This is the killer issue.
It's so profoundly saddenning, it feels like watching an adult being asked a question and calling mom to answer for them. There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.
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...
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).
It got me the information, AND it taught me to do something AND it helped me trust this person.
Everyone should be like this guy, regardless of the availability of AI.
> if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first
It's actually the other way around. You should think what makes you feel they didn't make an effort? Why do you think I am asking - because I think you have a better answer than I can get from Google or AI.
But this is where it's apparently going. We will all talk to AI rather than each other. And we will pat ourselves on the back how self-sufficient and non-lazy we all are. :-)
"I'm working on X problem, I tried Y solution, AI thinks Z is wrong and W could be better, human opinion?"
This way there's never space for ambiguity, you showed you did your homework to the best of your extent, you already asked AI, all that's left is explicit request for human input.
It works quite well, and I appreciate it from both ends, as it saves everyone time.
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
I've noticed this on IRC. You are generally expected to have at least made a basic effort to solve the problem on your own before wasting someone else's time.
On Discord there does not appear to be such a culture. People get stuck and they just immediately give up and go bother someone else. I don't have numbers but that seems to be the default strategy.
I heard it's a personality thing. Some people like figuring stuff out on their own... for some people it appears to be physically painful.
For me the thought that I'm wasting someone else's time when I could have figured it out on my own in five minutes, that's the painful thing. But many people don't seem to have that.
A lot of people are relatively stupid.
If you're not that smart, then it's not worth learning how to do something. Learning is harder and even if you learn about a topic, you can't make use of this knowledge that effectively.
Even more meta, learning how to learn is worth less, since you learn slower.
If that is the case, is it really a bad idea to offload the work onto someone smarter?
It's not PC and it's not a nice thing to think, but if someone is doing it to the point where you think they are being obnoxious, you should probably also consider the possibility that they could do better, but maybe not much better.
Because of this work, I'm seen by many of my peers as a "guy with all the answers". A friend of mine recently asked me about a policy at work to which I replied I was about 90% certain of the answer. I then explained to get to 100% I'd go to the company Intranet and look up the policy, something he could have done in the time it took us to have this exchange over text messaging.
It seems like we're slowly losing the ability to go and do research on our own. I suspect many never really developed these skills that well to begin with and now with an all knowing "oracle" they're even less inclined to work on them.
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
Sure, but that's for reddit comments. No one would do that at work or they would be fired.
The OP is talking about people using ChatGPT to speak for them at work, perhaps out of laziness, but I've also seen comments where people were trying to look smart in meetings (or cover up their lack of attention).
You also made a good point that answers at work often rely on institutional knowledge, existing infra, or policies. So that makes it even more unlikely that an AI answer is appropriate.
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. Then you can explain why your attempt to Google for the answer failed.
Of course that may be breaking down, as search engine results quality has declined dramatically in recent years.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
The line to that and coming across as an ass is whether you bother to read the result and put it in your own words (which also helps in actually learning something) vs. cutting and pasting the result...
With AI it's much the same - if you take the time to ask the question, and take the time to read, understand and put it in your own words you'll look good. The ones who cut and paste the AI answer will increasingly look passive-aggressive and rude.
Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. 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.
If they want a human, they need to invest at least a decent amount of time. Anything they can ask AI themselves, I am not willing to answer anymore in a human voice.
> I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible
This is (see above) where I tend to differ. Anything, really anything people ask me, they could have asked a bot, I am not willing to reply in kind to. To me, using AI daily for about 60% of my day, this is where I built my Iron Curtain so to speak, my red line. I have that as a clear warning in my MS Teams status (not that anybody ever reads it - like the nohello I had in there for years). I am in a kind off cold war, mutual assured dAIstruction mode in that regard.
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.
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".
I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.
In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/
Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
"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?
Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.
Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.
The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
The conversations are the point.
- "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"
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
What would you have preferred? They could have just said, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, please let me get back to you" but instead they tried to get an answer for you.
I'm not sure what the problem is?
Edit: in this instance if I were the expert I'd respond from my expertise. Using LLM is fine to explain whys/research per what you say, but ultimately I'm the educator here
I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?
Ugh.
I suppose it's possible that was the goal all along...
this was a thing in the past: LetMeGoogleThatForYou
- Louis de Bonald
I guess this sort of thing: https://www.panmurehouse.org/media/0j0ljqdl/pin-factory.jpg (that is an approximate illustration of Adam Smith's pin factory.)
He goes on to advocate for large families full of peasants doing manual labor, praises the ministers of the church and state, and says that painters and bankers are unnecessary. https://archive.org/details/lgislationprim00bona/page/372/mo...
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.
What about when the llm is smarter than the person? Sometimes I get material that is so bad I wish they had had AI do it. Then it would be poor to mediocre.
There was an episode of the podcast “Question Everything “ where they talked about how LLM s can sometimes talk people out of conspiracy theories by patiently refuting the arguments with facts. There have been academic studies on this.
I think people hate AI because it is often mediocre and flawed but sometimes it’s replacing humans that are inept.
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
Curbing the suffering by numbing yourself is seeking comfort in retreating to the local optimum instead of continuing to search for a better one.
that said, inebriation is pathetic in measure of performance against being sober. there's nothing I can get done inebriated that I can't get done better, faster, and with more focus when I'm sober. with the minor caveat of non-mind-altering drugs like caffeine and sugar being super helpful for a sober mind, any actual inebriate (rather than just a 'drug') only slows things down.
so, personally, I just see them as two modes that any particular person can engage, regardless of how "smart" or "dumb" someone might consider them (whatever that means).
where I always find myself frustrated is that I have my best ideas and make my best connections when I'm inebriated, but I have my best structuralization and conceptions of those ideas only when I'm sober. so I have to remember the inebriated stuff to be able to craft it when sober. which is honestly kind of a drag to capture while inebriated and kind of a slog to read back while sober.
I've seen this happening a lot in the recent times: people who are generally not very good at their job tend to offload disproportionately more to LLMs, and it's so damn annoying that their incompetence now comes sugarcoated in lengthy LLM babble for the sake of desperately trying to sound convincing. This is wasting me high single digit hours every week, not to mention the frustration of battling an asymmetrical fight: it takes them seconds to produce something that will take me minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.
Edit: typo -le+me
At the PR review time of this lengthy process, I get a bunch of AI slop saying: - this looks like it changes X to Y, did you mean to do this? Worth another look?
It's SO frustrating. Just copy pasted BS. Are we really paying someone 6 figures to copy and paste into a prompt all day? This is madness.
Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
However I disagree in that I don't want to "talk to AI" either. Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.
I had specified some high-temperature electrical components to repair a broken part of a high-temperature circuit, placed the PO, received the parts, and gave them to one of our electricians with a work order. I did the research myself sans AI, read data sheets, investigated alternative materials, etc.
The electrician asked chatgpt "Will PEEK shrink tubing survive 400*F?" because apparently he doesn't trust me, and chatGPT told him no. He complained to his boss who immediately asked chatGPT the same question, and it told him yes it was fine.
Squarely within the top 3 most exhausting meetings of my career.
The major difference now though, is when you get sent a chatGPT response, the implicit question often is now "Can you check this is correct for me?" which is exhausting and a little rude.
That's the part that really gets to me. It's one thing to say Hey friend, you could have quickly gotten the right answer yourself. It's another thing to say Hey buddy, you asked me a question which I COULD answer, but instead of giving you the CORRECT answer, I'm going to give you AN answer, and let you figure out if it's correct <-- with the unspoken expectation that if it is the wrong answer and I run with it because you gave it to me, it's still my fault.
Both of these are preferable.
You're welcome for the downvote.
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.
I can see that that could be kinda fun because it's not about the answer, it's about the discovery. AI and even smarter searches removes the sense of discovery. You'll never get to see "oh did you know that such and such actor was also in such as such movie in 2010??" if you just skip to the answer with AI.
That said, when they ask me a question that I don't immediately know the answer to, I'll use AI, ask it for sources, check those sources. In these cases it's more of a smarter Google search — just like couldn't always just use the first search result of Google in 2010, you can't always just use the AI response in 2026. Gotta be extra careful too because even the AI's sources can be AI.
I recount it here: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch
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.
It's like they're just... Fine?
AI became their god over a few months and it's... Fine?
I thought I knew humanity pretty well and I'm rarely surprised at human large scale behavior these days as I'm hitting 50 myself, but this took me by surprise.
It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.
And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.
6 hours later guess who is stranded in the middle of the road? Not me.
I can (very marginally) understand running the argument over an LLM if you've difficulties communicating in the language, but never copy paste
At least we'll be able to tell people our authentic emotions without AI, and AI will listen to our emotions, much like parents listen to their children's feelings.
The mere fact of asking another human a question (absent a strong pattern of behavior to the contrary) should be strong evidence the interlocutor wants a human answer! Sending an AI answer should have the same social valence as sending a lmgtfy link; appropriate for bad actors but a pretty insulting response to an earnest question.
Show them your distillation, your final recommendation, but not the raw output. That's useless, they could have prompted the AI themselves, you're not adding anything but being the middleman. At least share your prompt instead of the output!
(I asked AI to make a better version of this diagram but it wasn’t right. Motion is into the page. 200 kg of moon rocks can fit in a container 40 cm on a side.)
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.
It was forgotten. Time heals all wounds.
It makes you feel that way because it is that way. They're not self-sufficient.
Remember when "Google" used to be a synonym for "search"?
People have always loved to defer to a "leader" or (supposed) "expert". Take the hard decisions away daddy.
One of the more dangerous things LLMs have enabled is people feeling like they are suddenly experts on topics they would have never touched otherwise.
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 literal oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
Matching the amount of effort that others around me are putting in is pretty important to me now. Don't want to end up trying too hard for people who don't give a shit.
I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
I understand that behavioral changes from technology can be jarring and folks will process things differently.
But I keep seeing these kinds of melodramatic declarations of sadness. Were you this sad when it became the cultural norm to Google things? There even used to be a url, "let me Google that for you"
Why is this any different?
I think these kinds of things indicate the general age bracket of this forum. So profoundly saddening that it's like watching a child, I see these people as children... Etc.
For the first time we have a bunch of technologically literate people seeing their own norms being disrupted and unwilling to adapt. This is the kind of conservativism with age that happens time and time again.
Me and friends used to laugh at professors that would rant about wikipedia and force people to buy dictionaries in college.
I find it somewhat amusing that on a technology forum that literally has "hacker" in the title is feeling such a loss in response to this technology.
They answered with something that looked to be AI slop, and very verbose too. When I politely said "those instructions reference links and buttons that I cannot find in the UI, could you please tell me where to find them?" the Director simply replied "I cannot find them either, disregard. The feature doesn't support what you want after all."
This means they simply prompted my question to the builtin AI and copied back to our conversation without verifying it made sense.
That's the future we must deal with now. A sort of broken "LMGTFY" that only provides wrong answers.
I'll sometimes do the exact thing you are talking about. The reason is that I basically know the answer, but also know there is a nicer explanation to the question. I'll type in the question, often iterate a few times, get an answer that I basically knew but couldn't explain as clearly, and respond with it.
Humans haven't been "self sufficient" in 100,000 years. We've been building/using tools and specializing since the start. If you went back just a few hundred years some people (the version of you basically) would be profoundly sad you couldn't build your own house.
go to a bar
"i work with idiots who can't even write a sentence anymore and so they have AI write an essay for every sentence they wanna say"
and so you blame AI
AI doesn't have a problem with generating a lot of tokens cause you/your company pays by the token
how about asking AI to keep it short and sweet, does that work, yes? yes it does.
this is top of HN? shark, jumped
If you call a helpdesk agent - they have to query the system to pull up your case.
The UX is a bit different now.
That's it.
Your 'anthropomorphising projectION' here is the issue, not the person using basic tools to help you - as they always have.
Not sure if you mean an human or an AI here.
In America anyway, "knowledge workers" blithely punching context-less data in Excel for money to stop at a Target conveniently placed on their drive home, for a couple shirts they never made, as they consider what to order via Grubhub is not what I would call a "self sufficient entity".