Wtf is with this excuse-making for abandoning the bare minimum of professional competency?
You can be annoyed and right, and still avoid being crass.
Tact is not some barrier to clear communication, it is the very thing that allows communication to happen in lieue of violence and savagery.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
Please do not ask me questions that I know nothing more about than AI. Wish there was something like LMGTFY but for AI.
Turns out, there is such a thing as a stupid question after all: any question that a chatbot can answer that winds up wasting the time of a real human being because the asker was too lazy or inconsiderate to use resources that don't waste anyone else's time first.
>If they wanted the generic LLM answer, they'd have gotten it in four seconds without involving you, which is, in fact, easier.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but... while it can be seductively tempting to assume all humans act this logically, I must unfortunately be the one to inform you that, no, they do not, and no, they often don't get the answer that they were able to get themselves in four seconds without me, and instead choose to waste my time instead.
1. Asking a question which could be answered by an AI
2. Pasting an AI response to something
If 1 is fair game, I'd say 2 is too.
I don't think this is something we should be encouraging people to do if they don't know they answer to something. I recently had someone post quite confidently in Slack "I found the problem after some GPT research", followed by an absolute nonsense solution that would have cost us significant time and money if they tried to implement it.
If you don't have an understanding of the domain you're asking questions in, it can be dangerous to ask the plausible sounding answer generation machine.
At this point, any asker surely knows that they could ask AI whatever question but doesn't feel like that's a sound way to get a good answer.
When you reply to that with a pasted AI answer, you're disregarding the questioner's own implicit judgment about the quality of answer they're looking for and the authorities upon which they might rely. You're throwing out somebody's straightforward and clear social signal and just doing your own thing to shut them up.
You can do what you want, but don't expect people to be appreciative when you do that.
( When he starts his own threads, they're now of the form "I asked gemini question X and this several-page-long attached markdown file is how it answered" )
Suddenly, they have a oracle that can endlessly tickle their curiosity (accurately or not) and follow them as deep into discussion as they can imagine, without ever growing tired or annoyed.
Unfortunately, in many ways, there's a lot of overlap between those people and those that had once made great community members online. They had the curiosity to have already dug deep into topics so as to become knowledgeable about them and discovered interest communities online as a place where they could invest themselves socially and feel less alone. Online communities were good for them and they were good for the online communities.
The story you relate here is not singular, and it's sad one to see, as it likely means these people are going to eventually find that they've lost the esteem and social credit they'd spent years earning and are now as alone online as they ever were before.
And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.
or some kind of ideas/etc. might come to light.
It's interesting that this is so polarizing.
> Well... Hate to disappoint
Hmm, the capital H is a grammatical error, so this is likely not entirely LLM-generated. But the hundreds of words explaining something as basic as how to read AI output doesn't seem likely to be written entirely by a human.
1. "I'm not entirely sure, but this is what it says to save you some time."
2. "You didn't ask the question precisely because you are not an SME, but I reworded it using the jargon that would allow the AI to answer better and here is the response."
3. "This response is AI, but in general my other ones are not"
4. "I trust the AI's response in this scenario."
It’s not even a “do you trust the AI or not”, the AI is just able to quickly find and present basic data.
At work I’ll use AI to answer colleague questions and then wonder why they just didn’t use it instead. It’s usually just a training issue, the answers are usually right enough to unblock them at least.
I don’t need him to pass on LLM answers. I can and do ask them myself. I’m asking questions because I’m interested in the experience my coworkers have beyond what AIs have trained on.
HN Wishlist:
HN can help with this by providing an option to TLDR the posts, or long-winded linked stories or documents on demand. Would also be great to have a tool to figure out who up-votes or down-votes users. Some of the down-votes appear to be malicious, without reason, but hey in a few months, that won't matter to me__Veni__Vidi__Vici__:)
Sol :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992 - Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (~1 day ago, 414 comments)
I hate it when you quote the AI at me because you stop treating both yourself and me like humans who are communicating. I want to pull you up out of that dehumanization, not drop down into it myself in retaliation.
At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?
It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?
Authenticity earned through proof of work: invest your neurons and time to demonstrate fealty! Context switch for me!
Buried lede: much of the time the person asking could do all the work suggested.
This is like LMGTFY but backwards, it shames the person whose time is being asked for.
I'm starting to get a feeling there is a phenomenon like this with AI - some people just genuinely don't hear the AI "voice" at all. They really can't distinguish why sending AI written text is going to impact the person at the other end. It's going to be an interesting ride as these people start using AI and are completely baffled why people are offended by their perfectly reasonable responses.
There are also cases where I think I know the answer, and I ask the AI, and it produces a more complete answer than I would but I know enough to assess it. It seems like a waste of time to paraphrase the whole thing. That's the "Here's how Claude phrased it and I can attest that it's right" case.
What I hate far worse than what this article complains about is just blatant AI writing in articles, comments, video narration you name it.
Way more insidious, way bigger problem!
jayd16•53m ago
jaredsohn•3m ago