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>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 feel
by torben-friis 5mo ago
>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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rob74 5mo agoWell, 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...
- Dumblydorr 5mo agoSounds 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?
- choudharism 5mo agoI 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...").
- blueflow 5mo agoYou 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.
- rob74 5mo agoActually I didn't call them stupid, I called them lazy (and also inconsiderate, but mostly lazy).
- cryo32 5mo agoSomeone 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.
- gib444 5mo agoWhen your spreadsheet gets full, will you change jobs or change tactic?
- cryo32 5mo agoI'll have a peaceful life until it gets to my yearly management review of my teams.
- lionkor 5mo agoI 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.
- glaslong 5mo agoWe need to go deeper: ELO and matchmaking to keep the most annoying coworkers contained playing with each other
- gib444 5mo agoIt 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.
- lionkor 5mo ago> everyone is being forced to use AI Some small subset of companies are doing this, not all companies.
- deleted 5mo ago
- casey2 5mo agoIt'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.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoNo, 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".
- compass_copium 5mo agoIt'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.
- agumonkey 5mo agoNot 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)
- lionkor 5mo agoNo 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.
- dalmo3 5mo agoI 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".
- jplusequalt 5mo ago>I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker. Golden rule. Treat others the way you wish to be treated.
- lionkor 5mo agoI 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.
- sschueller 5mo agoTrue 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...
- chongli 5mo agoIs 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.
- sdoering 5mo ago> 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.
- sameesh 5mo agoIn 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.
- j_w 5mo ago
- juleiie 5mo agoNothing 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
- condis 5mo ago[dead]
- juleiie 5mo agoWeed is much less painful and the effect is the same
- forlorn_mammoth 5mo agoactually, 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.
- Dilettante_ 5mo agoIf 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.
- juleiie 5mo agoThat 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
- alexwwang 5mo agoSeems have to make a face to face appointment, without any online devices in hand.
- perching_aix 5mo agoIs that a feeling you battled a lot growing up or something? It's very specific, and not actually very connected or sensible.
- dv_dt 5mo agoI 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.
- friendly_chap 5mo ago[dead]
- Bengalilol 5mo agoAnd 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 https://letmegpt.com
- thisisidiotic 5mo agoThen came ChaCha trying to monetize it.
- jvanderbot 5mo agoWhat 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.
- MichaelZuo 5mo agoI’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.
- jvanderbot 5mo agoBut "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.
- MichaelZuo 5mo agoWell 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.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoThe 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
- quality_life 5mo agoIt feels insulting when discussing something serious, they respond back with a highly inaccurate ChatGPT response.
- jiaosdjf 5mo agoIt 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
- Uncle_Brumpus 5mo agoI 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.
- jkestner 5mo agoI'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.
- sfink 5mo agoMore likely they're already an AI/human hybrid, and that is just an innate part of their thinking process now.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoFrankly 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
- danielvaughn 5mo agoI 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.
- condis 5mo ago[dead]
- testfrequency 5mo agoI’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.
- infinet 5mo agoI 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...".
- testfrequency 5mo agoIt’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.
- Ragnarork 5mo agoIt 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).
- alfonsodev 5mo agoAnd 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.
- ghoulishly 5mo agoI’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.
- dist-epoch 5mo ago[flagged]
- contravariant 5mo agoI just want them to tell me if they don't know. It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.
- saintfire 5mo agoMaybe 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.
- throwaway27727 5mo agoSaw 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.
- isidisjcisjcud 5mo ago> Same argument can be used against you That’s false equivalence and I think you know that.
- volkl48 5mo agoUsually 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. ------ 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.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoIt 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.
- mcv 5mo agoLetting 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.
- dist-epoch 5mo agoAsking 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
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago> it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything I suppose it's possible that was the goal all along...
- trentnix 5mo agoThe more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines. - Louis de Bonald
- bogrollben 5mo agoBrilliantly poignant. Before AI, I don't think this would've resonated with me, but it sure does now.
- card_zero 5mo agoWritten 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 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/mode/1up?q=machines https://archive.org/details/lgislationprim00bona/page/372/mo...
- thesis 5mo agoI 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.
- rbongers 5mo agoThe 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.
- chris_armstrong 5mo ago“cognitive surrender” It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
- _heimdall 5mo agoAt 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.
- Quizzical4230 5mo agoI 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 https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch
- chillfox 5mo agoWhere are these people? I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
- goalieca 5mo agoThis 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.
- shevy-java 5mo agoI 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.
- abustamam 5mo agoThere'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.
- OberstKrueger 5mo agoThis 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.
- smerrill25 5mo agoI 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.
- basisword 5mo agoThis 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.
- neversupervised 5mo agoThis is just a glitch in time. It’ll be agents talking to agents. We won’t be able to keep up.
- zthrowaway 5mo agoAbsolutely. 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.
- liendolucas 5mo agoIf 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.
- the_af 5mo agoThere 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!
- edoloughlin 5mo ago"This is the killer issue" I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?
- ahknight 5mo agoThis is the question nobody's asking.
- abalashov 5mo agoIt's not just about the question--it's also about what's in the answer.
- Shacklz 5mo agoPossibly just a case of having seen "AI-language" too often and just starting to use it themselves?
- torben-friis 5mo agoNope, I'm not a native speaker and the damn thing has probably already affected my perception of what's idiomatic. Ugh.
- My_Name 5mo agoMost 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.
- metalliqaz 5mo agoI agree with your assessment of people. I find that there is a lot of overlap with this old quote: Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. 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.
- sodic 5mo ago> 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 :)
- metalliqaz 5mo agoHere'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.
- sfink 5mo ago> 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: Small minds create work; average minds do work; great minds talk about work.
- bluegatty 5mo agoWhat? 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.
- charles_f 5mo agoI 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.
- SubiculumCode 5mo agoThese 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.
- bigfishrunning 5mo ago> 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.
- PaulHoule 5mo agoOff 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 (I asked AI to make a better version of this diagram but it wasn’t right. Motion is into the page. 200 kg of moon rocks can fit in a container 40 cm on a side.) Like what did you expect?
- inquirerGeneral 5mo ago[dead]
- moistoreos 5mo agoI 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.
- Salgat 5mo agoMy 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.
- perarneng 5mo agoExactly, 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
- sinsudo 5mo agoI 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.
- georgeecollins 5mo agoOK 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.
- OptionOfT 5mo agoIf the LLM is smarter than the person, the person cannot look at the output and judge to see whether it is correct.
- anigbrowl 5mo agoTrue, but that's a people problem.
- abalashov 5mo agoI 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?
- georgeecollins 5mo agoYou 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-chatbot-convince-c-4cc36b https://play.cdnstream1.com/s/kcrw/question-everything/can-a...
- carlmr 5mo ago>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.
- Double_a_92 5mo agoWhen 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.
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoOn 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.
- abalashov 5mo agoI agree, with the caveat that when your pointy-haired-boss doesn't realise they're the idiots and you're not the idiot...
- thewebguyd 5mo agoMy "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.
- bitwize 5mo agoOn 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?
- solumunus 5mo agoHopefully such flagrant usage will be priced out at some point.
- kristjansson 5mo agoImplicit 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.
- aeternum 5mo agoIt'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.
- whatever120 5mo agoOverly dramatic. It’s not that deep dude
- abalashov 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- ezst 5mo ago> 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
- switchbak 5mo agoI 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.
- llbbdd 5mo agoI 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.
- JohnMakin 5mo agoIt 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.
- daveslash 5mo agoRe >> 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.
- Sevii 5mo agoIt'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.
- new_account_101 5mo ago[dead]
- danielmarkbruce 5mo agoThis 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.
- underlipton 5mo agoWell, 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"?
- witx 5mo agoIt'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
- narrator 5mo agoI 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.
- base698 5mo agoThis was the main thing I took from the movie Her. Wild to see it materialize so quickly.
- verst 5mo agoJust 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.
- hailruda 5mo agoI’m curious, what was their reaction? :)
- verst 5mo agoThey 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.
- jr3592 5mo agoWait, 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?
- verst 5mo agoThese 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_af 5mo agoI 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.
- jug 5mo agoIt'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.
- lgrapenthin 5mo agoWhy does this read like written by AI?
- Animats 5mo agoThat's when you realize you're not important enough to talk to a human.
- neya 5mo agoI 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.
- sscaryterry 5mo agoOne 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.
- fennecbutt 5mo agoPro 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.
- micik 5mo ago"i want to talk to reel peeple" go to a bar "i work with idiots who can't even write a sentence anymore and so they have AI write an essay for every sentence they wanna say" and so you blame AI AI doesn't have a problem with generating a lot of tokens cause you/your company pays by the token how about asking AI to keep it short and sweet, does that work, yes? yes it does. this is top of HN? shark, jumped
- addybojangles 5mo agoABSOLUTELY
- potsandpans 5mo ago> It's so profoundly saddenning I understand that behavioral changes from technology can be jarring and folks will process things differently. But I keep seeing these kinds of melodramatic declarations of sadness. Were you this sad when it became the cultural norm to Google things? There even used to be a url, "let me Google that for you" Why is this any different? I think these kinds of things indicate the general age bracket of this forum. So profoundly saddening that it's like watching a child, I see these people as children... Etc. For the first time we have a bunch of technologically literate people seeing their own norms being disrupted and unwilling to adapt. This is the kind of conservativism with age that happens time and time again. Me and friends used to laugh at professors that would rant about wikipedia and force people to buy dictionaries in college. I find it somewhat amusing that on a technology forum that literally has "hacker" in the title is feeling such a loss in response to this technology.
- b0r3dthisD4y 5mo ago> There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity. Not sure if you mean an human or an AI here. In America anyway, "knowledge workers" blithely punching context-less data in Excel for money to stop at a Target conveniently placed on their drive home, for a couple shirts they never made, as they consider what to order via Grubhub is not what I would call a "self sufficient entity".
- mik09 5mo agoeither ai closes the loop which is unlikely or ai is not good and a small group of people manage to resist the urge to talk to it and take over everyone that does eventually