8 ms·
It's rude to show AI output to people
- parasti 1y agoMy boss posts GPT output as gospel in chats and task descriptions. So now instead of being a "you figure it out" it's "read this LLM generated garbage and then figure it out".
- geor9e 1y agopasting llm output in group chat is a war crime
- vouaobrasil 1y agoA lot of the reason why I even ask other people is not to get a simple technical answer but to connect, understand another person's unexepected thoughts, and maybe forge a collaboration –– in addition to getting an answer of course. Real people come up with so many side paths and thoughts, whereas AI feels lifeless and drab. To me, someone pasting in an AI answer says: I don't care about any of that. Yeah, not a person I want to interact with.
- gharper 1y agoIt’s the conversational equivalent of “Let me google that for you”.
- MattGaiser 1y agoI think the issue is that about half the conversations in my life really shouldn't happen. They should have Googled it or asked an AI about it, as that is how I would solve the same problem. It wouldn't surprise me if "let me Google that for you" is an unstated part of many conversations.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoThe big issue here is that a lot of company IP is proprietary. You can't Google 90% of it. And internal documentation has never been particularlly good, in my experience. It's a great leverage point to prevent people from saying "just google it" if I'm dealing with abrasive people, at least.
- jddj 1y agoIt's the conversational equivalent of an amplification attack
- accrual 1y agoI remember reading about someone using AI to turn a simple summary like "task XYZ completed with updates ABC" into a few paragraphs of email. The recipient then fed the reply into their AI to summarize it back into the original points. Truly, a compression/expansion machine.
- ghjnut 1y agoIt is, which I'd argue has a time and a place. Maybe it's more specific to how I cut my teeth in the industry but as programmer whenever I had to ask a question of e.g the ops team, I'd make sure it was clear I'd made an effort to figure out my problem. Here's how I understand the issue, here's what I tried yadda yadda. Now I'm the 40-year-old ops guy fielding those questions. I'll write up an LLM question emphasizing what they should be focused on, I'll verify the response is in sync with my thoughts, and shoot it to them. It seems less passive aggressive than LMGTFY and sometimes I learn something from the response.
- Arainach 1y agoInstead of spending this time, it is faster, simpler, and more effective to phrase these questions in the form "have you checked the docs and what did they say?"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ivape 1y agoI can buy into this. I always thought it was rude or at least insulting when Hollywood robotically creates slop movies. As in, of course they can do it, but damn is it insulting. There really are two types of people in the world: a) Quantity > Quality if it prints $$$. or b) Quality > Quantity if it feels like the right thing to do. Witnessing type A at scale is a first-class ticket into misanthropy.
- devenson 1y agoless than perfect writing is a signal that your human. At least for now.
- phito 1y agoI really wish some of my coworkers would stop using LLMs to write me emails or even Teams messages. It does feel extremely rude, to the point I don't even want to read them anymore.
- SoftTalker 1y agoEven worse when they accidently leave in the dialog with the AI. Dead giveaway. I got an email from a colleague the other day and at the bottom was this line: > Would you like me to format this for Outlook or help you post it to a specific channel or distribution list?
- righthand 1y agoClippy is rolling in his grave.
- righthand 1y agoSeriously you should respond to the slop in the email and waste your coworkers time too. “No I don’t need this formatted for Outlook Dave. Thanks for asking though!”
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThat wastes your own time as well though.
- tbatchelli 1y agoI find it as yet another way to externalize costs: I spend 0 time thinking, I dump AI slop on you and ask you to review it or refute me with the nonsense that I just sent you. Last time someone did this to me I sent them a few other answers by the same LLM to the same prompt, all different, with no commentary.
- monkeydust 1y agoI don't mind people using AI to help refine their thoughts and proof their output but when it is used in absence of their own thoughts I am starting to value that person a little bit less.
- accrual 1y agoExactly. I've already seen two very obvious AI comments on Reddit in the past 2 days. One even had the audacity to copy a real user's reply back into the AI and pass the response back again. I just blocked them since they're in a sub I like to hang out in.
- zer00eyz 1y agoThis is an interesting take. Cause all an LLM is, is a reflection of its input. Garbage in garbage out. If we're going to have this rule about AI, maybe we should have it about... everything. From your mom's last Facebook post, to what is said by influencers to this post... Say less. Do more.
- echelon 1y agoPreviously there was some requirement for novel synthesis. You at least had to string your thoughts together into some kind of argument. Now that's no longer the case and there are lazy or unthoughtful people that simply pass along AI outputs, raw and completely unprocessed, as cognitive work for other human beings to deal with.
- z3c0 1y agoAn LLM's output being a reflection of its output would imply determinism, which is the opposite of their value prop. "Garbage in, garbage out" is an addage born from traditional data pipelines. "Anything in, generic slop, possibly garbage, out" is the new status quo.
- majormajor 1y agoThat's not really true at all, at least at the end user level. You can have a very thoughtful LLM prompt and get a garbage response if the model fails to generate a solid, sound answer to your prompt. Hard questions with verifiable but obscure answers, for instance, where it generates fake citations. You can have a garbage prompt and get not-garbage output if you are asking in a well-understood area with a well-understood problem. And the current generation of company-provided LLMs are VERY highly trained to make the answer look non-garbage in all cases, increasing the cognitive load on you to figure out.
- oncallthrow 1y agoIt's deeply sad to me that I will never again be able to read a message from someone and know, for sure, that it was written by them themselves.
- achierius 1y agoYou can if you can watch them write it :)
- dcreater 1y agoWe will have a web where proof of humanity is the de facto standard. Its only a question of when. Things have to get worse before they get better in afraid
- bhaney 1y agoHow would that help? Plenty of humans will just continue to be willing AI-proxies.
- accrual 1y agoIt would raise the barrier to entry, I suppose. I agree with GP that at some point in the future, real human output will become more rare and more valuable. And pure "human made" content (movies, music, books, blog posts, comments, etc.) may have access controls or costs associated. We're already seeing the social contract around hosting your own blog change due to the constant indexing from AI crawlers.
- thomashabets2 1y agoI got a feature request in the form of a PR a few months that said "chatgpt generated this as a possible implementation, does it work"? I stopped there and replied that if you don't care enough to test if it works, then clearly you don't actually want the feature, and closed the ticket. I have gotten other PRs that are more in the form of "hey I don't know what I'm doing. I used GPT but and it seems to work but I don't understand this part". I'm happy to help point in the right direction for those. Because an least they're trying. And seem like this is part of their learning. ... Or they just asked jippity to make it seem that way.
- MrGilbert 1y agoIt gets interesting once you start a discussion about a topic with someone who had ChatGPT doing all the work. They often do not have the same in-depth understanding of what is written there vs. someone who wrote it themselves. Which may not come as a surprise, but yet - here we are. It‘s these kind of discussions I find exhausting, because they show no honesty and no interest by the person I'm interacting with. I usually end these conversations quickly.
- conartist6 1y agoAI doesn't leave behind the people who don't use it, it leaves behind the people who do. Roko's Reverse Basilisk?
- MrGilbert 1y agoI never heard of Roko's Basilisk before, and now I entered a disturbing rabbit hole. Peoples' minds are... something. I mean, it's basically cheating. I get a task, and instead of working my way through the task, which might be tedious, you take the shorter route and receive instant gratification. I can understand how that is causing some kind of rush of endorphines, much like eating a bar of chocolate will. So, yeah - I would agree, altough I do not have any studies that support the hypothesis.
- esafak 1y agoApplications could automatically insert subtle icons next to messages that are automatically generated. It wouldn't work for copy-and-pasted text but it's a start.
- accrual 1y agoMaybe even a post-processing step that replaces all spaces with a suitable Unicode character to act as a watermark. There are more sophisticated ways to watermark text that aren't as easily thwarted with a search/replace, but it might work for some low-risk applications.
- dlevine 1y agoIf someone uses AI to generate an output, that should be stated clearly. That is not an excuse for it being poorly done or unvetted (which I think is the crux of the point), but it’s important to state any sources used. If i don’t want to receive AI generated content, i can use the attribution to filter it out.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoRelated: I'd rather read the prompt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoObviously the answer is to send them back an AI generated response
- majormajor 1y agoLLMs are very very good at adding words in a way that looks "well written" (to our current mental filters) without adding meaning or value. I wonder how long it will be before LLM-text trademarks become seen as a sign of bad writing or laziness instead? And then maybe we'll have an arms race of stylistic changes. --- Completely agree with the author: Earlier this week I asked Claude to summarize a bunch of code files since I was looking for a bug. It wrote paragraphs and had 3 suggestions. But when I read it, I realized it was mostly super generic and vague. The conditions that would be required to trigger the bug in those ways couldn't actually exist, but it put a lot of words around the ideas. I took longer to notice that they were incorrect suggestions as a result. I told it "this won't happen those ways [because blah blah blah]" and it gave me the "you are correct!" compliment-dance and tried again. One new suggestion and a claimed reason about how one of its original suggestions might be right. The new suggestion seemed promising, but I wasn't entirely convinced. Tried again. It went back to the first three suggestions - the "here's why that won't happen" was still in the context window, but it hit some limit of its model. Like it was trying to reconcile being reinforcement-learning'd into "generate something that looks like a helpful answer" with "here is information in the context window saying the text I want to generate is wrong" and failing. We got into a loop. It was a rare bug so we'll see if the useful-seeming suggestion was right or not but I don't know yet. Added some logging around it and some other stuff too. The counterfactuals are hard to evaluate: * would I have identified that potential change quicker without asking it? Or at all? * would I have identified something else that it didn't point out? * what if I hadn't noticed the problems with some other suggestions and spent a bunch of time chasing them? The words:information ratio was a big problem in spotting the issues. So was the "text completion" aspect of "if you're asking about a problem here, there must be a solution I can offer" RL-seeming aspect of its generated results. It didn't seem to be truly evaluating the code then deciding so much as saying "yes, I will definitely tell you there are things we can change, here are some that seem plausible." Imagine if my coworker had asked me the question and I'd just copy-pasted Claude's first crap attempt to them in response? Rude as hell.
- drewvlaz 1y agoOne of the largest issues I've experienced is LLMs being too agreeable. I don't want my theories parroted back to me on why something went wrong. I want to have ideas challenged in a way that forces me to think and hopefully lead me to a new perspective that I otherwise would have missed. Perhaps a large portion of people do enjoy the agreeableness, but this becomes a problem not only because I think there are larger societal issues that stem from this echo-chamber like environmental but also simply that companies training these models may interpret agreeableness as somehow better and something that should be optimized for.
- AllegedAlec 1y agoI have one of those coworkers. I tell him I have a problem with a missing BIOS setting. He comes back 2 minutes later "Yeah I asked an LLM and it said to go into [submenu that doesn't exist] and uncheck [setting I'm trying to find]. What's even more infuriating is that he won't take "I've checked and that submenu doesn't exist" for an answer and insists to check again. Had to step away for a fag a few times in fear of putting his face through the desk.
- Bluestein 1y ago"Your slop is showing ..."
- Isamu 1y agoYes it is absolutely rude in many contexts. In a team context you are looking for common understanding and being “on the same page”. If someone needs to consult AI to get up to speed that’s fine, then their interaction with you should reflect what they have learned.
- gigatree 1y agoSomeone telling you about a conversation they had with ChatGPT is the new telling someone about your dream last night (which sucks because I’ve had a lot of conversations I wanna share lol).
- toast0 1y agoEh. It's more like I asked my drunk uncle, and he sounded really confident when he told me X.
- accrual 1y agoI think it's different to talk about a conversation with AI versus just passing the AI output to someone directly. The former is like "hey, I had this experience, here's what it was about, what I learned and how it affected me" which is a very human experience and totally valid to share. The latter is like "I created some input, here's the output, now I want you reflect and/or act on it". For example I've used Claude and ChatGPT to reflect and chat about life experiences and left feeling like I gained something, and sometimes I'll talk to my friends or SO about it. But I'd never share the transcript unless they asked for it.
- sfink 1y agoThis is what valid LLM use looks like. Sadly many people don't seem interested in even admitting the existence of the distinction.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoYeah. We can't share dreams, but the equivalent would be if we made our subject sit down and put on a video of our dreams. it went from this potential 2 way conversation to essentially giving one person homework to review before commenting to the other person.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoThis is the same sentiment I have. It feels really interesting to the person who experienced it, not so much to the listener. Sometimes it can be fun to share because it gives you a glimmer of insight into how someone else's mind works, but the actual content is never really the point. If anything they share the same hallucinatory quality - ie: hallucinations don't have essential content, which is kind of the point of communication.
- reelchucknorris 1y ago[dead]
- cm2012 1y agoI couldn't disagree more. Its like someone going to Wikipedia to helpfully copy and paste a summary of an issue. Fast and with a good enough level of accuracy. Generally the AI summaries I see are more topical and accurate than the many other comments in the thread.
- Velorivox 1y agoReally!? [0] https://i.imgur.com/ly5yk9h.png https://i.imgur.com/ly5yk9h.png
- cm2012 1y agoYou shouldn't compare against perfection, but against reality. ChatGPT o3 has been proven to outperform even experts on knowledge tasks quite a bit. In general it raises the mean accuracy and info of a given thread. Its like self driving cars.
- lysace 1y agoThey are mostly posturing. I don't see any problem sharing a human-reviewed LLM output. (I also figure that human review may not be that necessary in a few years.)
- mook 1y agoBut it's the human review that makes it not rude; not bothering to review means you're wasting the other person's time. If they wanted a chatbot response they could have went to the LLM directly. It's like pointing to a lmgtfy link. That's _intentionally_ rude, in that it's normally used when the question isn't worth the thought. That's what pasting a chatbot response says.
- codeulike 1y agoBrilliant analogy with the Scramblers of Blindsight
- labrador 1y agoThe author was thinking "boring and uninteresting" but settled on the word "rude." No, it's not rude. Emailing your co-workers provactive political memes or telling someone to die in a fire is rude. Using ChatGPT to write and being obvious about it marks you as an uninteresting person who may not know what they are talking about. On the other hand, emailing your prompt and the result you got can be instructive to others learning how to use LLMs (aren't we all?) We may learn effective prompt techniques or decide to switch to that LLM because of the quality of the answer.
- recipe19 1y agoI disagree. The most obvious message this telegraphs is "I don't respect you or your argument enough to parse it and articulate a response, why don't you argue with a machine instead". That's rude. There is an alternative interpretation - "the LLM put it so much better than I ever could, so I copied and pasted that" - but precisely because of the ambiguity, you don't want to be sneaky about it. If you want me to have a look at what the LLM said, make it clear. A meta-consideration here is that there is just an asymmetry of effort when I'm trying to formulate arguments "manually" and you're using an LLM to debate them. On some level, it might be fair game. On another, it's pretty short-sighted: the end game is that we both use LLMs that endlessly debate each other while drifting off into the absurd.
- labrador 1y agoPoint taken. I wouldn't want to argue with someone's LLM. I guess I'm an outlier in that I would never post LLM output as my own. I write, then I sometimes have an LLM check it because it points out where people might be confused or misinterpret certain phrases. Edit: I'm 67 so ChatGPT is especially helpful in pointing out where my possible unconscious dinosaur attitudes may be offensive to Millennials and Gen Z.
- mkehrt 1y agoIt's rude like calling someone on the phone is rude or SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS is rude. It's a new social norm that the author is pointing out.
- 1y ago
- varjag 1y agoI recently had a non-technical person contest my opinion on a subtle technical issue with ChatGPT screenshots (free tier o4) attached in their email. The LLM wasn't even wrong, just that it had the answer wrapped in customary platitudes to the user and they are not equipped to understand the actual answer of the model.
- Keyframe 1y agoThere's another level altogether when the other party pretends it's not AI-generated at all.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoThe problem here is that I’ve been accused multiple times of using LLMs to write slop when it was genuinely written by myself. So I apologized and began actually using LLMs while making sure the prompt included style guides and rules to avoid the tell tale signs of AI. Then some of these geniuses thanked me for being more genuine in my response. A lot of this stuff is delusional. You only find it rude because you’re aware it’s written by AI. It’s the awareness itself that triggers it. In reality you can’t tell the difference. This post, for example.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- scarface_74 1y agoI did too, the AWS “house style” (former ProServe employee) of writing even before LLMs can come across as AI Slop. Look at some blog posts on AWS even pre-2021. I too use an LLM to help me get rid of generic filler and I do have my own style of technical writing and editing. You would never know I use an LLM.
- card_zero 1y agoShades of Cyrano de Bergerac and pig-butchering scams. Which lead me to read about Milgram's "cyranoids": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyranoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyranoid And then "echoborgs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoborg On the whole it's considered bad to mislead people. If my love letter to you is in fact a pre-written form, "my darling [insert name here]", and you suspect, but your suspicion is just baseless paranoia and a lucky guess, I suppose you're being delusional and I'm not being rude. But I'm still doing something wrong. Even if you don't suspect, and I call off the scam, I was still messing with you. But the definition of being "misleading" is tricky, because we have personas and need them in order to communicate, which in any context at all is a kind of honest, sincere play-acting.
- lvl155 1y agoWhile I understand this sentiment, some people simply suck at writing nice emails or have a major communication issue. It’s also not bad to run your important emails through multiple edits via AI.
- deadbabe 1y agoThen they shouldn’t be in jobs or positions where good communication skills and writing nice emails are important.
- z3c0 1y agoIs it too much to ask them to learn? People can have poor communication habits and still write* a thoughtful email.
- yoyohello13 1y agoSeriously. If you can’t spend effort to communicate properly, why should I expend effort listening?
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y agoMaybe yes, it's too much? I'm a non-native English speaker who writes many work emails in English. My English is quite good, but still, it takes me longer to write email in English because it's not as natural. Sometimes I spend a few minutes wondering if I'm getting the tone right or maybe being too pushy, if I should add some formality or it would sound forced, etc., while in my native language these things are automatic. Why shouldn't I use an LLM to save those extra minutes (as long as I check the output before sending it)? And being non-native with a good English level is nothing compared to people who might have autism, etc.
- z3c0 1y agoI'm a native English speaker who asks myself the same questions on most emails. You can use LLM outputs all you want, but if you're worried about the tone, LLM edits drive the tone to a level of generic that ranges from milquetoast, to patronizing, to outright condescending. I expect some will even begin to favor pushy emails, because at least it feels human.
- crazygringo 1y ago>> "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said: <...>". > Whoa, let me stop you right here buddy, what you're doing here is extremely, horribly rude. How is it any different from "I read book <X> and it said that..."? Or "Book <X> has the following quote about that:"? I definitely want to know where people are getting their info. It helps me understand how trustworthy it might be. It's not rude, it's providing proper context.
- toast0 1y agoBecause published books, depending on genre, have earned a presumption of being based on reality. And it's easy to reproduce a book lookup, and see if they link to sources. I might have experience with that book and know of its connection with reality. ChatGPT and similar have not earned a presumption of reality for me, and the same question may get many different answers, and afaik, even if you ask it for sources, they're not necessarily real either. IMHO, it's rude to use ChatGPT and share it with me as if it's informative; it disrespects my search for truth. It's better that you mention it, so I can disregard the whole thing.
- Arainach 1y agoA book is a credentialed source that can be referenced. A book is also something that not everyone may have on hand, so a pointer can be appreciated. LLMs are not that. If I wanted to know what they said I'd ask them. I'm asking you/the team to understand what THEY think. Unfortunately it's becoming increasingly clear that certain people and coworkers don't actually think at all very often - particularly the ones that just take any question and go throw it off to the planet burning machine.
- mook 1y agoTo me, it's different because having read a book, remembered it, and pulled out the quote means you spent time on it. Pasting a response from ChatGPT means you didn't even bother reading that, understand the output, thought about it to make sure it makes sense, and then resynthesize it. It mostly means you don't respect the other person's time and it's making them do the vetting. And that's the rude part.
- scarface_74 1y ago
- tlonny 1y agoI totally agree. Isaac, if you're reading this - stop sending me PDFs generated by Perplexity!
- nyclsrmn 1y agoCould not agree more! > "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said: <...>". ... > "I vibe-coded this pull request in just 15 minutes. Please review" This is even nice. You have outlined here an actual warning. Usually there is none. When you get this type of request you are pretty much debugging AI code on the spot without any additional context. You can just see when text/code is AI generated or not. No matter text or code. No tools needed.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago> I vibe-coded this pull request in just 15 minutes. Please review "I hand-typed this close message in just 15 seconds. Please refrain."
- icheyne 1y ago[flagged]
- stego-tech 1y agoWell said in a short, digestible post that’s easily shared with even non-tech folks. Exactly what a good post on etiquette should read like.
- smithbits 1y agoYes. I just had a bad experience with an online shop. I got the thing I ordered, but the interaction was bad so I sent a note to their support email saying "I like your company, but I recently had this experience that felt icky, here's what happened" and their "AI Agent Bot" replied with a whole lot of platitudes and "Since you’ve indicated no action is needed and your order has been placed, we will be closing this ticket." I'm all for LLM's helping people write better emails, but using them to auto-close support tickets is rude.
- oldge 1y agoSeems like a strongly coupled set of events that leaks their internal culture. “Customers are not worth the effort”.
- jmugan 1y agoThis is exactly how I feel about both advertising and unnecessary notifications. "The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus."
- lxgr 1y agoI believe there was a very similar line of argument at the time photography was becoming popular. "Sure, it's a useful tool, but it will never be an art form like painting. It only reproduces what's already there!" Yet today, we both cringe at forgettable food Instagrams and marvel at the World Press Photo of the Year. I do fully agree with the conclusions on etiquette. Just like it's rude to try to pass a line-traced photo as a freehand drawing, decompressing very little information into a wall of text without a disclaimer is rude.
- skeledrew 1y agoNot seeing a problem here as long as the one showing the output has reviewed it themselves before showing, and made the decision to show based on that review. That's what we should be advocating for. So far what I'm seeing is people slamming others or ignoring automatically on even the vague suspicion that something has been generated. Just the other day I witnessed in a chat someone commenting that another (who previously sent an AI summary of something) had sent a "block of text" which they wouldn't read because it was too much, then went to read it when they were told it was from Quora, not generated. It was a wild moment for me, and I said as much.
- intended 1y agoThats a big if.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago> the one showing the output has reviewed it themselves before showing Now let's really asks ourselves how this works out in reality. Cut corners. People using LLM's are not using it to enhance their conversation; they are using it to get it over with. It also doesn't help that yes, AI generated text tends to be overly verbose. Saying a lot of nothing. There are times where that formality is needed, but not in some casual work conversations. Just get to the point.
- skeledrew 1y agoShortening a conversation is a kind of enhancement. It means a state of satisfaction or completion has been reached that much sooner. Why debate back and forth for 20 minutes with incomplete arguments when 2 minutes will suffice by generating a well-prompted thread on the argument? Unless the lengthy arguing is the point. Get a short answer by including "keep answer short" or similar in the prompt. It just works.
- marliechiller 1y ago> "For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading" Such a great point and one which I hadn't considered. With LLMs, we've flipped this equation, and it's having all sorts of weird consequences. Most obviously for me is how much more time I'm spending on code reviews. Its massively increased the importance of making the PR as digestible as possible for the reviewer, as now both author and reviewer are much closer to equal understanding of the changes compared to if the author had written the PR solely by themselves. Who knows what other corollaries there are to this reversal of reading vs writing
- lxgr 1y agoYes, just like painting a picture used to be extremely time-consuming compared to looking at a scene. Today, these take roughly the same effort. Humanity has survived and adapted, and all in all, I'm glad to live in a world with photography in it. That said, part of that adaptation will probably involve the evolution of a strong stigma against undeclared and poorly verified/curated AI-generated content.
- hks0 1y ago> "I vibe-coded this pull request in just 15 minutes. Please review" > > Well, why don't you review it first? My current day to day problem is that, the PRs don't come with that disclaimer; The authors won't even admit if asked directly. Yet I know my comments on the PR will be fed to the cursor so it makes more crappy edits, and I'll be expecting an entirely different PR in 10 minutes to review from scratch without even addressing the main concern. I wish I could at least talk to the AI directly. (If you're wondering, it's unfortunately not in my power right now to ignore or close the PRs).
- lukevp 1y agoRather than close or ignore PRs, you should start a dialogue with them. Teach them that the AI is not a person, and if they contribute buggy or low quality code, it’s their responsibility, not the AIs, and ultimately their job on the line. Another perspective I’ve found to resonate with people is to remind them — if you’re not reviewing the code or passing it through any type of human reasoning to determine its fit to solving the business problem - what value are you adding at all? If you just copy pasta through AI, you might as well not even be in the loop, because it’d be faster for me to do it directly, and have the context of the prompts as well. This is a step change in our industry and an opportunity to mentor people who are misusing it. If they don’t take it, there are plenty of people who will. I have a feeling that AI will actually separate the wheat from the chaff, because right now, people can hide a lack of understanding and effort because the output speed is so low for everyone. Once those who have no issue with applying critical thinking and debugging to the problem and work well with the business start to leverage AI, it’ll become very obvious who’s left behind.
- drewbug01 1y ago> Rather than close or ignore PRs, you should start a dialogue with them. Teach them that the AI is not a person, and if they contribute buggy or low quality code, it’s their responsibility, not the AIs, and ultimately their job on the line. I’m willing to mentor folks, and help them grow. But what you’re describing sounds so exhausting, and it’s so much worse than what “mentorship” meant just a few short years ago. I have to now teach people basic respect and empathy at work? Are we serious? For what it’s worth: sometimes ignoring this kind of stuff is teaching. Harshly, sure - but sometimes that’s what’s needed.
- jmugan 1y agoI love the post but disagree with the first example. "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said: <...>". That seems totally fine to me. The sender put work into the prompt and the user is free to read the AI output if they choose.
- guywithahat 1y agoI think in any real conversation, you're treating AI as this authority figure to end the conversation, despite the fact it could easily be wrong. I would extract the logic out and defend the logic on your own feet to be less rude.
- jmugan 1y agoOh, I'm usually trying to gather information in conversations with peers, so for me, it's usually more like, "I don't know, but this is what the LLM says." But yeah, to a boss or something, that would be rude. They hired you to answer a question.
- justaj 1y agoAnd what if you let a human expert fact-check the output of an LLM? Provided you're transparent about the output (and its preceding prompt(s)) ? Because I'd much rather ask an LLM about a topic I don't know much about and let a human expert verify its contents than waste the time of a human expert in explaining the concept to me. Once it's verified, I add it to my own documentation library so that I can refer to it later on.
- lukebechtel 1y ago> For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.
- accrual 1y ago> "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." Quote is from Mark Twain and perfectly encapsulates the sentiment. Writing something intended for another person to read was previously an effort. Some people were good at it, some were less good. But now, everyone can generate some median-level effort.
- lukebechtel 1y agoone of my favorite quotes!
- linotype 1y agoI’m building a tool to help filter these kinds of low value articles out (especially the flow of constant AI negativity, but it will work for many topics). If you’re interested email me at linotype@fastmail.com and I’ll send you a link when it’s ready.
- jancsika 1y ago> The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message How is this more plausible than the scrambler's own lack of knowledge of potential specifications for these messages? In any case, there's obviously more explanations than the "coded nonsense" hypothesis.
- unyttigfjelltol 1y agoWhether it's LLM output is orthogonal to rudeness, lack of sensibility or generic content.There are all sorts of tools out there which use LLMs as a front end for some pretty spectacular back-end functions. If you're offered an AI output it should be taken as one of two situations: (a) the person adopts the output, and maybe put a fair amount of effort into interacting with the LLM to get it just right, but can't honestly claim ownership (because who can), or (b) the output is outside their domain of expertise and functioning as a toehold or thumbnail in some esoteric topic that no single resource they know can, and probably the point is so specific that such a resource doesn't exist. The tenor of the article makes me confused about what people have been doing, specifically , with ChatGPT that so alienated the author. I guess the point is there are some topics LLMs are fundamentally incompetent to perform? Maybe its more the perception that the LLM is being treated as an oracle than a tool for discovery?
- peteforde 1y agoI read and enjoyed Blindsight, and ironically an LLM wouldn't have made the mistake of believing this supports such a kooky position.
- QuantumGood 1y agoIn science fiction dystopias, there is often the "adjustment to the machines taking over" phase, with analysis of the arguments of those resisting. AI is rapidly ticking the boxes of common "shift to dystopia" writings.
- chang1 1y agoI get annoyed when I ask someone a question (work related or not) and they don't know the answer, they will then proceed to tell a prompt for ChatGPT in a stream of consciousness sort of way. Then I get even more annoyed when they decide to actually use their own prompt, and then read back to me the answer. I would much prefer the answer "I don't know".
- jerlam 1y agoIt seems there are people deeply afraid of admitting they don't know something, despite the fact that not knowing things is the default. But giving the wrong answer is always worse.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoHuge cultural issue in the US. We shame ignorance and don't believe in redemption. If you don't know even once, you must be a weak person. You don't want to waste your time with weaklings. But the macho approach? They are bold, they are someone you want to follow. They do the thinking. Even if you walk off a cliff, you feel that person was a good leader. If you are assertive, you must be strong, after all. "Strong people" never get punished for failure, it's just "the cost of doing business"; time to move to the next business.
- jtwoodhouse 1y agoNothing says “I don’t respect you” like giving someone a sequence from a random text generator.
- KronisLV 1y ago> For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity. I think it all goes to crap when there is some economic incentive: e.g. blogspam that is profitable thanks to ads and anyone that stumbles upon it, alongside being able to generate large amounts of coherent sounding crap quickly. I have seen quite a few sites like that in the first pages of both Google and DuckDuckGo which feels almost offensive. At the same time, posts that promise something and then don't go through with it are similarly bad, regardless of AI generated or not. For example, recently I needed to look up how vLLM compares with Ollama (yes, for running the very same abominable intelligence models, albeit for more subjectively useful reasons) because Qwen3-30B-A3B and Devstral-24B both run pretty badly on Nvidia L4 cards with Ollama, which feels disappointing given their price tags and relatively small sizes of those models. Yet pretty much all of the comparisons I found just regurgitated high level overviews of the technologies, like 5-10 sites that felt almost identical and could have been copy pasted from one another. Not a single one of those had a table of various models and their tokens/s on a given bit of hardware, for both Ollama and vLLM. Back in the day when nerds got passionate about Apache2 vs Nginx, you'd see comparisons with stats and graphs and even though I wouldn't take all of those at face value (since with Apache2 you should turn off .htaccess and also tweak the MPM settings for more reasonable performance), at least there would sometimes be a Git repo.
- conradludgate 1y agoThe problem I've been having is when I spend time researching a problem, I link documentation and propose a clean solution. Someone I'm talking with will then send a screenshot of deepseek or chatgpt essentially agreeing with me. I don't care what chatgpt or deepseek thinks about the proposal. I care what _you_ think about it - that's why I'm sending it to you.
- 627467 1y agoAnother one to add to the list: (Present a solution/output proposal to team) > Did you ask chatgpt?
- desolate_muffin 1y agoIn addition to what others have complained about, another issue I haven't seen highlighted as much in the comments is the infuriating explosion of content length. AI responses seem to have very low information density by default, so for me the irritation is threefold—it requires very little mental effort for the sender (i.e., I often read responses that don't feel sufficiently considered); it is often poorly validated by the sender; and it is disrespectful to the reader's time. Like some of the other commenters, I am also not in a position to change this at work, but I am disheartened by how some of my fellow engineers have taken to putting up low effort PRs with errors, as well as unreasonably long design docs. My entire company seems to have bought into the whole "AI-first company" thing without actually validating if the outputs are worth the squeeze. Maybe sometimes they are, but I get a sense that the path of least resistance tends toward accepting lower quality code and communication.
- idkfasayer 1y ago[dead]
- ram_rar 1y agoAs a non-native English speaker, I’ve often struggled to communicate nuance or subtlety in writing—especially when addressing non-technical audiences. LLMs have been a game-changer for me. They’ve significantly improved my writing and made it much easier to articulate my thoughts clearly. Sure, it can be frustrating that they don’t adapt to a user’s personal style. But for those of us who haven’t fully developed that stylistic sense (which is common among non-native speakers), it’s still a huge leap forward.
- AceLewis 1y agoI have encountered this problem at work a few times, the worst was someone asking if a list of pros and cons from something we were developing and asking if the list was accurate… I spent a long time responding to each pro and con assuming they got this list from somewhere or another companies promotional material. Every point was wrong in different ways, not understanding. I was giving detailed responses to each point explaining how they are wrong. Initially I thought the list was obtained from someone in marketing who did not understand, after a while I thought maybe this was AI and asked… they told me they just asked the pros and cons of the product/program to ChatGPT and was asking me to verify it it was correct or not before communicating to customers. If they had just asked me the pros and cons I could have responded in a much shorter amount of time. ChatGPT basically DOSed me because the time taken to produce the text was nothing compared to the time it took me to respond.
- creatonez 1y agoIt always been rude to tell someone to "just google it". But unsurprisingly, as Google Search got worse and worse over time, it got a lot more rude to do this. A search that may have brought you to useful documentation or high quality tutorials in 2005-2010 Google often just returns SEO garbage now. If you aren't at least checking what the results are, telling someone to google it has become beyond useless. If LLMs can be fixed to the point where they are as reliable as 2005-2010 Google, maybe you can start blindly pasting output or telling people to "just chatgpt it", and it won't be so useless for the victim anymore. But I'm not convinced the hallucination problem and inability to properly cite sources will be solved anytime soon, given how non-deterministic LLMs are. And it appears it's just creating a brand new SEO spam issue, with Gemini results at the top of the page based on the contents of spammy results.