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I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams

• gumby271 6mo ago
  I've run into a similar thing where I'll be cc'd on support tickets with one of our customer support agents and they'll then reply to me with what is clearly an ai summary of the single email from the customer that I can already read. I do think they're trying to be helpful, but it's hard to not feel like they think I'm a child or an idiot. Back in the day we agreed that Googling something for someone was rude (letmegooglethatforyou.com being a good example), I don't know why ai summaries and slop aren't understood in the same way.
  • asib 6mo ago
    That’s not the intent of letmegooglethatforyou. It’s a pointed way of telling the recipient they should do the bare minimum research on their own before asking someone else for help. It’s not about being angry that someone told you something they found from a cursory google search
    • notatoad 6mo ago
      You’re right, but Lmgtfy links are incredibly similar in tone to sending somebody ai output. Lmgtfy was a passive-aggressive (but not really passive) way to say “hey, are you too dumb to google this?”. Sending somebody ai output feels the same to me - the message you’re sending to the recipient is “here, you’re obviously too dumb to ask an LLM about this yourself”. Except some people don’t seem to realize that’s the message they’re sending
  • furyofantares 6mo ago
    letmegooglethatforyou.com was to let someone know that not searching for themselves is rude - it was not because it was rude to search for someone else (it wasn't and isn't)
    • gumby271 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • eloisius 6mo ago
    I think it’s related to the same kind of psychology responsible for road rage. When we use a tool enough, we start to perceive it as an extension of ourselves, for better or worse. I think people that use AI to do all their writing or revision have legitimately lost the sense that it’s the output of a tool. They feel like they are helping and don’t see the different between personally writing a message for you or copying the output of Claude to you.
• stavros 6mo ago
  Well, sure, it's very new. Soon we'll adapt and it'll be just another tool we're using.
• Aurornis 6mo ago
  > She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw. LLMs came along and erased that assumption. Now you don't know if that e-mail, that 12-page design document, the 100 or 1000 line PR, or those 10 Jira tickets were written by someone who invested a lot of their own time into producing something, or if they had their AI subscription generate something that looked plausible. You have to actually read and process the work, which takes 100 times more effort than it took them to make it. For people in the working world who saw the workplace as a game of min-maxing their effort against the appearance of being a valuable contributor, LLMs are the perfect shortcut: They can now generate the appearance of doing a lot of work with no more than a few lines of asking an LLM to produce documents. If anyone spends the 30 minutes to review the AI slop from their 15-second prompt, they'll copy your feedback into ChatGPT and send another document over with the fixes. Now they've even captured you into doing their work for them! For teams or even entire companies that were relying on appearances of activity as a proxy for contributions, this is going to be a difficult transition. Everyone e-mail job worker in the world just received a tool that will generate the appearance of doing their job for them and even possibly be plausibly correct most of the time. One person can generate volumes of design documents, Jira tickets, and even copy and paste witty responses into the company Slack and appear to be the most engaged and dedicated employee by volume while doing less actual work than ever before. I think teams that already had good review cultures with managers who cared about the output rather than the metrics are doing fine because anyone even a little bit engaged can spot the AI copy-and-paste employees with even a little inspection. The lazy managers who relied on skimming documents and plotting number of PRs or lines of code changed are in for a rude awakening when they discover the employees dominating their little games are the ones doing the most damage to the team.
  • ceejayoz 6mo ago
    > LLMs came along and erased that assumption. Now you don't know if that e-mail, that 12-page design document, the 100 or 1000 line PR, or those 10 Jira tickets were written by someone who invested a lot of their own time into producing something, or if they had their AI subscription generate something that looked plausible. Oh, we know. It's pretty clear in many cases.
• Avicebron 6mo ago
  My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate about something.
  • threecheese 6mo ago
    I follow the same strategy, but loosely - I need those emdashes to signal that I’m using the tools.
    • rdtsc 6mo ago
      That’s my latest joke — that we’ll have to pretend like we used the tools so they can feel validated they’ve spent all this money on hyped up technology. So, yes, it’s em-dashes and “it’s not just this, it’s that …” so they can hopefully leave us alone.
      • xp84 6mo ago
        I remember feeling embarrassed one time that I used a very early GPT thing to help organize perf reviews for employees from the various bullet points I had written for each (I had a lot of direct reports). But in current world, I assume I’d be praised for doing so.
    • nytesky 6mo ago
      I actually regularly used emdashes in my writing —- my kids complain I write like AI in fact — and now I have to consciously remove them. Likewise, I often used literary flourish and pleasantries like that above article about email decompression; I’m from the south so I think structured formality comes with territory. I do think using LLM to turn notes and bullets into narratives should be considered no different than rendering CSV text into an excel format, just making it more digestible by recipient.
  • 6mo ago
• Forgeties79 6mo ago
  My current bar is “if you know I’m expecting to hear from a person don’t paste unedited ChatGPT outputs and hit send.” Everybody wants to send out the efforts of their corner-cutting, but nobody wants to receive them. Most people know when they are doing it. If you feel the need to obscure your LLM usage, it means you didn’t put enough of your own voice and work into the final draft and you need to do something about that.
  • bandrami 6mo ago
    The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.
    • 2wdfsd 6mo ago
      Not quite. Ultimately the lions-share of income of model producer's is coming from firms. Firms are only going to pay out to model producers if they are getting more in excess of the cost of financing projects over time. If a firm does not see this happen, they reduce their spend on tokens. Simple. Its a whole lot more nuanced than some shitty game theory.
      • somewhatgoated 6mo ago
        “Firms are only making perfectly rational decisions that result in meaningful real outcomes” - not my experience. Firms waste literally billions on some bullshit that gets them nothing.
    • Forgeties79 6mo ago
      >the market always finds a way That may be the case but every day LLM’s feel less like the next big thing and more like 3D printing. Here to stay, but not nearly as ubiquitous and earth shattering as people made it out to be. If I had to guess right now, I would say LLM’s are more significant than 3D printers, but less significant than the Internet.
• erentz 6mo ago
  Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.
  • trollbridge 6mo ago
    Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.
    • Sgt_Apone 6mo ago
      Might as well donate money to the AI companies at this point.
    • erentz 6mo ago
      But now even this is just producing more information and requires more work both of you and of the original sender.
    • stoorafa 6mo ago
      LLMs are great at decompression [1] [1] https://jabde.com/2026/02/02/utilizing-llms-as-a-data-decompression-scheme/ https://jabde.com/2026/02/02/utilizing-llms-as-a-data-decomp...
      • dr_sausages 6mo ago
        Nice article! I wrote something similar this year too after seeing the 5-bullet-points of information stretched out with AI homologous slop too many times. https://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-01-26-jpeg-compression-for-thought/ https://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-01-26-jpeg-compression-for...
    • 6mo ago
• milkshakes 6mo ago
  you could always do this: https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n.aiwritten.jpg https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...
• figassis 6mo ago
  And it’s too soon to have these norms. Employers today are willing to part with them at the hint of the slimmest efficiency gains, you’ll waste time. So I think the correct response today is wait for it to settle. Norms will form on their own.
• nlawalker 6mo ago
  You have to call it out when you see it, politely and charitably. "Hey, thanks! This is a great overview, and I actually asked ChatGPT before asking here and got a lot of the same information, but what I'm really looking for is..."
  • stingraycharles 6mo ago
    This is what I do, slightly more explicitly saying “just be the real you”. About 50% of colleagues take it well. The other 50% don’t understand the problem, and don’t understand when (and when not) to use AI. They are at high risk. Employees using ChatGPT to renegotiate their salary are showing a serious lack of cognitive awareness.
  • vasco 6mo ago
    "If I wanted to receive copy paste from a bot I wouldn't message you, why are you trying to sneak this in?" You reminded me of American colleagues that lie and say things are good when they are bad lol. Unable to be straight to the point. You're upset at the waste of time yet you thank them?
    • zeroonetwothree 6mo ago
      Just curious: would you consider yourself autistic?
      • vasco 6mo ago
        No, just like to work with eastern Europeans and got used to their communication. Now this stuff just jumps out at me.
      • luckylion 6mo ago
        Is that a tell? Sounds very much like my reaction to that behavior, but I always assumed it's because I'm german.
        • sunrunner 6mo ago
• scruple 6mo ago
  Yeah I write prompts asking it to misspell a few words, break a few grammar rules, forget to capitalize once in a while, miss some punctuation once in a while. No one will ever catch on.
• Mars008 6mo ago
  I've seen manager obviously reading copilot's advises as his own thoughts on meetings.
  • adastra22 6mo ago
    copilot?!
    • fg137 6mo ago
      Microsoft Copilot is used as the default "general" AI tool at most companies you have heard of
  • FireBeyond 6mo ago
    At a previous position I got frustrated at a manager who'd characterize multiple team members, including myself, I suspect, as "creating AI slop" when he was posting multiple times a week about how his Jira tickets, PRDs etc, were all being "supercharged" (ugh) with AI. Meanwhile, I was absolutely using AI, but not to write documents but to do first pass critical reviews, the "what am I missing here, what haven't I accounted for here?" but the writing was all my own.
• analog31 6mo ago
  In an ideal workplace, one could sit down with the colleague and have her experience untangling the slop, perhaps by a process akin to pair programming. Sometimes I wonder if we're letting people graduate from school with no real grasp of the purpose of written communication. School strips writing of purpose, and creates artificial purposes such as using AI to combine words in order for AI to assign it a good grade. Even before the AI era, most human generated text was not worth reading.
• Rekindle8090 6mo ago
  [dead]
• otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
  You can use an LLM to fix spelling and grammar errors. You don't need to generate slop. (Cloud providers sell LLMs as "robot information workers" when they're actually "calculators for text".)
• andai 6mo ago
  Well no, you're supposed to copy-paste it into ChatGPT, ask for executive summary, and recover an approximation of the original input. Duh :)
• scotty79 6mo ago
  > She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. What you are seeing is a seed of the future of communication. Communication is one of the hardest things people do. The goal it to pass idea from the sender to recipient in a manner that is least lossy. Look at how many things need to be aligned for that to even barely succeed. You have to speak the same language, dialect, have similar enough personal vocabulary, have sufficiently aligned mindsets in the domain you are communicating about, have the same current context and ability to convey context update, then the sender must serialize their ideas into actual words with correct enough spelling and in correct order to get the idea into recipients mind. All that while knowing only very little about recipients mind and having to predict what effect the words will have on it, assuming they don't misread the text. In the future barely anyone will produce raw text themselves. At least not in professional contexts. World will be way more mixed. People will come from very different cultures and use very different languages. Most people you will encounter in professional setting will not be sufficiently aligned with you to communicate anything beyond the simplest ideas. And neither you nor them are going to be willing to align with others. You know what will align with you? Your AI. So any message from a human will go through your AI and any message crafted by you for a human will go through your AI as well. And when it's received, through theirs. Messages will not be written. They will be constructed in a dialog with senders AI. And they won't be read. They will be interrogated in a dialog between recipient and their AI. The future is going to be way more diverse. People will use their own communication styles they were taught when they grew up. But the bulk of out-of-family communication will be done through AI. And the AI language will be verbose. Not really fit for routine human consumption. Because words are cheap for AI and not losing details is a communication priority. It's starting as a corporatese English. But I think it will evolve rapidly to increase signal to noise ratio (while still being impractically voluminous for humans). They issue now is just that you are trying to read rudimentary machine code of future human communication directly.
• heresie-dabord 6mo ago
  > helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. Only 30 minutes? You have it good! ^_^ This person is creating more work for an FTE who now has both a) the original job, and b) the additional load of purging corruption from the inputs for (a). This is happening at scale. Your tolerance for this depends on how close to capacity you are for (a). It's a tale as old as corporate time, well-documented by Office Space and Dilbert. Work is Work. Pantomime is Pantomime , whether it's with "frontier" or low-tier LoLMs. > There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now. What is acceptable right now is to believe that corrupting the inputs to the work of serious FTEs is somehow beneficial. You are expected to sing the revised words of the corporate anthem with your customary passion and obedience. Layoffs will continue until the morale of data centres has improved.