>But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
This is the killer issue.
It's so profoundly saddenning, it feels like watching an adult being asked a question and calling mom to answer for them. There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis.
Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change
Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious
Maybe they need _that person_ to provide some assurances directly because they are not confident in thier plan (see 1)
Maybe they are just in a rut and need to start a conversation with a person
Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Spot on.
The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.
People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
Yes. The role of good management here cannot be understated. Good management (all the way up) is the difference between saying "be more productive, here's an AI subscription" and people understanding what types of usage are actually wanted and useful.
As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.
Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether.
Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f
Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.
I really am not a big fan of this... Hand-waving, I guess? Around this problem. Saying "well the norms are still being established" feels kind of like a "well don't really get mad at the people doing it, they're still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable use" kind of thing to me. People should already know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. The fact that they don't is very, very telling and says a lot about the people doing it IMO.
Maybe. It doesn't help that a lot of corporations are pushing their employees into dark patterns around LLMs. That in turn informs their own personal use of LLMs outside the workplace
Sending an AI response to a question that someone asks you is insulting because it's a bit like sending them a link to letmegooglethat where it just animates typing the question you have into google.
I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.
In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/
Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
honestly a sad state. Obviously there is a reasonable threshold, but trying not to speak to anyone until you've done a ton of work / research when they know the answer is just sad. Like what's wrong with asking a question? We've entered this anti-human hellscape where asking a question in slack (async) is somehow a crime, like posting an opinion without a double-blind study to back it up (burn him!).
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.
I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with:
"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)
If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)
That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)
> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
and what if i tell you i asked stack overflow?
Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).
What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.
Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.
Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.
Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.
And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.
Stack overflow or Claude or Wikipedia…it doesn’t matter.
We don’t usually tolerate copy-paste answers at school so why should it count at work?
Work is not school. Within certain legal and ethical constraints, at work we only care about results.
Hard disagree. If I only cared about immediate results, I'd just ask Claude myself, sure. But I care about developing people's judgement, longer term. And if they're just parroting back what Claude says, I'm not doing that.
I care about developing people's judgment, longer term. You care about developing people's judgment, longer term. Does capitalism, or the managerial-business class that only sees 6 months out?
I mean it was always easy enough to say "Hey not quite sure but I did find this post on SO, in case it helps"
You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.
What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?
And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.
No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).
Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.
But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.
Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.
It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.
> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something. Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.
Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it
The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.
They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.
This used to horrify me, until I started noticing the type of person that mindlessly spits crap out for me to deal with are the exact type of people I had already identified as being at most neutral or dead weight anyway. Sounds harsh but if your first reaction to solving a problem is to turn off your brain entirely and dump the thinking onto something/someone else for you, you're likely already layoff fodder, even pre AI. Maybe we'll all get there eventually, but for now, there's a clear distinction I see between types of people that use these tools, and one is very exhausting to deal with.
My experience aligns with that. But there’s no guarantee that the criteria for layoffs, when they happen, will include these people.
A lot of jobs don't need a human for anything from 80-99% of their work tasks and can be replaced by an LLM or other form of AI/ML. As an employer, you hire the human for the 1-20% where you actually need the experience - to quote the punchline of an old but gold joke [1]:
> The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.
In many a company, the "old neckbeards" and "dead weight" are the first ones to be cut or eventually be driven off by ever more outright bullshit - and often enough, it is only realized way too late that important "institutional knowledge" is gone [2].
[1] https://calvincorreli.com/blog/1397-knowing-which-screw-to-t...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35821782
> I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.
Lots of people aren't very thoughtful or wise, including some supposedly very intelligent people.
For further proof: think of all the workers proudly parroting their bosses' anti-union rhetoric, like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
I personally feel using AI to reply personal chats is extremely bogus. Worse is those that do not even bother to remove the AI watermark. Like, pasting directly from the AI without removing the AI's personal thoughts.
But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?
Not the person you’re replying to, but, because I don’t know what they know.
“I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation
Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.
Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things
This is an interesting comment for me because if someone said that to me I'd lose all respect for them I think.
It would be true if they bothered hiding it. But as the featured author said, people seem increasingly not shy of simply forwarding you a screenshot of the AI answer.
...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.
Do you feel returning an answer that an AI gives is the same as searching it on Google (old fashion way) and just producing an answer from there?
What you're describing still requires that you look at sources and put a little bit of effort into understanding something.
AI answers may or may not be completely hallucinated, and often the people copy/pasting them didn't even read them.
Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.
Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.
> I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question.
At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.
Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.
The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
“employer culture” is sad in itself. Perhaps there is less or a different nuance in your mother tongue. It’s abhorrent in English to this ESL.
Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.
would it blow your mind if I told you there are already idiosyncrasies in the way you write? not you specifically; everyone has them
I know, I could've worded my comment clearer. I meant that I specifically introduce them in a way to make it obvious my text was written by me.
AI will clone your idiosyncrasies before you know it. There’s no point
No point? There certainly is a point. The point is that I don't sound like AI now. Sure, one day, some AI lab might build models so that everyone has a model that's indistinguishable from them, and at that point, this method won't work.
But saying it's not worth it is like going back in time and telling a peasant to stop harvesting their crop manually because in 10 years someone will invent the tractor. I get trust of others now, which is something that is useful now. Any benefits I accumulate don't get undone.
Unless you mean they'd target me specifically... which I find very unlikely.
I caught myself watching an AI video on youtube a few days ago where the narrator's AI voice had deliberate instances of stammering and stuttering. It's definitely simple to have these introduce idiosyncrasies just through specific prompting.
Why would that matter? You still have to read, understand, and respond. If something is important and specific it takes longer to prompt iterations to generate my response. It's nice for spelling and grammar correction.
I use lots of em dashes and emojis now to blend in.
Same. I no longer fix spelling mistakes (I never used auto-complete or "smart" keyboards).
I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D
Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
I've gone back to just calling people on the phone like a true savage.
Unfortunately that's not enough, voice AI is very good nowadays,
If someone puts me on with a voice AI i'm never talking to them again lol.
I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.
...which might be exactly what they wanted in the first place.
Weirdly, and MAYBE tangentially related to AI, me too.
I've been driving my friends nuts cuz we're all neurodivergent little goblin people and now I just call them. And they aren't actually mad they're just like "what's wrong with you" and it's just like, look, sometimes I just need a fuckin answer to a fuckin question, and faster is better. And phone calls are instant.
I think they're coming around now cuz two of em do it to me.
Aw. A little goblin network.
I never stopped.
Relax, it's niche internet points, you'll be fine lol
Same, I've started adding stylistic (-/; with an odd/imperfect placement- like this) errors to make it clear it's artisanal home made slop, not AI-generated.
When I use my phone, I don't have to... I usually use gesture input and don't proof read before hitting send/reply/post.
>artisanal home made slop
Even in the depths of corporate life, the last beacon of light was interacting with a person who may be similarly philosophically placed as you, sharing something. Artisanal home made slop may be more underrated that people think, its a proxy for human connection, which surprise surprise, is a big basis of life
For me personally, I have co-workers I will not communicate with because all they do is have AI generate their responses and most of the time, don't even check the AI response. I ignore their teams messages and have outlook configured to send their emails directly to the junk folder. My manager knows about this and so far is fine with it.
This is some terry pratchett level craziness.
I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations.
The conversations are the point.
Humans are already forgetting how to Human.
And notably, these are still all problems even if the AI is perfect in its response in every way.
In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with
Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai.Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.
It’s in the same spirit of citing your sources in academic writing.
Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.
I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust.
AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.
Well you should probably find a workplace that doesnt punish the “curmudgeons” for directly saying that.
I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.
The people are answering with copy-paste AI are the curmudgeons trying not to get fired for being “hard to work with”
The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to
EVery company that comes up with a product that brings a lot of gravy turns into place where people like this flourish. They have always been there - they would ask your question to many people, get their anwers and pass the response as their own.
Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.
[dead]
I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'.
I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.
The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.)
Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.
What a nightmare hellscape you’ve described here.
It's trained on the internet so it's wrong just as much as the internet is wrong or misleading.
Maybe the current implementation
Pro tip: people did this long before AI was a thing.
People have always loved to defer to a "leader" or (supposed) "expert". Take the hard decisions away daddy.
Just yesterday I had to attend internal "office hours" of an expert team to get a question answered - I had done extensive research of my own, both manual and using AI leveraging internal resources. What did the "expert" do when they couldn't answer my question right away? They said "let me ask {insert AI tool}". I cut them off stating that this is an insult to my intelligence. I am in the office hours for expert advice not someone else performing the same AI prompts that I already performed.
Exactly! If you're an owner (ie: expert, you teach other people how to do your stuff) you should be making decisions and taking responsibility, given existing context. I'm happy using LLM to confirm my reasoning or research, but it's still me doing the coding, or architecting or anything, not LLM, and if something goes bad I cannot say "LLM told me to do it". If people are blindly doing what their tools tell them to do, that's the problem there.
Edit: in this instance if I were the expert I'd respond from my expertise. Using LLM is fine to explain whys/research per what you say, but ultimately I'm the educator here
Wait, you're upset because they used AI to answer a question they weren't expecting, and couldn't answer? Yet, you used AI as part of your upfront research?
What would you have preferred? They could have just said, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, please let me get back to you" but instead they tried to get an answer for you.
I'm not sure what the problem is?
I think it's perfectly fine for the author to use AI in their research process, and it sounds like they weren't relying on it exclusively.
So they've already asked AI its opinion on the topic. They're explicitly reaching out to an expert because they've exhausted their ability to move forward on their own (even with AI).
If the expert just asking the same question to the AI and returning the answer directly - that's what OP has just done, and it actually is a waste of time. They're looking for insight, not just another quick response from an LLM.
I would imagine that letting the expert know ahead of time so they can research an answer (perhaps with the assistance of AI) would be a good pattern. But it has to be guided by the expert's knowledge - that's the whole point. Using AI is fine, and probably even good if it's being guided by a wise hand, but it isn't sufficient on its own, and bouncing answers directly back from an AI with no refinement is not useful, and dare I say it is somewhat insulting.
These were expert office hours for API modeling. The company has certain requirements and standards - this team is supposed to live and breathe them. The question wasn't that advanced. Performing a basic AI prompt in the authoritative expert office hours is not the answer.
The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
And to be clear: I manually read and studied the official guiding documents without AI. Then I used a separate AI setup to more effectively research a larger array of additional internal sources, wikis, etc. I also reviewed the code from other teams / projects to infer any patterns that could apply to my project, so I came prepared with examples for discussion.
> The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
I suppose that would be very close to "you've come to the experts for advice and I probably shouldn't be here because I'm not one of them", which nobody wants to admit.
For many, an honest look at themselves would end with "I don't contribute anything". They have the opposite of impostor syndrome - they don't belong, but they feel like they should, and AI helps them pretend.
I’m curious, what was their reaction? :)
They were speechless. Kind of shocked. It was hilarious. They then agreed to reach out to some colleagues / other teams to research and find the answer. After 20 min they followed up with an acceptable answer.
True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first.
EDIT:
By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover what they need but they don't go there first and not something I have some deep domain knowledge of that would take them a long time to find or figure out.
I would personally still not reply with an AI answer but I am tempted sometimes...
Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement.
He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.
I’ve encountered this regularly.
I love to learn. I never want to stop learning.
Apparently, I’m in a minority.
I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context.
Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO.
Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.
Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)."
Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments)
(strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)
Thanks for that link.
I think one of my advantages has been, that I’m a high school dropout, with a GED. I never took a matriculated college course.
Almost all of my education has been practicum. I learn by do.
Having to direct my own education has been both liberating and exhausting.
I haven’t had any “tracks,” since I was 16.
You learn to know who are the lazy ones, and at that point you can politely always respond with a, "what were you able to find on this?". You can repeat this ad infinitum since at that point, they're just being lazy and disrespectful of your time. They eventually give up going to you because they know they won't get you to do their work for them.
Good point, and I realize that's what I did in school. When people came to me that I suspected were just looking for easy answers to avoid doing the work themselves, I'd lead them gradually through the chain of reasoning. Like, point out the first step and imply that that should be enough for them to work it out, leading them to ask again ("ok, I get that, but what does that mean for the final answer? What should I write down?"), and I'd give them the next step, leading them to walk away in disgust and bother somebody else. Even better, the next time they start with that person and it's no longer my problem.
Be high friction when you suspect it's warranted. Even if you're not sure someone is looking for a shortcut, the people who aren't won't mind. It's detection and deterrence rolled into one.
(And if possible, find a place to work where you never have to do this.)
As someone who loves helping people to learn things for themselves... you have to identify these "help vampires" and just stop helping them.
I had a coworker who would ask me the same questions over and over and over, despite me trying to show them 10 different ways how to do it or find the answer in the docs or whatever. And eventually I just said I was too busy and they had to figure it out. After a while they actually started figuring stuff out.
Basically if those people aren't your direct reports, your obligation to help them only goes so far. Take care of yourself first. If they figure it out eventually then good for them. If not, it's really not your problem.
I've struggled with this, even encountering people who basically say "if AI can do it why do I need to spend any more time?"
It was disappointing hearing someone tank their own prospect of career growth like that.
You're looking at human nature. We evolved to conserve energy, to take the berries that are growing right here rather than go foraging for something else with less certain outcomes. Even better, someone else collects the berries for you.
There are some exceptional people, who have the drive and curiosity to see what else is out there, but that's not the average.
I've done a similar thing with close friends and family who would constantly ask me things I couldn't possibly know because I always came up with an answer.
Eventually I realized why and explained, "you know, I'm really just going to do a web search for what you just asked me, and maybe a couple more until I have a decent answer and then give you that answer. Let me show you how I would go about that".
From then on, they started getting into the habit of doing that for themselves. I think now with LLMs, they've kept the habit, but the LLM gives a more complete answer with fewer steps so it becomes the default. I think the magic of AI is two-fold (well, more than two, but two bullets for this conversation).
1. You don't have to "query". You can just braindump, and it'll build a context and figure out what you're looking for
2. It's conversational, so instead of filtering and tweaking results from the first query, your second "query" builds on top of the context from the first question, and you get a stronger result as the conversation continues.
>He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
I absolutely love this.
That's a great tip. Thanks for sharing.
LMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion.
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.
Unfortunately this is true; and if you're not careful with your time, a lot can be wasted by people who realize "I can email so-and-so instead of putting in 5 minutes to finding the issue myself".
They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
> after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
Agreed, and I do the same. They still get a courteous reply, but they also feel a little "pain" when they don't get a timely answer - an effective teacher.
But as a good manager, you should throw it back: "what do you think?" "what have you tried so far?" etc.
Just giving them AI back is pointless. It means _your_ role is pointless.
Indeed - I had a team that called this "remote brain execution" (we were a build team that used Bazel, and often fielded questions about why someone's build broke).
My favorite phrase on that team was "What have you tried so far?"
Ironically, I have to edit out my "what I have tried so far" when asking questions, because I'm more likely to go into a long-winded explanation of the headers that I hacked and the kernel module I installed to fake my way around this or that, when the actual answer tends to be "uh... are you sure you're building the code you think you are? That sounds like you're running from the wrong directory or wrong branch."
Not just the workforce, my parents still barely know how to use a computer because any time they hit the slightest snag, they immediately call me for help.
>> what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"
I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.
Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.
And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.
If you're telling them all that and not wasting their time, that's fine.
But if you just ask them the question and don't tell them what you've found or where you got stuck, you're asking them to stop doing what they're doing and spend all that same time you just spent working on your problem.
> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?
Usually because the question is very easily answered with a quick web search.
Then we should create LMGPTTFY, then it's at least apparent and the recipient needn't click.
But this is often simply not the case - people will often ask for trivial things trivially found on Google.
IME it usually means they have some good reason to ask, which you are not aware of. For example, people might believe you are an expert or can give a better answer in the context.
Yes, they might believe you are an expert, but they often ask "experts" trivial questions they should just have Googled. As evidenced by how just using Google to answer them will often make people think you are an expert even at topics you're clueless about.
Frankly I find it flattering when people asked me certain kinds of questions!
Maybe I’m just more generous with my time than others (or perhaps I don’t value it), but all these responses saying friends and colleagues asking you questions they could’ve theoretically looked up are “wasting your time” are rather perplexing. If somebody’s asking me, like you said, I generally assume they have a reason for asking. Or maybe they’re just tired and don’t want to spend an hour looking it up and verifying it because they know I have a quick answer that takes me little to no effort. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I get asked camera questions all the time, and frankly I just see those as opportunities to stay sharp. No better way to learn/reinforce your knowledge than teaching others
If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood.
If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise.
"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is:
"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
Let me Google that for you implies the answer is well known and trivial to find.
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
No one here wants to say it, so I will.
A lot of people are relatively stupid.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?
Kind of.
Everyone needs to draw a line. Call it an "explore vs exploit" problem, if you want.
Sure, you want to fail a bit so you know where the line is, or to push it forwards a bit. But there is, at least in principal, always a line.
I'm just saying that if someone draws the line in a place that you think is waaaay too soon, maybe they aren't entirely wrong.
Ah, okay, that makes your original comment make more sense. Thank you for the clarification.
I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
So I think it's a cultural thing.
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me."
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.
> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything.
Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.
90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.
Maybe they don’t wanna take responsibility for that answer?
In our case we're completely allowed to use AI, but if you do, you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously). So if your LLM says "Sure, go ahead and run that code" and it deletes the production database, that's your fault, just as much as if you reviewed it manually and said the same thing.
> you carry the responsibility for it's output (not in a legal sense obviously)
why not in a legal sense? If someone asks me what cleaning supplies are safe to mix, and i just ask some chatbot, don't vet the output, copy the response, and they end up poisoning themselves, am I not responsible?
If I'm a lawyer, and pass unvetted AI legal advice to my client, and they go to jail, should i keep my license?
Typically if you develop a software product for a company, the company resumes responsibility. No one would develop anything for any high risk business, if they were to assume personal responsibility of the end result. LLMs don't really chance that, and any serious bug would be an error of process.
Developers are perfectly capable of creating dangerous or expensive mistakes even without LLMs. If we accept that LLMs are just tools, the developer should be no more responsible that if they choose to use Visual Studio over Vim and Visual Studio refactors something wrong.
Theres's then the question of gross incompetence, and were the developer could be fired or perhaps even sued by their employer, the same as if they hadn't used an LLM.
However the case I had in mind was in regards to the legality of the way the AI models acquire and reproduce code. We're not held personally responsible for any license violation created by the tool.
So, just a fake "yes"?
I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.
The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.
Is it laziness? Or is it frustration from answering the same basic beginner questions over and over again?
It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed.
Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.
It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy.
Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction?
There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.
I’m using ai to answer questions, but I instruct it in draft what answers to include, what info to include from my llm wiki (second brain). Saves time to write a correct response, can easily refer to past conversations, but definitely not 100% outsources to AI.
If you need to find information to answer a colleague, use AI if that's helpful.
I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?
Because it’s often hard to find the right voice? because it’s often hard to describe something in the correct way? Communication is hard, finding the correct tone of voice often takes me a long time, so using AI makes me more efficient in a busy day?
That "hardness" is what brings value to the interaction, in almost every sense of value except "speed", and with AI, speed is suspect because of the investment imbalance - it's too easy to prompt for a response then fire that response and expect the reader to do the hard work.
I notice you didn't use an AI to debate this, just as I didn't use an AI to refute it. Does this make the interaction more or less meaningful for you? That you cared enough to actually read and reply, and I did, too? I didn't have too reply, nor did you, but we felt the need to exchange ideas together, not spawn agents to fight.
I don’t care who wrote it, as long as it is a good message, communicating what the sender intents to communicate, well articulated. I prefer it above a self written piece that is hard to understand, contains unclear wording, and could be interpreted in an incorrect way.
Not everyone is gifted with the ability to write well, so using tools to achieve that is no shame in my opinion. And no, practicing more is not always going to get you to a higher, sufficient level. We all have our limitations that cannot be crossed by just practicing more. Practice does not make Einstein.
I quite often send messages where I later think “i should have phrased it differently, maybe it was misunderstood”. And often I’ll respond way too late because lack of time.
I feel AI is a tool that helps me communicate better, and I expect that holds for many others as well.
Not understanding that some feel more effective using tools is also a sign of lack of empathy.
> It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own.
In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
In my line of work, its certain peoples' jobs to know certain things. If I need a piece of information that somebody else is responsible for understanding, I'm just going to ask directly for what I need instead of trying to research it myself. To research it myself would mean attempting to do somebody else's job, which is just unhelpful for everyone.
There is a line between "somebodies job to know" and you just being too lazy to look at the documentation/do basic research.
That experience is better characterized as unprofessional, then. ;)
The examples in the article are questions the AI did not know the answer to though. So hardly "basic beginner"
Laziness and "Memetic Imprinting" of the inevitability where the ultimate attack vectors.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
IMO, its a little jab/playful when a friend sends a LMGTFY link and its really disrespectful if a colleuage sends it
I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing.
If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up.
edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.
The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good.
The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...
With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
If you feel the need to hide how you got the answer then you know something is wrong.
> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.
> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible
This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
> And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop.
Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".
Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them.
Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.
"conflict management" before "try to work out how I'd offended them."
Let me Claude that for you.
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>If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.
If you tell somebody to go google it, you are being incredibly rude 95% of the time. That is pretty widely understood
Sure, but asking someone something that should be easily answered in a few seconds is also rude.
Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress
I highly doubt you never ask questions that you could’ve looked up yourself. “Go Google it” translates to “this isn’t worth my time,” which is a pretty rude way to be.
What I'm trying to say is that the cost of answering the question might look like 30 seconds to the person asking.
What really happened is, you context switch, answer a mundane question, and now spend 30 minutes to get back to the mental state that you were in that made you productive
But sometimes it isn't worth my time. If I'm being asked something about what I'm working on, fair enough. If I'm being asked what a command-line switch for curl does (and that's not related to what I'm doing) the total cost is less to look at the docs, rather then asking me to look at the docs.
Not weighing my time and effort into the equation is rude on behalf of the asker.
Nobody said you must answer any and all questions sent your way or that everyone is allowed to dismiss the value of your time. We’re veering away from the original discussion here.
if they aren't presenting proof of doing research or they don't have the benefit of doubt (e.g. a new hire, etc.) they're being rude by not doing the research in the first place.
I’m sorry but nobody behaves this way. Nobody sits around in every conversation showing their homework/proving they tried to find an answer before asking somebody else. It is incredibly common to just ask somebody a question and expect an answer regardless if you could’ve looked up yourself.
It’s important to not make everybody do your research for you, but what you’re describing is not at all typical.
I'm not particularly sorry, but when I ask questions out of the blue over email or chat, I always explain what I've already tried. The two exceptions are when it's urgent, in which case I briefly explain the urgency ("prod is down did you deploy just now?"), or when it's part of an ongoing conversation.
If this is not typical for you, then you are surrounded by people who disrespect you and your time.
> I'm not particularly sorry
Yes that seems rather consistent with your attitude.
As for the rest, you are drastically narrowing the scope
It's not typical but it's how you should personally act.
You aren't going to be able to convince others to be upstanding coworkers that actually give a damn, but you can be that person yourself.
steelman, don't strawman. pushback on someone being rude by requesting something they could have looked up doesn't look like "let me google that for you" 95% of the time. it's far more likely to come out as "I'm not sure, honestly. I worked on X, but I didn't really need to get in to Y, so I'm not as familiar. Personally, I'd just do a google search, since I'm a little behind on that."
not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.
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The worst part about this to me is if someone routes a response through AI, I have no idea what they, personally, are trying to tell me that they may have included specifically in their prompt, what is hallucination, and what is something in-between.
It makes it hard to pick apart hallucinations from the miscommunications and disagreements. Picking apart every single point and treating it with the same tact you have to treat human output with, while still accounting for the fact that it could be a hallucination, takes an extremely skewed amount of effort compared to the effort of sending someone AI output. The worst part is, it's probably going to be pasted right back into the LLM chat box.
It's astonishingly bad form to send someone AI output, and this is only one of the reasons.
> that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
I've seen this happening a lot in the recent times: people who are generally not very good at their job tend to offload disproportionately more to LLMs, and it's so damn annoying that their incompetence now comes sugarcoated in lengthy LLM babble for the sake of desperately trying to sound convincing. This is wasting me high single digit hours every week, not to mention the frustration of battling an asymmetrical fight: it takes them seconds to produce something that will take me minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
Edit: typo -le+me
I spent a bunch of time on a task that we've chatted about for WEEKS.
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.
I had a deeply maddening experience at one job where somebody was reviewing a Typescript PR of mine. In their first copy-pasted review there was a suggestion that I do something slightly differently; it wasn't something I had a strong opinion on and they were more familiar with the codebase, so I made the suggested change to just keep the peace and get the change out.
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.
Someone does that to me and they go on the spreadsheet and I work around them every time in future. It's not worth interacting with those people.
That's probably the goal
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
You might get fired for still using spreadsheets. ;)
Ha. I refer back to my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278108
Option B would involve being incredibly verbose and burying prompt injections in your question.
The sabot of the AI era. Love it.
When your spreadsheet gets full, will you change jobs or change tactic?
I get that this is supposed to be unproductive snark, but the real answer is probably to then sort the spreadsheet and assign a tier system of how annoying and useless each person in it is.
We need to go deeper: ELO and matchmaking to keep the most annoying coworkers contained playing with each other
It was not snark (an uncharitable read I must say). The point was everyone is being forced to use AI. So keeping a shitlist is going to be a very, very short term solution.
I'll have a peaceful life until it gets to my yearly management review of my teams.
Switch to a DB
That seems like a lot of bother. If I hit the 1,048,576 row limit I'd start a new column.
I think they own the company at that point.
Letting AI answer a personal question for you feels deeply disrespectful to the person asking the question, but also to yourself; you're signalling you don't know anything. If I wanted an AI answer, I could ask it myself. I'm not asking AI, I'm asking you. If you're going to give me an AI answer, it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything.
> it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything
I suppose it's possible that was the goal all along...
Asking a question which is easily google-able/answered by an LLM is also disrespectful of that other person time, not to mention interruption/flow state/etc
this was a thing in the past: LetMeGoogleThatForYou
Yeah but that was an explicit sarcastic response. I guess we need a 'letmechatgptthatforyou' link to show explicit sarcasm
it already exists! https://letmegptthatforyou.com/
The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines.
- Louis de Bonald
Written in 1802, before the Jacquard loom. I wonder what machines he had in mind? "Modern administrations, busy trying to provoke the invention of machines that can multiply human labor and make it easier," apparently.
I guess this sort of thing: https://www.panmurehouse.org/media/0j0ljqdl/pin-factory.jpg (that is an approximate illustration of Adam Smith's pin factory.)
He goes on to advocate for large families full of peasants doing manual labor, praises the ministers of the church and state, and says that painters and bankers are unnecessary. https://archive.org/details/lgislationprim00bona/page/372/mo...
Brilliantly poignant. Before AI, I don't think this would've resonated with me, but it sure does now.
Most people are not self-sufficient entities. 10% are so unable to think that they are simply not able to be a net positive in any job, it takes more energy/time to micromanage them, even for simple tasks, than they put back into the business. 50% are incapable of real innovation.
Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.
I agree with your assessment of people. I find that there is a lot of overlap with this old quote:
AI is the perfect product for that third group.However I disagree in that I don't want to "talk to AI" either. Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
> Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Heh. It's a believable taxonomy, but it makes me suspect it could often have the corollary:
> Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
In my experience their prompt is usually a verbatim copy-paste of the message I sent them, personal info and all. They simply put zero thought in it.
> I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
I didn't quite get this, you ask them to send you their prompt? Does this disincentivize them from sending AI responses in the future?
P.S. I always found it ironic that this quote does the very thing it classifies as small-minded - discusses people :)
Here's an example that may help:
Their prompt: "write a polite and friendly email message to turn down an invitation because I already have plans at that time."
What I want them to send me: "thank you but I already have plans"
I don't want 2-paragraphs of milquetoast slop.
P.S. Ideas can involve people.
There's something refreshing and endearing about my wife's family not using AI at all (at least, not intentionally). My in-laws don't really know how to Google and my wife will do interesting stuff like Google an actor's or movie's IMDB and scroll through the list to figure out who a specific character was in a show (instead of Googling show name character name).
I can see that that could be kinda fun because it's not about the answer, it's about the discovery. AI and even smarter searches removes the sense of discovery. You'll never get to see "oh did you know that such and such actor was also in such as such movie in 2010??" if you just skip to the answer with AI.
That said, when they ask me a question that I don't immediately know the answer to, I'll use AI, ask it for sources, check those sources. In these cases it's more of a smarter Google search — just like couldn't always just use the first search result of Google in 2010, you can't always just use the AI response in 2026. Gotta be extra careful too because even the AI's sources can be AI.
I’ve seen this at work and it drives me nuts. I don’t value my time extraordinarily highly but even still I find it disrespectful to offload my question and make me read something they didn’t even bother to read.
Same argument can be used against you: why do you bother someone with a question and want them to dedicate time to answer it for you when that question is easily google-able or answered by an LLM?
It costs you seconds to ask the question, and you want them to invest minutes in answering it?
You invest seconds in a question, they invest seconds in the answer. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Usually when people are asking questions it isn't that they don't know how to find a possible solution at all, it's that they don't feel they know enough to evaluate the correctness of the solutions they may find, and they think you do.
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Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.
A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.
There is a difference between "how do I do X" and "I tried googling/asking GPT and I don't know which answer from A/B/C to pick"
Discussing things with colleagues is also how you build collaborative networks. I'm trying to get out of the habit of searching for all information myself and engaging in more discussions with coworkers. I'm perfectly capable of searching information out myself. If I'm asking a question, it's a sign of respect, and shows that I am interested in the person's experience with the topic, and in nuance and context. I want to learn from them. If you offload the answer to AI, it's disrespectful to yourself more than anything--you don't even value your own expertise!
I just want them to tell me if they don't know.
It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.
Saw this in a PR review yesterday. Reviewer made comments about the reasonableness of a solution and alternatives to consider. Submitter posted an LLM response that gives zero additional context about the PR. As the submitter, you should be the one with the context, not the reviewer, and having an LLM answer doesn't provide that additional context.
Maybe they already did and the answer was in some way lacking so they asked a peer.
Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.
> Same argument can be used against you
That’s false equivalence and I think you know that.
I was talking to someone about a possible clutch issue on their car and they pinpointed to with a screenshot saying my diagnosis was wrong. I've been a car guy all my life and so I am not some amateur. I just wished them good luck and went about my business.
6 hours later guess who is stranded in the middle of the road? Not me.
It's also very surprising to me. This whole deal where humans instantly started taking AI answers at face value, as sources standing on their own legs, or delegating their own mind to a third party, not even a human, but an algorithm.
It's like they're just... Fine?
AI became their god over a few months and it's... Fine?
I thought I knew humanity pretty well and I'm rarely surprised at human large scale behavior these days as I'm hitting 50 myself, but this took me by surprise.
It feels like commoditising intelligence because they think an AI screenshot is some kind of currency of truth. The truth doesn't even really matter anymore, its just whatever ChatGPT says it is
I had to sit through a ~45 minute meeting once where an electrician and his boss sat and presented literal chat screenshots to justify their positions opposing or agreeing with a repair I requested.
I had specified some high-temperature electrical components to repair a broken part of a high-temperature circuit, placed the PO, received the parts, and gave them to one of our electricians with a work order. I did the research myself sans AI, read data sheets, investigated alternative materials, etc.
The electrician asked chatgpt "Will PEEK shrink tubing survive 400*F?" because apparently he doesn't trust me, and chatGPT told him no. He complained to his boss who immediately asked chatGPT the same question, and it told him yes it was fine.
Squarely within the top 3 most exhausting meetings of my career.
I'm ramming my head against a wall in sympathy.
Interesting that the boss immediately asked the same question. So they're aware that AI gives nondeterministic answers and yet still use it.
More likely they're already an AI/human hybrid, and that is just an innate part of their thinking process now.
I have the same experience! When I asked someone for help, they (on my face), opened claude and started asking it.
I recount it here: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch
It's at this point you have zero empathy for someone and just shame them personally and report to some higher up.
I can (very marginally) understand running the argument over an LLM if you've difficulties communicating in the language, but never copy paste
I have been saying for a while that when AI gets smarter than us we will be like 5 year old children totally dependent on our AI mommy and daddy to interpret and understand the vast and mysterious world of things that are too complicated or obscure for us to comprehend. We'll spend all day experiencing the natural world and watching kids shows. Any hard questions go to mommy and daddy.
At least we'll be able to tell people our authentic emotions without AI, and AI will listen to our emotions, much like parents listen to their children's feelings.
I feel like we went through something similar to this early in the era when Google's search engine was new. People posted engine results, but pretty quickly, people got tired of doing that, and would say google it. Part of that was if the answer was as easy as a google search away - the social validation became lower to negative if you just provided low effort copypasta service.
Now, response of "google it" could be take many ways depending on where you are in a conversation, it could be a range of being polite to quite rude. Google it could mean "I don't know, but I think thats findable on google", or it could mean "Im not going to help you". I wonder if we will settle back to having a real conversation with "ai it"/"google it" occasionally.
And then we were sending those "let me google it for you". I just wanted to find the site again and, surprise it has the GPT part now ^^ but on the joke side.
https://letmegpt.com
Then came ChaCha trying to monetize it.
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And the killer killer issue is that even if you would manage to talk to them, their opinion will be shaped but what AI told them and AI opinion will always be perceived as superior, your real world experience and instinct will be disregarded quickly.
I remember a moment at the very onset when chatgpt was just opened to the public. A manager sent us a congratulations text chatGPT had prepared for his kid's graduation from high school. He said that he was not much of a writer and that was miles better than he could have said. We had a discussion about the moral side of that (though moral might not be the word), pointing out that bad words that come from a genuine place and required effort from you are better than great words that are manufactured by a robot. He didn't see the issue.
I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.
And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.
At least to me, this seems like a pretty logical progression based on how education is handled today.
We teach children from a very early age that there's always a right answer and that someone smarter/older/etc knows it. They're told to ask that person and largely memorize the answer for a test.
With LLMs we're being told they are, or will soon be, as smart or smarter than any human. Its no surprise to me that people with access to LLMs that can already answer a question would just blindly use it and trust the response.
It doesn't feel so different to me than the early days of google, when google worked pretty well - people often would say things like "do you want me to google that for you?" the implication being you were wasting their time by asking them a question they could find the answer to themselves.
The major difference now though, is when you get sent a chatGPT response, the implicit question often is now "Can you check this is correct for me?" which is exhausting and a little rude.
Re >> Can you check this is correct for me?
That's the part that really gets to me. It's one thing to say Hey friend, you could have quickly gotten the right answer yourself. It's another thing to say Hey buddy, you asked me a question which I COULD answer, but instead of giving you the CORRECT answer, I'm going to give you AN answer, and let you figure out if it's correct <-- with the unspoken expectation that if it is the wrong answer and I run with it because you gave it to me, it's still my fault.
"This is the killer issue"
I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?
Possibly just a case of having seen "AI-language" too often and just starting to use it themselves?
This is the question nobody's asking.
It's not just about the question--it's also about what's in the answer.
“cognitive surrender”
It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
Implicit in the human to human to AI conversational chain is the second person’s assumption that the first person didn’t think to ask AI.
The mere fact of asking another human a question (absent a strong pattern of behavior to the contrary) should be strong evidence the interlocutor wants a human answer! Sending an AI answer should have the same social valence as sending a lmgtfy link; appropriate for bad actors but a pretty insulting response to an earnest question.
I FEEL this. It's empowered lazy devs to defer thought and accountability. To some degree, I understand. It softens the imposter syndrome feeling one can get. But, I see it as a character barrier; not a moral one.
This behavior from people is the one thing that makes me wonder if we all wouldn't be better off just chucking AI off the proverbial cliff. It should be useful tool for enhancing the tasks we have to do, not something to fully replace thinking and human interaction completely.
It's not that sad, it'll probably go away. Anyone remember when Google first got popular and for like 5-10 years after everyone did the same with that, there was even the "let me google that for you" meme + site.
It was forgotten. Time heals all wounds.
Absolutely. But I’m afraid people are forced to do this because management wants to see AI usage otherwise they’re gonna go on the chopping block. Leadership is ultimately to blame.
It is the ultimate cop-out to avoid having any involvement in anything. "AI said so..." then shrugs or more AI answers, ultimately removing oneself from any form of commitment to an opinion or knowledge (even partial).
That's when you realize you're not important enough to talk to a human.
It's very insulting. I don't need them to talk to an AI. I talk to AI all day already. If all a person is doing is forwarding messages to AI why do we need them? Just have an AI do their job.
> I talk to AI all day already.
> If all a person is doing is forwarding messages to AI why do we need them? Just have an AI do their job.
Why do we need your job? If you talk to AI all day already, why shouldn't we fire you and replace you with AI?
Off the cuff analysis by AI is often wrong. Lately I've been feeling bad for Casey Handmer whose latest blog post contains an illustration with the caption
Like what did you expect?On the other hand, I think it's perfectly good that latent natural idiots who happened to seem like normal people among us would just drop their masks and disclose themselves in such an obvious way by delegating what little left of their brain power to the artificial one.
I agree, with the caveat that when your pointy-haired-boss doesn't realise they're the idiots and you're not the idiot...
This was the main thing I took from the movie Her. Wild to see it materialize so quickly.
OK I am bracing for the downvotes..
What about when the llm is smarter than the person? Sometimes I get material that is so bad I wish they had had AI do it. Then it would be poor to mediocre.
There was an episode of the podcast “Question Everything “ where they talked about how LLM s can sometimes talk people out of conspiracy theories by patiently refuting the arguments with facts. There have been academic studies on this.
I think people hate AI because it is often mediocre and flawed but sometimes it’s replacing humans that are inept.
If the LLM is smarter than the person, the person cannot look at the output and judge to see whether it is correct.
True, but that's a people problem.
I thought it was pretty well-established that conspiracists aren't deterred with facts, and that their commitments to the conspiracy theory are essentially emotional and/or in-group identitarian?
You should definitely listen to this podcast which is an interview with a Professor of Psychology at Columbia. He also thought what you thought-- that you can't convince a Q-Anon type-- and they were actually testing something else. When they found out that 25% of people who believed conspiracy theories actually changed their mind after three exchanges with an LLM.
They repeated the test and the results were replicable. (But still only about 25%, but that is something.)
This made me think: I grew up in a world where there was a flawed but consensus view of the world, its problems, institutions motivations. This came from a common mass media. Maybe getting our answers from AI will lead us to a new (inevitably flawed or even bad) consensus. Weird.
Source: https://play.cdnstream1.com/s/kcrw/question-everything/can-a...
Very interesting. Thank you for that, and I say so with due recognition that my response wasn't really aimed at the central idea of your comment. Thank you for humouring it anyway!
I don’t think all ai generated responses are bad though. They need to be brief. People need to iterate on the content and understand their response.
Oneshotting a response just because ChatGPT said so is super annoying.
I will a lot of times write and email and give it to an LLM to soften it or round it out since I have a bad habit of being overly direct.
My "favorite" as a sysadmin is when I explain why something should be done differently, or shouldn't be done at all, and I get back "but ChatGPT said..." followed by a no-context, incorrect AI slop paragraph.
One of the more dangerous things LLMs have enabled is people feeling like they are suddenly experts on topics they would have never touched otherwise.
>There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
It makes you feel that way because it is that way. They're not self-sufficient.
Not trying to defend ai but I observed another mode: what used to be bored dev chats where people avoided topics or started feuds, now it's "well Claude suggests...". It's not great but it's a short form of improvement somehow. (Sure I'd prefer passionate convos steering toward innovation, but that's been a rare sight in my career)
No it isn't an improvement. If I wanted the output of an LLM instead of a thinking, smart, real human, I would have simply asked an LLM. Nearly nobody who asks humans questions WANTS to get an LLM answer, that's simply not why people ask other people.
I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker.
But if I'm the askee, I honestly don't know how to navigate those waters yet.
If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?
Do I say "Have you tried X?", where X is the thing the LLM suggested? Should I pretend that I did not ask the LLM?
In the past, I could find some source and send them the link, and I wouldn't assume the person had exhausted the entire Google index. Sending a link isn't the same as LMGTFY.
Analogously, while "Claude says X" does sound as rude as lmgtfy, disclosing that your suggestion was found via llm is more akin to linking to a source, or "take this with a grain of salt".
I think as long as nobody can tell you've used an LLM, it's fine. If you use an LLM to get your info and then respond, that's normal. Copy pasting or going "claude said" and then more or less just regurgitating is different, because you are no longer involved.
If I ask you, I want your thoughts, based on whatever you can find or know. It's difficult to articulate for me, honestly, but I hope it makes sense.
> If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?
Correct. you should not share. maybe say "I don't know. Have you tried asking claude?"
>I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker.
Golden rule. Treat others the way you wish to be treated.
Exactly, people want to talk to AI when they choose to, as a tool, but not reaching out to other human beings. There is no easy way of solving this sadly
Why does this read like written by AI?
If this is already happening among adults, what's left for the current or next generation? Kids that can no longer think by themselves? I believe this is really scary.
This says more about you than the other person. Some people like giving good answers and are less concerned about being the source themselves.
I'll sometimes do the exact thing you are talking about. The reason is that I basically know the answer, but also know there is a nicer explanation to the question. I'll type in the question, often iterate a few times, get an answer that I basically knew but couldn't explain as clearly, and respond with it.
Humans haven't been "self sufficient" in 100,000 years. We've been building/using tools and specializing since the start. If you went back just a few hundred years some people (the version of you basically) would be profoundly sad you couldn't build your own house.
One of the reasons my co-founder (CEO) and I (CTO) are now going different ways. AI slop bombs are one of the most disrespectful things you can do to another human. Well, just my opinion.
It depends on the situation. If you were just talking then sure. Pretty rude to just check out of the conversation and replace the human you were talking to with an LLM.
That's sad, but you know what's infuriating? It's humans who come at you sarcastic and dismissive and without spending any effort actually engaging with what you've said in good faith. Imagine writing a well reasoned out post or comment, only to get a sarcastic dismissive literal oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
Matching the amount of effort that others around me are putting in is pretty important to me now. Don't want to end up trying too hard for people who don't give a shit.
Is that a feeling you battled a lot growing up or something? It's very specific, and not actually very connected or sensible.
It feels insulting when discussing something serious, they respond back with a highly inaccurate ChatGPT response.
Where are these people?
I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
These people don't know the answer, but they are trying (generally) to be helpful. The former reality of the article's author would be posting and getting no replies and/or links to the wrong answer you already read.
> The former reality of the article's author would be posting and getting no replies and/or links to the wrong answer you already read.
Both of these are preferable.
I’ve distanced myself from a close friend group chat over the past few years as they seem to be more and more like this. They all work in tech at various FAANG companies, and I just mentally hate engaging anymore as it all has turned into “let me prove you wrong in 10s or find nuance in this conversation I don’t already have” by referencing AI. It’s like the Google search nerd snipe crowd 2.0, and I’m not entertaining them. I’ve had to flat out tell them they are wrong as they source a clearly inaccurate AI response, which is even more strain on the friendship.
I feel your pain. I also get "chatgpt/gemini/grok... CONFIRMED blah blah" as if these are ground truth. What is even more sad is it sometimes mixed with "from first principles...".
It’s sad. I just expect better from my friends, but this group chat is also full of friends who are chronically online, so I fear they are just so infatuated with AI as it seems they are constantly considering it at every point of their day.
Seems have to make a face to face appointment, without any online devices in hand.
I can't stand this at all. People are becoming more and more sheepish. They don't know when things are harder than they actually are and the dunning-kruger effect is happening at a pace unbeknownst to our culture on nearly all surfaces.
The stupidity and helplessness are by design.
My stomach churns when I see an e-mail obviously written by AI. It just comes off so disingenuous and disrespectful, as if they couldn't be bothered to respond to me themselves but instead had a machine do it. Even worse, it's usually very verbose, wasting my time further to have to read through all the slop.
Well, I used to Google, and read what real people wrote on the subject, and then answer from what I've found.
Remember when "Google" used to be a synonym for "search"?
This is just a glitch in time. It’ll be agents talking to agents. We won’t be able to keep up.
Hopefully such flagrant usage will be priced out at some point.
I don't claim to know the context in which that AI slop communication happens. But when people are really interested in what you ask them, they usually give their own opinions in their own voice.
What? This is patronizing and maybe a bit insulting.
If you call a helpdesk agent - they have to query the system to pull up your case.
The UX is a bit different now.
That's it.
Your 'anthropomorphising projectION' here is the issue, not the person using basic tools to help you - as they always have.
This is the most infuriating part of dealing with support engineers at companies i've paid giant bills with. They didn't answer my question, i get a wall of text that i read 4 times before i figure out it says nothing, and nothing seems to get fixed.
When they do that (e.g. in customer support) I sometimes do the same. I explain to the AI what my end goal is, and then let it deal with the answers.
There was an insightful post here on HN, a few weeks ago, about "AI hygiene". One of the recommendations is: never share raw AI output with anyone. It's like showing your dirty underwear.
Show them your distillation, your final recommendation, but not the raw output. That's useless, they could have prompted the AI themselves, you're not adding anything but being the middleman. At least share your prompt instead of the output!
I hate it so much. It's one thing to lean on AI for complex or toilsome work, but to openly supplant your own ability to interact thoughtfully with another person. It should be embarrassing.
Frankly it’s just incredibly disrespectful. If I ask for your take on an issue, I want your words and thoughts. You can use an LLM, but vet the results and actually have a hand in it. Otherwise why am I even asking? I don’t need an intermediary between me and ChatGPT
Overly dramatic. It’s not that deep dude
Yeah, we know it's all atoms and entropy and dust to dust and the heat death of the universe in the end, and nothing means anything. But during our short time living in human society and trying to find meaning in our existence, this cuts pretty deep to the heart of that quest.
You're welcome for the downvote.
I asked the person responsible for a new integration at work (nominally a Director level person, with a bit of title inflation going on) about a feature that didn't do what we wanted.
They answered with something that looked to be AI slop, and very verbose too. When I politely said "those instructions reference links and buttons that I cannot find in the UI, could you please tell me where to find them?" the Director simply replied "I cannot find them either, disregard. The feature doesn't support what you want after all."
This means they simply prompted my question to the builtin AI and copied back to our conversation without verifying it made sense.
That's the future we must deal with now. A sort of broken "LMGTFY" that only provides wrong answers.
On JIRA ticket discussion threads now involve the liaison for another team copypasta-ing LLM slop as a comment. Makes me feel like Will Hunting. What, is that it or do you have an original thought you'd like to contribute?
This is truly infuriating. "Have you asked AI? - no I thought I'd see if anyone had a real answer from experience first. Someone I can trust. AI should be the fallback, not the first call. Watching people just regurgitate AI responses with zero understanding they've just copy/pasted total BS is becoming far too common in work environments. We've become utterly helpless as a society and things continue to get worse year after year. Whether it's helicopter parenting, inability to navigate anywhere (even places you go every day) without GPS, abject fear at asking someone for help, inability to have a conversation without ending it immediately by Googling...etc. The biggest issue is you can't really fight back now. Regardless of what you do personally everybody else is doing the other thing and you can't avoid it.
I noticed this on the ffmpeg dev list, where one of the core devs was too lazy to write his own proposal and instead used AI slop to autogenerate it, then send it to other people. He will not understand why people don't want to get spammed down via AI slop.
Nothing feels quite as good as getting dumb and drooling literally. Being intelligent is painful, it’s the most painful state of existence. You see everything with mind bending clarity. The inane nonsense of it all
No wonder the mind instinctively recoils and wants to smoothen itself
For past ten years my life consisted mainly of desperately trying to be dumb and happy. AI is really good tool for that. Just outsource the thinking until the organ atrophies, hopefully permanently. some drugs and the life gets actually even pleasurable.
To be aware is a curse, no wonder desperate attempts to lift it take place en masse
If you were so smart, you'd find a way to be happy that includes your intellect.
Curbing the suffering by numbing yourself is seeking comfort in retreating to the local optimum instead of continuing to search for a better one.
Pfft.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799035/
Smart people drink and smoke more; not less, potentially to self sooth/deal with the oppressive reality they find themselves in.
That certainly must be very comfortable opinion to have. People truly love their illusions that allow to smoothly glance over giant uncomfortable spikes of reality under the balancing line of life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function at all in this circus. We would just lie down in cave paralysed by dread, ending the homo sapiens brand of intelligence the moment it started
You could hit your head against a brick wall repeatedly. Tries that yet?
actually, yes.
I also tried banging it on my desk. The desk was better, because you get a bit of a drum sound and you cause yourself less damage.
Also, the desk is closer. Brick walls require gettting up and walking somewhere first.
Weed is much less painful and the effect is the same
a bit too simplistic for my tastes. I wouldn't call being inebriated the same as being dumb; but I would absolutely agree that being inebriated is way more fun, easy, and fulfilling than being sober. I would choose being inebriated over being sober almost every time, regardless of the mechanism of inebriation.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
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It's like asking someone to deadlift a dresser and move it to another room, even though they have a dolly right next to them. Should they be able to? It depends. Should you expect them to? No, that's just odd.
It's more like asking someone to use a toilet when they have a perfectly good set of pants they're wearing, already on them. Thinking is what makes you human, don't give it up so easily.
No, it's like asking someone "Would you like to have a coffee?" and they responds by pointing at a Starbucks and saying "Sure, go over there, they have coffee you can buy".
Well, it's subtly different than a kid calling mum - kids generally do that because they're insecure, an adult using ChatGPT to answer simply can't be bothered to turn on their brain...
You had an good, psychologically plausible explanation for some individuals to over-rely on AI and... dismissed it and called them stupid. Adults are not special, they are mostly kids that got older.
Actually I didn't call them stupid, I called them lazy (and also inconsiderate, but mostly lazy).
I think you might be underestimating the level of insecurity in the average adult ("I only used AI to refine my own thoughts...", "I only used AI to correct my typos...").
Sounds pretty unsubtle to me. It’s possible they’re insecure as adults as well? Or they want to save time or brain power for other work and don’t see the inherent rudeness in it?