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I've decided that I'm done being pissy about this kind of response, or thinking that it's something that can be coached away. I choose to look at it like any ot

I've decided that I'm done being pissy about this kind of response, or thinking that it's something that can be coached away. I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference - something that you learn about, try to give some grace to, and work a little harder to bridge (unless you're defusing a bomb, performing surgery, flying an airplane etc.). In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help." For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem. Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.

csbrooks 5mo ago
To me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  I'd prefer just "I don't know." I can ask Claude on my own.
  - nlawalker 5mo ago
    > To me > I'd prefer This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect. Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
    - linkregister 5mo ago
      In my culture, I prefer not to wear clothing in public. I also prefer not to be confined to toilets when transferring personal products. Maybe there are some universal conventions we can accept.
      - scared_together 5mo ago
        Nudists exist, and compared to the span of human history toilets are a recent phenomenon.
        vitally3643 5mo ago
        In several cultures right now, today, toilets still do not exist.
    - watwut 5mo ago
      Common, if you are in indirect culture, you will HINT that you dont know or that the answer is no and the other person will get it. These stories are not about people who are from indirect cultures being frustrating to the direct person. They are about people who paste stuff into claude and unnecessary large wall of text - written in direct style.
      - justsomehnguy 5mo ago
        IIRC it would be quite rude to poat the wall of clearly not yours/ clearly generated text in the indirct cultures.
    - _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
      When I started managing international teams (long ago) the first months were painful for us all because I didn't understand some culturally didn't feel they could tell me 'no'. I was used to American devs that would happily flat out tell me 'I'm not doing that' or calling me out when I was being too phb style oblivious. Made me change my initial one on ones with new team leads to focus on 'how should we communicate'. I didn't realize how much I was requiring co-workers under me in the org chart to meet me where I was. Huge eye opener. I realized the same obliviousness on my part made some of my people feel like I was 'good old boys club' because I was more relatable to other white guys into sports (I used American sports analogies up to that point because that was how the management I rose up with talked). I felt awful for making people feeling bad/stressed/in an out group.
  - fortyseven 5mo ago
    That's how I'm finding I feel, too. It's not that I don't use LLMs myself, but I trust myself enough to know how to filter that data that comes back from them and compare it to actual facts. I don't necessarily know the processing of this information from the other person, to trust that they vet the information properly. So instead of it being helpful to me, it becomes incredibly irritating. Especially because I just know they're going to expect me to take that data at face value quite often. And then it's going to be on me to vet the data. How about you just let me get the data myself and cut out the middleman?
    - byzantinegene 5mo ago
      exactly, the people who copy-paste AI responses are typically the ones who don't do due diligence in verifying the responses.
    - ragequittah 5mo ago
      It's going to be exactly like Wikipedia on schools. People don't like me using AI for answers? Ok I'll use AI for the answer ask it to cite the source it used and then skim and paste the source. AI sti did all the work but the anti-ai crowd can't reflexively say it's probably wrong or a dream or whatever people are on about ITT.
  - p_j_w 5mo ago
    >I can ask Claude on my own. I've already used up the tokens, why donate money to Anthropic?
  - otherme123 5mo ago
    Some years ago, answering "just google it!" was considered rude in some forums. It was asumed that some people didn't have enough googlefu, so googling for them was considered a good help. Also, almost all StackOverflow could be boiled down to a "RTFM" and close the questions. Today there might be people who can't extract enough juice from LLMs, so it is not entirely useless to say "I was able to extract this info from a LLM, because I am good at it and you seem to struggle", instead of throwing "just ask Claude!".
    - SchemaLoad 5mo ago
      Except 99% of the time they are asking it's because they explicitly need a real opinion or the info couldn't be found via LLMs. But instead of giving an "I don't know", they paste back an wall of text with an incorrect answer that the sender hasn't even read or verified to be true. At least with "I don't know" the asker can move on to someone who might know faster.
      - efskap 5mo ago
        It reminds me of how LLM hallucination is attributed to "I don't know" being underrepresented in training data, and it being a better strategy to guess on evaluations rather than admit not knowing. Different reward function, but the same behaviour emerges.
        nullc 5mo ago
        We'll see that improve as people move onto synthetic training data-- something now possible that we have sufficiently smart LLMs to create enough of it. The idea is that you generate fake llm transcripts using your classical training data. E.g. look at some training data, generate q/a transcripts. Generate radom questions, RAG against your whole dataset and look for relevant stuff, if there is nothing there, train a "I don't know." reply. A moderately sized LLM operating some tools to access more information behind the scenes, perform tests and correct its own errors can write transcripts simulating a much larger and smarter llm.
    - nullc 5mo ago
  - signatoremo 5mo ago
    No. "I don't know" may be interpreted as "I don't care". Adding additional info may be a way to say "I do care". Similar to sometimes we say "I don't know, but I googled it, and I got this". Also, LLM's answers can be good if the prompts are good, so can still be helpful.
    - boomlinde 5mo ago
      A much better way to say "I do care" is to be explicit about that. "It's an important question, but you should ask someone more knowledgeable."
    - wisty 5mo ago
      Turning up to a potluck with no food says "I don't care". Turning up to a potluck with a bag of garbage you got for free in the dumpster on the way says "I don't care, and I'm so dumb I think you're too dumb to know this is trash".
      - handoflixue 5mo ago
        This is more like bringing fast food burgers. Yeah, it's a bit lazy, but some people do actually appreciate the effort. And post of the people complaining aren't even part of the potluck.
      - imhoguy 5mo ago
        "I don't know. Do you want me to figure it out?" would be my take, depending on circumstances.
    - ozim 5mo ago
      There is whole range of requests or questions that I don’t care but I don’t want to reply „I don’t care” especially when someone asks for something easily googlable/llmable.
  - whattheheckheck 5mo ago
    Can you though? Can you be the final answer on everything?
- ungreased0675 5mo ago
  Even that is bad. It’s similar to “I don’t know, but these are the top three links when I searched Google.” It’s a useless response, verbal chaff. And friendlies don’t use countermeasures.
  - low_tech_love 5mo ago
    Yeah, you’re spot on, and I hope people catch up on this soon (it’s already taking too long). I think one thing that most people haven’t realized yet is that reading AI slop bombs is really time consuming and stressful. We’re still operating on the assumption that reading is “free”, which came from the fact that writing took time and effort and written words were mostly meaningful before (at least you read something that you know took someone some time to write). But now that “writing” slop is so easy, reading can’t keep up. We can’t just keep reading all the meaningless crap people dump everywhere. It’s not scalable or even doable.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - imhoguy 5mo ago
    "Google it: <query>" was the right response back in the time, now it should be "Claude it: <prompt>".
- mikeweiss 5mo ago
  Or just "I don't know, but researching quickly right now maybe 'xyz'"? Agreed that you need to at least read the response and summarize... Not just copy and paste
ahtihn 5mo ago
Copy/pasting a question to LLM and pasting back the output isn't an attempt ar being helpful. It's the equivalent of a lmgtfy link.
- sweetheart 5mo ago
  But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).
  - ahtihn 5mo ago
    Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious.
    - snowwrestler 5mo ago
      Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation.
      - jplusequalt 5mo ago
        >Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious. >Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation. In the situation being discussed, is it even a conversation if one party is not even actively engaging with the other person? Also, respect is earned not given. If you don't respect me enough to put time into communicating in your own words, you can punch sand because I'm not reading your AI slop.
  - layer8 5mo ago
    Good intentions don’t excuse bad behavior, and shouldn’t oblige one to silently accept it.
andrewflnr 5mo ago
> In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help." It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best. If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.
ruszki 5mo ago
With lmgtfy, the point was to show that you can do that with Google, how you can do it, and you shouldn’t ask (not in the nicest way for sure). With replying with an LLM answer, you pretend that I cannot do the same. The equivalent would be a link to an LLM chat. There is a clear intent difference. The LLM answer version doesn’t want to teach the how.
- robocat 5mo ago
  > lmgtfy https://google.com/search?q=LMGTFY https://google.com/search?q=LMGTFY
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Foivos 5mo ago
why should you be the one who has to work a little harder though?
BeetleB 5mo ago
> In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help." You know all those support sites for various products (Microsoft, etc) where people ask questions, and lots of folks eagerly give answers that really aren't helpful? Throwing AI grenades generally falls into the same category. I don't mind an AI generated answer as long as it's on point, concise, and answers my problem. If I have to read a wall of text in search of the answer, it's useless. There's a reason I've blocked those types of "answer" sites from my Kagi search results. Kagi is awesome that way.
- vitally3643 5mo ago
  AI text dumps fall somewhere between "delete system32" and "run sfc /scannow".
  - Kim_Bruning 5mo ago
    Which is funny, because if you hook up a current generation AI to a command line (with some amount of caution) , it will actually tend to fix your problem. See eg. Claude Code.
conartist6 5mo ago
I'm the opposite. Trust can only be given so long as it isn't used to facilitate rampant abuse. Open abuse is rampant now. I'll slam the door in your face if you try to slop on me because that's the only way anyone is ever going to learn at the scale a lesson needs to be learned. And of course I notice the people posting the massive slop screed don't seem to have thought critically about it at all. After all, if they had time to read it thinking critically, they probably would have had time to write it.
toasty228 5mo ago
Saying "I don't know" is 100x less shameful than asking a clanker for an answer and pretending it's yours. If they don't realise this they won't last long
- efskap 5mo ago
  Specifically a clanker that itself would rather hallucinate something than say "I don't know".
- noisem4ker 5mo ago
  > they won't last long I wish that was the case for people with insincere communication practices. On the contrary, they seem to embody the sociopath stereotype that ultimately climbs ladders.
- whattheheckheck 5mo ago
  Using clanker kinda shows how racist you are. If you get defensive its true
  - bigfishrunning 5mo ago
    It's not, because clankers don't have a race
    - whattheheckheck 5mo ago
      I agree robots do not have a race in the most literal, autistic interpetation of the sentence. It's the shape of the behavior. It translates from a primordial belief systems that enables someone to say its okay to position themselves above something. The word robot originates from the Czech term robotnik, meaning "forced worker," which is derived from robota, denoting forced labor or drudgery performed by feudal serfs. This Czech word traces its roots to the Old Church Slavonic rabota (servitude) and the Slavic root rabu, which literally means slave Remember history? Its not okay to subjugate human beings? People that pounce of clanker type behavior are definitely problematic behind closed doors
low_tech_love 5mo ago
I think you’re wrong in one thing: Reading through meaningless walls of text takes time and effort that I’m not willing to waste. So it’s not just accepting a different culture; it’s not “free”. Reading AI grenades is really stressful (at least for me).
- ethbr1 5mo ago
  This. The central issue is the bait and switch. The bait: here is a ton of text The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it The new normal: there is ZERO signal about the magnitude of human thought and effort that went into something on the basis of its length ... and what really pisses people off about that: when AIstas intentionally abuse that social contract to their benefit. E.g. people who pass AI content off as their own, people who don't read their own genai before pasting to you, everyone on LinkedIn
  - codebje 5mo ago
    I don't think it's a new normal. In my experience a large volume of text rarely has a lot of information to convey. Instead, it's intended to convey the sense that a lot of work has been done. The consultant mindset set this trend before AI made it all worse.
  - throwawee 5mo ago
    >The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it. (Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)
    - ethbr1 5mo ago
      If you received an email at work that was three paragraphs, you wouldn't assume the author put in more work than a one-sentence reply?
SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
I try not to be pissy about it, but the problem is this from the source article: > Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness. Conversational norms simply do not allow me to give grace or bridge the gap. It would be so, so rude for me to infer that they meant to say "I don't know" if it turns out that it really was a detailed answer they expected me to read in full. I respect that the people who do this probably mean well, but there's some conversations I just can't have with people who respond this way, in the same way that there's some conversations I can't have with people who aren't comfortable exploring contested hypotheticals.
idle_zealot 5mo ago
> I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though. In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers what you have isn't just a culture you exist outside of, you have a common faux pas. One of many, many rude and inconsiderate acts that are nonetheless common, like sticking gum under a table or catcalling. Something about the environment prompts antisocial behavior, and shame is one way to shift the environment and reduce the behavior. There are almost certainly more effective ways to change the environment and curb the behavior, but establishing a consensus on whether the behavior is acceptable or not for those in the know is an important step. In case it was unclear I'm on the "it's not acceptable" side. Do share if you've observed someone appreciative of being grenaded in the wild, though.
- handoflixue 5mo ago
  Anecdotally, LLMs are apparently good enough at writing to routinely make the front page of Hacker News. Twitter has a plague of bot comments. From all these up-votes, we can infer there is an audience and this is good faith. Partly, I admit, I just tend to be wary of shame as a tool. "Someone said something I dislike" has a long history of being abused. Conversely, even something like your gum example, one can point at concrete harms like littering and forcing others to clean up after you.
  - imperfect_blue 5mo ago
    Using LLM as a writing assistant to properly format your ideas, while lazy, is not the same thing as a slop bomb. They're highly rated because the original ideas are good, even if the writing quality is sloppish, and it genuinely contains human input that you can't get simply by asking LLMs a question.
    - adastra22 5mo ago
      If the AI has enough editing input that your article comes off stylistically as AI-written, it is lazy and your writing is not as good as you think it is.
andrei_says_ 5mo ago
“ I don't know, but here's my attempt to help.” “I don’t know” would be so much more productive and respectful than “here, this may be useful or completely useless, figure it out on your own time. Took me 30 seconds to produce…” A bit asymmetrical by time, signal to noise, and frankly, bs metrics.
raincole 5mo ago
> In this person's communication culture And it's a bad culture. Yes, there are good and bad cultures. Cultural relativism has its limitations.
mlinhares 5mo ago
I usually go the other way, sometimes ignoring the wall of text completely or just exiting the conversation. I find it incredibly distasteful when people do this (i also have access to all the same tools), specially because its a lazy response where they copy the conversation, paste it at the tool and just vomit the response back. Its also usually the dickhead nobody likes that does it as well.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
andrewljohnson 5mo ago
This sounds like a broken culture to me. Teams shouldn't tolerate it... it is both harmful and contagious.
ineedasername 5mo ago
>In this person's communication culture, they are saying Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”. With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms. Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
- boomlinde 5mo ago
  A language game assumes mutually understood "rules" in the form of shared context that makes language that would otherwise be unclear meaningful. If the intended meaning is not conveyed, we're failing at playing a language game. In this case, the notion that the slop grenade is intended to communicate "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help" is as far as we know entirely a fiction, possibly a favorable interpretation GP uses not to let themselves be annoyed. In reality, the intent could be any number of things or nothing in particular. It seems more likely to me that these slop grenades are attempts at appearing to a third party to have weighed in on important decisions. It's a deliberate technique to become more visible in order to win favor with someone who can't tell reasoned responses from useless bullshit. This self-aggrandizing trash was a normal part of professional culture before the current LLM sewage torrent, but tactlessly used LLMs are so awful at writing that it's never been so transparent before.
boomlinde 5mo ago
If I am explicitly asking for someone's opinion and they respond with a slop grenade that has nothing to do with their opinion, I'm indifferent to the moral question whether they're acting in good faith. The practical effects are the same: my time is wasted, I'm annoyed, I lose respect for them, I am less likely to consider their opinion in the future.
throwawaythekey 5mo ago
In my workplace AI has more credibility than humans, so dropping a block of claude with attribution can be: - A way to convince others of your position. - A way to demonstrate that you did research (because experience is worthless) - A way to soften harsh feedback. At first I found this very dysfunctional but now I don't mind too much. It beats being ignored and/or offending someone.

csbrooks 5mo ago

To me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.

SoftTalker 5mo ago
I'd prefer just "I don't know." I can ask Claude on my own.
- nlawalker 5mo ago
  > To me > I'd prefer This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect. Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
  - linkregister 5mo ago
    In my culture, I prefer not to wear clothing in public. I also prefer not to be confined to toilets when transferring personal products. Maybe there are some universal conventions we can accept.
    - scared_together 5mo ago
      Nudists exist, and compared to the span of human history toilets are a recent phenomenon.
      - vitally3643 5mo ago
        In several cultures right now, today, toilets still do not exist.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    Common, if you are in indirect culture, you will HINT that you dont know or that the answer is no and the other person will get it. These stories are not about people who are from indirect cultures being frustrating to the direct person. They are about people who paste stuff into claude and unnecessary large wall of text - written in direct style.
    - justsomehnguy 5mo ago
      IIRC it would be quite rude to poat the wall of clearly not yours/ clearly generated text in the indirct cultures.
  - _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
    When I started managing international teams (long ago) the first months were painful for us all because I didn't understand some culturally didn't feel they could tell me 'no'. I was used to American devs that would happily flat out tell me 'I'm not doing that' or calling me out when I was being too phb style oblivious. Made me change my initial one on ones with new team leads to focus on 'how should we communicate'. I didn't realize how much I was requiring co-workers under me in the org chart to meet me where I was. Huge eye opener. I realized the same obliviousness on my part made some of my people feel like I was 'good old boys club' because I was more relatable to other white guys into sports (I used American sports analogies up to that point because that was how the management I rose up with talked). I felt awful for making people feeling bad/stressed/in an out group.
- fortyseven 5mo ago
  That's how I'm finding I feel, too. It's not that I don't use LLMs myself, but I trust myself enough to know how to filter that data that comes back from them and compare it to actual facts. I don't necessarily know the processing of this information from the other person, to trust that they vet the information properly. So instead of it being helpful to me, it becomes incredibly irritating. Especially because I just know they're going to expect me to take that data at face value quite often. And then it's going to be on me to vet the data. How about you just let me get the data myself and cut out the middleman?
  - byzantinegene 5mo ago
    exactly, the people who copy-paste AI responses are typically the ones who don't do due diligence in verifying the responses.
  - ragequittah 5mo ago
    It's going to be exactly like Wikipedia on schools. People don't like me using AI for answers? Ok I'll use AI for the answer ask it to cite the source it used and then skim and paste the source. AI sti did all the work but the anti-ai crowd can't reflexively say it's probably wrong or a dream or whatever people are on about ITT.
- p_j_w 5mo ago
  >I can ask Claude on my own. I've already used up the tokens, why donate money to Anthropic?
- otherme123 5mo ago
  Some years ago, answering "just google it!" was considered rude in some forums. It was asumed that some people didn't have enough googlefu, so googling for them was considered a good help. Also, almost all StackOverflow could be boiled down to a "RTFM" and close the questions. Today there might be people who can't extract enough juice from LLMs, so it is not entirely useless to say "I was able to extract this info from a LLM, because I am good at it and you seem to struggle", instead of throwing "just ask Claude!".
  - SchemaLoad 5mo ago
    Except 99% of the time they are asking it's because they explicitly need a real opinion or the info couldn't be found via LLMs. But instead of giving an "I don't know", they paste back an wall of text with an incorrect answer that the sender hasn't even read or verified to be true. At least with "I don't know" the asker can move on to someone who might know faster.
    - efskap 5mo ago
      It reminds me of how LLM hallucination is attributed to "I don't know" being underrepresented in training data, and it being a better strategy to guess on evaluations rather than admit not knowing. Different reward function, but the same behaviour emerges.
      - nullc 5mo ago
        We'll see that improve as people move onto synthetic training data-- something now possible that we have sufficiently smart LLMs to create enough of it. The idea is that you generate fake llm transcripts using your classical training data. E.g. look at some training data, generate q/a transcripts. Generate radom questions, RAG against your whole dataset and look for relevant stuff, if there is nothing there, train a "I don't know." reply. A moderately sized LLM operating some tools to access more information behind the scenes, perform tests and correct its own errors can write transcripts simulating a much larger and smarter llm.
  - nullc 5mo ago
- signatoremo 5mo ago
  No. "I don't know" may be interpreted as "I don't care". Adding additional info may be a way to say "I do care". Similar to sometimes we say "I don't know, but I googled it, and I got this". Also, LLM's answers can be good if the prompts are good, so can still be helpful.
  - boomlinde 5mo ago
    A much better way to say "I do care" is to be explicit about that. "It's an important question, but you should ask someone more knowledgeable."
  - wisty 5mo ago
    Turning up to a potluck with no food says "I don't care". Turning up to a potluck with a bag of garbage you got for free in the dumpster on the way says "I don't care, and I'm so dumb I think you're too dumb to know this is trash".
    - handoflixue 5mo ago
      This is more like bringing fast food burgers. Yeah, it's a bit lazy, but some people do actually appreciate the effort. And post of the people complaining aren't even part of the potluck.
    - imhoguy 5mo ago
      "I don't know. Do you want me to figure it out?" would be my take, depending on circumstances.
  - ozim 5mo ago
    There is whole range of requests or questions that I don’t care but I don’t want to reply „I don’t care” especially when someone asks for something easily googlable/llmable.
- whattheheckheck 5mo ago
  Can you though? Can you be the final answer on everything?
ungreased0675 5mo ago
Even that is bad. It’s similar to “I don’t know, but these are the top three links when I searched Google.” It’s a useless response, verbal chaff. And friendlies don’t use countermeasures.
- low_tech_love 5mo ago
  Yeah, you’re spot on, and I hope people catch up on this soon (it’s already taking too long). I think one thing that most people haven’t realized yet is that reading AI slop bombs is really time consuming and stressful. We’re still operating on the assumption that reading is “free”, which came from the fact that writing took time and effort and written words were mostly meaningful before (at least you read something that you know took someone some time to write). But now that “writing” slop is so easy, reading can’t keep up. We can’t just keep reading all the meaningless crap people dump everywhere. It’s not scalable or even doable.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- imhoguy 5mo ago
  "Google it: <query>" was the right response back in the time, now it should be "Claude it: <prompt>".
mikeweiss 5mo ago
Or just "I don't know, but researching quickly right now maybe 'xyz'"? Agreed that you need to at least read the response and summarize... Not just copy and paste

ahtihn 5mo ago

Copy/pasting a question to LLM and pasting back the output isn't an attempt ar being helpful. It's the equivalent of a lmgtfy link.

sweetheart 5mo ago
But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).
- ahtihn 5mo ago
  Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious.
  - snowwrestler 5mo ago
    Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation.
    - jplusequalt 5mo ago
      >Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious. >Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation. In the situation being discussed, is it even a conversation if one party is not even actively engaging with the other person? Also, respect is earned not given. If you don't respect me enough to put time into communicating in your own words, you can punch sand because I'm not reading your AI slop.
- layer8 5mo ago
  Good intentions don’t excuse bad behavior, and shouldn’t oblige one to silently accept it.

andrewflnr 5mo ago

> In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help." It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best. If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.

ruszki 5mo ago

With lmgtfy, the point was to show that you can do that with Google, how you can do it, and you shouldn’t ask (not in the nicest way for sure). With replying with an LLM answer, you pretend that I cannot do the same. The equivalent would be a link to an LLM chat. There is a clear intent difference. The LLM answer version doesn’t want to teach the how.

robocat 5mo ago
> lmgtfy https://google.com/search?q=LMGTFY https://google.com/search?q=LMGTFY
deleted 5mo ago
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Foivos 5mo ago

why should you be the one who has to work a little harder though?

BeetleB 5mo ago

> In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help." You know all those support sites for various products (Microsoft, etc) where people ask questions, and lots of folks eagerly give answers that really aren't helpful? Throwing AI grenades generally falls into the same category. I don't mind an AI generated answer as long as it's on point, concise, and answers my problem. If I have to read a wall of text in search of the answer, it's useless. There's a reason I've blocked those types of "answer" sites from my Kagi search results. Kagi is awesome that way.

vitally3643 5mo ago
AI text dumps fall somewhere between "delete system32" and "run sfc /scannow".
- Kim_Bruning 5mo ago
  Which is funny, because if you hook up a current generation AI to a command line (with some amount of caution) , it will actually tend to fix your problem. See eg. Claude Code.

conartist6 5mo ago

I'm the opposite. Trust can only be given so long as it isn't used to facilitate rampant abuse. Open abuse is rampant now. I'll slam the door in your face if you try to slop on me because that's the only way anyone is ever going to learn at the scale a lesson needs to be learned. And of course I notice the people posting the massive slop screed don't seem to have thought critically about it at all. After all, if they had time to read it thinking critically, they probably would have had time to write it.

toasty228 5mo ago

Saying "I don't know" is 100x less shameful than asking a clanker for an answer and pretending it's yours. If they don't realise this they won't last long

efskap 5mo ago
Specifically a clanker that itself would rather hallucinate something than say "I don't know".
noisem4ker 5mo ago
> they won't last long I wish that was the case for people with insincere communication practices. On the contrary, they seem to embody the sociopath stereotype that ultimately climbs ladders.
whattheheckheck 5mo ago
Using clanker kinda shows how racist you are. If you get defensive its true
- bigfishrunning 5mo ago
  It's not, because clankers don't have a race
  - whattheheckheck 5mo ago
    I agree robots do not have a race in the most literal, autistic interpetation of the sentence. It's the shape of the behavior. It translates from a primordial belief systems that enables someone to say its okay to position themselves above something. The word robot originates from the Czech term robotnik, meaning "forced worker," which is derived from robota, denoting forced labor or drudgery performed by feudal serfs. This Czech word traces its roots to the Old Church Slavonic rabota (servitude) and the Slavic root rabu, which literally means slave Remember history? Its not okay to subjugate human beings? People that pounce of clanker type behavior are definitely problematic behind closed doors

low_tech_love 5mo ago

I think you’re wrong in one thing: Reading through meaningless walls of text takes time and effort that I’m not willing to waste. So it’s not just accepting a different culture; it’s not “free”. Reading AI grenades is really stressful (at least for me).

ethbr1 5mo ago
This. The central issue is the bait and switch. The bait: here is a ton of text The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it The new normal: there is ZERO signal about the magnitude of human thought and effort that went into something on the basis of its length ... and what really pisses people off about that: when AIstas intentionally abuse that social contract to their benefit. E.g. people who pass AI content off as their own, people who don't read their own genai before pasting to you, everyone on LinkedIn
- codebje 5mo ago
  I don't think it's a new normal. In my experience a large volume of text rarely has a lot of information to convey. Instead, it's intended to convey the sense that a lot of work has been done. The consultant mindset set this trend before AI made it all worse.
- throwawee 5mo ago
  >The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it. (Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)
  - ethbr1 5mo ago
    If you received an email at work that was three paragraphs, you wouldn't assume the author put in more work than a one-sentence reply?

SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago

I try not to be pissy about it, but the problem is this from the source article: > Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness. Conversational norms simply do not allow me to give grace or bridge the gap. It would be so, so rude for me to infer that they meant to say "I don't know" if it turns out that it really was a detailed answer they expected me to read in full. I respect that the people who do this probably mean well, but there's some conversations I just can't have with people who respond this way, in the same way that there's some conversations I can't have with people who aren't comfortable exploring contested hypotheticals.

idle_zealot 5mo ago

> I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though. In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers what you have isn't just a culture you exist outside of, you have a common faux pas. One of many, many rude and inconsiderate acts that are nonetheless common, like sticking gum under a table or catcalling. Something about the environment prompts antisocial behavior, and shame is one way to shift the environment and reduce the behavior. There are almost certainly more effective ways to change the environment and curb the behavior, but establishing a consensus on whether the behavior is acceptable or not for those in the know is an important step. In case it was unclear I'm on the "it's not acceptable" side. Do share if you've observed someone appreciative of being grenaded in the wild, though.

handoflixue 5mo ago
Anecdotally, LLMs are apparently good enough at writing to routinely make the front page of Hacker News. Twitter has a plague of bot comments. From all these up-votes, we can infer there is an audience and this is good faith. Partly, I admit, I just tend to be wary of shame as a tool. "Someone said something I dislike" has a long history of being abused. Conversely, even something like your gum example, one can point at concrete harms like littering and forcing others to clean up after you.
- imperfect_blue 5mo ago
  Using LLM as a writing assistant to properly format your ideas, while lazy, is not the same thing as a slop bomb. They're highly rated because the original ideas are good, even if the writing quality is sloppish, and it genuinely contains human input that you can't get simply by asking LLMs a question.
  - adastra22 5mo ago
    If the AI has enough editing input that your article comes off stylistically as AI-written, it is lazy and your writing is not as good as you think it is.

andrei_says_ 5mo ago

“ I don't know, but here's my attempt to help.” “I don’t know” would be so much more productive and respectful than “here, this may be useful or completely useless, figure it out on your own time. Took me 30 seconds to produce…” A bit asymmetrical by time, signal to noise, and frankly, bs metrics.

raincole 5mo ago

> In this person's communication culture And it's a bad culture. Yes, there are good and bad cultures. Cultural relativism has its limitations.

mlinhares 5mo ago

I usually go the other way, sometimes ignoring the wall of text completely or just exiting the conversation. I find it incredibly distasteful when people do this (i also have access to all the same tools), specially because its a lazy response where they copy the conversation, paste it at the tool and just vomit the response back. Its also usually the dickhead nobody likes that does it as well.

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andrewljohnson 5mo ago

This sounds like a broken culture to me. Teams shouldn't tolerate it... it is both harmful and contagious.

ineedasername 5mo ago

>In this person's communication culture, they are saying Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”. With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms. Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

boomlinde 5mo ago
A language game assumes mutually understood "rules" in the form of shared context that makes language that would otherwise be unclear meaningful. If the intended meaning is not conveyed, we're failing at playing a language game. In this case, the notion that the slop grenade is intended to communicate "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help" is as far as we know entirely a fiction, possibly a favorable interpretation GP uses not to let themselves be annoyed. In reality, the intent could be any number of things or nothing in particular. It seems more likely to me that these slop grenades are attempts at appearing to a third party to have weighed in on important decisions. It's a deliberate technique to become more visible in order to win favor with someone who can't tell reasoned responses from useless bullshit. This self-aggrandizing trash was a normal part of professional culture before the current LLM sewage torrent, but tactlessly used LLMs are so awful at writing that it's never been so transparent before.

boomlinde 5mo ago

If I am explicitly asking for someone's opinion and they respond with a slop grenade that has nothing to do with their opinion, I'm indifferent to the moral question whether they're acting in good faith. The practical effects are the same: my time is wasted, I'm annoyed, I lose respect for them, I am less likely to consider their opinion in the future.

throwawaythekey 5mo ago

In my workplace AI has more credibility than humans, so dropping a block of claude with attribution can be: - A way to convince others of your position. - A way to demonstrate that you did research (because experience is worthless) - A way to soften harsh feedback. At first I found this very dysfunctional but now I don't mind too much. It beats being ignored and/or offending someone.