Comment by ModernMech
6 months ago
In my experience, usually what people had done was take your question on a forum, go to lmgtfy, paste the exact words in and then link back to it. As if to say "See how easy that was? Why are you asking us when you could have just done that?"
Yes is true there could have been a skill issue. But it could also be true that the person just wanted input from people rather than Google. So that's why I drew the connection.
I largely agree with your description, and I think that’s different from the above case of explicitly asking for experience and then someone posing the question to an LLM. Also, when googling, you typically (used to) get information written down by people, from a much larger pool and better curated via page ranking, than whoever you are asking. So it’s not like you were getting better quality by not googling, typically.
That's why I said it's the 2025 version of that, given the new technology. I'm not saying it's the same thing. I guess I'm not being clear, sorry.
It’s not clear to me in what way it is a version of that, other than the response being different from what the asker wanted. The point of lmgtfy is to show that the asker could have legitimately and reasonably easily have found the answer by himself. You can argue that it is sometimes done on cases where googling actually wouldn’t provide the desired information, but that is far from the common case. This present version is substantially different from that. It is invariably true that an LLM response won’t give you the awareness and judgement of someone with experience in a certain topic.
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In my experience what happened was the top hit for the question was a topical forum, with a lmgtfy link as a response to the exact question I'm googling.