot of people don't really care what they do and will happily use any bullshit machine to simulate work.
Let's be real. Our economies are in the gutters and an insane amount of "work" is actually textbook "bullshit jobs".
However, we as a society aren't nearly ready to actually hold a conversation about that. We could probably eliminate half of all non-hands-on (i.e. a human uses their hands to manufacture a thing) employment in a matter of a year or two if we would embrace computers and digital infrastructure and give lower levels of employees more authority - and that's before AI even enters the picture. Government services are a prime example - a lot of "e government" services in Germany aren't truly digital, they generate a PDF that is printed out in some clerk's office and processed manually by copying information from that PDF into some admin program.
But unfortunately, if we were to do that, we'd run into riots faster than we could imagine. We aren't ready for a society in which we still have a small base of people that have to, literally, work (with their bodies) to keep society alive while the rest does not need to work any more.
I agree with that 100%
Opus 4.7 has been outright obstinate to me lately
I'm tired of sorting out what github link is worth clicking, considering the deluge of vibecoded [I dont like this verb] new repos, the pride of minor accomplishments, no matter how meaningless: 'Look Mom. I made it say hello!'.
I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.
Same.
AI is a hugely powerful tool, but I’m sick of having to treat a human’s AI-based verbatim reply as a real thing.
Anybody that does this is going to be calmly corrected as much as possible, and if the behavior doesn’t change then something will have to change.
The ChatGPT screenshot part is mind-blowing.
We're building a cage for ourselves
This is all downstream of people not giving a shit about what they do.
It’s not about AI. If it wasn’t AI, it would be some other convenience.
There are a myriad of reasons why people generally give less of a shit now, that we can all opine about, but that is ultimately what has to change.
I want to talk to real people as well
Try talking to grok its more entertaining.
Yeah, I have dropped out of the tech biz completely. I'm unemployed and kind of screwed now. I couldn't take it anymore. I used to work with intellectuals and thinkers. This is why I was in the industry for 20+ years. I liked the stimulation. Communication with humans is dead in the workplace. Now it's just a bunch of mindless automatons asking AI. No thinking about the problems at hand. No interest in understanding the solutions. It's all just "get it done as fast as possible." I refuse to work in that environment. Tech people are becoming about as skill-leveled as a fast food worker's level of training. Just pressing buttons on a screen as the screen tells the to press them. It's a meaningless existence to sit there an be forced to communicate with f'n AI models. No thanks. All you AI bros can have it. We'll see how useless you are in a few years when you realize you know absolutely nothing and couldn't work yourself out of a paper bag without AI guiding you.
Same guy also had another #1 on HN days ago. Low score account, mildly interesting content ... I wouldn't discard manipulation.
Anyway, his other "essay" was about how he doesn't take phone calls or something, so seeing this note a couple days after is just fun.
This is your peer's natural reaction to "my time matters more than yours"; you're getting it back.
Your value to them amounts to forwarding your musings from/to an LLM. This does not happen by chance. Enjoy it.
These are not situations a human would have given you a response on in the past. it's the same irrational ai phobia. we've had automated phone agents for decades. even on reddit, automod has been a thing for a long time. it's always been the case for many tech companies that unless you get someone on HN or twitter, you're out of luck. plenty of HN posts about people who've had google business accounts disabled or locked out with no explanation or recourse.
a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.
Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.
I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.
It seems that a lack of respect is the real issue here. A few years ago, you would have been met with silence, which is probably equally infuriating.
I recently had someone send me a PCAP file with a network package dump suggesting that the error is on my side.
I threw it to Claude and a minute later had a "look at packet 131 and 136, it's on their side."
Yeah, it is exhausting to read verbose slop. But you're the author.
I used to be extremely verbose, and AI has helped me appreciate brevity because now I'm being exposed to it.
I would love to be without the "Top 5 Kubernetes commands" slop images LinkedIn feeds me.
sounds like a Monty Python sketch ...
Increasingly happy with ability to simply avoid this entire debacle. Interfacing with machine extruded text, or even people re-wording such text, isn't something I've had to deal hardly at all in or our of work. Ensuring that did take quite a bit of effort though...
in a couple of years you can not trust if you write someone. bot? Ai? Human?
Have encountered this too - we really need new social norms around this.
Bombarding others with pages of slop that took you 10 seconds to generate (and not even read) yet take minutes to untangle for the recipient is obviously downright rude.
...unfortunately every office has a small number of people that are dumb as rocks and don't recognise this - in fact think they're helping
Sounds like a nightmare.
I think this is more reflection of how important you are to those people so it is more social thing then anything.
I know you think your questions are legitimate but look it in broader context. Use AI to craft questions for them that they will find engaging as a exercise.
Go outside
I despise when someone just passes my prompt to an AI, but I do honestly think that there are a minority of people who do better work with it. Not that the work is good, but they don't care to try and at least the AI is eager.
Growing pains. We haven't yet established norms surrounding use of LLMs, and people are lazy. We will have to learn from mistakes first, unfortunately. In this case that means diminishing trust.
K
I hate to say it, but I'm becoming less and less interested in structured content, and more interested in disorganized, messy content over time. I don't like the thought of how this may end up in a few years for me.
This ^. The moment I open an article/post and see subtitles in *bold*, emojis everywhere and/or symmetric paragraphs, I start to suspect instantly whether it's AI.
> more interested in disorganized, messy content over time
Same, that kind of content kinda forces me to use my brain (yeah.. sounds obvious..) to organize the message, understand it, agree/disagree, and actually CONSUME the content, like the old days..
I hate getting AI generated emails from people. They probably haven't even read or understood the slop they're sending me, the chances of them understanding and contextualizing what I reply are slim, I might as well reply with AI slop. What's the point of any of this.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
If the power dynamic allows it, I tend to just reply "Sorry, I'm not reading that".
(Unless it's a) trivially short or b) there's a solid reason to send me it. It's the "wall of AI text" that I generally nope out on)
What a weird first world problem this guy has …
I was actually thinking of how tired i was talking to real people and how refreshing AI was to talk something through with.
Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.
Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.
I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.
Benveniuto!
I already saw this starting to happen when I wrote the following almost a year ago: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/
> I’m tired of talking to AI. > I want to talk to real people. > But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
I don't use AI, but I rarely respond to any PMs. There are many reasons for this; for instance, I remember in the old days, when I first heard about MMA, I registered on sherdog for a discussion. I don't recall when that was, but it was many, many years ago. Then, after many years of not using it, I logged in and found a PM merely insulting me. I very politely and skillfully correct that PM - however had, ultimately this is not really "interaction", this is just wasting my time (and, admittedly, I already was not using sherdog for many years before that either). Since then I have very decreasingly used PMs in general. It's a difference when I know someone, of course, but random people on the internet ... the barrier to want to talk via PMs for me is very low in general. I simply dislike the format of it.
I find it much easier when it is an open discussion, such as was the case on reddit (before moderators censoring everyone killed that). It's interesting to see how much censorship happens nowadays. That's very different to the 1990s era. Either way I think AI is not solely at fault here, because I could see problems way before AI emerged already. I very rarely use webforums these days, and Discord is no alternative either - Discord is even worse since it is all a private company controlling discussions. IRC was easier than that.
I've started to go low-tech and ask noai.duckduckgo.com first, and then, gasp, go to the local library for some books on my hobbies.
Using AI to learn objective things is acceptable. However, as long as it's combined with your own experience, because AI can't possibly understand your entire world, any subjective answers will be disgusting, disastrous, obsequious, and boring.
I'm tired of talking to people telling them to stop talking to an AI
AI generated slop has exploded across reddit. Last year I would see about 1 obvious AI generated post and report it. Today I've already reported 5 posts and it is 7am here.
The posts are some technical topic but there isn't even really a question in the post and then it ends with "thoughts about this?" and people try to clarify with the OP what the question is.
I reply to them to stop wasting their time because it is a bot. Sometimes there are 20 comments and nothing from the OP bot. Sometimes the OP bot says "Interesting, thanks" but never any real followup question.
We had this discussion 3 weeks ago "AI Slop is Killing Online Communities"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053203
Reddit has fallen. Stop wasting your time there.
Reddit makes money from spam accounts. Even before LLMs, they'd ban you for reporting the wrong spambots, those being the ones that pay Reddit for priority access.
The replies to the LLM post are probably LLMs themselves.
I've already unsubcribed to a bunch of subreddits because the moderators did nothing to stop the slop.
I almost never go to the main "popular" page as it is full of garbage.
But I was still enjoying my niche subreddits. But in the last year the amount of AI slop has exploded and it is getting worse every day. Reposts of things from less than a week ago. Really vague technical questions with emdashes, bullet points, and ending in "thoughts?" that generate a discussion but the OP bot never replies or has vague 1 word comments.
I know that reddit makes money from ads so more bots mean more traffic which means more ads and more money.
But it is sad watching communities because useless and die.
I think about how violently HN (in general) reacts to technology like Web Environment Integrity which could enable websites to relatively easily block AI spam, and at the same time opine about the days of being able to talk to (just) humans online. Personally I'd be fine at this point for _some_ kind of identity based authentication for discussion forums, at least. I'm tired of hearing ChatGPT's opinion on things.
I'd rather pay some nominal fee for access than give up my identity to an unaccountable entity I'd struggle to take cross-border action against if that became necessary. The price shouldn't exclude anyone who's struggling, just a one-time fee of £5 or so that'd damage the economic viability of creating slop accounts at scale.
What's so great about talking to real people?
Just it being the only thing that matters for humanity
Talking to them online ? I think most of us will be better off without the huge amounts of online toxicity.
not if the replacement is AI slop
Hot take - who still actually uses the actual chat features for general conversation in the dev community?
How do you define general conversation? I have used the Gemini web chat yesterday to review and generate a report about multiple credit card statements.
depends what you mean. I regularly ask it to explain stuff, terminology I don't recognize etc. I also ask it about neat things it did, terminal commands etc so I can do them when I want to. That's chat in some sense, no? its not all "write this code"
Maybe this is a signal the author themselves needs to get better at adopting AI...
The company I work at tries to solve it right now, not promoting, just want to share.
Slop is no fun to deal with, so we have a thesis that slop should be left for agents to read and human-to-human communication should happen outside of passing empty fluffy docs to one another. To realise that, we have a workspace with group chats where multiple agents and humans can work together and agents can engage with humans for additional information when needed. The challenge is, of course, to find the right level of autonomy for the agents and let the agent learn and follow user's workflows well enough to be useful.
I work with a handful of offshore devs and it’s basically just talking to Claude now with a delay measured in timezone differences. What is even the point of having offshore Claude middle men when I can just orchestrate remote agents directly without giving a crap about timezones?
The meatsack agents do the same thing anyway - I give them requirments and they build it exactly as specified with zero question, and in the laziest get-it-done method possible with no thought about complexity, architecture, technical debt, etc…. If there is a mistake in the spec they don’t question it, they just build the mistake. If they aren’t going to use their brains WHY SHOULDNT I replace them with Claude?
Managers send me AI generated specs and AI generated slop mock-ups. They answer questions about how the product should work by giving me AI generated responses they didn’t even spot-check for correctness. AI generated bug reports with hallucinated STR. Offshores send me slop they not only didn’t read, they didn’t even run once because it’s OBVIOUSLY broken. Absolute madness.
None of this sh*t is actually helpful. It’s work SLOP. It’s not more productive. It’s a productivity tar-pit that once you’ve gotten stuck it’s almost impossible to escape.
I hate all this garbage and the total rotting out of people’s minds and abilities it has inflicted upon humanity.
Nothing has made me hate billionaires more than AI. It helped me realize that I could never be a successful multinational corpo man because I’m not a morally bankrupt POS and I look at people much different now because of this realization. There is no way one could get to the place that people like Altman, Amodei, Nadella, Ellison, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, etc…are without being giant pieces of rotten excrement.
>I’m tired of talking to AI.
>I want to talk to real people.
Good luck with that while on the internet - that's only going to get worse. The bright side is that this may make all of us touch grass more often.
The internet isn't going to die out, but it feels like it's becoming a place where you go to do a specific task and then you check out again.
One interesting observation from myself: I don't "browse" the internet anymore. I go read specific sites, order something, or do some task. So my internet usage is way down, but I also don't watch a lot of TV or streaming content anymore, because I can't really deal with it. There's to much of it, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, everything is just a rehash (Cinematography is beautiful though). So now I just read, preferably books written before the year 2000.
It used to be like this, during the golden age of the internet. We didn't have it anywhere, we had it on a computer on our desk. We had to sit down at that desk to use it. Eventually we would get up again and be offline.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
"Let me google that for you" has been replaced by "Let me AI that for you"
The tragedy is we could just stop, but we won't.
Refuse. Reject. Rebel.
I’m tired of seeing GitHub filled with vibe coded slop.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I often see new projects that look exciting at first. But when I start reading the source code, I realize there’s a ton of messy code, and it was clearly written by Claude or another AI tool.
It feels like some beginners are using vibe coded projects just to brag: “Look, I built this tool,” even when the code quality is abysmal.
I feel the same as the article author. Worse, every Diary/Journaling app is now including AI, so the place where original thoughts are supposed to be written for posterity is now also AI generated slop. I've canceled subscriptions because of it.
Now people are seeing why in-person matters.
I know its going to cause angst, but the net we knew of is dead.
The incentives to keep it the way it used to be are gone. AI is cheap, and it sounds better than what a majority of users write.
Humans adapt. Maybe we shift from communites and moderation, to predefined rules of engagement. If a commenter can follow some pre agreed upon rules of debate, then it doesn't matter if they are silicon or not.
We went from a cave of wonders to a dark forest in a single life time. It would be amazing if it wasn't so fucking frustrating.
We can go a level higher - reasoning as we know it might be dead.
AI made writing cheap, but it's a human thing to validate, research and respond! It's human slop! Not AI slop!
Humans are highly dependent on the environment; you can blame people for eating too much of highly processed food and lots of sugar, but that's what happens if all you see around is highly processed food and sugar
True, but it is impossible to catch up while preserving quality and mental sanity.
I know about several of my friends, non-tech, being directly impacted by AI.
In finance, lots of analysis work is now offset to LLMs, and the people leveraging the tools obviously still have the issue that they need to review everything the AI has analyzed, their formulas, etc. And lots of nuance and things that a human would caught are lost. But in the meantime the expectation is that your analysis output is 5 times what it was before.
My girlfriend works in corporate law for an insurance company. The company is FOMOing hard for LLMs and pushing everybody to write gemini "gems" and notebooklm presets to do lots of the work.
But it absolutely does not scale: you can't keep up with those demands, while also providing the same quality coming from thoroughly analyzing new regulations and such.
Another friend that works in credit has now the company mandate that people update financial statements etc directly to LLMs and those tools come with a yes/no about whether they will finance it or not. Quality of debt has now plummeted, needless to say and the process is longer that it has ever been because re-reviewing the LLM analysis is more expensive than doing it on your own.
My own bank has had a terrific customer care that has been recently replaced by an LLM, tragedy. It is absolutely unhelpful beyond the 80% pareto principle where customer care had already pre-canned answers anyway. But for the 20% of cases that are major issues/bugs, the AI is simply not helpful.
My bank genuinely had a bug with invoice processing and there was no way to tell them nor to resolve my issue (which required somebody to manually void the previous invoice and restart the process that got bugged).
I think it's a tragedy.
Except for the fully autonomous OpenClaws invading social spaces. There's no human in the loop. That's pure, unfettered AI slop, at a scale no human could keep up with.
Get used to it. This is the "task inflation" phase of the process. When you get a mechanized harvester that can harvest 20x the produce of a human produce picker, do you get done in 5% of the time, or grow 20x the produce to pick? Right, it's always more more more. Now that the business owner can answer your email in two seconds with his ChatGPT screenshot, he stacks more tasks in the free time. You're not getting a human response anymore. Enjoy the slop.
I put people who do some of the BS listed here on mute or block.
Life is better with people who actually engage and are curious about improving things human-to-human.
AI (LLM) responses are catered towards the lowest common denominator / average type shit responses.
The best use for AI/LLM agents is to do work I tell them to do, like a servant who obeys my orders and executes them.
A human using AI/LLM to respond to another human (who has already used AI/LLM to come up with a v1 he wants to discuss) is a moron and not worth engaging with further. Even if they're your friend, it is a good signal that you need better friends.
this is quite dystopian
My employer's IT guy is now just someone who searches Claude for solutions, finds a company that does a niche thing and say "we spent X dollars discussing it, let's just hire this company and pay them $13,000 every year to handle the problem."
The problems are usually nothingburgers the IT guy doesn't understand (cookie banners). I cannot fight: 1. IT guy constant stupid takes on why we should throw money at a problem 2. a company that's only goal is to tell us we need X verification for $13k/yr or we'll be screwed
The verification is a cron job that checks cookies. Any time you try to discuss the issue he copy and pastes an AI text wall.
A lot, a lot, a lot of companies are going under because the fake-it-to-make-it people do not know what to do. And the C-Suite wants to contract out all expertise to some pointless corporation that won't help.
am I the only one who always replies to people manually? I don't think I've ever done the "send back a chatGPT screenshot" or copy paste a response from chatGPT to a message I know was from a human.
why? They are useful
Get a grip! If you want to talk to a human then pickup the phone or go meet them in person
It doesn't prevent people from outsourcing their thinking to AI. People don't bother preparing to discuss topics beyond what AI told them. If they have access to their computer during the conversation they'll ask AI rather than google for reference material. If they don't have access, they'll suggest "investigating" (asking AI) and reconvening.
We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.
lol
AI is a new medium. It's used and going to be used for everything. Including communication.
More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.
About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2
When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.
If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.
the fallacy is not recognizing ai is interpolating the human body of work. all the people decrying ai slop: this is our sythesis. ai is not a separate thing from human work. whwt the author is really saying is "I am tired of individuals no longer having the leverage they once did."
too much whining with non-AI believers