ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
53% Positive
Analyzed from 29572 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#don#more#answer#human#question#llm#something#someone#person#where
Discussion (918 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
I wonder what the difference is between your community there and our community here since all these interactions are mediated by smartphone.
There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.
A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.
There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.
Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
After an hour doom scroll session I don't really remember most of it.
The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
We can think ill of the Israeli state without jumping to "fuck you for living in Israel and having nice things" as soon as someone mentions their city name.
In fact, I think the war in Iran is a stupid and immoral thing to do. It's possible that the person you are responding to feels the same about the Israeli government's genocidal actions in Gaza.
However, you did not bother to find out. When you judge someone before knowing them, it is called "prejudice". Pre-judging.
I hope your friend over there is doing well, and hopes for peace as much as we all do over here. Maybe then we'll see an end to all this.
After hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, most people had no electricity or internet for many weeks, some for many months. This kind of human (normal!) connection fluorished for all that time.
I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.
So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
(And even alone there's a pretty strong case to be made that you should pay attention to the actual food.)
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
Some clubs around here sometimes run whole-weekend parties that attract thousands of people, those are fun.
The trust issue: we already see hacker news members accusing each other of being LLMs, we already see legitimate images being immediately put in the AI category, and AI images and videos being shared as if the truth. We already see signs of infosec changing forever, with flaws found in SSL libraries that makes you wonder how trusty that little padlock next to the URL will become, we already see operating systems having to patch faster than they can.
With all that you get to wonder how much you can trust the pixels you see on your device, and how much we'll collectively trust them in the future. That leads you to trust your neighbours way more than your social media feed, which frankly, may have a positive impact on society over the long run, despite a very painful transition.
That's under the hypothesis that AI leads us to experience a trust crisis, which isn't a given.
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!
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.
This has that slopccato feeling.
It is nothing short of profoundly ironic to quote Jean Baudrillard in this context.
« Le contexte réel s’effondre au moment même où l’on me cite. »
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...
There are or course some asshole companies whose bots are designed to never connect you to a human and just hang up after a while.
(Me: "here is a comprehensive analysis of modem logs over the past 7 days and clear indication of the cause"; Xfinity: "Let's turn off the wifi router for 30s! It didn't work the last 50 times but it's the only thing we can do.")
Humaaaan!
Humaaaaaan!
HUMAAAAAAAAN!
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.
But people at the higher abstraction levels have a problem because they often never had (or lose) the ability to zoom in anywhere. And even the ones that can don't have time to learn to zoom in everywhere so they have to learn how to trust others, aka recognizing shibboleths. AI is great at sounding trustworthy and making reasonable looking output. In so doing, however, it's undermining the utility of shibboleths for large scale thinkers! That is the powerful are now deluding themselves that they have access to infinite reliable experts, and have gained the ability to zoom in everywhere, for only the cost of a data center. In a sense programmer experts like us are lucky because we have objective verification as a feedback loop to temper the exuberance. They do not.
If this is true, the kinds of error modes we'll see will be novel and catastrophic to a large fraction of businesses. If the feedback loops for correction are damaged or destroyed, we'll see firms gleefully, optimistically and energetically committing obvious mistakes until they die.
It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:
"Why didn't you build what I said?" "I did. This is exactly what you said." "No it's not! I said x y z" "Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z" Silence. "Then that's not what I meant"
I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!
Garbage Invoker, Garbage Output
With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.
No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).
Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.
Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.
confidence man
Probably more under-developed than psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
- It's nearly always poorly written because dummies also usually can barely write
- It's poorly packaged (some random comments section, not a polished slide deck)
- It's biased in predictable ways (when you do know who wrote it, their self-interested takes are predictable).
Enter "AI" - it writes mechanically well (even though it overuses several tropes, it doesn't make grammatical errors). AI packages its output as exactly what you ask it to (e.g. finished coding projects, outlines, essays, etc.) And not being a person, it's not guaranteed to have a certain bias, but it does echo and validate all your own biases.
Given all this, people think AI sounds exactly like what they assume an oracle would sound like.
As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.
But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.
I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.
I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.
GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.
I've been in IT a while, and am more of an AI skeptic - but I'm OK with it being used as a tool where it makes sense in my field, and it certainly has some value.... but shoehorning it into everything and using it as a general replacement for human creativity is a no-go for me.
It's a relief to know GenZ is feeling this way, and I hope having an entire generation against it will help pump the brakes a bit.
I think this issue gets more difficult for software developers. AI is especially good at software development.
You have to make a very strong business case to NOT be using AI. I hate it, but its the reality and the world we live in. Adopt, or be left behind.
I fully expected AI to let human intelligence shine in comparison to the mass-generated artificial stupidity, but instead it just prompted a multiplied outflow of human idiocy.
While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.
I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.
Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.
Prompt Engineering
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.
To be fair the human body is immensely complex. Every specialist will look at everything through the lens of their field, as at the very least they can rule out some things this way.
I had a doctor judge that my tonsils need to be removed, but for unrelated reasons I went to two other and both of them figured it's not as bad yet.
The difference between them was generational, as the first practiced an approach from 30 years ago, back when tonsils were indeed commonly removed.
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.
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.
Spot on.
The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.
People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.
Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.
In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/
Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
And the same people who are complaining about time wasting of having to ask/answer a question from a coworker which might create a modicum of civility and connection in this bitter cruel world are the same shit-posting on social media and doom watching youtube all day. "My flow can't be interrupted, I need all my energy to refactor this column from VARCHAR to TEXT, and to update this button from onClick inline to using a named closure".
Please, the reality is that we sold human connection for an illusion of productivity and the bitter pill of isolation where we all now feel guilt and shame for wanting to talk with other people (through an albeit disconnected and disembodied asynchronous channel).
If anyone responds with "I don't have time to respond I'm so busy", please realize you are proving my point. You are literally doom scrolling YC for no reason and alienating / pushing away coworkers to argue with internet strangers, sad.
"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)
That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)
They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.
Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.
Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.
The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
The conversations are the point.
Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.
Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.
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...
He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
Eventually I realized why and explained, "you know, I'm really just going to do a web search for what you just asked me, and maybe a couple more until I have a decent answer and then give you that answer. Let me show you how I would go about that".
From then on, they started getting into the habit of doing that for themselves. I think now with LLMs, they've kept the habit, but the LLM gives a more complete answer with fewer steps so it becomes the default. I think the magic of AI is two-fold (well, more than two, but two bullets for this conversation).
1. You don't have to "query". You can just braindump, and it'll build a context and figure out what you're looking for
2. It's conversational, so instead of filtering and tweaking results from the first query, your second "query" builds on top of the context from the first question, and you get a stronger result as the conversation continues.
I absolutely love this.
> 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.
Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"
Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.
And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.
Usually because the question is very easily answered with a quick web search.
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'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
A lot of people are relatively stupid.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.
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.
In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up.
edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.
The 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".
Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.
Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.
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
not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.
What would you have preferred? They could have just said, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, please let me get back to you" but instead they tried to get an answer for you.
I'm not sure what the problem is?
So they've already asked AI its opinion on the topic. They're explicitly reaching out to an expert because they've exhausted their ability to move forward on their own (even with AI).
If the expert just asking the same question to the AI and returning the answer directly - that's what OP has just done, and it actually is a waste of time. They're looking for insight, not just another quick response from an LLM.
I would imagine that letting the expert know ahead of time so they can research an answer (perhaps with the assistance of AI) would be a good pattern. But it has to be guided by the expert's knowledge - that's the whole point. Using AI is fine, and probably even good if it's being guided by a wise hand, but it isn't sufficient on its own, and bouncing answers directly back from an AI with no refinement is not useful, and dare I say it is somewhat insulting.
The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
And to be clear: I manually read and studied the official guiding documents without AI. Then I used a separate AI setup to more effectively research a larger array of additional internal sources, wikis, etc. I also reviewed the code from other teams / projects to infer any patterns that could apply to my project, so I came prepared with examples for discussion.
Edit: in this instance if I were the expert I'd respond from my expertise. Using LLM is fine to explain whys/research per what you say, but ultimately I'm the educator here
It makes it hard to pick apart hallucinations from the miscommunications and disagreements. Picking apart every single point and treating it with the same tact you have to treat human output with, while still accounting for the fact that it could be a hallucination, takes an extremely skewed amount of effort compared to the effort of sending someone AI output. The worst part is, it's probably going to be pasted right back into the LLM chat box.
It's astonishingly bad form to send someone AI output, and this is only one of the reasons.
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
I suppose it's possible that was the goal all along...
this was a thing in the past: LetMeGoogleThatForYou
- Louis de Bonald
I guess this sort of thing: https://www.panmurehouse.org/media/0j0ljqdl/pin-factory.jpg (that is an approximate illustration of Adam Smith's pin factory.)
He goes on to advocate for large families full of peasants doing manual labor, praises the ministers of the church and state, and says that painters and bankers are unnecessary. https://archive.org/details/lgislationprim00bona/page/372/mo...
I've seen this happening a lot in the recent times: people who are generally not very good at their job tend to offload disproportionately more to LLMs, and it's so damn annoying that their incompetence now comes sugarcoated in lengthy LLM babble for the sake of desperately trying to sound convincing. This is wasting me high single digit hours every week, not to mention the frustration of battling an asymmetrical fight: it takes them seconds to produce something that will take me minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
Edit: typo -le+me
At the PR review time of this lengthy process, I get a bunch of AI slop saying: - this looks like it changes X to Y, did you mean to do this? Worth another look?
It's SO frustrating. Just copy pasted BS. Are we really paying someone 6 figures to copy and paste into a prompt all day? This is madness.
In their followup review, again copy-pasted, it made a new recommendation - which was the way I had done it originally. Absolutely no human conviction behind the review, just copy-paste ping-pong feedback.
The way I got around it was by implementing my original change again, and writing a stronger defense of it, with lots of references, and calling out as many downsides to their initial recommendation as possible, in an attempt to prompt-inject and overwhelm whatever model they were feeding my work into, and it worked. It gave me a very grim view of the near future.
I can see that that could be kinda fun because it's not about the answer, it's about the discovery. AI and even smarter searches removes the sense of discovery. You'll never get to see "oh did you know that such and such actor was also in such as such movie in 2010??" if you just skip to the answer with AI.
That said, when they ask me a question that I don't immediately know the answer to, I'll use AI, ask it for sources, check those sources. In these cases it's more of a smarter Google search — just like couldn't always just use the first search result of Google in 2010, you can't always just use the AI response in 2026. Gotta be extra careful too because even the AI's sources can be AI.
Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.
However I disagree in that I don't want to "talk to AI" either. Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
I didn't quite get this, you ask them to send you their prompt? Does this disincentivize them from sending AI responses in the future?
P.S. I always found it ironic that this quote does the very thing it classifies as small-minded - discusses people :)
Heh. It's a believable taxonomy, but it makes me suspect it could often have the corollary:
In my experience their prompt is usually a verbatim copy-paste of the message I sent them, personal info and all. They simply put zero thought in it.
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.
------
Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.
A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.
It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.
That’s false equivalence and I think you know that.
Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.
I had specified some high-temperature electrical components to repair a broken part of a high-temperature circuit, placed the PO, received the parts, and gave them to one of our electricians with a work order. I did the research myself sans AI, read data sheets, investigated alternative materials, etc.
The electrician asked chatgpt "Will PEEK shrink tubing survive 400*F?" because apparently he doesn't trust me, and chatGPT told him no. He complained to his boss who immediately asked chatGPT the same question, and it told him yes it was fine.
Squarely within the top 3 most exhausting meetings of my career.
Interesting that the boss immediately asked the same question. So they're aware that AI gives nondeterministic answers and yet still use it.
I recount it here: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch
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
It's like they're just... Fine?
AI became their god over a few months and it's... Fine?
I thought I knew humanity pretty well and I'm rarely surprised at human large scale behavior these days as I'm hitting 50 myself, but this took me by surprise.
We teach children from a very early age that there's always a right answer and that someone smarter/older/etc knows it. They're told to ask that person and largely memorize the answer for a test.
With LLMs we're being told they are, or will soon be, as smart or smarter than any human. Its no surprise to me that people with access to LLMs that can already answer a question would just blindly use it and trust the response.
6 hours later guess who is stranded in the middle of the road? Not me.
It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.
And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.
I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?
Ugh.
I can (very marginally) understand running the argument over an LLM if you've difficulties communicating in the language, but never copy paste
At least we'll be able to tell people our authentic emotions without AI, and AI will listen to our emotions, much like parents listen to their children's feelings.
The major difference now though, is when you get sent a chatGPT response, the implicit question often is now "Can you check this is correct for me?" which is exhausting and a little rude.
That's the part that really gets to me. It's one thing to say Hey friend, you could have quickly gotten the right answer yourself. It's another thing to say Hey buddy, you asked me a question which I COULD answer, but instead of giving you the CORRECT answer, I'm going to give you AN answer, and let you figure out if it's correct <-- with the unspoken expectation that if it is the wrong answer and I run with it because you gave it to me, it's still my fault.
The mere fact of asking another human a question (absent a strong pattern of behavior to the contrary) should be strong evidence the interlocutor wants a human answer! Sending an AI answer should have the same social valence as sending a lmgtfy link; appropriate for bad actors but a pretty insulting response to an earnest question.
Not sure if you mean an human or an AI here.
In America anyway, "knowledge workers" blithely punching context-less data in Excel for money to stop at a Target conveniently placed on their drive home, for a couple shirts they never made, as they consider what to order via Grubhub is not what I would call a "self sufficient entity".
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".
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.
It was forgotten. Time heals all wounds.
People have always loved to defer to a "leader" or (supposed) "expert". Take the hard decisions away daddy.
What about when the llm is smarter than the person? Sometimes I get material that is so bad I wish they had had AI do it. Then it would be poor to mediocre.
There was an episode of the podcast “Question Everything “ where they talked about how LLM s can sometimes talk people out of conspiracy theories by patiently refuting the arguments with facts. There have been academic studies on this.
I think people hate AI because it is often mediocre and flawed but sometimes it’s replacing humans that are inept.
They repeated the test and the results were replicable. (But still only about 25%, but that is something.)
This made me think: I grew up in a world where there was a flawed but consensus view of the world, its problems, institutions motivations. This came from a common mass media. Maybe getting our answers from AI will lead us to a new (inevitably flawed or even bad) consensus. Weird.
Source: https://play.cdnstream1.com/s/kcrw/question-everything/can-a...
It makes you feel that way because it is that way. They're not self-sufficient.
One of the more dangerous things LLMs have enabled is people feeling like they are suddenly experts on topics they would have never touched otherwise.
That's sad, but you know what's infuriating? It's humans who come at you sarcastic and dismissive and without spending any effort actually engaging with what you've said in good faith. Imagine writing a well reasoned out post or comment, only to get a sarcastic dismissive literal oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
Matching the amount of effort that others around me are putting in is pretty important to me now. Don't want to end up trying too hard for people who don't give a shit.
I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
Both of these are preferable.
I'll sometimes do the exact thing you are talking about. The reason is that I basically know the answer, but also know there is a nicer explanation to the question. I'll type in the question, often iterate a few times, get an answer that I basically knew but couldn't explain as clearly, and respond with it.
Humans haven't been "self sufficient" in 100,000 years. We've been building/using tools and specializing since the start. If you went back just a few hundred years some people (the version of you basically) would be profoundly sad you couldn't build your own house.
go to a bar
"i work with idiots who can't even write a sentence anymore and so they have AI write an essay for every sentence they wanna say"
and so you blame AI
AI doesn't have a problem with generating a lot of tokens cause you/your company pays by the token
how about asking AI to keep it short and sweet, does that work, yes? yes it does.
this is top of HN? shark, jumped
If you call a helpdesk agent - they have to query the system to pull up your case.
The UX is a bit different now.
That's it.
Your 'anthropomorphising projectION' here is the issue, not the person using basic tools to help you - as they always have.
Remember when "Google" used to be a synonym for "search"?
Show them your distillation, your final recommendation, but not the raw output. That's useless, they could have prompted the AI themselves, you're not adding anything but being the middleman. At least share your prompt instead of the output!
You're welcome for the downvote.
I understand that behavioral changes from technology can be jarring and folks will process things differently.
But I keep seeing these kinds of melodramatic declarations of sadness. Were you this sad when it became the cultural norm to Google things? There even used to be a url, "let me Google that for you"
Why is this any different?
I think these kinds of things indicate the general age bracket of this forum. So profoundly saddening that it's like watching a child, I see these people as children... Etc.
For the first time we have a bunch of technologically literate people seeing their own norms being disrupted and unwilling to adapt. This is the kind of conservativism with age that happens time and time again.
Me and friends used to laugh at professors that would rant about wikipedia and force people to buy dictionaries in college.
I find it somewhat amusing that on a technology forum that literally has "hacker" in the title is feeling such a loss in response to this technology.
They answered with something that looked to be AI slop, and very verbose too. When I politely said "those instructions reference links and buttons that I cannot find in the UI, could you please tell me where to find them?" the Director simply replied "I cannot find them either, disregard. The feature doesn't support what you want after all."
This means they simply prompted my question to the builtin AI and copied back to our conversation without verifying it made sense.
That's the future we must deal with now. A sort of broken "LMGTFY" that only provides wrong answers.
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799035/
Smart people drink and smoke more; not less, potentially to self sooth/deal with the oppressive reality they find themselves in.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
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.
This is so true.
So many people just parrot whatever nonsensical talking point they heard.
Regurgitating things without an ounce of reflection or critical thought.
My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.
"Tell it like it is. Don't sugar-coat responses. Be concise. Short answers only. No bullet points. One paragraph max. No over-explaining."
Not endorsing, don't shoot messenger.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.
I've found most work communication apps not to be very condusive to it, but Discord is pretty good.
I sincerely miss working in an office, but with my current job it would've been impossible anyway (everyone is remote in different countries). I've only once met some of my coworkers irl a few years ago when we went to a conference together.
You can see if people are in there and actively talking before you join and that alone encourages spontaneous drop ins.
It doesn’t feel like seven years. 2020 feels like last year.
What can one typically accomplish in seven years? An undergrad, masters, and maybe a PHD. It is a long time.
The years have flown by
I see people who advocate for permanent wfh has plans with their social circle. Either already has a family or friends. Sucks to be the one trying to build a new life.
Btw, I don’t believe them a bit. All I see are rotten people who no longer speaks new things, or is a living instagram bot.
1. "Sorry can't come" an hour after we were supposed to meet - this alone kills 80% of my friendships
2. "I like edgy humor" and then a month later "I'm going to report you to HR" literally had this happen to me
3. Most people have very little depth and stick to superficial smalltalk, which I find very exhausting
And when on top of that you say "I wish my friend had similar values and enjoyed at least one common hobby" then it's basically over. Not to mention the fact that most people aren't open to new friendships. If they're married then they straight up say "wife doesn't allow", if they're not then it's "yeah let's grab a coffee someday".
My motto is "if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go alone" because trying to be cooperative with people has never yielded me better results than just doing the shit on my own.
#2 seems situational so I can't speak to that
#3 I think anxiety pervades people's lives, and I often wonder how many of them are "holding on by a thread" and literally don't have capacity for ANYTHING that may stir the pot, like a new friend, so they give any tired excuse to avoid rocking their boat.
- 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.
I did ask the AI. I gave it several rounds. I got a summary of their diff from it. I skimmed their diff myself. I have a rough mental model of the work they did, plus what the AI did/didn't tell me. I'm asking THEM so THEY can confirm my mental model is correct to the code they supposedly authored.
I suspect the real problem is they vibed the whole thing and didn't even self-review it. So they don't know, can't answer, and the interaction is truly pointless. They are not the expert any longer. It's not worth asking them.
- Wendell Berry
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxhuUMa6cjo
- lead AI engineer asking tech advice - me proposing something (out of my experience and knowledge) - he invoking inline slack bot to ask if what I said made any sense - me telling that the AI arguments were kind of off - he invoking again the same both asking why I said that - .... so on... - third developer kicking in responding with obviously ChatGPT generated message
I left the company shortly after.
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.
Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!
It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?
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.
"I have one job on this lousy ship. It's stupid, but I'm gonna do it!"
The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.
You're going to ask your own LLM session why they did it that way. And if there's a problem, you raise it. And if this individual keeps opening buggy PRs, you have a talk with them about how to use the LLM to catch these issues before a PR is opened.
I 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.
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.
You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.
If the guy was asking about a business process in their business how would chatGPT know what their process is?
`Just send me the prompt` applies. If you have an answer and you feed it to an LLM to dress it up, just send me the prompt. If you don't have the answer and are just going to ask an LLM just tell me `I don't know`.
I don't need a proxy for ChatGPT.
> you can get a straight answer from an LLM
By definition, LLMs cannot give a straight answer. They give you text based off next token probabilities.
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.
> original question shows effort was put into it
What matters is how the other side interprets it, not your level of effort or your expectations. If the other side apparently doesn't get what you wanted to happen, that's a communication issue.
Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?
If this happens to me, it's a sign that they don't want to talk to me and I'm going to be let go.
This should be grounds for firing someone.
That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer. Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.
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.
--EDIT--
I should add though that I am still tired of talking to AI. Not because people are giving me AI responses but b/c 95% of my communication is routed through Claude Code. :/
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 don't think we are doing very well in preventing "large scale" conflict between World Powers.
Russia v. Ukraine war has half a million deaths on the Russian side alone. Is this large scale?
Others call it a proud tradition (as opposed to a useful tradition).
I think a lot of people are actually tired of having to explain their situations practically from scratch every now and then.
Many real people talk like AI now.
I notice it more and more every day.
Sometimes I can notice it in my speech pattern as well. And worse of all, my thinking. It is like I am reading the same book over and over again.
Now I actually have old sci-fi (mona lisa) between me and the keyboard, while claude is writing, I am reading. And I avoid reading its output as much as I can.
I've also noticed the tool used for communication having a big change on speech patterns too. I basically got the same group of people migrating from IRC, to Discord and then to Signal group and the level of discussion hit rock bottom with the last move. Most of the dialogue shifted to phones and it's inconvenient input system and lack of readability. Even if people return to the desktop the space is already polluted with low quality short-form banter making it less attractive for higher level of communication that used to be the default.
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.
Great suggestion. Problem: these are bosses and coworkers and people you need to work with to keep receiving income to live, and the topics talked about are things important to the place of work.
But ten years later, the one on the other side of the screen isn't even a person anymore.
And that's the sad truth, isn't it? The way we relate to new technology is always one step behind the technology itself.
Hell, even the replies to this post might not have been written by a human.
I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.
I love chatting to AI.
The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.
We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26915336/
If Russian is the original I would imagine the site would default to Russian and then /en for English.
AI translation is very different from AI writing though!
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?
It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?
Local meetups, library, walks, and local coffee shops (not places that offer free wifi where people are anyway buried in their devices) are where real human connections happen.
https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
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.
(to be clear, i do a lot of things, but this is one of them, and boy is it wild how important it feels)
If the computer (AI or not) provided you with that convenience, you'd never want to deal with a human for a given task.
The 'mischaracterization' of AI as human - now that's annoying. We probably should not submit answers by AI in the form of human identities.
I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings
I personally don’t care if an output is from LLM or human, as long as someone has validated it and determined that it’s correct and useful.
> 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.
I'm just speculating though.
I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.
OP is right. I don’t want to talk with AI.
BTW this will be insane in next years as LLM usage in customer care has not reached the peak yet…
I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,
Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.
>granted she was significantly older
I said, "Why don't you believe it?"
"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.
"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."
"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."
She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.
I did get a cookie recipe out of it, though.
Aren't we all getting sick of it?
My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents
Turtles all the way down.
I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?
I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.
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?
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>".
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.
Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.
I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.
AI is here to stay its permeating through all of our communication layer and this is the worst its going to be
Think about that. Anything fault you find with AI or experiences are not going to wait and sit around , its going to get better faster.
It's like shouting against the wind eventually people stop paying attention and learn to adapt as they always do with technology
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.
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.
Yes, I'm with the author. I'm absolutely sick of constantly reading AI content.
But if I have to really dig into it deep, a lot of the people who send me AI content now, weren't sending me anything meaningful to begin with (pre ai).
The number of organizations I have been around where most people just copy paste each other's messages is no joke. This was happening long before AI came along. AI has just made it so much more obvious.
Previously they might have copied it from Joe in Product. Now it all sounds like Claude or GPT.
It’s not about AI. If it wasn’t AI, it would be some other convenience.
There are a myriad of reasons why people generally give less of a shit now, that we can all opine about, but that is ultimately what has to change.
a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.
Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.
I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.
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.
I can only hope aerospace and medical industries are raising strict constraints against this slop otherwise I fear for the future. Eroding engineering AND communication? Thats a good formula for success
I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.
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
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
AI is a hugely powerful tool, but I’m sick of having to treat a human’s AI-based verbatim reply as a real thing.
Anybody that does this is going to be calmly corrected as much as possible, and if the behavior doesn’t change then something will have to change.
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.
(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)
> more interested in disorganized, messy content over time
Same, that kind of content kinda forces me to use my brain (yeah.. sounds obvious..) to organize the message, understand it, agree/disagree, and actually CONSUME the content, like the old days..
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.
My career was using C# and JS, and LLMs have caused me to lose interest in learning more. I was always a hobbyist Python and Ruby user. I prefer to put my efforts towards skills that are still useful. Software as a craft is dying, no different than being an expert at riding a horse.
The important part now for a developer is a very strong command of the English language, for both the LLM as well as the rising importance of client interactions. As the space is very competitive, so you need to offer value or form a union so you can regain back some of your lost negotiating power.
Most of the developers I worked with were very poor in that area. I worked hard and was deemed a "top performer" in my last job, but it was equal parts perception management. This is what you should be thinking about and focusing on going forward. Improving your linguistic skills, and polishing your social skills.
Otherwise, for someone like me who grew up in a machine shop and mechanic's environment, anything new I learn is more brawn and brain going forward so I stay relevant as a human being. And no longer just brain like software was.
His wife posts only AI images that are not real in any way. The images are not modified, they are completely fake.
I'm exhausted of all A.I. output replacing normal human interactions.
BEFORE: my buddy : customer -- 1 day turnaround
AFTER: my buddy : chatGPT : MBA guy: Chat GPT: Customer -- 1 week turnaround
Efficiency!
Anyway, his other "essay" was about how he doesn't take phone calls or something, so seeing this note a couple days after is just fun.
This is your peer's natural reaction to "my time matters more than yours"; you're getting it back.
Your value to them amounts to forwarding your musings from/to an LLM. This does not happen by chance. Enjoy it.
I know you think your questions are legitimate but look it in broader context. Use AI to craft questions for them that they will find engaging as a exercise.
I don't use AI, but I rarely respond to any PMs. There are many reasons for this; for instance, I remember in the old days, when I first heard about MMA, I registered on sherdog for a discussion. I don't recall when that was, but it was many, many years ago. Then, after many years of not using it, I logged in and found a PM merely insulting me. I very politely and skillfully correct that PM - however had, ultimately this is not really "interaction", this is just wasting my time (and, admittedly, I already was not using sherdog for many years before that either). Since then I have very decreasingly used PMs in general. It's a difference when I know someone, of course, but random people on the internet ... the barrier to want to talk via PMs for me is very low in general. I simply dislike the format of it.
I find it much easier when it is an open discussion, such as was the case on reddit (before moderators censoring everyone killed that). It's interesting to see how much censorship happens nowadays. That's very different to the 1990s era. Either way I think AI is not solely at fault here, because I could see problems way before AI emerged already. I very rarely use webforums these days, and Discord is no alternative either - Discord is even worse since it is all a private company controlling discussions. IRC was easier than that.
>I 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.
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.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I often see new projects that look exciting at first. But when I start reading the source code, I realize there’s a ton of messy code, and it was clearly written by Claude or another AI tool.
It feels like some beginners are using vibe coded projects just to brag: “Look, I built this tool,” even when the code quality is abysmal.
I 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.
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.
Life is better with people who actually engage and are curious about improving things human-to-human.
AI (LLM) responses are catered towards the lowest common denominator / average type shit responses.
The best use for AI/LLM agents is to do work I tell them to do, like a servant who obeys my orders and executes them.
A human using AI/LLM to respond to another human (who has already used AI/LLM to come up with a v1 he wants to discuss) is a moron and not worth engaging with further. Even if they're your friend, it is a good signal that you need better friends.
The problems are usually nothingburgers the IT guy doesn't understand (cookie banners). I cannot fight: 1. IT guy constant stupid takes on why we should throw money at a problem 2. a company that's only goal is to tell us we need X verification for $13k/yr or we'll be screwed
The verification is a cron job that checks cookies. Any time you try to discuss the issue he copy and pastes an AI text wall.
A lot, a lot, a lot of companies are going under because the fake-it-to-make-it people do not know what to do. And the C-Suite wants to contract out all expertise to some pointless corporation that won't help.
We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.
More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.
About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2
When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.
If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.
But I'd still rather be travelling and seeing the world than being nervous about my job being cut due to AI.
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 :)
It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.
The easiest place in France I've traveled as an English speaker was Nice. They all speak English well and don't seem to care if you don't speak French.
How they keep their English speaking "in shape" then?
> 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