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.

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

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.

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...

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.

The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines.

- Louis de Bonald

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.

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.

“cognitive surrender”

It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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)

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 oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.

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.

It feels insulting when discussing something serious, they respond back with a highly inaccurate ChatGPT response.

Is that a feeling you battled a lot growing up or something? It's very specific, and not actually very connected or sensible.

Seems have to make a face to face appointment, without any online devices in hand.

The stupidity and helplessness are by design.

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

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

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.

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...

> That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.

With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.

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...

> psychotic

Probably more under-developed than psychotic.

ie not really using their adult thinking any more

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

Lovely! I am all for an offline day in the year where everybody does what you described.

We need to go back

People can't even keep up discussions. Most of the population is totally dumbened down, like on the levels of barely functioning monkeys.

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?

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

How do you find the language barrier problem? Do you speak English to everyone you meet?

lmk if you ever visit Zürich :)

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.

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 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...

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

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.

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 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.

You can send them this: https://noslopgrenade.com

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 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.

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.

The only AI screenshots I like to read are when it's comically wrong and we both get a quick laugh

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

These people are probably more attuned to conceptual abstract specifications.

Does AI talk about us?

That's alright, nobody's making you. You can choose to disengage.

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.

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.

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.

Leave and go where? A homestead in the middle of the woods? Another planet?

You get something like Mars Express [1].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26915336/

Mass unemployment and wealth inequality

Yeah I'm curious re: theorchid and who they are...

>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.

Helping you "write or rewrite something you want to convey" is already using it as a replacement of thinking.

If you're not able to convey it maybe you haven't spent long enough thinking about it?

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.

”You can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding” — probably some AI

I think actual thinking is now more valuable than ever.

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.

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"

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.

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.

Just it being the only thing that matters for humanity

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.

Thanks, if I want to talk to an LLM I will do so specifically.