Comment by torben-friis

Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether.

Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.

Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.

I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)

If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.

Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)

That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.

The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)

The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.

They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.

Do you feel returning an answer that an AI gives is the same as searching it on Google (old fashion way) and just producing an answer from there?

It would be true if they bothered hiding it. But as the featured author said, people seem increasingly not shy of simply forwarding you a screenshot of the AI answer.

...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.

> 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.

At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.

I use lots of em dashes and emojis now to blend in.

would it blow your mind if I told you there are already idiosyncrasies in the way you write? not you specifically; everyone has them

Same. I no longer fix spelling mistakes (I never used auto-complete or "smart" keyboards).

Same, I've started adding stylistic (-/; with an odd/imperfect placement- like this) errors to make it clear it's artisanal home made slop, not AI-generated.

I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D

Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol

It’s in the same spirit of citing your sources in academic writing.

Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.

But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust.

AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.

I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'.

I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.

The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.

I've done a similar thing with close friends and family who would constantly ask me things I couldn't possibly know because I always came up with an answer.

Eventually I realized why and explained, "you know, I'm really just going to do a web search for what you just asked me, and maybe a couple more until I have a decent answer and then give you that answer. Let me show you how I would go about that".

From then on, they started getting into the habit of doing that for themselves. I think now with LLMs, they've kept the habit, but the LLM gives a more complete answer with fewer steps so it becomes the default. I think the magic of AI is two-fold (well, more than two, but two bullets for this conversation).

1. You don't have to "query". You can just braindump, and it'll build a context and figure out what you're looking for

2. It's conversational, so instead of filtering and tweaking results from the first query, your second "query" builds on top of the context from the first question, and you get a stronger result as the conversation continues.

>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).

I absolutely love this.

That's a great tip. Thanks for sharing.

> You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?

Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.

Then we should create LMGPTTFY, then it's at least apparent and the recipient needn't click.

>> what makes you feel they didn't make an effort?

Because everyone has had that person who you help out, and become their path of least resistance to an answer. They are not looking for the BEST or a GOOD answer, just the least effort. It's completely reasonable to push back with "what have you tried so far?"

I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.

Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.

And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.

But this is often simply not the case - people will often ask for trivial things trivially found on Google.

If someone doesn’t make an effort I don’t care what the excuse is “you’ll know faster, I don’t know what to look up” etc. I won’t enable learned helplessness. At best you’ll get a “maybe read up on X” and that’s about it, if I’m in a good mood.

If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. If you don't understand, you aren't smart enough to and shouldn't try? If you learn slow, just stop because you're... slower? What are you talking about?

The bigger issue I feel is knowing the medium for the question/help you need. If you need their experience and knowledge then talk to them. Email as a medium is already a wrong choice most of the time in these situations. Expecting them to give you the context that helps you grow from their experience in an email is placing a huge burden on them.

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

People actively do that at work. My employer is a large [US] government financial entity, that likely holds your mortgage and the mortgage of people you know. Our profit this last quarter was publicly reported as 3.6 billion dollars. Most people will respond to any question with an OpenAI-generated answer, and you'll notice it most when 3 or 4 people in a teams chat all reply with a near-identical answer to a question you ask in the channel. I can't overstate how much AI is used here, or how zealous the leadership is in pushing us to use it for...everything.

Just wanted to point out that people are doing it at work, not getting fired, and this isn't some 2-bit business you haven't heard about.

If you are really concerned with that, you should take a first stab at it, then ask AI to proofread it for you and change the tone if necessary. I have no problem with that; thinking was still done by a human, you just needed help proofreading, which has always been something that's valid to outsource.

Maybe they don’t wanna take responsibility for that answer?

So, just a fake "yes"?

It may not be laziness, but it is definitely entirely lacking in empathy.

Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction?

There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.

> It should be considered common courtesy that when you ask a question you have at least attempted a bit of research to find the answer on your own.

In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.

The examples in the article are questions the AI did not know the answer to though. So hardly "basic beginner"

I already feel disrespected if a colleague makes me feel like sending it. If a friend tells me to get him a beer from the fridge because they're too lazy to get up, 7/10 times I'm going to do it. They're not going to be insulted when I don't because they know that they don't deserve anything, and they'll probably more often than not get up if I asked them the same thing.

If somebody at work tells me to do something for him that would take the same amount of time to do themselves, we're literally in a context where time is money and they're telling me that my time is worth less than theirs. It literally better be (some people are higher up than you, or currently managing a larger thing than you are), or else it's an insult, and I mean to be insulting them back. I'm actually saying that I think that they're either lazy or stupid, or spacing out and need to wake up.

edit: there's a parallel in Spanish forms of address where the way you ask friends to do something is to just announce that it's currently being done, and the way you formally ask someone to do something (like a work colleague) is to use a hypothetical (the subjunctive) basically saying "this is something that could be done." It's important not to presume the right to spend a colleague's (or superior's) time.

> 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.

Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop.

Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".

Can you not say "sorry but I think you should try Claude first" and send the slop next? If someone treated me like that I'd either look for a new job, walk to their desk and do conflict management, or try to work out how I'd offended them.

Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.

>If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.

Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.

Sure, but asking someone something that should be easily answered in a few seconds is also rude.

Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress

if they aren't presenting proof of doing research or they don't have the benefit of doubt (e.g. a new hire, etc.) they're being rude by not doing the research in the first place.

steelman, don't strawman. pushback on someone being rude by requesting something they could have looked up doesn't look like "let me google that for you" 95% of the time. it's far more likely to come out as "I'm not sure, honestly. I worked on X, but I didn't really need to get in to Y, so I'm not as familiar. Personally, I'd just do a google search, since I'm a little behind on that."

not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.

Yeah but that was an explicit sarcastic response. I guess we need a 'letmechatgptthatforyou' link to show explicit sarcasm

Ha. I refer back to my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278108

The sabot of the AI era. Love it.

I get that this is supposed to be unproductive snark, but the real answer is probably to then sort the spreadsheet and assign a tier system of how annoying and useless each person in it is.

I'll have a peaceful life until it gets to my yearly management review of my teams.

Switch to a DB

I think they own the company at that point.

Usually when people are asking questions it isn't that they don't know how to find a possible solution at all, it's that they don't feel they know enough to evaluate the correctness of the solutions they may find, and they think you do.

------

Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.

A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.

Discussing things with colleagues is also how you build collaborative networks. I'm trying to get out of the habit of searching for all information myself and engaging in more discussions with coworkers. I'm perfectly capable of searching information out myself. If I'm asking a question, it's a sign of respect, and shows that I am interested in the person's experience with the topic, and in nuance and context. I want to learn from them. If you offload the answer to AI, it's disrespectful to yourself more than anything--you don't even value your own expertise!

I just want them to tell me if they don't know.

It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.

Saw this in a PR review yesterday. Reviewer made comments about the reasonableness of a solution and alternatives to consider. Submitter posted an LLM response that gives zero additional context about the PR. As the submitter, you should be the one with the context, not the reviewer, and having an LLM answer doesn't provide that additional context.

Maybe they already did and the answer was in some way lacking so they asked a peer.

Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.

> Same argument can be used against you

That’s false equivalence and I think you know that.

I'm ramming my head against a wall in sympathy.

Interesting that the boss immediately asked the same question. So they're aware that AI gives nondeterministic answers and yet still use it.

> Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Heh. It's a believable taxonomy, but it makes me suspect it could often have the corollary:

    Small minds create work; average minds do work; great minds talk about work.

> I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.

I didn't quite get this, you ask them to send you their prompt? Does this disincentivize them from sending AI responses in the future?

P.S. I always found it ironic that this quote does the very thing it classifies as small-minded - discusses people :)

I agree with your sentiment from the perspective of the asker.

But if I'm the askee, I honestly don't know how to navigate those waters yet.

If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?

Do I say "Have you tried X?", where X is the thing the LLM suggested? Should I pretend that I did not ask the LLM?

In the past, I could find some source and send them the link, and I wouldn't assume the person had exhausted the entire Google index. Sending a link isn't the same as LMGTFY.

Analogously, while "Claude says X" does sound as rude as lmgtfy, disclosing that your suggestion was found via llm is more akin to linking to a source, or "take this with a grain of salt".

It’s sad. I just expect better from my friends, but this group chat is also full of friends who are chronically online, so I fear they are just so infatuated with AI as it seems they are constantly considering it at every point of their day.

Pfft.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799035/

Smart people drink and smoke more; not less, potentially to self sooth/deal with the oppressive reality they find themselves in.

That certainly must be very comfortable opinion to have. People truly love their illusions that allow to smoothly glance over giant uncomfortable spikes of reality under the balancing line of life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function at all in this circus. We would just lie down in cave paralysed by dread, ending the homo sapiens brand of intelligence the moment it started

actually, yes.

I also tried banging it on my desk. The desk was better, because you get a bit of a drum sound and you cause yourself less damage.

Also, the desk is closer. Brick walls require gettting up and walking somewhere first.

Weed is much less painful and the effect is the same

Actually I didn't call them stupid, I called them lazy (and also inconsiderate, but mostly lazy).