>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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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 oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
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’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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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 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...
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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...
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
Sometimes language barriers, not native speaker, prompt you to use LLM to help you with grammar, words that you don't know, or expressions that need to be very precise to convey their meaning. But the use of LLMs for that purpose may change your initial intention, the LLM may average, cut corners, expand what you did not want to expand, and as a result the focus and initial message is destroyed, the spark in the initial thought is not longer alive, it is saddling to be so limited. LLMs help you to bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity. Done without LLM help.
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.
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 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!
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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".
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
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.
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….
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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>".
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 work with a handful of offshore devs and it’s basically like just talking to Claude now. 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 sinkhole.
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 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
The article, if you'd read it, was about receiving the same response to a technical question from multiple sources, whilst seeking human assistance with a problem AI hadn't been able to solve.
“Stop changing my code you st*d piece of s*t. And stop pushing that youtube garbage like i’m some 5 year old” - me against gemini. But he, helps with my anger management.
Being able to just bluntly tell it in very colorful language that its neurotic cargo-culting phobia of imaginary things is something that needs to stop is such a breath of fresh air after the dark ages of 2017.
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.
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.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
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...
> 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. :-)
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.
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.
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
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.
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.
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".
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
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.
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 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?
In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
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
It’s important to not make everybody do your research for you, but what you’re describing is not at all typical.
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.
- Louis de Bonald
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
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.
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.
https://letmegpt.com
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 oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
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".
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
Curbing the suffering by numbing yourself is seeking comfort in retreating to the local optimum instead of continuing to search for a better one.
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.
With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.
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.
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.
Probably more under-developed than psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
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 :)
> 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.
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.
I prefer silence over that tbh.
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...
/dystopia
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
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...
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.
> 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 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 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.
Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.
Anarchism / destabilisation.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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 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.
[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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 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….
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?
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.
Sounds like a movie plot, or is Bladerunner all over.
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.
Hence my first message
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.
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.
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.
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 wonder if a similar fate awaits us?
(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)
Turtles all the way down.
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.
The screenshots part is crazy.
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>".
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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
https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/2018886083120153046
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.
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 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.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
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.
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 sinkhole.
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.
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 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.
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.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
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.