5 ms·

What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy

What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis. Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious Maybe they need _that person_ to provide some assurances directly because they are not confident in thier plan (see 1) Maybe they are just in a rut and need to start a conversation with a person Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.

MichaelZuo 5mo ago
I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that. Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
- jvanderbot 5mo ago
  But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust. AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
  - MichaelZuo 5mo ago
    Well you should probably find a workplace that doesnt punish the “curmudgeons” for directly saying that. I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.
    - AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
      The people are answering with copy-paste AI are the curmudgeons trying not to get fired for being “hard to work with” The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to
      - limaoscarjuliet 5mo ago
        EVery company that comes up with a product that brings a lot of gravy turns into place where people like this flourish. They have always been there - they would ask your question to many people, get their anwers and pass the response as their own. Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.
  - sinsudo 5mo ago
    I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.
  - mtrifonov 5mo ago
    [dead]
- boelboel 5mo ago
  I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'. I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.
voncheese 5mo ago
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment. Spot on. The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse. People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether. Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
  - eithed 5mo ago
    I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f
- lanfeust6 5mo ago
  Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.
bauldursdev 5mo ago
Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
  I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
  - FuriouslyAdrift 5mo ago
    I've gone back to just calling people on the phone like a true savage.
    - sofixa 5mo ago
      Unfortunately that's not enough, voice AI is very good nowadays,
      - cevn 5mo ago
        If someone puts me on with a voice AI i'm never talking to them again lol.
        soco 5mo ago
        ...which might be exactly what they wanted in the first place.
        abalashov 5mo ago
        I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.
rickydroll 5mo ago
I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with: "Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
- LeifCarrotson 5mo ago
  The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply. They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
  - sumanthvepa 5mo ago
    But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?
    - jamespo 5mo ago
      Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things
    - holden_nelson 5mo ago
      Not the person you’re replying to, but, because I don’t know what they know. “I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation
    - jimbokun 5mo ago
      Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.
    - 5mo ago
azath92 5mo ago
In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with - "from my ai to yours" where ive pointed my ai at some relevant context, and asked it to transform it for other ai context that a coworker needs - "my thoughts prettied by AI" where i just polished up my own words, often for outside coms, but indicating that i wrote the bones of it. - "i wrote this myself" in my case i tend to be very casual with my written coms, and ive been leaning into this in the past year rather than looking to correct it, as it gives the personal feel. but for cases where ive written more thoughtfully, i just flat out say that. Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai. Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
- jimbokun 5mo ago
  It’s in the same spirit of citing your sources in academic writing. Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.
- autoexec 5mo ago
  I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.
ertgbnm 5mo ago
Sending an AI response to a question that someone asks you is insulting because it's a bit like sending them a link to letmegooglethat where it just animates typing the question you have into google. I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do. In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/ https://letmegpt.com/ Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
- program_whiz 5mo ago
  honestly a sad state. Obviously there is a reasonable threshold, but trying not to speak to anyone until you've done a ton of work / research when they know the answer is just sad. Like what's wrong with asking a question? We've entered this anti-human hellscape where asking a question in slack (async) is somehow a crime, like posting an opinion without a double-blind study to back it up (burn him!). And the same people who are complaining about time wasting of having to ask/answer a question from a coworker which might create a modicum of civility and connection in this bitter cruel world are the same shit-posting on social media and doom watching youtube all day. "My flow can't be interrupted, I need all my energy to refactor this column from VARCHAR to TEXT, and to update this button from onClick inline to using a named closure". Please, the reality is that we sold human connection for an illusion of productivity and the bitter pill of isolation where we all now feel guilt and shame for wanting to talk with other people (through an albeit disconnected and disembodied asynchronous channel). If anyone responds with "I don't have time to respond I'm so busy", please realize you are proving my point. You are literally doom scrolling YC for no reason and alienating / pushing away coworkers to argue with internet strangers, sad.
  - ertgbnm 5mo ago
    My threshold for asking for help might be a little higher than the median, but, I like this operating style personally. Maybe it's just how I was raised, but the thought of not trying to figure something out for myself first is unthinkable. I fill like I get plenty of human connection at work and collaborate with peers and other disciplines plenty. I'm not in tech, I'm in civil engineering so maybe it's just a difference in the types of problems we have in different industries. I do find it very frustrating when an EIT asks me how to do something and it's clear that they haven't even read the instructions page to the excel sheet that they literally have open. I have time to mentor peers and subordinates but I want them to treat my time with the same respect that they treat their own.
jimbokun 5mo ago
Humans are already forgetting how to Human.
basch 5mo ago
The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.) Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.
- flextheruler 5mo ago
  It's trained on the internet so it's wrong just as much as the internet is wrong or misleading.
  - basch 5mo ago
    Maybe the current implementation
- ofjcihen 5mo ago
  What a nightmare hellscape you’ve described here.
  - big_paps 5mo ago
    I think this idea is also from an AI thread. I had quite the same sentence/prophecy from chatgpt a year ago as i chatted about the furure of communication
furyg3 5mo ago
I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations. The conversations are the point.
indoordin0saur 5mo ago
And notably, these are still all problems even if the AI is perfect in its response in every way.
w10-1 5mo ago
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment. Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current. Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products. The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
- stasomatic 5mo ago
  “employer culture” is sad in itself. Perhaps there is less or a different nuance in your mother tongue. It’s abhorrent in English to this ESL.
tcmart14 5mo ago
For me personally, I have co-workers I will not communicate with because all they do is have AI generate their responses and most of the time, don't even check the AI response. I ignore their teams messages and have outlook configured to send their emails directly to the junk folder. My manager knows about this and so far is fine with it.
- pineaux 5mo ago
  This is some terry pratchett level craziness.

MichaelZuo 5mo ago

I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that. Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.

jvanderbot 5mo ago
But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust. AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
- MichaelZuo 5mo ago
  Well you should probably find a workplace that doesnt punish the “curmudgeons” for directly saying that. I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.
  - AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
    The people are answering with copy-paste AI are the curmudgeons trying not to get fired for being “hard to work with” The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to
    - limaoscarjuliet 5mo ago
      EVery company that comes up with a product that brings a lot of gravy turns into place where people like this flourish. They have always been there - they would ask your question to many people, get their anwers and pass the response as their own. Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.
- sinsudo 5mo ago
  I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.
- mtrifonov 5mo ago
  [dead]
boelboel 5mo ago
I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'. I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.

voncheese 5mo ago

> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment. Spot on. The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse. People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".

ryandrake 5mo ago
Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether. Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
- eithed 5mo ago
  I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f
lanfeust6 5mo ago
Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.

bauldursdev 5mo ago

Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.

ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
- FuriouslyAdrift 5mo ago
  I've gone back to just calling people on the phone like a true savage.
  - sofixa 5mo ago
    Unfortunately that's not enough, voice AI is very good nowadays,
    - cevn 5mo ago
      If someone puts me on with a voice AI i'm never talking to them again lol.
      - soco 5mo ago
        ...which might be exactly what they wanted in the first place.
      - abalashov 5mo ago
        I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.

rickydroll 5mo ago

I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with: "Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?

LeifCarrotson 5mo ago
The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply. They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
- sumanthvepa 5mo ago
  But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?
  - jamespo 5mo ago
    Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things
  - holden_nelson 5mo ago
    Not the person you’re replying to, but, because I don’t know what they know. “I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation
  - jimbokun 5mo ago
    Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.
  - 5mo ago

azath92 5mo ago

In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with - "from my ai to yours" where ive pointed my ai at some relevant context, and asked it to transform it for other ai context that a coworker needs - "my thoughts prettied by AI" where i just polished up my own words, often for outside coms, but indicating that i wrote the bones of it. - "i wrote this myself" in my case i tend to be very casual with my written coms, and ive been leaning into this in the past year rather than looking to correct it, as it gives the personal feel. but for cases where ive written more thoughtfully, i just flat out say that. Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai. Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"

jimbokun 5mo ago
It’s in the same spirit of citing your sources in academic writing. Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.
autoexec 5mo ago
I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.

ertgbnm 5mo ago

Sending an AI response to a question that someone asks you is insulting because it's a bit like sending them a link to letmegooglethat where it just animates typing the question you have into google. I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do. In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/ https://letmegpt.com/ Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.

program_whiz 5mo ago
honestly a sad state. Obviously there is a reasonable threshold, but trying not to speak to anyone until you've done a ton of work / research when they know the answer is just sad. Like what's wrong with asking a question? We've entered this anti-human hellscape where asking a question in slack (async) is somehow a crime, like posting an opinion without a double-blind study to back it up (burn him!). And the same people who are complaining about time wasting of having to ask/answer a question from a coworker which might create a modicum of civility and connection in this bitter cruel world are the same shit-posting on social media and doom watching youtube all day. "My flow can't be interrupted, I need all my energy to refactor this column from VARCHAR to TEXT, and to update this button from onClick inline to using a named closure". Please, the reality is that we sold human connection for an illusion of productivity and the bitter pill of isolation where we all now feel guilt and shame for wanting to talk with other people (through an albeit disconnected and disembodied asynchronous channel). If anyone responds with "I don't have time to respond I'm so busy", please realize you are proving my point. You are literally doom scrolling YC for no reason and alienating / pushing away coworkers to argue with internet strangers, sad.
- ertgbnm 5mo ago
  My threshold for asking for help might be a little higher than the median, but, I like this operating style personally. Maybe it's just how I was raised, but the thought of not trying to figure something out for myself first is unthinkable. I fill like I get plenty of human connection at work and collaborate with peers and other disciplines plenty. I'm not in tech, I'm in civil engineering so maybe it's just a difference in the types of problems we have in different industries. I do find it very frustrating when an EIT asks me how to do something and it's clear that they haven't even read the instructions page to the excel sheet that they literally have open. I have time to mentor peers and subordinates but I want them to treat my time with the same respect that they treat their own.

jimbokun 5mo ago

Humans are already forgetting how to Human.

basch 5mo ago

The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.) Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.

flextheruler 5mo ago
It's trained on the internet so it's wrong just as much as the internet is wrong or misleading.
- basch 5mo ago
  Maybe the current implementation
ofjcihen 5mo ago
What a nightmare hellscape you’ve described here.
- big_paps 5mo ago
  I think this idea is also from an AI thread. I had quite the same sentence/prophecy from chatgpt a year ago as i chatted about the furure of communication

furyg3 5mo ago

I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations. The conversations are the point.

indoordin0saur 5mo ago

And notably, these are still all problems even if the AI is perfect in its response in every way.

w10-1 5mo ago

> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment. Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current. Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products. The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.

stasomatic 5mo ago
“employer culture” is sad in itself. Perhaps there is less or a different nuance in your mother tongue. It’s abhorrent in English to this ESL.

tcmart14 5mo ago

For me personally, I have co-workers I will not communicate with because all they do is have AI generate their responses and most of the time, don't even check the AI response. I ignore their teams messages and have outlook configured to send their emails directly to the junk folder. My manager knows about this and so far is fine with it.

pineaux 5mo ago
This is some terry pratchett level craziness.