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 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?

> 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".

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.

Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"

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.

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.