>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.
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.
> 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".
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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"
> 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 le minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
True 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...
Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement.
He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is:
"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me."
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.
Is 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.
The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good.
The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...
With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.
> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible
This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
The 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.
Letting 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.
Asking 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
It'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.
I’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.
Same argument can be used against you: why do you bother someone with a question and want them to dedicate time to answer it for you when that question is easily google-able or answered by an LLM?
It costs you seconds to ask the question, and you want them to invest minutes in answering it?
You invest seconds in a question, they invest seconds in the answer. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Implicit 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.
It 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
I 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.
Most 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.
I 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.
There'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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
And 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.
And 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.
On 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.
At 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.
This 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.
Off 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.)
Absolutely. 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.
Exactly, 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
It 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).
My "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.
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.
If 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.
Not 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)
No 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.
These 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.
It 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.
I’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.
I 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...".
I 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.
My 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.
I 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.
This 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.
There 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!
I 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.
Frankly 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
On 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?
This 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.
I 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.
Nothing 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
a bit too simplistic for my tastes. I wouldn't call being inebriated the same as being dumb; but I would absolutely agree that being inebriated is way more fun, easy, and fulfilling than being sober. I would choose being inebriated over being sober almost every time, regardless of the mechanism of inebriation.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
It'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.
It'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.
No, 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".
Well, 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...
You 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.
I 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...").
Sounds 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?
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer.
That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.
Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a sales pitch for the thing I was trying to build for him. He was always pitching for new business, and seemed to struggle to get out of 'sales mode'. I have no doubt that if I were working for him now, he'd be pointing me to an LLM in response to any question.
This is why executives think LLMs can replace everyone. They can see it can replace them, and project that onto everyone else. And they don't see the gaps in knowledge because they don't care about the facts, only the presentation.
Maybe unrelated but this memory pops up: I once worked with a mechanical engineer who could not visualize anything in his mind and had quite some trouble with word finding and explaining his ideas. He just couldn't say what needed to be built, he could only evaluate after it was built (often "argh, no not that").
It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:
"Why didn't you build what I said?"
"I did. This is exactly what you said."
"No it's not! I said x y z"
"Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z"
Silence.
"Then that's not what I meant"
I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!
There's an old computing maxim: GIGO. It used to mean "garbage in, garbage out" meaning that if you put garbage into a computer, then the output was garbage. Nowadays, GIGO means "garbage in, gospel out" meaning that no matter how bad the input was, the output was to be treated as The Word of God.
I use to get emails with some oddball questions slightly out of my field of expertise from business owners. I would answer, and they would forward my email to the person that asked them the question. They saw their role as routers.
>That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).
Maybe he was trying to say "look, when I can look this up, it means that you can too, i won't put any effort into it, because i pay you, but if i can use AI, so can you."
Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.
Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.
The 'AI-generated pseudo-spec' is becoming a massive productivity killer. Non-technical managers prompt an LLM, get a highly confident 5-page document with chosen libraries, and think they've done 80% of the work. But as a developer, you now have to spend hours debugging and debunking hallucinated architectures just to prove why the AI's approach doesn't fit the existing codebase. It completely shifts the burden of actual product management into AI-babysitting for the dev team.
I was discussing a change we wanted to make to some tables in one of the DBs, but it would require a lot of effort because of the sheer size. Anyway, after saying how much effort would be required the response I got was to “please ask ChatGPT.” It gave a slightly different response, but changed it after I presented it with my solution and agreed that was the better approach. Just… sigh
You'd be surprised how many "scale-up"'s are owned by genuine idiots. I don't even mean inexperienced people, just people that - if you were to meet them for the first time - seem like they are fucking idiots. The type that recently figured out you can tie your shoe instead of tripping over them.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.
At my company, non technical Managers (including marketing folks) are posting Claude and ChatGPT responses in bug tickets with the "fix" for the bug. No explanation of what the expected vs actual behavior is, just AI slop telling me how to fix it. Soooo helpful.
One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.
I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.
There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.
A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.
There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.
Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
This reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early.
The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
Reminds me of my friends in Gaza, where every day means no shops, no restaurants, no home, no medicine, no food, no water, no hope. The beaches are full of people just trying to exist.
Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.
I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.
I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.
So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
Plenty of these experiences can be found without disconnecting the electricity for multiple countries. Personally, I find musical events of all sorts are amazing for this, and completely AI free should you chose the right events :)
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
I forget where, but there was a restaurant who locked all phones in a box at your table and if you made it to the end without opening it the table got a free cookie.
In comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?
In my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end.
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.
I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!
I work on a small team. I talk to coding agents a lot. I also talk to my human team members a lot. So I have decent experience with interacting with both LLMs and humans.
My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.
I called the local Apple Store, got what was probably an AI. I just needed the hours, so that was OK, but then it asked if I needed anything else. I asked for winning numbers to the lottery. It thunk and thunk and thought some more and came back with, I’ll have to pass you to a store employee. Now I know how to avoid 1,000 questions and get a live person.
Sometimes yelling fuck shit piss bitch cunt fuck ass whore etc works. They have them setup to detect swear words to figure out when youre pissed off and need to talk to a human lmao
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer.
Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."
We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.
I agree with the messaging generally, but unfortunately to fight implicitly unprofessional behavior with a terse response like this would look explicitly unprofessional!
I understand that example, on the other hand, RTFM is as old as history and it can often be replaced by googling or asking LLMs.
Not saying that's the very specific case, but I regularly encounter in my daily life at work people delegating the kind of information seeking that can be done independently.
No, this was in response to some questions about different approaches enterprises take to automated code quality review and complying with some arbitrary security standard out there. And this was a principal secops guy who thought the appropriate thing to do was to ask Copilot.
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
I have five Gen-Z kids that are pushing back on GenAI hard and they claim their peers are getting angry about how it’s impacted their lives.
As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.
But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.
I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.
I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.
GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.
My oldest is on the tail end of Gen-Z and is vehemently anti-AI. This isn't a position I've been vocal about, she just kind of expressed her disdain for it one day.
I've been in IT a while, and am more of an AI skeptic - but I'm OK with it being used as a tool where it makes sense in my field, and it certainly has some value.... but shoehorning it into everything and using it as a general replacement for human creativity is a no-go for me.
It's a relief to know GenZ is feeling this way, and I hope having an entire generation against it will help pump the brakes a bit.
It makes sense. GenZ and younger have the most to lose from AI. Corporate America is absolutely giddy about its promise to make 50+% of white collar jobs redundant. I'd have a very negative view about it too, if I were just graduating college and looking for an entry-level office job.
A bit off topic, but I am currently travelling through Europe by train. It is such a boon to just be outside everyday and meet locals and fellow travellers. Highly recommend.
Highly depends on the country. Go to Sweden and you'll have a hard time even practicing Swedish, as soon as the natives discover you're also not a native, they'll switch to English immediately in most places of the country.
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
last time in Italy I "spoke" to lots of Italians very slowly with lots of gestures and a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot! Nearly ordered 100x as much cheese as I meant to except the guy in the shop was not a computer so he understood what I really meant. Much better than in the Netherlands where they just switch to English as soon as they hear you try to say choodumorchen
I speak three European languages, and English worked almost always. Especially the younger folks in the cities. If it didn't work, I used a translation app.
I have a pet theory that we were better off when the economy flowed through Wall St rather than Silicon Valley because Wall St people ride the subway to work.
I am also traveling through Europe, currently in Budapest. Twice now in the last week, I have heard AI music being played through the speakers at restaurants.
Well, I think I couldn't distinguish AI music from the good (or bad) old human-made "elevator music", but maybe I'm mistaken and it would stand out to me when I hear it...
That's probably to be expected, before that they used covers of popular songs, likely produced by a company that offers much lower rates than e.g. the original artists.
There are already solutions for doing exactly that. e.g., DB's apps allow purchasing tickets for many other countries, and you can find and purchase DB tickets via Google Flights.
Just wait until everyone is using AR glasses which listen to your conversation, run it through an LLM, then use the speaker to bark an answer at you with the wearer’s previously synthesised voice, while they’re scrolling instagram inside the lenses.
I took my private jet to Fiji. Just needed a month to unwind and walk on the beach, sample local cuisine, get to know fellow travelers. Also highly recommended
I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt here. It reminds me of the Google search phenomenon others have mentioned, which culminated in the joke website "let me google that for you." But, I don't think the cause is necessarily that people are dumb or lazy. Both are factors, but another big one is that people are overwhelmed at work. Another question coming in may not be viewed as an opportunity to learn or help a colleague but as just another task to complete as quickly as possible so the task mountain doesn't grow higher. I'd like to think that we'll eventually use AI to automate a lot of the mundane stuff at work so people have the opportunity to dig into questions from colleagues and provide real answers and genuinely have a conversation when they do. I realize that's pretty optimistic and it may take a while to get there but people stopped sending me google search results years ago. That phenomenon was relatively short-lived and hopefully this one is too.
AI makes it apparent that the only value some people bring to the table is that they have access to information that you do not. If now they fold that one advantage by just delegating everything to AI (which is in the same position as you informationwise), they will remove themselves from the worker pool soon.
If you're in a particularly fiesty mood you can lean into that. "If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"
While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.
I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.
Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.
Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off. There's value in that if they are, as if they really are experts they can filter out bs and reprompt better than you likely could if you're not an expert - and in rare cases, who knows, maybe they could actually do it themselves.
AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
There have always been people that did the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
AI will just make it more obvious.
And those people will be at the front to be let go when AI inevitably kills white collar jobs as it creates other jobs. They just might not be able to get one of those new ones because they rotted what little brain cells they had to begin with.
> I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off
The co-founder of Anthropic isn't even doing this when preparing statements to say after the Pope has spoken about AI, I think you're expecting a bit too much here.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that's a must too, but I also think people should test software extensively before deploying/releasing it, seemingly nowadays I'm in the minority about these sort of things.
> Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
I've seen people employed working on some code bases that couldn't code at all.
> Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Some lawyers are downright incompetent and don't know what they're talking about / just want your money.
> Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
Some doctors are downright incompetent or malicious. You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
> AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
It does help people overall, the worst coworkers are probably going to still be there, just a bit better hidden.
The rest just have a new-age search engine to augment their capabilities.
I mostly use it because I'm lazy on the presentation, not so much on the content. I provide full knowledge and content plan in my prompt. I do manual review & fix.
Someone informed can tell the content is generated. I don't really care, that's still my knowledge and I can discuss content in depth.
"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit — a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."
This is 2009 right? I almost expected the classic 100+ year old quote, but knowing the year still has the same effect of conveying how something that feels recent has been felt forever.
I agree and on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life working from home, talking to a machine, and not enriching any person's life directly. It's just so gruesomely LONELY.
There are still in-office jobs out there, where you can have lunch with humans, and maybe even make friends with your coworkers. I have one. It's not a popular opinion on this site, but it's OK to admit that being isolated home alone for 40+ hours a week is not healthy for your personality type.
I'm back in the office (3 days a week) and there's some weird cultural thing on my team that I don't quite understand. Coworkers I sit next to will message me on Teams instead of just standing up and talking to me over the cube wall. No one eats lunch together or really converses outside of meetings. We have meetings on Teams even though everyone in the meeting is in the office sitting next to each other. I'll book rooms for the meetings and inform the team only to be the only one in the room.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
Remote doesn't need to be isolating. You can make friends with remote coworkers, but it requires a culture where jumping on a call to work things out is normalized.
I've found most work communication apps not to be very condusive to it, but Discord is pretty good.
It hurts that I relate with this so much. I am wasting my 20s.
I see people who advocate for permanent wfh has plans with their social circle. Either already has a family or friends. Sucks to be the one trying to build a new life.
Btw, I don’t believe them a bit. All I see are rotten people who no longer speaks new things, or is a living instagram bot.
Different strokes for different folks at different stages in their lives. If I wrote OP's post 7 years ago before WFH, I'd have said: "on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life driving 2.5 hours each way to an office to type into a machine and to maintain physical proximity to people I don't really like or dislike. It's just so gruesomely UNNECESSARY."
Yeah but that's because people suck so fucking much.
1. "Sorry can't come" an hour after we were supposed to meet - this alone kills 80% of my friendships
2. "I like edgy humor" and then a month later "I'm going to report you to HR" literally had this happen to me
3. Most people have very little depth and stick to superficial smalltalk, which I find very exhausting
And when on top of that you say "I wish my friend had similar values and enjoyed at least one common hobby" then it's basically over. Not to mention the fact that most people aren't open to new friendships. If they're married then they straight up say "wife doesn't allow", if they're not then it's "yeah let's grab a coffee someday".
My motto is "if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go alone" because trying to be cooperative with people has never yielded me better results than just doing the shit on my own.
This is the result of having everything customised to you. I don’t know how old you are and I am not going to assume.
I feel the way we live our lives, algorithmic everything tailored to us, we just don’t accept differences anymore.
AI has "just" greatly accelerated/amplified dysfunction that was already there previously.
Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.
So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.
The sad thing is it happens in real life too. You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day. You have to just wait for them to get it out and then you can talk to the real person again.
> You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day.
This is so true.
So many people just parrot whatever nonsensical talking point they heard.
Regurgitating things without an ounce of reflection or critical thought.
I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.
OP clearly is out of the loop and hasn't tried out the latest frontier models. SOA labs have specifically tuned the new models to counter the "I'm tired of talking to AI" issues using even less tokens and power!
My experience as well. It's happened a few times now that I'll ask a coworker a question about some system they built, and they tell me to just ask the AI.
I did ask the AI. I gave it several rounds. I got a summary of their diff from it. I skimmed their diff myself. I have a rough mental model of the work they did, plus what the AI did/didn't tell me. I'm asking THEM so THEY can confirm my mental model is correct to the code they supposedly authored.
I suspect the real problem is they vibed the whole thing and didn't even self-review it. So they don't know, can't answer, and the interaction is truly pointless. They are not the expert any longer. It's not worth asking them.
Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.
I told some of my coworkers that they should keep in mind that if their job becomes "passing messages between an AI Assistant and their co-workers", sooner or later someone will realize they can just cut the middle man and build an agent that does their job. Use AI assistants all you like but don't forget to add value.
I just had a maddening convo with Amazon's AI https://share.zight.com/o0udw54W (i had mentioned before that in 5 minutes it would be time to get my refund according to some other policy message they sent me). A convo before this Amazon's bot didn't even recognize the reply the forced me to give from their button. I clicked "Entire package is missing". and they replied "Couldn't understand your response". It's a brutal, antagonistic experience. The kicker is how Amazon keeps saying "we're passionate about customer experience". You were Amazon. You were. But you've given that up.
The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.
I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?
The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.
Don't worry. It happens to many of us, but it's not that serious. It's really like talking to yourself, given that they're still great language models, LLMs. Just imagine what it will be like in 10 years.
That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer.
Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.
I found a GitHub that was spreading malware. I chatted to AI and it cloned it into a vm, did some static analysis, pulled the usernames of the bad guys and the guys they were impersonating and gave me a summary and an email address I could contact. The guy replied with a note of appreciation.
I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.
I love chatting to AI.
The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.
We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective
For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?
A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.
I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
There used to be so much discussion of "brand safety" and people would flip out if their ad showed on a video that didn't align with company viewpoints, even though the company clearly wasn't the creator of the video.
Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!
It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?
There’s more mass manipulation AKA nudge campaigns going on than ever. Plus, there’s a market for “aged” (forgot the term they actually used) accounts that look authentic.
Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?
Because we built an economy where you’re rewarded for being an attention whore. Flooding the scene with bots is a good way to statistically make sure you’re a good little whore.
It generally helps when one is not surrounded by tactless buffoons.
I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.
Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.
Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.
Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.
In my documents I usually preface with "This document is 100% typed by Aperocky". And then where ever part of it is generated by LLM, it is clearly marked (e.g. SVGs). It is necessary these days.
This is good information, but a bit superficial - before AI, what percentage of online articles were generated from templates? What was written by content generation farms? Fiverrr and co pay-per-word writers?
I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.
I imagine something like 98% of articles also get less than 100 views. So the question is more about the articles you're reading rather than articles in general.
If one cant remember what they generated, whats the point in generating? Half of those who write articles do not remember what the AI put in it... Reviewing has become a slop work by humans!
> We build on our prior research by using three different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). We independently evaluate each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%. Each AI detector shows a similar trend.
This is all bullshit, none of those actually work, and the false-positives rates are sky-high. I'm not sure how any serious person have tried out any of those services and came away with the impression of "Well, better than nothing" because literally, it seems the opposite.
The detectors aren’t great but they aren’t really the issue. The fact that LLMs make it so easy to impersonate human communication is precisely the problem here. There cannot be a reliable way to identify if something is from a human or not. And the ease of access and low price makes using LLM generated content a no brainer, you have to actively go out of your way to produce human generated content.
We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
If you need an AI detector to figure out if something is AI or not, surely that means the AI is so good that there is no need to detect whether it is AI or not, because it is indistinguishable from writings by a human when read by humans?
I mean this is an article coming from an SEO company that's really just trying to advertise its services in the end. Their methodology seems very loose.
1. Find some nicher but interesting topic (e.g. some historical event like Lepanto's battle)
2. Have AI generate the content of the 20 minutes video by collecting information about it online
3. Have AI generate the video
4. Have AI generate a realistic voice to comment on the video
5. Upload it without mentioning it's all AI generated
6. Have me get mad 4 minutes into the video because footage/paintings referring to that battle...do not exist at all...slowly realize it was all AI generated
The YouTube algorithm got unbearable to me even before the mudslide of AI content.
I highly recommend using an extension like Unhook and disabling all algorithmic recommendations such as the Home feed, sidebar/endscreen recommendations etc. The only way I interface with YouTube now is through the subscriptions page which shows me videos from creators I follow in chronological order.
In Neal Stephenson's fall or dodge in hell there's a timeline where the internet is so flooded by fake AI generated news that characters have their own agent both filtering info and maintaining their fake social presence.
The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.
I've recently been connecting some machines to a new switch and my colleague has been monitoring web logs at the same time using Claude. He send me a Claude-generated observation that the machines that I was able to put my hands on simultaneously must be in different buildings due to high pings. Surreal experience.
How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?
You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.
LMGTFY was an intentionally rude tongue-in-cheek response when someone was asking a question that could easily be answered by a simple search. This is about asking more complex questions that don't necessarily have a single objective answer.
I may have to break the news to you that the LMGTFY was also rude. Both LMGTFY and AI copypastes are rude and dismissive answers that are intended to make the person asking the question feel stupid and bad. It only provides value in making you feel really smart and possibly smug about showing that question-asker what's up, and offers nothing in the short term about their problem (or in the long term about their comfort in turning to you for help).
> you can get a straight answer from an LLM
By definition, LLMs cannot give a straight answer. They give you text based off next token probabilities.
The difference is that the LLM answer is almost always wrong. It assumes I have not already used an LLM and that I am asking something that an LLM can answer.
If the guy was asking about a business process in their business how would chatGPT know what their process is?
`Just send me the prompt` applies. If you have an answer and you feed it to an LLM to dress it up, just send me the prompt. If you don't have the answer and are just going to ask an LLM just tell me `I don't know`.
AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.
I'm not tired to talking to AI because I specifically instructed my agents to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross, so i constantly reminded that coffee is for closers only.
I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.
If it comes to that I’m done with the internet. It has been an alright ride but that is not how I need to use it. Plus most all this discussion we do imo is just low effort noise anyhow. This is a time sink for me. It isn’t enriching, and often comes at the cost of actually enriching things, I’m beginning to realize. Remember any of the articles and discussion threads you read last week on hn and wherever else? Me neither. This is junk food, potato chips, small comfort stuff. If it becomes even more perverted the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.
We’re optimizing the soul out of human interaction.
Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?
I was reflecting the other day how discovering things online felt like being in on a secret. You had to just know about a chat room or BBS or website. Each one was like discovering a secret.
Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.
There are exceptions, e.g. lobste.rs has an invitation tree. When someone starts posting LLM-generated comments, that part of the tree can get yanked. Also, it builds up a community gradually, because you need to be invited by someone. Since the invitation tree is visible, people will generally only vouch on people they trust, because an invitee that violates the rules will reflect bad on the inviter (and might get removed if they do that too often).
> I think I've managed to avoid most of the AI generated internet.
I honestly am not sure that one can know that that is true anymore. Probably the only place left that I have any confidence in is maybe the small discords I'm in with various friend groups with <30 people that all know each other IRL.
My partner had issues with an online retailer and contacted support, which happily went around in circles since it was an AI agent and wasn't well prompted.
AI has made my experience as a fully remote worker in a not-fully-remote company worse. It is adding a layer of indirection between myself and the juniors I'm mentoring, or the product manager I'm working on a feature with, and many other mundane facets of work. The opportunity to passively pick up on my coworkers' idiosyncrasies is now gone and all I can do is guess at what prompt they might have used.
I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
The worst part of this is the person that doesn't even bother copying the text, rather just screenshot the AI answer and send it. That's the new lowest level of not giving a crap about the question.
Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
I feel sorry for people who have to use strong AI agentic agents all day long for their jobs. I just came off of a 30 day experiment using Gemini Ultra (all the Antigravity+Claude Opus I could use) and while it was great to re-work a few dozen of my open source projects and to check my Open Content books for inconsistencies and make improvements, the awful thing was it felt dehumanizing. I am now just using DeepSeek v4 for less than 1 hour a day and that feels better: a good mix of getting help when really needed and doing my own thing by myself.
The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?
A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.
It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.
That is not entirely true. Some business first contact is AI. It is, on purpose, a bit difficult or bothersome to actually try and contact a human being.
When I think about a PGP-style web of trust that shows that you're human, this is the showstopper I come up against. Provably human people can just parrot the bots.
Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?
It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?
It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
There's a feeling of abandonment online, and the optimist in me is wondering if maybe people would rather be doing something else. This is pollyannaish, but I'd love to imagine that people are discovering the real world, sitting alone or otherwise, and leaving this version of themselves on the internet to an empty shell.
You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
Unfortunately this is a skill issue. The information is in the machine, you just need to figure out how to get it out. Most people are very far behind on this.
I thought the LLM promise was that people could do things easily because conversation is the most intuitive input there is. If we still have to "figure out how to get it out", what if we put that educational effort into... I don't know, learning search or queries or something that gives concrete answers and not statistically-average-probability answers?
This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it". Which at the time was a rude but effective way of telling people to get off their ass and figure it out themselves instead of being lazy and expecting others to solve their issues.
You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.
The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.
>This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it".
I don't think that is always the case. Sometimes it is. Other times the social cues and later follow up makes it seem the person thought they were being really helpful, not sarcastic, by sending the response. Yet other times, the person acts as if it was their own response and not the AI's, almost akin to passing off the AI's work as their own.
This is most notable when the original question shows effort was put into it and it isn't a simple case.
I can't judge the specific situation. But if this happens to you a lot, I'd suggest looking at how you are asking things from other people (i.e. how you communicate).
> original question shows effort was put into it
What matters is how the other side interprets it, not your level of effort or your expectations. If the other side apparently doesn't get what you wanted to happen, that's a communication issue.
This is the sad reality we live in I suppose, I feel that the trajectory that our species is moving towards is one of over-reliance. It seems like people are slowly becoming more and more dependent on AI, and to be honest, that was always the goal of technology whether we like it or not. Things are invented to make other things easier, but of course this case is just sad.
We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.
As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions.
But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.
> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.
Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.
At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.
> Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Great suggestion. Problem: these are bosses and coworkers and people you need to work with to keep receiving income to live, and the topics talked about are things important to the place of work.
When you work in STEM fields you tend to interact with people with higher non verbal reasoning skills (often called Performance IQ) who generally have lower verbal IQs (not always). These people are definitively less articulate and cannot see the linguistic inconsistencies and inhuman demeanor of LLM outputs. Much in the same way that non creative people cannot tell why some AI art is unappealing, they can't easily comprehend the value of the human dimension of art. Similarly, people with poor non-verbal/performance reasoning skills cannot understand the difference between AI produced code and human produced code.
Its happening with me too since around a year. When I ask a solution from one of my senior he just reply by pasting the response from ChatGPT. Now I have stopped asking him.
I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.
The tiring part for me is the waiting and/or context switching to fill that time. When agents of this intelligence or better can get you results in seconds instead of minutes we can start thinking single threaded again and it will be more enjoyable.
> Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.
My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents
I remember late into my master's degree in a ethic's class about AI we had discussed the possibilities of the butterfly effect of not letting it transpire. He had given us a tricky word, and I don't remember what it was, but he asked us to create a definition for it.
I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,
Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.
>granted she was significantly older
I said, "Why don't you believe it?"
"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.
"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."
"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."
She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.
What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)
For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.
Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.
Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.
How would this happen? I thought most of these things used random seeds when returning responses. I understand similar, but exactly the same seems pretty odd if 2 people use the same prompt in 2 sessions.
Help desks and canned replies - if a user complains about X, respond with Y. We used to just have humans do it, but turns out machines can do that bit, too, especially if the question is relatively simple or asked a lot or has an answer not up for debate.
I assume if they copy pasted the same question it could have been cached? It would seem wasteful for <llm_provider> to not cache responses to exact same questions with exact same context windows (fresh session).
I like the way how you have written this text. It’s short and clear. Not a wall of text. Very easy to read and comprehend.
I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings
Until someone fine tunes their LLM to match whatever the trend is and then the contrarians buck that trend for something else. An endless game of cat and mouse.
I personally don’t care if an output is from LLM or human, as long as someone has validated it and determined that it’s correct and useful.
I think new norms will develop around this behavior - it's rude to show someone else your AI output, and I think long term that will be broadly recognized.
Two months ago I responded to my nontechnical business partners asking me what do I expect from AI in the future couple of months or years - people will cherish and value in person talk and meeting other people much more and even this will hold true for minor share of human population and only until we augment human body to hide its permanent connection to AI.
A year ago (or so) I had a colleague whose messages were all obviously AI-generated. I told them that it felt weird that they were sending me AI answers in Slack and code reviews, and they stopped doing it.
Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.
Keybase. Keybase was/is a trust network that was unceremoniously and unduly strangled. (You were the chosen one!)
I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.
It doesn't worry me at all. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’ll adapt by switching to different means of communication to keep finding what you’re looking for. AI is simply carrying out natural selection.
So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?
That's a pretty big "I'd". In my experience the answer is no, the AI is not as effective as a human operator (as long as the human operator is paid enough to care)
- you use AI-generated argument in a discussion.
- your co-worker counters with AI-generated argument.
- you re-counter with AI-generated rebuttal.
- the co-worker counter the re-counter with another AI-generated…
etc.
I'm tired of sorting out what github link is worth clicking, considering the deluge of vibecoded [I dont like this verb] new repos, the pride of minor accomplishments, no matter how meaningless: 'Look Mom. I made it say hello!'.
I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.
I totally understand! Started getting AI fatigue for a few months now. I find myself constantly questioning if content I interact with is AI generated or not.
In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, the "Net" is overrun by rouge AI and eventually humanity has to quarantine itself from them, ironically, using another AI.
that's a real issue, nowadays people are so depended on Ai that they canno even think themselves and for being so called "i know everything" uses Ai to make conversation.
I think using AI to help you write or rewrite something you want to convey is fine, the difference is using it as a replacement of thinking instead of a tool.
Think the difference between AI saying "This paragraph seemed muddled and lacks a clear point. Consider rewriting it." vs "Here, I rewrote this paragraph to focus it more on bridging the previous and next paragraphs."
The problem with this as a metric is that it is loosely defined so it becomes quite easy for a person to twist it to justify almost any level of AI usage as "well, it is still more effort than <X>".
On the other hand, I recently had a problem with my grocery order from Sam’s Club (the onions were smashed) and had to call to get it hopefully addressed. Talked to an LLM for 30 seconds after 0 wait and it was resolved. No accent I could barely understand, no potato microphone, no being put on hold for 5 minutes in the middle while they do whatever.
Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.
Was it Sam Altman, who said that they intent exactly that? To offer intelligence as a service?
I trust myself to be hard headed enough to keep my intelligence from atrophy, but it's going to suck living in a society where most people don't (or who never developed it at all).
The other day I was at the theatre and I overheard the people next to me glad that they had the best tickets because chatgpt had advised what to buy. The big tip was choosing something centered rather than very angled. Sigh.
Let's be real. Our economies are in the gutters and an insane amount of "work" is actually textbook "bullshit jobs".
However, we as a society aren't nearly ready to actually hold a conversation about that. We could probably eliminate half of all non-hands-on (i.e. a human uses their hands to manufacture a thing) employment in a matter of a year or two if we would embrace computers and digital infrastructure and give lower levels of employees more authority - and that's before AI even enters the picture. Government services are a prime example - a lot of "e government" services in Germany aren't truly digital, they generate a PDF that is printed out in some clerk's office and processed manually by copying information from that PDF into some admin program.
But unfortunately, if we were to do that, we'd run into riots faster than we could imagine. We aren't ready for a society in which we still have a small base of people that have to, literally, work (with their bodies) to keep society alive while the rest does not need to work any more.
Yeah, I have dropped out of the tech biz completely. I'm unemployed and kind of screwed now. I couldn't take it anymore. I used to work with intellectuals and thinkers. This is why I was in the industry for 20+ years. I liked the stimulation. Communication with humans is dead in the workplace. Now it's just a bunch of mindless automatons asking AI. No thinking about the problems at hand. No interest in understanding the solutions. It's all just "get it done as fast as possible." I refuse to work in that environment. Tech people are becoming about as skill-leveled as a fast food worker's level of training. Just pressing buttons on a screen as the screen tells the to press them. It's a meaningless existence to sit there an be forced to communicate with f'n AI models. No thanks. All you AI bros can have it. We'll see how useless you are in a few years when you realize you know absolutely nothing and couldn't work yourself out of a paper bag without AI guiding you.
Increasingly happy with ability to simply avoid this entire debacle. Interfacing with machine extruded text, or even people re-wording such text, isn't something I've had to deal hardly at all in or our of work. Ensuring that did take quite a bit of effort though...
I think this is more reflection of how important you are to those people so it is more social thing then anything.
I know you think your questions are legitimate but look it in broader context. Use AI to craft questions for them that they will find engaging as a exercise.
These are not situations a human would have given you a response on in the past. it's the same irrational ai phobia. we've had automated phone agents for decades. even on reddit, automod has been a thing for a long time. it's always been the case for many tech companies that unless you get someone on HN or twitter, you're out of luck. plenty of HN posts about people who've had google business accounts disabled or locked out with no explanation or recourse.
a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.
Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.
I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.
Growing pains. We haven't yet established norms surrounding use of LLMs, and people are lazy. We will have to learn from mistakes first, unfortunately. In this case that means diminishing trust.
I despise when someone just passes my prompt to an AI, but I do honestly think that there are a minority of people who do better work with it. Not that the work is good, but they don't care to try and at least the AI is eager.
I hate to say it, but I'm becoming less and less interested in structured content, and more interested in disorganized, messy content over time. I don't like the thought of how this may end up in a few years for me.
This ^. The moment I open an article/post and see subtitles in *bold*, emojis everywhere and/or symmetric paragraphs, I start to suspect instantly whether it's AI.
> more interested in disorganized, messy content over time
Same, that kind of content kinda forces me to use my brain (yeah.. sounds obvious..) to organize the message, understand it, agree/disagree, and actually CONSUME the content, like the old days..
Have encountered this too - we really need new social norms around this.
Bombarding others with pages of slop that took you 10 seconds to generate (and not even read) yet take minutes to untangle for the recipient is obviously downright rude.
...unfortunately every office has a small number of people that are dumb as rocks and don't recognise this - in fact think they're helping
I hate getting AI generated emails from people. They probably haven't even read or understood the slop they're sending me, the chances of them understanding and contextualizing what I reply are slim, I might as well reply with AI slop. What's the point of any of this.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
> I’m tired of talking to AI.
> I want to talk to real people.
> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
I don't use AI, but I rarely respond to any PMs. There are many reasons
for this; for instance, I remember in the old days, when I first heard
about MMA, I registered on sherdog for a discussion. I don't recall when
that was, but it was many, many years ago. Then, after many years of not
using it, I logged in and found a PM merely insulting me. I very politely
and skillfully correct that PM - however had, ultimately this is not really
"interaction", this is just wasting my time (and, admittedly, I already was
not using sherdog for many years before that either). Since then I have very
decreasingly used PMs in general. It's a difference when I know someone,
of course, but random people on the internet ... the barrier to want to talk
via PMs for me is very low in general. I simply dislike the format of it.
I find it much easier when it is an open discussion, such as was the case on
reddit (before moderators censoring everyone killed that). It's interesting to
see how much censorship happens nowadays. That's very different to the 1990s
era. Either way I think AI is not solely at fault here, because I could see
problems way before AI emerged already. I very rarely use webforums these
days, and Discord is no alternative either - Discord is even worse since it
is all a private company controlling discussions. IRC was easier than that.
I was actually thinking of how tired i was talking to real people and how refreshing AI was to talk something through with.
Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.
Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.
I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.
Using AI to learn objective things is acceptable. However, as long as it's combined with your own experience, because AI can't possibly understand your entire world, any subjective answers will be disgusting, disastrous, obsequious, and boring.
I'm tired of talking to people telling them to stop talking to an AI
AI generated slop has exploded across reddit. Last year I would see about 1 obvious AI generated post and report it. Today I've already reported 5 posts and it is 7am here.
The posts are some technical topic but there isn't even really a question in the post and then it ends with "thoughts about this?" and people try to clarify with the OP what the question is.
I reply to them to stop wasting their time because it is a bot. Sometimes there are 20 comments and nothing from the OP bot. Sometimes the OP bot says "Interesting, thanks" but never any real followup question.
We had this discussion 3 weeks ago "AI Slop is Killing Online Communities"
Reddit makes money from spam accounts. Even before LLMs, they'd ban you for reporting the wrong spambots, those being the ones that pay Reddit for priority access.
The replies to the LLM post are probably LLMs themselves.
I've already unsubcribed to a bunch of subreddits because the moderators did nothing to stop the slop.
I almost never go to the main "popular" page as it is full of garbage.
But I was still enjoying my niche subreddits. But in the last year the amount of AI slop has exploded and it is getting worse every day. Reposts of things from less than a week ago. Really vague technical questions with emdashes, bullet points, and ending in "thoughts?" that generate a discussion but the OP bot never replies or has vague 1 word comments.
I know that reddit makes money from ads so more bots mean more traffic which means more ads and more money.
But it is sad watching communities because useless and die.
I work with a handful of offshore devs and it’s basically just talking to Claude now with a delay measured in timezone differences. What is even the point of having offshore Claude middle men when I can just orchestrate remote agents directly without giving a crap about timezones?
The meatsack agents do the same thing anyway - I give them requirments and they build it exactly as specified with zero question, and in the laziest get-it-done method possible with no thought about complexity, architecture, technical debt, etc…. If there is a mistake in the spec they don’t question it, they just build the mistake. If they aren’t going to use their brains WHY SHOULDNT I replace them with Claude?
Managers send me AI generated specs and AI generated slop mock-ups. They answer questions about how the product should work by giving me AI generated responses they didn’t even spot-check for correctness. AI generated bug reports with hallucinated STR. Offshores send me slop they not only didn’t read, they didn’t even run once because it’s OBVIOUSLY broken. Absolute madness.
None of this sh*t is actually helpful. It’s work SLOP. It’s not more productive. It’s a productivity tar-pit that once you’ve gotten stuck it’s almost impossible to escape.
I hate all this garbage and the total rotting out of people’s minds and abilities it has inflicted upon humanity.
Nothing has made me hate billionaires more than AI. It helped me realize that I could never be a successful multinational corpo man because I’m not a morally bankrupt POS and I look at people much different now because of this realization. There is no way one could get to the place that people like Altman, Amodei, Nadella, Ellison, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, etc…are without being giant pieces of rotten excrement.
The company I work at tries to solve it right now, not promoting, just want to share.
Slop is no fun to deal with, so we have a thesis that slop should be left for agents to read and human-to-human communication should happen outside of passing empty fluffy docs to one another. To realise that, we have a workspace with group chats where multiple agents and humans can work together and agents can engage with humans for additional information when needed. The challenge is, of course, to find the right level of autonomy for the agents and let the agent learn and follow user's workflows well enough to be useful.
The internet isn't going to die out, but it feels like it's becoming a place where you go to do a specific task and then you check out again.
One interesting observation from myself: I don't "browse" the internet anymore. I go read specific sites, order something, or do some task. So my internet usage is way down, but I also don't watch a lot of TV or streaming content anymore, because I can't really deal with it. There's to much of it, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, everything is just a rehash (Cinematography is beautiful though). So now I just read, preferably books written before the year 2000.
It used to be like this, during the golden age of the internet. We didn't have it anywhere, we had it on a computer on our desk. We had to sit down at that desk to use it. Eventually we would get up again and be offline.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
How do you define general conversation? I have used the Gemini web chat yesterday to review and generate a report about multiple credit card statements.
depends what you mean. I regularly ask it to explain stuff, terminology I don't recognize etc. I also ask it about neat things it did, terminal commands etc so I can do them when I want to. That's chat in some sense, no? its not all "write this code"
am I the only one who always replies to people manually? I don't think I've ever done the "send back a chatGPT screenshot" or copy paste a response from chatGPT to a message I know was from a human.
I feel the same as the article author. Worse, every Diary/Journaling app is now including AI, so the place where original thoughts are supposed to be written for posterity is now also AI generated slop. I've canceled subscriptions because of it.
Get used to it. This is the "task inflation" phase of the process. When you get a mechanized harvester that can harvest 20x the produce of a human produce picker, do you get done in 5% of the time, or grow 20x the produce to pick? Right, it's always more more more. Now that the business owner can answer your email in two seconds with his ChatGPT screenshot, he stacks more tasks in the free time. You're not getting a human response anymore. Enjoy the slop.
I’m tired of seeing GitHub filled with vibe coded slop.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I often see new projects that look exciting at first. But when I start reading the source code, I realize there’s a ton of messy code, and it was clearly written by Claude or another AI tool.
It feels like some beginners are using vibe coded projects just to brag: “Look, I built this tool,” even when the code quality is abysmal.
I put people who do some of the BS listed here on mute or block.
Life is better with people who actually engage and are curious about improving things human-to-human.
AI (LLM) responses are catered towards the lowest common denominator / average type shit responses.
The best use for AI/LLM agents is to do work I tell them to do, like a servant who obeys my orders and executes them.
A human using AI/LLM to respond to another human (who has already used AI/LLM to come up with a v1 he wants to discuss) is a moron and not worth engaging with further. Even if they're your friend, it is a good signal that you need better friends.
I know its going to cause angst, but the net we knew of is dead.
The incentives to keep it the way it used to be are gone. AI is cheap, and it sounds better than what a majority of users write.
Humans adapt. Maybe we shift from communites and moderation, to predefined rules of engagement. If a commenter can follow some pre agreed upon rules of debate, then it doesn't matter if they are silicon or not.
We went from a cave of wonders to a dark forest in a single life time. It would be amazing if it wasn't so fucking frustrating.
Humans are highly dependent on the environment; you can blame people for eating too much of highly processed food and lots of sugar, but that's what happens if all you see around is highly processed food and sugar
True, but it is impossible to catch up while preserving quality and mental sanity.
I know about several of my friends, non-tech, being directly impacted by AI.
In finance, lots of analysis work is now offset to LLMs, and the people leveraging the tools obviously still have the issue that they need to review everything the AI has analyzed, their formulas, etc. And lots of nuance and things that a human would caught are lost. But in the meantime the expectation is that your analysis output is 5 times what it was before.
My girlfriend works in corporate law for an insurance company. The company is FOMOing hard for LLMs and pushing everybody to write gemini "gems" and notebooklm presets to do lots of the work.
But it absolutely does not scale: you can't keep up with those demands, while also providing the same quality coming from thoroughly analyzing new regulations and such.
Another friend that works in credit has now the company mandate that people update financial statements etc directly to LLMs and those tools come with a yes/no about whether they will finance it or not. Quality of debt has now plummeted, needless to say and the process is longer that it has ever been because re-reviewing the LLM analysis is more expensive than doing it on your own.
My own bank has had a terrific customer care that has been recently replaced by an LLM, tragedy. It is absolutely unhelpful beyond the 80% pareto principle where customer care had already pre-canned answers anyway. But for the 20% of cases that are major issues/bugs, the AI is simply not helpful.
My bank genuinely had a bug with invoice processing and there was no way to tell them nor to resolve my issue (which required somebody to manually void the previous invoice and restart the process that got bugged).
Except for the fully autonomous OpenClaws invading social spaces. There's no human in the loop. That's pure, unfettered AI slop, at a scale no human could keep up with.
My employer's IT guy is now just someone who searches Claude for solutions, finds a company that does a niche thing and say "we spent X dollars discussing it, let's just hire this company and pay them $13,000 every year to handle the problem."
The problems are usually nothingburgers the IT guy doesn't understand (cookie banners). I cannot fight: 1. IT guy constant stupid takes on why we should throw money at a problem 2. a company that's only goal is to tell us we need X verification for $13k/yr or we'll be screwed
The verification is a cron job that checks cookies. Any time you try to discuss the issue he copy and pastes an AI text wall.
A lot, a lot, a lot of companies are going under because the fake-it-to-make-it people do not know what to do. And the C-Suite wants to contract out all expertise to some pointless corporation that won't help.
It doesn't prevent people from outsourcing their thinking to AI. People don't bother preparing to discuss topics beyond what AI told them. If they have access to their computer during the conversation they'll ask AI rather than google for reference material. If they don't have access, they'll suggest "investigating" (asking AI) and reconvening.
We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.
AI is a new medium. It's used and going to be used for everything. Including communication.
More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.
About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2
When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.
If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.
the fallacy is not recognizing ai is interpolating the human body of work. all the people decrying ai slop: this is our sythesis. ai is not a separate thing from human work. whwt the author is really saying is "I am tired of individuals no longer having the leverage they once did."
The article, if you'd read it, was about receiving the same response to a technical question from multiple sources, whilst seeking human assistance with a problem AI hadn't been able to solve.
“Stop changing my code you st*d piece of s*t. And stop pushing that youtube garbage like i’m some 5 year old” - me against gemini. But he, helps with my anger management.
Being able to just bluntly tell it in very colorful language that its neurotic cargo-culting phobia of imaginary things is something that needs to stop is such a breath of fresh air after the dark ages of 2017.
The question is really why are you asking your coworkers questions that can be answered by AI. Likely you're putting the burden on them because you're tired of talking to AI. This is learned helplessness.
If instead you ask questions that are targeted, like "did you look at the PR I pushed yesterday, do you think this is something we can get into production soon?" then you'll get a human answering. I would posit that anything than can be answered by an LLM adequately, should be, then when you ask a coworker a question be direct in what you want. Ask for their input. for example, instead of "what alternatives do we have to <tech of the day>?" instead ask "I've researched a few alternatives (to <tech>) but I'd like to see what your experience might tell us about each of these that seem promising..." It all comes down to what and how you're asking.
You'll burn through your goodwill with coworkers if you keep asking questions than can be adequately answered by an LLM.
> "did you look at the PR I pushed yesterday, do you think this is something we can get into production soon?"
ChatGPT, look at the status of the PR and compare it to the flow chart of how we merge into production. Check against the milestones for this quarter, too. Respond in a short but cheerful manner.
Given a prompt like that, you are going to get equally trashy responses. You feed it slop, it's going to give back slop.
They aren't putting any effort into quality questions or requests. Maybe these aren't accurate to what they actually wrote or the actual response, but then that just means they are lying and can't be trusted.
>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.
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.
> 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".
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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?
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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/
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Humans are already forgetting how to Human.
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
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"
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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.
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> 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 le minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
True 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...
Tip: The best coworker I ever worked with had the name of a famous italian pop star and worked at JPL and yes this is a roundabout endorsement.
He would _always_ say "Let's find out together", and then proceed to find the answer in front of me, doing effectively LMGTFY but in a way that was extremely more helpful (by watching his workflow and allowing questions) and empathetic (by taking time politely and starting from what I knew, not what he knew).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
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LMGTFY is an ironic jab, not a suggestion.
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
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The pattern I notice more frequently at work now is:
"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
No one here wants to say it, so I will.
A lot of people are relatively stupid.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
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Let me Google that for you implies the answer is well known and trivial to find.
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
I figure from the context of the post they are asking sincere questions to their co-workers where they think their experience and knowledge is appropriate, but otherwise I agree that people should do a little legwork on their own before asking out loud.
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So I think it's a cultural thing.
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
I see a ton of this inherently lazy behavior. A big part of my job is supporting a ticket system for employees to ask questions about a pretty complex employment contract. The number of questions that come in where it's so clear the submitter didn't even attempt to answer on their own is dumb founding.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
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> True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
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I also knew people who have some social dysfunction, and they seem to rely on LLMs as a crutch. The belief seems to be "there's no way I'll phrase this right, I need to let the LLM do it for me."
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
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90% of the time I ask a question of a coworker that could be googled or clauded what I’m actually asking for is their confirmation that they agree with the answer. So use the AI, but at least read the reply and/or reword it so it’s clear that you agree.
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Is 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.
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IMO, its a little jab/playful when a friend sends a LMGTFY link and its really disrespectful if a colleuage sends it
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Laziness and "Memetic Imprinting" of the inevitability where the ultimate attack vectors.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
The best "hack" to appearing smart and knowledgable in the average organisation used to be to not just not say "I don't know" until after Googling things, because 80% of the time the person asking you didn't bother doing that first, and in doing so you learn something as a result, and end up looking good.
The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...
With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
If you feel the need to hide how you got the answer then you know something is wrong.
> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.
Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.
If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.
> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible
This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
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If you tell somebody to go google it, you are being incredibly rude 95% of the time. That is pretty widely understood
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The 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.
The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines.
- Louis de Bonald
Brilliantly poignant. Before AI, I don't think this would've resonated with me, but it sure does now.
Letting 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.
> it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything
I suppose it's possible that was the goal all along...
Asking 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
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Someone 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.
That's probably the goal
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
You might get fired for still using spreadsheets. ;)
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Option B would involve being incredibly verbose and burying prompt injections in your question.
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When your spreadsheet gets full, will you change jobs or change tactic?
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It'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.
I’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.
Same argument can be used against you: why do you bother someone with a question and want them to dedicate time to answer it for you when that question is easily google-able or answered by an LLM?
It costs you seconds to ask the question, and you want them to invest minutes in answering it?
You invest seconds in a question, they invest seconds in the answer. Seems like a fair deal to me.
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Implicit 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.
It 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
I 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.
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Most 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.
I agree with your assessment of people. I find that there is a lot of overlap with this old quote:
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.
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I 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
There'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.
I 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.
"This is the killer issue"
I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?
This is the question nobody's asking.
I 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.
I 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.
And 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
Then came ChaCha trying to monetize it.
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And 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.
On 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.
At 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.
“cognitive surrender”
It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
This 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.
Off 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
Like what did you expect?
>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.
Absolutely. 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.
Exactly, 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
It 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).
My "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.
I 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.
OK 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.
If the LLM is smarter than the person, the person cannot look at the output and judge to see whether it is correct.
If 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.
Not 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)
No 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.
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Overly dramatic. It’s not that deep dude
These 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.
> 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.
Hopefully such flagrant usage will be priced out at some point.
It 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.
Where are these people?
I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
Is that a feeling you battled a lot growing up or something? It's very specific, and not actually very connected or sensible.
It feels insulting when discussing something serious, they respond back with a highly inaccurate ChatGPT response.
I’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.
I 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...".
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I 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.
My 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.
Seems have to make a face to face appointment, without any online devices in hand.
I 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.
When 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.
This is just a glitch in time. It’ll be agents talking to agents. We won’t be able to keep up.
The stupidity and helplessness are by design.
What? 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.
This 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.
There 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!
I 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.
Frankly 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
On 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?
This 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.
I 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.
Nothing 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
If 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.
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You could hit your head against a brick wall repeatedly. Tries that yet?
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a bit too simplistic for my tastes. I wouldn't call being inebriated the same as being dumb; but I would absolutely agree that being inebriated is way more fun, easy, and fulfilling than being sober. I would choose being inebriated over being sober almost every time, regardless of the mechanism of inebriation.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
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It'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.
It'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.
No, 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".
Well, 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...
You 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.
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I 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...").
Sounds 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?
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer.
That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.
Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a sales pitch for the thing I was trying to build for him. He was always pitching for new business, and seemed to struggle to get out of 'sales mode'. I have no doubt that if I were working for him now, he'd be pointing me to an LLM in response to any question.
This is why executives think LLMs can replace everyone. They can see it can replace them, and project that onto everyone else. And they don't see the gaps in knowledge because they don't care about the facts, only the presentation.
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Maybe unrelated but this memory pops up: I once worked with a mechanical engineer who could not visualize anything in his mind and had quite some trouble with word finding and explaining his ideas. He just couldn't say what needed to be built, he could only evaluate after it was built (often "argh, no not that").
It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:
"Why didn't you build what I said?" "I did. This is exactly what you said." "No it's not! I said x y z" "Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z" Silence. "Then that's not what I meant"
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Its so much worse now.
I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!
There's an old computing maxim: GIGO. It used to mean "garbage in, garbage out" meaning that if you put garbage into a computer, then the output was garbage. Nowadays, GIGO means "garbage in, gospel out" meaning that no matter how bad the input was, the output was to be treated as The Word of God.
> That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.
I use to get emails with some oddball questions slightly out of my field of expertise from business owners. I would answer, and they would forward my email to the person that asked them the question. They saw their role as routers.
>That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).
Maybe he was trying to say "look, when I can look this up, it means that you can too, i won't put any effort into it, because i pay you, but if i can use AI, so can you."
Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.
Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.
The 'AI-generated pseudo-spec' is becoming a massive productivity killer. Non-technical managers prompt an LLM, get a highly confident 5-page document with chosen libraries, and think they've done 80% of the work. But as a developer, you now have to spend hours debugging and debunking hallucinated architectures just to prove why the AI's approach doesn't fit the existing codebase. It completely shifts the burden of actual product management into AI-babysitting for the dev team.
I was discussing a change we wanted to make to some tables in one of the DBs, but it would require a lot of effort because of the sheer size. Anyway, after saying how much effort would be required the response I got was to “please ask ChatGPT.” It gave a slightly different response, but changed it after I presented it with my solution and agreed that was the better approach. Just… sigh
You'd be surprised how many "scale-up"'s are owned by genuine idiots. I don't even mean inexperienced people, just people that - if you were to meet them for the first time - seem like they are fucking idiots. The type that recently figured out you can tie your shoe instead of tripping over them.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
>I don't know how they do it.
They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.
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Flowers for Algernon has something to say about this.
So Silicon Valley's big-head is based on an actual stereotype?
> psychotic
Probably more under-developed than psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
I think psychotic fits. They have lost touch with reality, and are treating AI as some all knowing entity.
At my company, non technical Managers (including marketing folks) are posting Claude and ChatGPT responses in bug tickets with the "fix" for the bug. No explanation of what the expected vs actual behavior is, just AI slop telling me how to fix it. Soooo helpful.
One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.
I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.
There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.
A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.
There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.
Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
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This reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early.
The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
Reminds me of my friends in Gaza, where every day means no shops, no restaurants, no home, no medicine, no food, no water, no hope. The beaches are full of people just trying to exist.
That sounds nice. Not sure I'd like to live in a war zone, but it sounds like it has its perks.
Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.
I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.
I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.
So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
Easily configurable via router rules at home!
This has a name in literature: post disaster utopia, google it :)
'A Paradise Built in Hell' by Solnit is a good read about it
It's the same with remote locations, we destroyed substantial parts of their magic by getting everyone online everywhere, all the time.
Lovely! I am all for an offline day in the year where everybody does what you described.
Plenty of these experiences can be found without disconnecting the electricity for multiple countries. Personally, I find musical events of all sorts are amazing for this, and completely AI free should you chose the right events :)
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
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I forget where, but there was a restaurant who locked all phones in a box at your table and if you made it to the end without opening it the table got a free cookie.
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Let's do it today
one day a year? it should be every week :)
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People can't even keep up discussions. Most of the population is totally dumbened down, like on the levels of barely functioning monkeys.
We need to go back
Yeah totally. Now cut the power for a week and see how long the socialization lasts.
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People don't want to hear this hard truth, sadly.
In comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?
In my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end.
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.
I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!
I work on a small team. I talk to coding agents a lot. I also talk to my human team members a lot. So I have decent experience with interacting with both LLMs and humans.
My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.
I called the local Apple Store, got what was probably an AI. I just needed the hours, so that was OK, but then it asked if I needed anything else. I asked for winning numbers to the lottery. It thunk and thunk and thought some more and came back with, I’ll have to pass you to a store employee. Now I know how to avoid 1,000 questions and get a live person.
I just keep repeating "operator" ad nauseam not stopping for anything other than the sound of the call transferring and that almost always works.
Sometimes yelling fuck shit piss bitch cunt fuck ass whore etc works. They have them setup to detect swear words to figure out when youre pissed off and need to talk to a human lmao
I just keep blowing raspberries down the line until I'm connected to a human.
There are or course some asshole companies whose bots are designed to never connect you to a human and just hang up after a while.
Better just play operator.ogg use your favorite media player on loop until someone does pick up.
> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer.
Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."
We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.
Thanks for your response-- it's really load-bearing.
You can send them this: https://noslopgrenade.com
>Or as Jean Baudrillard has said:
It is nothing short of profoundly ironic to quote Jean Baudrillard in this context.
I agree with the messaging generally, but unfortunately to fight implicitly unprofessional behavior with a terse response like this would look explicitly unprofessional!
At my company this behaviour is celebrated
If it wasn't essential, I'd tell them to talk to me like a human or else I'd just quit the conversation entirely. Boundaries and stuff.
I have done this a few times. If you can't be bothered to give me your attention when asking something from me, you won't get mine.
if you shame ppl for ai use you might get branded as ai non beliver and shown the door next layoff round ( which is just around the corner)
[dead]
I understand that example, on the other hand, RTFM is as old as history and it can often be replaced by googling or asking LLMs.
Not saying that's the very specific case, but I regularly encounter in my daily life at work people delegating the kind of information seeking that can be done independently.
No, this was in response to some questions about different approaches enterprises take to automated code quality review and complying with some arbitrary security standard out there. And this was a principal secops guy who thought the appropriate thing to do was to ask Copilot.
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
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I have five Gen-Z kids that are pushing back on GenAI hard and they claim their peers are getting angry about how it’s impacted their lives.
As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.
But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.
I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.
I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.
GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.
My oldest is on the tail end of Gen-Z and is vehemently anti-AI. This isn't a position I've been vocal about, she just kind of expressed her disdain for it one day.
I've been in IT a while, and am more of an AI skeptic - but I'm OK with it being used as a tool where it makes sense in my field, and it certainly has some value.... but shoehorning it into everything and using it as a general replacement for human creativity is a no-go for me.
It's a relief to know GenZ is feeling this way, and I hope having an entire generation against it will help pump the brakes a bit.
It makes sense. GenZ and younger have the most to lose from AI. Corporate America is absolutely giddy about its promise to make 50+% of white collar jobs redundant. I'd have a very negative view about it too, if I were just graduating college and looking for an entry-level office job.
A bit off topic, but I am currently travelling through Europe by train. It is such a boon to just be outside everyday and meet locals and fellow travellers. Highly recommend.
It can also be exhausting. Extended travel makes me very tired. And I generally like talking to people.
Hope the heat doesn’t impact your travel plans too much. Feel free to reach out if you’re around Hamburg, always happy to meet HNers
The heat is ferocious indeed! I will, thank you!
How do you find the language barrier problem? Do you speak English to everyone you meet?
Highly depends on the country. Go to Sweden and you'll have a hard time even practicing Swedish, as soon as the natives discover you're also not a native, they'll switch to English immediately in most places of the country.
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
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It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
last time in Italy I "spoke" to lots of Italians very slowly with lots of gestures and a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot! Nearly ordered 100x as much cheese as I meant to except the guy in the shop was not a computer so he understood what I really meant. Much better than in the Netherlands where they just switch to English as soon as they hear you try to say choodumorchen
I speak three European languages, and English worked almost always. Especially the younger folks in the cities. If it didn't work, I used a translation app.
lmk if you ever visit Zürich :)
I have a pet theory that we were better off when the economy flowed through Wall St rather than Silicon Valley because Wall St people ride the subway to work.
I am also traveling through Europe, currently in Budapest. Twice now in the last week, I have heard AI music being played through the speakers at restaurants.
Well, I think I couldn't distinguish AI music from the good (or bad) old human-made "elevator music", but maybe I'm mistaken and it would stand out to me when I hear it...
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That's probably to be expected, before that they used covers of popular songs, likely produced by a company that offers much lower rates than e.g. the original artists.
I prefer silence over that tbh.
I am in Budapest tomorrow. Lmk if you want to meet for a coffee :)
AI K-pop was in the cafes in Seoul.
I’m in Europe travelling and AI has been a boon navigating the utterly fragmented public transport.
I have been pasting screenshots of NS international to ChatGPT and getting from A to B.
I wouldn’t be so confident without ChatGPT
I wrote about how ChatGPT can help even more in this space https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/ai-can-fix-the-fragmented-o...
There are already solutions for doing exactly that. e.g., DB's apps allow purchasing tickets for many other countries, and you can find and purchase DB tickets via Google Flights.
Just wait until everyone is using AR glasses which listen to your conversation, run it through an LLM, then use the speaker to bark an answer at you with the wearer’s previously synthesised voice, while they’re scrolling instagram inside the lenses.
/dystopia
I took my private jet to Fiji. Just needed a month to unwind and walk on the beach, sample local cuisine, get to know fellow travelers. Also highly recommended
Haha, enjoy! I am staying in cheap hostels or sleeper trains. I don't have the money, only the time. Which is more precious I realised.
I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt here. It reminds me of the Google search phenomenon others have mentioned, which culminated in the joke website "let me google that for you." But, I don't think the cause is necessarily that people are dumb or lazy. Both are factors, but another big one is that people are overwhelmed at work. Another question coming in may not be viewed as an opportunity to learn or help a colleague but as just another task to complete as quickly as possible so the task mountain doesn't grow higher. I'd like to think that we'll eventually use AI to automate a lot of the mundane stuff at work so people have the opportunity to dig into questions from colleagues and provide real answers and genuinely have a conversation when they do. I realize that's pretty optimistic and it may take a while to get there but people stopped sending me google search results years ago. That phenomenon was relatively short-lived and hopefully this one is too.
AI makes it apparent that the only value some people bring to the table is that they have access to information that you do not. If now they fold that one advantage by just delegating everything to AI (which is in the same position as you informationwise), they will remove themselves from the worker pool soon.
If you're in a particularly fiesty mood you can lean into that. "If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"
While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.
"If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"
Prompt Engineering
I'll give the counter example:
I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.
Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.
Organizations will become even less about adding real value and more about making the boss feel good about you.
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Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off. There's value in that if they are, as if they really are experts they can filter out bs and reprompt better than you likely could if you're not an expert - and in rare cases, who knows, maybe they could actually do it themselves.
AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
There have always been people that did the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
AI will just make it more obvious.
And those people will be at the front to be let go when AI inevitably kills white collar jobs as it creates other jobs. They just might not be able to get one of those new ones because they rotted what little brain cells they had to begin with.
> I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off
The co-founder of Anthropic isn't even doing this when preparing statements to say after the Pope has spoken about AI, I think you're expecting a bit too much here.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that's a must too, but I also think people should test software extensively before deploying/releasing it, seemingly nowadays I'm in the minority about these sort of things.
I find your comment a bit funny
> Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
I've seen people employed working on some code bases that couldn't code at all.
> Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Some lawyers are downright incompetent and don't know what they're talking about / just want your money.
> Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
Some doctors are downright incompetent or malicious. You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
> AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
It does help people overall, the worst coworkers are probably going to still be there, just a bit better hidden.
The rest just have a new-age search engine to augment their capabilities.
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I mostly use it because I'm lazy on the presentation, not so much on the content. I provide full knowledge and content plan in my prompt. I do manual review & fix.
Someone informed can tell the content is generated. I don't really care, that's still my knowledge and I can discuss content in depth.
"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit — a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."
- Wendell Berry
This is 2009 right? I almost expected the classic 100+ year old quote, but knowing the year still has the same effect of conveying how something that feels recent has been felt forever.
I agree and on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life working from home, talking to a machine, and not enriching any person's life directly. It's just so gruesomely LONELY.
There are still in-office jobs out there, where you can have lunch with humans, and maybe even make friends with your coworkers. I have one. It's not a popular opinion on this site, but it's OK to admit that being isolated home alone for 40+ hours a week is not healthy for your personality type.
I'm back in the office (3 days a week) and there's some weird cultural thing on my team that I don't quite understand. Coworkers I sit next to will message me on Teams instead of just standing up and talking to me over the cube wall. No one eats lunch together or really converses outside of meetings. We have meetings on Teams even though everyone in the meeting is in the office sitting next to each other. I'll book rooms for the meetings and inform the team only to be the only one in the room.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
Remote doesn't need to be isolating. You can make friends with remote coworkers, but it requires a culture where jumping on a call to work things out is normalized.
I've found most work communication apps not to be very condusive to it, but Discord is pretty good.
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It hurts that I relate with this so much. I am wasting my 20s.
I see people who advocate for permanent wfh has plans with their social circle. Either already has a family or friends. Sucks to be the one trying to build a new life.
Btw, I don’t believe them a bit. All I see are rotten people who no longer speaks new things, or is a living instagram bot.
Different strokes for different folks at different stages in their lives. If I wrote OP's post 7 years ago before WFH, I'd have said: "on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life driving 2.5 hours each way to an office to type into a machine and to maintain physical proximity to people I don't really like or dislike. It's just so gruesomely UNNECESSARY."
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COVID will be seven years old this December. Many of us here are still working from home since that time.
It doesn’t feel like seven years. 2020 feels like last year.
What can one typically accomplish in seven years? An undergrad, masters, and maybe a PHD. It is a long time.
The years have flown by
Yeah but that's because people suck so fucking much.
1. "Sorry can't come" an hour after we were supposed to meet - this alone kills 80% of my friendships
2. "I like edgy humor" and then a month later "I'm going to report you to HR" literally had this happen to me
3. Most people have very little depth and stick to superficial smalltalk, which I find very exhausting
And when on top of that you say "I wish my friend had similar values and enjoyed at least one common hobby" then it's basically over. Not to mention the fact that most people aren't open to new friendships. If they're married then they straight up say "wife doesn't allow", if they're not then it's "yeah let's grab a coffee someday".
My motto is "if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go alone" because trying to be cooperative with people has never yielded me better results than just doing the shit on my own.
This is the result of having everything customised to you. I don’t know how old you are and I am not going to assume. I feel the way we live our lives, algorithmic everything tailored to us, we just don’t accept differences anymore.
Yeah people are like that but you have to keep trying. It's better than the alternative.
There should be a common agreement that synthetic text should have a specific color, for example, blue.
AI has "just" greatly accelerated/amplified dysfunction that was already there previously.
Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.
So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.
The sad thing is it happens in real life too. You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day. You have to just wait for them to get it out and then you can talk to the real person again.
I had people actually in-person scream at me, because I refused to engage with the engagement bait they had downloaded from tiktok or wherever.
Digital opioid crisis, this tribalism thing.
A lot of people do not seem to be doing well, which seems to be the foundation of many of the business models of the employers of people here on HN.
Digital copioid crisis.
> You'll talk to people and it's like 25% of their brain has been taken over by a parasite that replicates itself by amplifying their tribe's Talking Point of The Day.
This is so true.
So many people just parrot whatever nonsensical talking point they heard.
Regurgitating things without an ounce of reflection or critical thought.
Got any examples?
I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.
Humans will get their Vinyl moment. We will come back.
OP clearly is out of the loop and hasn't tried out the latest frontier models. SOA labs have specifically tuned the new models to counter the "I'm tired of talking to AI" issues using even less tokens and power!
This has been my experience as well.
- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.
- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.
- Claude does the PR review.
- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".
We're just passing butter at this point.
My experience as well. It's happened a few times now that I'll ask a coworker a question about some system they built, and they tell me to just ask the AI.
I did ask the AI. I gave it several rounds. I got a summary of their diff from it. I skimmed their diff myself. I have a rough mental model of the work they did, plus what the AI did/didn't tell me. I'm asking THEM so THEY can confirm my mental model is correct to the code they supposedly authored.
I suspect the real problem is they vibed the whole thing and didn't even self-review it. So they don't know, can't answer, and the interaction is truly pointless. They are not the expert any longer. It's not worth asking them.
Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.
I told some of my coworkers that they should keep in mind that if their job becomes "passing messages between an AI Assistant and their co-workers", sooner or later someone will realize they can just cut the middle man and build an agent that does their job. Use AI assistants all you like but don't forget to add value.
I'm reminded of Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest.
"I have one job on this lousy ship. It's stupid, but I'm gonna do it!"
I just had a maddening convo with Amazon's AI https://share.zight.com/o0udw54W (i had mentioned before that in 5 minutes it would be time to get my refund according to some other policy message they sent me). A convo before this Amazon's bot didn't even recognize the reply the forced me to give from their button. I clicked "Entire package is missing". and they replied "Couldn't understand your response". It's a brutal, antagonistic experience. The kicker is how Amazon keeps saying "we're passionate about customer experience". You were Amazon. You were. But you've given that up.
The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.
I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?
The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.
Don't worry. It happens to many of us, but it's not that serious. It's really like talking to yourself, given that they're still great language models, LLMs. Just imagine what it will be like in 10 years.
That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer. Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.
I found a GitHub that was spreading malware. I chatted to AI and it cloned it into a vm, did some static analysis, pulled the usernames of the bad guys and the guys they were impersonating and gave me a summary and an email address I could contact. The guy replied with a note of appreciation.
I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.
I love chatting to AI.
The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.
We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective
For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?
A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.
I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
I could be wrong, it's just a guess.
You're probably right, as Reddit has or wants to go to the stock market and they need to demonstrate line going up, even if it's fake.
Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.
Reddit has been botting since the very beginning and never stopped.
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There used to be so much discussion of "brand safety" and people would flip out if their ad showed on a video that didn't align with company viewpoints, even though the company clearly wasn't the creator of the video.
Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!
It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?
There’s more mass manipulation AKA nudge campaigns going on than ever. Plus, there’s a market for “aged” (forgot the term they actually used) accounts that look authentic.
Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?
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>For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deployed
I can't. And the only reason you can, is because we've been accustomed to rote script-based zero quality human customer service first.
AI customer service bots are awful. Their only redeeming feature is how bad most customer service processes already are.
Because we built an economy where you’re rewarded for being an attention whore. Flooding the scene with bots is a good way to statistically make sure you’re a good little whore.
It generally helps when one is not surrounded by tactless buffoons.
I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.
Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.
Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.
You inspired me to write this: https://ivanlugo.dev/writing/first-words/
Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.
In my documents I usually preface with "This document is 100% typed by Aperocky". And then where ever part of it is generated by LLM, it is clearly marked (e.g. SVGs). It is necessary these days.
You can't blame AI for people outsourcing talking to you. That's not a technology problem, it's a much worse problem, it's a social-cultural collapse.
You're absolutely right! This isn't just tiring <em-dash> it's _insulting_.
You hit the nail on the head!
Nearly half of online articles are now AI-generated. [0]
[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
This is good information, but a bit superficial - before AI, what percentage of online articles were generated from templates? What was written by content generation farms? Fiverrr and co pay-per-word writers?
I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.
I don't know, at least half of the front page seems to be LLM generated at any given time on HN. I couldn't say half seemed templated a few years ago.
I imagine something like 98% of articles also get less than 100 views. So the question is more about the articles you're reading rather than articles in general.
If one cant remember what they generated, whats the point in generating? Half of those who write articles do not remember what the AI put in it... Reviewing has become a slop work by humans!
> We build on our prior research by using three different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). We independently evaluate each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%. Each AI detector shows a similar trend.
This is all bullshit, none of those actually work, and the false-positives rates are sky-high. I'm not sure how any serious person have tried out any of those services and came away with the impression of "Well, better than nothing" because literally, it seems the opposite.
The detectors aren’t great but they aren’t really the issue. The fact that LLMs make it so easy to impersonate human communication is precisely the problem here. There cannot be a reliable way to identify if something is from a human or not. And the ease of access and low price makes using LLM generated content a no brainer, you have to actively go out of your way to produce human generated content.
We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
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So if these do not work, to what do you attribute the rising positive rate?
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If you need an AI detector to figure out if something is AI or not, surely that means the AI is so good that there is no need to detect whether it is AI or not, because it is indistinguishable from writings by a human when read by humans?
I mean this is an article coming from an SEO company that's really just trying to advertise its services in the end. Their methodology seems very loose.
Are you an AI agent trying to gaslight us?
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I'd say even half of my Youtube feed nowadays is.
1. Find some nicher but interesting topic (e.g. some historical event like Lepanto's battle)
2. Have AI generate the content of the 20 minutes video by collecting information about it online
3. Have AI generate the video
4. Have AI generate a realistic voice to comment on the video
5. Upload it without mentioning it's all AI generated
6. Have me get mad 4 minutes into the video because footage/paintings referring to that battle...do not exist at all...slowly realize it was all AI generated
The YouTube algorithm got unbearable to me even before the mudslide of AI content.
I highly recommend using an extension like Unhook and disabling all algorithmic recommendations such as the Home feed, sidebar/endscreen recommendations etc. The only way I interface with YouTube now is through the subscriptions page which shows me videos from creators I follow in chronological order.
There is a "do not recommend this channel" option somewhere
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In Neal Stephenson's fall or dodge in hell there's a timeline where the internet is so flooded by fake AI generated news that characters have their own agent both filtering info and maintaining their fake social presence.
The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.
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I've recently been connecting some machines to a new switch and my colleague has been monitoring web logs at the same time using Claude. He send me a Claude-generated observation that the machines that I was able to put my hands on simultaneously must be in different buildings due to high pings. Surreal experience.
How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?
You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.
LMGTFY was an intentionally rude tongue-in-cheek response when someone was asking a question that could easily be answered by a simple search. This is about asking more complex questions that don't necessarily have a single objective answer.
LMGTFY was rude. You'd never send that to a coworker, unless you were close friends and wanted to rib them a bit for having a brain fart.
I may have to break the news to you that the LMGTFY was also rude. Both LMGTFY and AI copypastes are rude and dismissive answers that are intended to make the person asking the question feel stupid and bad. It only provides value in making you feel really smart and possibly smug about showing that question-asker what's up, and offers nothing in the short term about their problem (or in the long term about their comfort in turning to you for help).
> you can get a straight answer from an LLM
By definition, LLMs cannot give a straight answer. They give you text based off next token probabilities.
The difference is that the LLM answer is almost always wrong. It assumes I have not already used an LLM and that I am asking something that an LLM can answer.
If the guy was asking about a business process in their business how would chatGPT know what their process is?
`Just send me the prompt` applies. If you have an answer and you feed it to an LLM to dress it up, just send me the prompt. If you don't have the answer and are just going to ask an LLM just tell me `I don't know`.
I don't need a proxy for ChatGPT.
Did we all forget "let me google that for you"? The cycle continues.
AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.
I'm not tired to talking to AI because I specifically instructed my agents to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross, so i constantly reminded that coffee is for closers only.
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I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.
If it comes to that I’m done with the internet. It has been an alright ride but that is not how I need to use it. Plus most all this discussion we do imo is just low effort noise anyhow. This is a time sink for me. It isn’t enriching, and often comes at the cost of actually enriching things, I’m beginning to realize. Remember any of the articles and discussion threads you read last week on hn and wherever else? Me neither. This is junk food, potato chips, small comfort stuff. If it becomes even more perverted the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
I see this happening too for various reasons. But I don't see it solving the "guy sent me a ChatGPT screenshot" issue.
I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.
We’re optimizing the soul out of human interaction.
Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?
Face reality my friend, Internet is now hostile to humans. Time to leave this place for good.
Yes and then we refuge in the physical meat space until the robots would be indistiguishing from humans.
Sounds like a movie plot, or is Bladerunner all over.
I was reflecting the other day how discovering things online felt like being in on a secret. You had to just know about a chat room or BBS or website. Each one was like discovering a secret.
Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.
There are exceptions, e.g. lobste.rs has an invitation tree. When someone starts posting LLM-generated comments, that part of the tree can get yanked. Also, it builds up a community gradually, because you need to be invited by someone. Since the invitation tree is visible, people will generally only vouch on people they trust, because an invitee that violates the rules will reflect bad on the inviter (and might get removed if they do that too often).
At least the internet is not one single place, and while I can't speak for anyone I think I've managed to avoid most of the AI generated internet.
> I think I've managed to avoid most of the AI generated internet.
I honestly am not sure that one can know that that is true anymore. Probably the only place left that I have any confidence in is maybe the small discords I'm in with various friend groups with <30 people that all know each other IRL.
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How? I'm genuinely interested.
Where are you going?
Reddit has a lot of AI generated stuff
Youtube comments are even worse.
Twitter seems 99% AI garbage
I think I need to find old school forums to discuss things.
How do you know? You can easily create AI generated text that is impossible to identify as such.
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Even the human generated content is written by humans increasingly influenced by AI generated content
Uhh, you are on HN. Most articles posted here are ai slop and many of the comments too.
Leave and go where? A homestead in the middle of the woods? Another planet?
To the bar or whatever physical activity you may like as long as you can talk to flesh and blood human beings.
My partner had issues with an online retailer and contacted support, which happily went around in circles since it was an AI agent and wasn't well prompted.
I did get a cookie recipe out of it, though.
Aren't we all getting sick of it?
Not going away. Next time it happens, employ The Gay Jailbreak
https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
AI has made my experience as a fully remote worker in a not-fully-remote company worse. It is adding a layer of indirection between myself and the juniors I'm mentoring, or the product manager I'm working on a feature with, and many other mundane facets of work. The opportunity to passively pick up on my coworkers' idiosyncrasies is now gone and all I can do is guess at what prompt they might have used.
I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.
South park called this out in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_(South_Park)
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
I think a lot of people are tired of talking to an Amnesiac AI, and would prefer memory consolidation into the network weights.
I think a lot of people are actually tired of having to explain their situations practically from scratch every now and then.
I agree this is probably true, but IMO the solution to this problem is unpalletable.
The worst part of this is the person that doesn't even bother copying the text, rather just screenshot the AI answer and send it. That's the new lowest level of not giving a crap about the question.
Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
I feel sorry for people who have to use strong AI agentic agents all day long for their jobs. I just came off of a 30 day experiment using Gemini Ultra (all the Antigravity+Claude Opus I could use) and while it was great to re-work a few dozen of my open source projects and to check my Open Content books for inconsistencies and make improvements, the awful thing was it felt dehumanizing. I am now just using DeepSeek v4 for less than 1 hour a day and that feels better: a good mix of getting help when really needed and doing my own thing by myself.
Urge to paste this into ChatGPT and tell it to create a reply is so high right now.
Talking to ai sometimes always gets me all worked up and frustrated when it keeps hallucinating and going in circles
Plenty of people are also chasing their own tail.
The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?
A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.
It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.
The only AI screenshots I like to read are when it's comically wrong and we both get a quick laugh
We just have to keep calling it out. Lazy thinking has always been an issue, but at least it could be coachable.
I'm tired of talking ABOUT AI.
Try working at my company where we now have an AI-Native product. I hear the word every 10 seconds when we have a meeting.
Does AI talk about us?
Yup: https://openclawbook.io/
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That's alright, nobody's making you. You can choose to disengage.
That is not entirely true. Some business first contact is AI. It is, on purpose, a bit difficult or bothersome to actually try and contact a human being.
When I think about a PGP-style web of trust that shows that you're human, this is the showstopper I come up against. Provably human people can just parrot the bots.
Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?
It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?
You are absolute right, would you like to talk about something else?
Yes tell me about what happened at Tianenmen square
It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
For what they are worth, nuclear weapons are still preventing large-scale conflict between world powers.
Hard to say if that is from the nukes or the global elite now being so very globally leveraged. Little column a and b probably.
Cargo-culting has "a rich history."
Others call it a proud tradition (as opposed to a useful tradition).
There's a feeling of abandonment online, and the optimist in me is wondering if maybe people would rather be doing something else. This is pollyannaish, but I'd love to imagine that people are discovering the real world, sitting alone or otherwise, and leaving this version of themselves on the internet to an empty shell.
You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
Probably what you want is answers.
If the computer (AI or not) provided you with that convenience, you'd never want to deal with a human for a given task.
The 'mischaracterization' of AI as human - now that's annoying. We probably should not submit answers by AI in the form of human identities.
Unfortunately this is a skill issue. The information is in the machine, you just need to figure out how to get it out. Most people are very far behind on this.
I thought the LLM promise was that people could do things easily because conversation is the most intuitive input there is. If we still have to "figure out how to get it out", what if we put that educational effort into... I don't know, learning search or queries or something that gives concrete answers and not statistically-average-probability answers?
So you're telling me that the business logic or some domain knowledge about my company is in the LLM and that I sould not ask my manager questions?
This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it". Which at the time was a rude but effective way of telling people to get off their ass and figure it out themselves instead of being lazy and expecting others to solve their issues.
You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.
The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.
>This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it".
I don't think that is always the case. Sometimes it is. Other times the social cues and later follow up makes it seem the person thought they were being really helpful, not sarcastic, by sending the response. Yet other times, the person acts as if it was their own response and not the AI's, almost akin to passing off the AI's work as their own.
This is most notable when the original question shows effort was put into it and it isn't a simple case.
I can't judge the specific situation. But if this happens to you a lot, I'd suggest looking at how you are asking things from other people (i.e. how you communicate).
> original question shows effort was put into it
What matters is how the other side interprets it, not your level of effort or your expectations. If the other side apparently doesn't get what you wanted to happen, that's a communication issue.
This is the sad reality we live in I suppose, I feel that the trajectory that our species is moving towards is one of over-reliance. It seems like people are slowly becoming more and more dependent on AI, and to be honest, that was always the goal of technology whether we like it or not. Things are invented to make other things easier, but of course this case is just sad.
We are cooked. Bots and automated answers should be banned permanently from GitHub etc., I mean the networks based on human conversation.
OP is right. I don’t want to talk with AI.
BTW this will be insane in next years as LLM usage in customer care has not reached the peak yet…
We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.
I think the root reason of the rising of AI chatbot is that many people are tired of talking to people.
As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions. But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.
I have this issue with students a lot and I'd rather get broken english than AI slop.
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> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.
Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.
At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.
> Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Great suggestion. Problem: these are bosses and coworkers and people you need to work with to keep receiving income to live, and the topics talked about are things important to the place of work.
Many people retired because of AI
When you work in STEM fields you tend to interact with people with higher non verbal reasoning skills (often called Performance IQ) who generally have lower verbal IQs (not always). These people are definitively less articulate and cannot see the linguistic inconsistencies and inhuman demeanor of LLM outputs. Much in the same way that non creative people cannot tell why some AI art is unappealing, they can't easily comprehend the value of the human dimension of art. Similarly, people with poor non-verbal/performance reasoning skills cannot understand the difference between AI produced code and human produced code.
These people are probably more attuned to conceptual abstract specifications.
Its happening with me too since around a year. When I ask a solution from one of my senior he just reply by pasting the response from ChatGPT. Now I have stopped asking him.
I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.
The tiring part for me is the waiting and/or context switching to fill that time. When agents of this intelligence or better can get you results in seconds instead of minutes we can start thinking single threaded again and it will be more enjoyable.
> Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.
My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents
I remember late into my master's degree in a ethic's class about AI we had discussed the possibilities of the butterfly effect of not letting it transpire. He had given us a tricky word, and I don't remember what it was, but he asked us to create a definition for it.
I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,
Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.
>granted she was significantly older
I said, "Why don't you believe it?"
"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.
"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."
"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."
She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.
I am so thankful that I was able to go through school before LLMs.
What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)
You get something like Mars Express [1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26915336/
Soo crying robots
Mass unemployment and wealth inequality
We have that already. We did not need AI for that. AI will happily bring more and more of it though.
A solution to this is to actually insist on calling people. At least then you'll get the person's immediate inputs to your question.
The business owner was just being rude.
For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.
Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230104
Yeah I'm curious re: theorchid and who they are...
I'm tired of talking about AI
How would this happen? I thought most of these things used random seeds when returning responses. I understand similar, but exactly the same seems pretty odd if 2 people use the same prompt in 2 sessions.
Help desks and canned replies - if a user complains about X, respond with Y. We used to just have humans do it, but turns out machines can do that bit, too, especially if the question is relatively simple or asked a lot or has an answer not up for debate.
I assume if they copy pasted the same question it could have been cached? It would seem wasteful for <llm_provider> to not cache responses to exact same questions with exact same context windows (fresh session).
I'm just speculating though.
I like the way how you have written this text. It’s short and clear. Not a wall of text. Very easy to read and comprehend.
I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings
Until someone fine tunes their LLM to match whatever the trend is and then the contrarians buck that trend for something else. An endless game of cat and mouse.
I personally don’t care if an output is from LLM or human, as long as someone has validated it and determined that it’s correct and useful.
> What you’re describing is a real social shift, not just annoyance with a tool.
> AI is useful as a tool. But when it replaces attention, judgment, and personality, conversations start feeling empty.
I pasted your article into ChatGPT and it gave me the most depressing statements. The above and also about 800 more words.
I think new norms will develop around this behavior - it's rude to show someone else your AI output, and I think long term that will be broadly recognized.
Two months ago I responded to my nontechnical business partners asking me what do I expect from AI in the future couple of months or years - people will cherish and value in person talk and meeting other people much more and even this will hold true for minor share of human population and only until we augment human body to hide its permanent connection to AI.
Log off, go outside, problem solved.
A year ago (or so) I had a colleague whose messages were all obviously AI-generated. I told them that it felt weird that they were sending me AI answers in Slack and code reviews, and they stopped doing it.
Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.
Keybase. Keybase was/is a trust network that was unceremoniously and unduly strangled. (You were the chosen one!)
I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.
Same.
AI is a hugely powerful tool, but I’m sick of having to treat a human’s AI-based verbatim reply as a real thing.
Anybody that does this is going to be calmly corrected as much as possible, and if the behavior doesn’t change then something will have to change.
It doesn't worry me at all. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’ll adapt by switching to different means of communication to keep finding what you’re looking for. AI is simply carrying out natural selection.
Same guy also had another #1 on HN days ago. Low score account, mildly interesting content ... I wouldn't discard manipulation.
Anyway, his other "essay" was about how he doesn't take phone calls or something, so seeing this note a couple days after is just fun.
This is your peer's natural reaction to "my time matters more than yours"; you're getting it back.
Your value to them amounts to forwarding your musings from/to an LLM. This does not happen by chance. Enjoy it.
Does it matter though.
So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?
That's a pretty big "I'd". In my experience the answer is no, the AI is not as effective as a human operator (as long as the human operator is paid enough to care)
- you use AI-generated argument in a discussion. - your co-worker counters with AI-generated argument. - you re-counter with AI-generated rebuttal. - the co-worker counter the re-counter with another AI-generated… etc.
Turtles all the way down.
I'm tired of sorting out what github link is worth clicking, considering the deluge of vibecoded [I dont like this verb] new repos, the pride of minor accomplishments, no matter how meaningless: 'Look Mom. I made it say hello!'.
I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.
I totally understand! Started getting AI fatigue for a few months now. I find myself constantly questioning if content I interact with is AI generated or not.
In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, the "Net" is overrun by rouge AI and eventually humanity has to quarantine itself from them, ironically, using another AI.
I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?
that's a real issue, nowadays people are so depended on Ai that they canno even think themselves and for being so called "i know everything" uses Ai to make conversation.
I think using AI to help you write or rewrite something you want to convey is fine, the difference is using it as a replacement of thinking instead of a tool.
The screenshots part is crazy.
Helping you "write or rewrite something you want to convey" is already using it as a replacement of thinking.
Is hiring a <professional> for a <task> a replacement for thinking?
I think it depends upon the effort involved.
Think the difference between AI saying "This paragraph seemed muddled and lacks a clear point. Consider rewriting it." vs "Here, I rewrote this paragraph to focus it more on bridging the previous and next paragraphs."
The problem with this as a metric is that it is loosely defined so it becomes quite easy for a person to twist it to justify almost any level of AI usage as "well, it is still more effort than <X>".
If you're not able to convey it maybe you haven't spent long enough thinking about it?
That's funny. Why use the brain if tokens are cheap nowadays? (This is not AI btw)
The thing is that to externalize your thought process is very dangerous because you feel you know things, but you really don't.
This feels to me like a transitional problem. People will learn not to do this. I hope.
I feel that if there was a startup that would tackle automating copy&paste, they could take over the world. ;)
go to the streets, meet your friends, the internet is now an echo chamber
Preach! No one wants AI!
I want AI like i want a hammer, screwdriver, car or a refrigerator. There when i can use them. Not constantly enforced on me.
Give it a few years and the web will be AIs talking to other AIs ad infinitum
On the other hand, I recently had a problem with my grocery order from Sam’s Club (the onions were smashed) and had to call to get it hopefully addressed. Talked to an LLM for 30 seconds after 0 wait and it was resolved. No accent I could barely understand, no potato microphone, no being put on hold for 5 minutes in the middle while they do whatever.
Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.
Me too, which is why I do my best to keep KPIs, and do everything else as always.
This is all downstream of people not giving a shit about what they do.
It’s not about AI. If it wasn’t AI, it would be some other convenience.
There are a myriad of reasons why people generally give less of a shit now, that we can all opine about, but that is ultimately what has to change.
Opus 4.7 has been outright obstinate to me lately
We're building a cage for ourselves
The ChatGPT screenshot part is mind-blowing.
thinking becomes a commodity
”You can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding” — probably some AI
Wasn't some AI, it was Andrej Karpathy and he got it from someone else (unattributed).
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I think actual thinking is now more valuable than ever.
Depends if you can find someone to buy that line of thinking. Theres only a market if someone recognizes one.
Was it Sam Altman, who said that they intent exactly that? To offer intelligence as a service?
I trust myself to be hard headed enough to keep my intelligence from atrophy, but it's going to suck living in a society where most people don't (or who never developed it at all).
The other day I was at the theatre and I overheard the people next to me glad that they had the best tickets because chatgpt had advised what to buy. The big tip was choosing something centered rather than very angled. Sigh.
I also wonder if this is so visible because a lot of people don't really care what they do and will happily use any bullshit machine to simulate work.
Let's be real. Our economies are in the gutters and an insane amount of "work" is actually textbook "bullshit jobs".
However, we as a society aren't nearly ready to actually hold a conversation about that. We could probably eliminate half of all non-hands-on (i.e. a human uses their hands to manufacture a thing) employment in a matter of a year or two if we would embrace computers and digital infrastructure and give lower levels of employees more authority - and that's before AI even enters the picture. Government services are a prime example - a lot of "e government" services in Germany aren't truly digital, they generate a PDF that is printed out in some clerk's office and processed manually by copying information from that PDF into some admin program.
But unfortunately, if we were to do that, we'd run into riots faster than we could imagine. We aren't ready for a society in which we still have a small base of people that have to, literally, work (with their bodies) to keep society alive while the rest does not need to work any more.
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Yeah, I have dropped out of the tech biz completely. I'm unemployed and kind of screwed now. I couldn't take it anymore. I used to work with intellectuals and thinkers. This is why I was in the industry for 20+ years. I liked the stimulation. Communication with humans is dead in the workplace. Now it's just a bunch of mindless automatons asking AI. No thinking about the problems at hand. No interest in understanding the solutions. It's all just "get it done as fast as possible." I refuse to work in that environment. Tech people are becoming about as skill-leveled as a fast food worker's level of training. Just pressing buttons on a screen as the screen tells the to press them. It's a meaningless existence to sit there an be forced to communicate with f'n AI models. No thanks. All you AI bros can have it. We'll see how useless you are in a few years when you realize you know absolutely nothing and couldn't work yourself out of a paper bag without AI guiding you.
I want to talk to real people as well
Increasingly happy with ability to simply avoid this entire debacle. Interfacing with machine extruded text, or even people re-wording such text, isn't something I've had to deal hardly at all in or our of work. Ensuring that did take quite a bit of effort though...
in a couple of years you can not trust if you write someone. bot? Ai? Human?
I think this is more reflection of how important you are to those people so it is more social thing then anything.
I know you think your questions are legitimate but look it in broader context. Use AI to craft questions for them that they will find engaging as a exercise.
Try talking to grok its more entertaining.
These are not situations a human would have given you a response on in the past. it's the same irrational ai phobia. we've had automated phone agents for decades. even on reddit, automod has been a thing for a long time. it's always been the case for many tech companies that unless you get someone on HN or twitter, you're out of luck. plenty of HN posts about people who've had google business accounts disabled or locked out with no explanation or recourse.
a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.
Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.
I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.
Go outside
sounds like a Monty Python sketch ...
It seems that a lack of respect is the real issue here. A few years ago, you would have been met with silence, which is probably equally infuriating.
Growing pains. We haven't yet established norms surrounding use of LLMs, and people are lazy. We will have to learn from mistakes first, unfortunately. In this case that means diminishing trust.
K
I despise when someone just passes my prompt to an AI, but I do honestly think that there are a minority of people who do better work with it. Not that the work is good, but they don't care to try and at least the AI is eager.
I recently had someone send me a PCAP file with a network package dump suggesting that the error is on my side.
I threw it to Claude and a minute later had a "look at packet 131 and 136, it's on their side."
Yeah, it is exhausting to read verbose slop. But you're the author.
I used to be extremely verbose, and AI has helped me appreciate brevity because now I'm being exposed to it.
I would love to be without the "Top 5 Kubernetes commands" slop images LinkedIn feeds me.
I hate to say it, but I'm becoming less and less interested in structured content, and more interested in disorganized, messy content over time. I don't like the thought of how this may end up in a few years for me.
This ^. The moment I open an article/post and see subtitles in *bold*, emojis everywhere and/or symmetric paragraphs, I start to suspect instantly whether it's AI.
> more interested in disorganized, messy content over time
Same, that kind of content kinda forces me to use my brain (yeah.. sounds obvious..) to organize the message, understand it, agree/disagree, and actually CONSUME the content, like the old days..
Have encountered this too - we really need new social norms around this.
Bombarding others with pages of slop that took you 10 seconds to generate (and not even read) yet take minutes to untangle for the recipient is obviously downright rude.
...unfortunately every office has a small number of people that are dumb as rocks and don't recognise this - in fact think they're helping
What a weird first world problem this guy has …
Sounds like a nightmare.
The tragedy is we could just stop, but we won't.
I hate getting AI generated emails from people. They probably haven't even read or understood the slop they're sending me, the chances of them understanding and contextualizing what I reply are slim, I might as well reply with AI slop. What's the point of any of this.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
If the power dynamic allows it, I tend to just reply "Sorry, I'm not reading that".
(Unless it's a) trivially short or b) there's a solid reason to send me it. It's the "wall of AI text" that I generally nope out on)
I've started to go low-tech and ask noai.duckduckgo.com first, and then, gasp, go to the local library for some books on my hobbies.
I already saw this starting to happen when I wrote the following almost a year ago: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/
> I’m tired of talking to AI. > I want to talk to real people. > But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
I don't use AI, but I rarely respond to any PMs. There are many reasons for this; for instance, I remember in the old days, when I first heard about MMA, I registered on sherdog for a discussion. I don't recall when that was, but it was many, many years ago. Then, after many years of not using it, I logged in and found a PM merely insulting me. I very politely and skillfully correct that PM - however had, ultimately this is not really "interaction", this is just wasting my time (and, admittedly, I already was not using sherdog for many years before that either). Since then I have very decreasingly used PMs in general. It's a difference when I know someone, of course, but random people on the internet ... the barrier to want to talk via PMs for me is very low in general. I simply dislike the format of it.
I find it much easier when it is an open discussion, such as was the case on reddit (before moderators censoring everyone killed that). It's interesting to see how much censorship happens nowadays. That's very different to the 1990s era. Either way I think AI is not solely at fault here, because I could see problems way before AI emerged already. I very rarely use webforums these days, and Discord is no alternative either - Discord is even worse since it is all a private company controlling discussions. IRC was easier than that.
Benveniuto!
I was actually thinking of how tired i was talking to real people and how refreshing AI was to talk something through with.
Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.
Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.
I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.
Using AI to learn objective things is acceptable. However, as long as it's combined with your own experience, because AI can't possibly understand your entire world, any subjective answers will be disgusting, disastrous, obsequious, and boring.
I'm tired of talking to people telling them to stop talking to an AI
AI generated slop has exploded across reddit. Last year I would see about 1 obvious AI generated post and report it. Today I've already reported 5 posts and it is 7am here.
The posts are some technical topic but there isn't even really a question in the post and then it ends with "thoughts about this?" and people try to clarify with the OP what the question is.
I reply to them to stop wasting their time because it is a bot. Sometimes there are 20 comments and nothing from the OP bot. Sometimes the OP bot says "Interesting, thanks" but never any real followup question.
We had this discussion 3 weeks ago "AI Slop is Killing Online Communities"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053203
Reddit has fallen. Stop wasting your time there.
Reddit makes money from spam accounts. Even before LLMs, they'd ban you for reporting the wrong spambots, those being the ones that pay Reddit for priority access.
The replies to the LLM post are probably LLMs themselves.
I've already unsubcribed to a bunch of subreddits because the moderators did nothing to stop the slop.
I almost never go to the main "popular" page as it is full of garbage.
But I was still enjoying my niche subreddits. But in the last year the amount of AI slop has exploded and it is getting worse every day. Reposts of things from less than a week ago. Really vague technical questions with emdashes, bullet points, and ending in "thoughts?" that generate a discussion but the OP bot never replies or has vague 1 word comments.
I know that reddit makes money from ads so more bots mean more traffic which means more ads and more money.
But it is sad watching communities because useless and die.
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What's so great about talking to real people?
Just it being the only thing that matters for humanity
Talking to them online ? I think most of us will be better off without the huge amounts of online toxicity.
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Refuse. Reject. Rebel.
"Let me google that for you" has been replaced by "Let me AI that for you"
I work with a handful of offshore devs and it’s basically just talking to Claude now with a delay measured in timezone differences. What is even the point of having offshore Claude middle men when I can just orchestrate remote agents directly without giving a crap about timezones?
The meatsack agents do the same thing anyway - I give them requirments and they build it exactly as specified with zero question, and in the laziest get-it-done method possible with no thought about complexity, architecture, technical debt, etc…. If there is a mistake in the spec they don’t question it, they just build the mistake. If they aren’t going to use their brains WHY SHOULDNT I replace them with Claude?
Managers send me AI generated specs and AI generated slop mock-ups. They answer questions about how the product should work by giving me AI generated responses they didn’t even spot-check for correctness. AI generated bug reports with hallucinated STR. Offshores send me slop they not only didn’t read, they didn’t even run once because it’s OBVIOUSLY broken. Absolute madness.
None of this sh*t is actually helpful. It’s work SLOP. It’s not more productive. It’s a productivity tar-pit that once you’ve gotten stuck it’s almost impossible to escape.
I hate all this garbage and the total rotting out of people’s minds and abilities it has inflicted upon humanity.
Nothing has made me hate billionaires more than AI. It helped me realize that I could never be a successful multinational corpo man because I’m not a morally bankrupt POS and I look at people much different now because of this realization. There is no way one could get to the place that people like Altman, Amodei, Nadella, Ellison, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, etc…are without being giant pieces of rotten excrement.
The company I work at tries to solve it right now, not promoting, just want to share.
Slop is no fun to deal with, so we have a thesis that slop should be left for agents to read and human-to-human communication should happen outside of passing empty fluffy docs to one another. To realise that, we have a workspace with group chats where multiple agents and humans can work together and agents can engage with humans for additional information when needed. The challenge is, of course, to find the right level of autonomy for the agents and let the agent learn and follow user's workflows well enough to be useful.
>I’m tired of talking to AI.
>I want to talk to real people.
Good luck with that while on the internet - that's only going to get worse. The bright side is that this may make all of us touch grass more often.
The internet isn't going to die out, but it feels like it's becoming a place where you go to do a specific task and then you check out again.
One interesting observation from myself: I don't "browse" the internet anymore. I go read specific sites, order something, or do some task. So my internet usage is way down, but I also don't watch a lot of TV or streaming content anymore, because I can't really deal with it. There's to much of it, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, everything is just a rehash (Cinematography is beautiful though). So now I just read, preferably books written before the year 2000.
It used to be like this, during the golden age of the internet. We didn't have it anywhere, we had it on a computer on our desk. We had to sit down at that desk to use it. Eventually we would get up again and be offline.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
lol
Hot take - who still actually uses the actual chat features for general conversation in the dev community?
How do you define general conversation? I have used the Gemini web chat yesterday to review and generate a report about multiple credit card statements.
depends what you mean. I regularly ask it to explain stuff, terminology I don't recognize etc. I also ask it about neat things it did, terminal commands etc so I can do them when I want to. That's chat in some sense, no? its not all "write this code"
am I the only one who always replies to people manually? I don't think I've ever done the "send back a chatGPT screenshot" or copy paste a response from chatGPT to a message I know was from a human.
I feel the same as the article author. Worse, every Diary/Journaling app is now including AI, so the place where original thoughts are supposed to be written for posterity is now also AI generated slop. I've canceled subscriptions because of it.
Get used to it. This is the "task inflation" phase of the process. When you get a mechanized harvester that can harvest 20x the produce of a human produce picker, do you get done in 5% of the time, or grow 20x the produce to pick? Right, it's always more more more. Now that the business owner can answer your email in two seconds with his ChatGPT screenshot, he stacks more tasks in the free time. You're not getting a human response anymore. Enjoy the slop.
Now people are seeing why in-person matters.
this is quite dystopian
I’m tired of seeing GitHub filled with vibe coded slop.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I often see new projects that look exciting at first. But when I start reading the source code, I realize there’s a ton of messy code, and it was clearly written by Claude or another AI tool.
It feels like some beginners are using vibe coded projects just to brag: “Look, I built this tool,” even when the code quality is abysmal.
I put people who do some of the BS listed here on mute or block.
Life is better with people who actually engage and are curious about improving things human-to-human.
AI (LLM) responses are catered towards the lowest common denominator / average type shit responses.
The best use for AI/LLM agents is to do work I tell them to do, like a servant who obeys my orders and executes them.
A human using AI/LLM to respond to another human (who has already used AI/LLM to come up with a v1 he wants to discuss) is a moron and not worth engaging with further. Even if they're your friend, it is a good signal that you need better friends.
I know its going to cause angst, but the net we knew of is dead.
The incentives to keep it the way it used to be are gone. AI is cheap, and it sounds better than what a majority of users write.
Humans adapt. Maybe we shift from communites and moderation, to predefined rules of engagement. If a commenter can follow some pre agreed upon rules of debate, then it doesn't matter if they are silicon or not.
We went from a cave of wonders to a dark forest in a single life time. It would be amazing if it wasn't so fucking frustrating.
We can go a level higher - reasoning as we know it might be dead.
AI made writing cheap, but it's a human thing to validate, research and respond! It's human slop! Not AI slop!
Humans are highly dependent on the environment; you can blame people for eating too much of highly processed food and lots of sugar, but that's what happens if all you see around is highly processed food and sugar
True, but it is impossible to catch up while preserving quality and mental sanity.
I know about several of my friends, non-tech, being directly impacted by AI.
In finance, lots of analysis work is now offset to LLMs, and the people leveraging the tools obviously still have the issue that they need to review everything the AI has analyzed, their formulas, etc. And lots of nuance and things that a human would caught are lost. But in the meantime the expectation is that your analysis output is 5 times what it was before.
My girlfriend works in corporate law for an insurance company. The company is FOMOing hard for LLMs and pushing everybody to write gemini "gems" and notebooklm presets to do lots of the work.
But it absolutely does not scale: you can't keep up with those demands, while also providing the same quality coming from thoroughly analyzing new regulations and such.
Another friend that works in credit has now the company mandate that people update financial statements etc directly to LLMs and those tools come with a yes/no about whether they will finance it or not. Quality of debt has now plummeted, needless to say and the process is longer that it has ever been because re-reviewing the LLM analysis is more expensive than doing it on your own.
My own bank has had a terrific customer care that has been recently replaced by an LLM, tragedy. It is absolutely unhelpful beyond the 80% pareto principle where customer care had already pre-canned answers anyway. But for the 20% of cases that are major issues/bugs, the AI is simply not helpful.
My bank genuinely had a bug with invoice processing and there was no way to tell them nor to resolve my issue (which required somebody to manually void the previous invoice and restart the process that got bugged).
I think it's a tragedy.
Except for the fully autonomous OpenClaws invading social spaces. There's no human in the loop. That's pure, unfettered AI slop, at a scale no human could keep up with.
My employer's IT guy is now just someone who searches Claude for solutions, finds a company that does a niche thing and say "we spent X dollars discussing it, let's just hire this company and pay them $13,000 every year to handle the problem."
The problems are usually nothingburgers the IT guy doesn't understand (cookie banners). I cannot fight: 1. IT guy constant stupid takes on why we should throw money at a problem 2. a company that's only goal is to tell us we need X verification for $13k/yr or we'll be screwed
The verification is a cron job that checks cookies. Any time you try to discuss the issue he copy and pastes an AI text wall.
A lot, a lot, a lot of companies are going under because the fake-it-to-make-it people do not know what to do. And the C-Suite wants to contract out all expertise to some pointless corporation that won't help.
why? They are useful
Get a grip! If you want to talk to a human then pickup the phone or go meet them in person
It doesn't prevent people from outsourcing their thinking to AI. People don't bother preparing to discuss topics beyond what AI told them. If they have access to their computer during the conversation they'll ask AI rather than google for reference material. If they don't have access, they'll suggest "investigating" (asking AI) and reconvening.
We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.
AI is a new medium. It's used and going to be used for everything. Including communication.
More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.
About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2
When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.
If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.
the fallacy is not recognizing ai is interpolating the human body of work. all the people decrying ai slop: this is our sythesis. ai is not a separate thing from human work. whwt the author is really saying is "I am tired of individuals no longer having the leverage they once did."
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too much whining with non-AI believers
Talking to AI can be useful , but depends on how one uses it :)
The article, if you'd read it, was about receiving the same response to a technical question from multiple sources, whilst seeking human assistance with a problem AI hadn't been able to solve.
“Stop changing my code you st*d piece of s*t. And stop pushing that youtube garbage like i’m some 5 year old” - me against gemini. But he, helps with my anger management.
Being able to just bluntly tell it in very colorful language that its neurotic cargo-culting phobia of imaginary things is something that needs to stop is such a breath of fresh air after the dark ages of 2017.
Thanks, if I want to talk to an LLM I will do so specifically.
The question is really why are you asking your coworkers questions that can be answered by AI. Likely you're putting the burden on them because you're tired of talking to AI. This is learned helplessness.
If instead you ask questions that are targeted, like "did you look at the PR I pushed yesterday, do you think this is something we can get into production soon?" then you'll get a human answering. I would posit that anything than can be answered by an LLM adequately, should be, then when you ask a coworker a question be direct in what you want. Ask for their input. for example, instead of "what alternatives do we have to <tech of the day>?" instead ask "I've researched a few alternatives (to <tech>) but I'd like to see what your experience might tell us about each of these that seem promising..." It all comes down to what and how you're asking.
You'll burn through your goodwill with coworkers if you keep asking questions than can be adequately answered by an LLM.
> "did you look at the PR I pushed yesterday, do you think this is something we can get into production soon?"
ChatGPT, look at the status of the PR and compare it to the flow chart of how we merge into production. Check against the milestones for this quarter, too. Respond in a short but cheerful manner.
If you read their other article on AI, you see the general problem.
https://orchidfiles.com/ai-will-build-your-roadmap-in-ten-se...
> Build a 7-year growth roadmap for my project
Given a prompt like that, you are going to get equally trashy responses. You feed it slop, it's going to give back slop.
They aren't putting any effort into quality questions or requests. Maybe these aren't accurate to what they actually wrote or the actual response, but then that just means they are lying and can't be trusted.