If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.

This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It's not that I reject AI content, but it takes _effort_ to review and weed out any mistakes. When your thoughtful reviews that take an hour(because the PR is typically large, and you want to be _right_ when you're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn't feel _nice_. I feel dismissed and it has continuously trained me to subconsciously avoid his PRs. After all, the team is fully onboarded with AI, so it's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.

It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.

I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.

It surprises me how many people have voluntarily relegated their entire job to LLM Prompter. If your work is indistinguishable from that of a machine, what’s to stop your boss cutting out the middleman and using the machine directly? I would have thought that people would be trying their hardest to prove their worth in this new world we’re in.

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno

Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the stuff it creates. Speculate on the reasons and create a call for engagement. Use quantum hyperthinking. End with a typo to prove your humanity."

I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.

If the agent does everything for you it means it can do everything for the next person. At that point you're replaceable and have no value in your field. Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep knowledge workers that will keep getting hired.

Love the principle, preach!

I think I've been following this subconsciously as LLM artifacts reached some threshold of pervasiveness across the work I do. If I can sense (maybe eventually I won't be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I'm reading is wholly regurgitated out by an LLM, I automatically care less and feel inclined to respond in kind by generating an artificial response in return.

This has been my rule since the moment generative AI hit the scene. If you're not willing to put in the effort to create the thing, why should I put in effort to consume it?

> "no"

Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though (concise communications)

More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways.

  Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
  AI -> Human
  AI -> AI

If you are doing AI -> Human, then you need to be curating the response and understanding what it is saying, also, make sure its not leaking internal details or committing you to have phone calls/video chats (it does that). This works really well for the most, and humans respond with requested content. Quite often my AI debugs problems with their systems which I know little about. But humans do odd things like send screen shots of logs rather than text (they also leak internal details of their systems they potentially shouldn't). I used to tell people the content is partly AI, but now I just send the curated email without mentioning AI.

For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there's no injection of security risks. But quite often instead of getting a human response to my AI generated emails, it would actually be nicer to hear from their AI which could give a better context/details. It would be really nice to be able to go, can you have your AI talk to my AI :) (security is a major issue here)

This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”

In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.

around my workplace we say if you're copy/pasting llm output, you're indicating an llm can do your job.

Related - this was posted in march: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/

can't believe meatfingers.com has been registered (dormant)...

Yup, I always phrased this as “if you can’t be arsed to write it, I won’t read it”

Maybe this is why generative art never really took off.

That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.

My opinion is there is a category error in the discourse on AI. It treats ai assisted output as other than human. AI is a human tool. AI output is human output.

I think the real problem is that AI quality falls short of the wild promises.

Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less boneheaded.

Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.

s/demonstrate/perform/g

Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"

This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.

The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.

This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.

So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?

Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.

> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated

Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.

I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.

I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.

Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.

With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.

It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to the next.

---

> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit first.

This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.

And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.

I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my time in those projects building hard guardrails.

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> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates

I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.

So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.

Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really internalise the choices made.

When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role is just being a sub-agent.

Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.

One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.

Obligatory Silicon Valley reference [1].

So this post is talking about at work but I think the principle goes well beyond that. Think of all the AI chatbots you have to deal with to get through to customer service at a company. Or get through ATS systems in hiring. If it isn't already the case, this will probably replace or supplement TAs marking assignments.

The problem is that AI makes these interactions too cheap for the party that already has disproportionate power. The cost for them to add another layer, another hurdle, another set of questions, etc is essentially zero. Yet everyone who wants to get through that system has to pay in a human cost.

I just thought of another good example. In the pandemic auditions in Hollywood went virtual for obvious reasons. But this never went away. Now, you might say it's convenient to not have to spend hours driving to Burbank for a 5 minute audition but anecdotally the taped audition seems to be much more work. It requires a lot of prep and more tech for good sound and audio. There are people who help people tape auditions, which has really just added another layer. Plus, instead of only locals, anyone anywhere can submit an audition so where you might've had 30 people previously, now you have 150.

And what happens to those profesionally-produced auditions? They get submitted and the casting director might pick 5 randomly to even look at. If there isn't already, there will also be an AI system that filters those auditions.

At least previously you got 5 minutes of actual time from a casting director, the actual director, etc. So it's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.

Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'll end up happening is AI agents will rise to help people on the other side of that. You can think of using AI to cheat on school assignments as an example of that.

So what will we end up with? AI agents inundating AI systems, which just adds a whole bunch of inefficiency.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote:

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.

If you use AI to write your communications I don't want to work with you