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.