I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.
( 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" )
Some people are lost to AI fascination quickly because they're curious and maybe a little lonely, or at least isolated.
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.
> Some people are lost to AI fascination quickly because they're curious and maybe a little lonely, or at least isolated.
There's a scene or an arc in Mr. Robot where the FBI agent behaves this way with her Alexa. I've also heard/read tales of parents realizing just how much their kids interact with Alexa. It's easy to understand how having this oracle as you stated would be interesting to interact with if that's truly what it was. However, knowing how these LLMs work, I find it utterly uninteresting for that kind of use. Knowing how much they "hallucinate" just makes me not interested at all. I've had enough real life interactions with people that I have come to use the term "shitstory" when the person just clearly makes stuff up as they continue to talk about something they don't really know about. My favorite is when it's something I know a lot about while several people are listening and engaged with shitstory totally oblivious to the bullshit. Why would I want to do that with a service I'm expected to pay for?
Maybe reply with a different answer from a different AI and start dueling AI's. I will always prefer the old trusty Infobot [1] src [2] over any of the current AI's and their fancy schmansy algorithms.
Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.
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?
While I endorse the message of TFA (though do find the framing a bit on the overly blunt side), I believe it's unfair to reduce to "losing the person". The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI. The latent space they exposed within the model is still uniquely the result of their words and effort.
We're just missing the establishment of a decorum of, "even if you do feel like you need to prompt the AI before responding, and even if you like the response, you still need to paraphrase and synthesize to avoid coming off rude and inhuman."
> The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI.
But they aren't willing enough to participate to actually engage in a discussion. They're just making people interact with a bot with a layer of indirection. Apparently, they don't know (or care) that if someone wants the machine's answer rather than the person's, they'd just ask the machine directly.
> At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
You can say nearly the same of someone obsessed with social media and brain-rot. If you don't actively resist, soon your world view becomes the algorithm that you are being fed.
Suppose they simply directly quoted Wikipedia or some other expert authority, with attribution, rather than AI. Would you say the same thing? The person isn't giving you the uniqueness of their brain's weights and biases when they do that, either. That doesn't make the response any less helpful or appropriate in the situation.
People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK. In fact, sometimes it's completely appropriate. We have to get used to the idea that sometimes, that source will be AI, and pretty soon (if not already) it will be just as authoritative and correct as Wikipedia or any other expert the person might quote.
If you don't like it, instead of responding by sending them a link to an aggressive, insulting, disrespectful and frankly low emotional IQ site like this, you can just say, "OK, thanks, that's great, but what's your opinion? I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you think." Unfortunately, if you send a link to this site, you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.
> People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK.
It's OK in the context of doing that to support a larger discussion they're participating in. It's not OK if the quote is the entirety of the response.
> you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.
Perhaps, but they weren't really participating in the discussion anyway.
I've always been fascinated that some people don't seem to have any email "voice" - they just can't translate email text into human emotional impact. So they write super abrupt emails, things they would never say in real life, totally different to their actual personality. It's almost like a distinct form of autism. Meanwhile I'm almost the opposite extreme - I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person. It takes me ages to write my emails.
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.
> I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person.
The dedication is admirable, but work emails aren't in-person chats. Imo it's not appropriate to try to retain a singular voice across varied genres. I don't want my emails to sound the way I do in person just like I don't want a programming book I read to sound like a lunchroom discussion.
I admire your quality and I envy it, but I have to say, finesse, even if I could, is not something I would have time for, at least not for professional emails. And I stopped writing personal emails years ago now…
I find that junior engineers like to use it “up the authority” of their arguments when my experience clashes with their desires. OTOH, I am humbly aware that sometimes my experience is wrong and a curse to me. I DO need to be careful to not “hold on to old ways”. But I’m not convinced this is the right way to level the fields between wisdom/experience and innovation/freshtake.
I think it depends on the context and also not being deceptive. If someone just spent 4 hours trying to root cause a SEV with Claude and they finally have a nice high-level Claude-generated summary of all that work, just paste it and share it. Don't waste time trying to reword it to make it seem like you wrote it. A simple "After spending a few hours with Claude, here's the conclusion about what the problem was: [paste]".
On the other hand, if you send someone a very personal and heartfelt message and receive a reply like "Yeah, it was so nice spending time with [niece] today!", well, that's a bit different...
This really depends on context. Sure, if you're responding to a forum post or StackOverflow question with nothing but the LLM output, then I agree with this. On the other hand, where I've done this at work, it's because I and some peers _together_ are trying to understand something (e.g., debugging), and Claude has some potentially useful input, but I'm not actually sure. And I'm looking to collaborate on interpreting the output together to see if there's anything useful. (Folks can decide to ignore it if it doesn't seem promising.) As another comment[1] said, pasting the output as-is contains other useful metadata.
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.
The page doesn’t state that all copy-pasting of AI response is bad. If everybody intend on analyzing the AI output together, definitely do copy-paste it in the chat
The essence of what this page is stating is: “do not act as a reverse proxy between me and a LLM.” That’s rude and shows that the person in question is acting like a brainless automata.
Back in my day, when people were too lazy to put in effort they would want you to google for them, read results, interpret the data, and tell them what you found out. Lmgtfy.
Well now people are still lazy, but at least they talked to their llm, they just want you to read the result, interpret the data and tell them what you found out.
We might make better software, but we aren't making better humans.
I wonder if we gathered all of the "don't quote the ai" people and all of the lmgtfy people in the same place, would they cancel out? Like matter/anti-matter annihilation?
Reading the BBC article about poisoning the real time AI well of info yesterday, I was super struck by this point
> "We're moving towards this 'one true answer' world. Before, Google would give you 10 blue links and you would kind of do your own research. But AI just gives you one answer. It becomes so easy to just take things at face value. You need to be careful."
In a world of insecurities, and a world where we crave out-facting or out-proving our fellow discussioners, this “one right answer” is like synthetic drugs to the social experience. And we suspect “it’s not good for us” but it’s just so damned addictive.
What a rude response to someone's attempt to help someone else out by expending their AI subscription tokens to answer their question. At least they started their comment by disclosing the text was generated by AI - they should be rewarded for that - punishing them for it by insulting them, telling their brain is a gizmo, and telling them not to have children, is aggressive, not going to have the desired outcome, and is only going to make it less likely they disclose that information in future. If you don't want to read an AI response, you can stop reading after the disclosure that it's an AI response. This is a somewhat obnoxious site, in my personal (and human) opinion. Send to others at your own risk I say (of being defriended, fired, or blocked).
You entirely missed the point in the article: Everybody has access to AI. Nobody needs another person proxying it slowly and poorly in a worse medium than direct access.
Replying with AI responses is equal to saying that you're no longer relevant or valuable to the discussion. If you are annoyed by that and want to block people, fine, obviously nothing of value will be lost because they can just go to the source directly next time instead of you.
They're not doing anyone any favors by disclosing it either, and anyone replying with AI verbatim but undisclosed also isn't going to be savvy enough to hide the other tells and quirks. Assuming they're ever asked again for their "input".
On the contrary, I completely understand the point of the article. I disagree that there are no people who benefit from another person using AI on their behalf.
Everybody has free access to Google, Wikipedia, and Bing - that doesn't make sharing quotes from those sources worthy of abusive language telling people they shouldn't have children. Some people really do find value in another person opening up their ChatGPT subscription, crafting a suitable prompt, and passing on the response. There is absolutely some value in that, and many AI models are not even free.
Even just with Google, some people aren't very good at crafting search queries. Crafting a query or a prompt, deciding which model to use, vetting and sharing the response - these all add value beyond just "proxying it slowly and poorly".
Replying with an AI response can absolutely be relevant and valuable to a discussion, just as replying with a quote from Wikipedia or some other authority can be.
On the other hand, flaming people for trying to help you is, frankly, obnoxious, even if you don't appreciate the help or the manner in which it was offered.
Some people are on the bottom 5th percentile of the intelligence bell curve. Some people also enjoy having their balls being smashed in by high heels. Some people... blah blah blah. What a weasel statement. You are describing a straw man scenario that doesn't normally play out in the real world as such.
Replying with AI is the first obnoxious act. People reactive negatively to it should be expected.
> Replying with an AI response can absolutely be relevant and valuable to a discussion, just as replying with a quote from Wikipedia or some other authority can be.
But AI isn't an authority. If you're using AI as a search engine for other media, then I'd much rather you link to the source than make me wade through "Gemini suggested..." first. We should all know by now that "is this true, Grok?" is not a helpful barometer for anyone.
In your search engine analogy, I'd compare it to someone linking their search query instead of the desired link. Making me do extra work to engage with your point doesn't advance either of our understandings.
mental health is really important and there seems to be a growing trends of folks making comments on HN like this who sound really burnt out. burn out can be hard to place, ive been through it and in now way do i share this reflection. ide rather reach across the isle and just help someone vs. go on HN and complain like this.
I do think that pasting AI responses gives "reading the encyclopedia entry at someone", which is quite rude and crass, but you can't open peoples' eyes with similar levels of rudeness. Especially when it's an accurate description. I appreciate a good screed and also think we are looking for a subtler tool.
It's even more aggressive, inconsiderate and boorish to paste multiple paragraphs of LLM output at somebody in response to a question or topic. Let's normalize having no tolerance and calling out people when they're being rude.
Sending an AI response communicates more than just the response itself:
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"
These are somewhat valid reasons, but I think most of us have seen the use of pasting AI responses that are simply a laziness of communicating.
If you're trying (1), it's easier to say "I don't know, maybe <available ai> can answer". It doesn't save any time to ask an AI that the other party is equally equipped to ask. It just saves the responder time from being genuinely helpful.
If you're (2), at least explain this (or include the prompt so it's self evident and a teaching moment). Of course, if you're a SME, maybe you also have the knowledge to just answer directly - see 4.
For (3), why reply at all: see 1.
For (4), saying this associates your own authority and knowledge, and is valuable, but the omission of such disclaimer makes it indistinguishable from 1.
Sometimes people ask questions on HN off handedly while making some kind of argument where the questions can easily be answered by plugging them into a Google search box. And then I wonder why didn’t they just do that? Usually they don’t do it because it causes whatever argument they are making to implode quickly. I’m guessing they aren’t anti AI they just don’t want to know. It’s not even a “do you trust the AI or not” since the AI is just able to quickly find and present basic data. The fact that their question can be answered quickly and easily is what they find offensive.
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.
tbh some questions deserve the ai response pasted at them. The type that you'd like lmgtfy at them before. The edge cuts both ways; if you put zero effort into your question, sometimes you deserve 0 effort responses. That being said, I always hesitate to do this since I'm an imperfect judge
Off topic, but when I opened the website I was instantly teleported back to a better website design time. This site has character, I will recognize it, it's not like what I was complaining about in https://jeena.net/content-is-king
I feel like there’s a journey from being skeptical about AI, to being wowed when it does something impressive, then to eventual realism about its abilities and shortcomings. Not everyone has completed that journey yet, especially people who are less technical.
I generally think this is a poor take although it mostly hinges in my opinion on whether the answer you're giving them is correct or not.
There's plenty of people who probably remember the "Let me Google That For You". This is a combination of people being rude about giving others answers mixed with some people not spending enough time figuring out the answer themselves (sometimes with just a simple google search).
I've seen plenty of people ask questions that LLMs when given the right context and prompting are able to answer. Providing them the correct answer in any way (via search, via an LLM, or via your own human expertise) is valid. Its certainly annoying if a person is giving you poor answers because the answers come from an AI. And I'd definitely take that to heart and likely ask them fewer questions in the future. But similarly if someone kept coming to me with questions that can be easily answered by AI I'd tell them to spend some more time investigating on their own.
I guess this is all about rudeness from being too lazy.
My understanding is 'lmgtfy' is a response to a lazy request for help. Someone's asking for help, but it seems like they could have helped themselves if they just searched Google. -- The corrective action is: it would have been better if the person asking the question had demonstrated thought/effort about their response.
Whereas "don't paste AI slop", merely copy-pasting an LLM's output is lazy. (The asker could have asked an LLM). -- The corrective action is: the response should show more thought/effort.
Early on, when I would try this, it resulted in instant downvotes, and I noticed others that would cite explicitly that AI was used would also receive an unusually large number of downvotes that seemed more correlated to the admission of using AI.
I suspect nobody is willing to admit it anymore because they will lose internet points over it.
This is not clever. A lot of people do not understand what LLMs are capable of now. It can be learning experience to show a product person how they can leverage LLMs rather than acting like you're the know-it-all by obfuscating the fact that you used an LLM to answer a question
If you want to do it occasionally, sure, whatever. I have a coworker who solely communicates in the form of screenshots of him asking Cursor my question, even when they’re questions that are interested in his motivation or plans, not the code base, and that Cursor does a bad job answering. I’ll ask a Slack channel “does anyone have experience with tools A and B, so they can suggest which matches our use case better”, and he’ll respond with a screenshot.
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.
As a meta note, I'm seeing more downvoted responses in this comment section for reasonable points of view on both sides than I've ever seen for any HN topic.
Can I get a version of this without the over-the-top misanthropic "don't reproduce" comment?
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.
Well, imagine not having the time in the world to read the 40 page docs that are referenced on a forum like this. By the time you read, analyze, absorb and make a conclusion, it is time to hit the sack. So, AI helps to analyze, TLDR, summarize the data. In a lot of cases, it's a question of time, not intelligence. HN is not a message board known for balanced opinions. I've found it to be a place where hate, threats get hurled incessantly. Just ask my Karma ;)
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__:)
I am not anti-AI. My issue with HN is that there is no real balance of opinions, no actual policing. Just feels like another mainstream free-for-all media tool :(
That being said, I shall consider your suggestion :)
>you just proved that there's no difference between asking you or asking the AI.
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.
> 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.
Neurotypical members of Generation Z and even many millennials perceive question-asking differently than you or I do. If you tell them on Reddit etc. that they should do some of their own research or consult a FAQ (or now an LLM), they’ll respond that the point of asking wasn’t just to get information, it was to spark a conversation and get feeling of community and interaction with other people. Moreover, you may well get dogpiled with downvotes by the rest of the people reading, who will tell you the same thing.
Remember that younger generations were brought up on corporate social media where things like FAQs were discouraged, because the corporation has to maximize engagement and wants people asking the same basic questions again and again. So, the very concept of a FAQ or a search culture is foreign to them. Add to that the social isolation they report, and you can see why they might be subconsciously desperate to throw a low-effort post out there. Ironically, they would probably better served both socially and informationally by old-school forums, but they are hardly aware now that those existed, and their default internet device (the phone) plays badly with old-school forum culture.
Came here to say this -- humans are not always rational actors. I get asked questions all the time, which I have no special knowledge of, and which the asker could have easily Googled or ChatGPTed. And yet...
Funniest thing about this is that I think it's ~all~ (edit) mostly LLM-generated (and Pangram agrees). I think the biggest tell these days is when the text is generated in a way that seems like it was intended to be funny, but the jokes never land.
> 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.
My parents come to me with questions about how to close a app on their iPad, and frankly I can not be asked to give them a walk through when I put chatgpt on their iPad for that reason.
And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.
No. 1 has been around since the dawn of time. Remember the saying, there are no stupid questions. Asking is how people learn, including learning how to ask good questions. #2 is just rude because everyone has access to the same AIs. You’re not doing anyone a favor or being helpful - if they wanted to ask AI, they would have. And what do you learn from an AI response?
Of course there are stupid questions. Just look at Stack Overflow, it's full of them. The better approach is "Invest as much time answering a question as the other party spent thinking about how to formulate it".
> Asking a question which could be answered by an AI
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.
You should know. I find it hard to believe, in fact, that you don't know.
Telling people they shouldn't even ask questions that can theoretically be Googled/AI'd with enough time or blind trust is hideous in the extreme, and absolutely antithetical to the ideas of humanity and intellectual curiosity. I would like to never hear such a suggestion come out of anybody's mouth, particularly on HN.
If you want to know the truth I find it worse to ask questions that folks can answer themselves.
When you don't know the answer to something you should try to figure it out before asking. That builds important skills. Like it or not LLMs are now a useful tool for that. The first instinct shouldn't be to ask someone else if you haven't expended any effort.
For example, if you don't know 6*27 I'd consider it rude to ask if you have a calculator on your desk but you're too lazy to use it.
I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.
( 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" )
Some people are lost to AI fascination quickly because they're curious and maybe a little lonely, or at least isolated.
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.
> Some people are lost to AI fascination quickly because they're curious and maybe a little lonely, or at least isolated.
There's a scene or an arc in Mr. Robot where the FBI agent behaves this way with her Alexa. I've also heard/read tales of parents realizing just how much their kids interact with Alexa. It's easy to understand how having this oracle as you stated would be interesting to interact with if that's truly what it was. However, knowing how these LLMs work, I find it utterly uninteresting for that kind of use. Knowing how much they "hallucinate" just makes me not interested at all. I've had enough real life interactions with people that I have come to use the term "shitstory" when the person just clearly makes stuff up as they continue to talk about something they don't really know about. My favorite is when it's something I know a lot about while several people are listening and engaged with shitstory totally oblivious to the bullshit. Why would I want to do that with a service I'm expected to pay for?
Maybe reply with a different answer from a different AI and start dueling AI's. I will always prefer the old trusty Infobot [1] src [2] over any of the current AI's and their fancy schmansy algorithms.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infobot
[2] - https://infobot.sourceforge.net/download.html
I see ATFA - ask the fine AI - in our future instead of RTFM
I'm surprised I haven't seen a "let me ai that for you" going around yet lol
https://let-me-ai.com/
did anyone try telling him
I asked Qwen and it suggested the same.
Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.
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?
While I endorse the message of TFA (though do find the framing a bit on the overly blunt side), I believe it's unfair to reduce to "losing the person". The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI. The latent space they exposed within the model is still uniquely the result of their words and effort.
We're just missing the establishment of a decorum of, "even if you do feel like you need to prompt the AI before responding, and even if you like the response, you still need to paraphrase and synthesize to avoid coming off rude and inhuman."
> The person is still willing to engage with you
But the highlighted examples demonstrate the complete opposite. Shuttling things between a model isn’t engaging with another human meaningfully.
> The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI.
But they aren't willing enough to participate to actually engage in a discussion. They're just making people interact with a bot with a layer of indirection. Apparently, they don't know (or care) that if someone wants the machine's answer rather than the person's, they'd just ask the machine directly.
> still had to use their human words to prompt the AI
In that case, I would like to know what prompt they used so that I can learn to use the AI tools better.
Like, we've had "let me google that for you" since 2008...
Maybe "let me prompt that for you" will catch on?
> At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
You can say nearly the same of someone obsessed with social media and brain-rot. If you don't actively resist, soon your world view becomes the algorithm that you are being fed.
Very few people are able to resist this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
Suppose they simply directly quoted Wikipedia or some other expert authority, with attribution, rather than AI. Would you say the same thing? The person isn't giving you the uniqueness of their brain's weights and biases when they do that, either. That doesn't make the response any less helpful or appropriate in the situation.
People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK. In fact, sometimes it's completely appropriate. We have to get used to the idea that sometimes, that source will be AI, and pretty soon (if not already) it will be just as authoritative and correct as Wikipedia or any other expert the person might quote.
If you don't like it, instead of responding by sending them a link to an aggressive, insulting, disrespectful and frankly low emotional IQ site like this, you can just say, "OK, thanks, that's great, but what's your opinion? I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you think." Unfortunately, if you send a link to this site, you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.
> People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK.
It's OK in the context of doing that to support a larger discussion they're participating in. It's not OK if the quote is the entirety of the response.
> you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.
Perhaps, but they weren't really participating in the discussion anyway.
Please don’t say “okay, thanks, that’s great” unless you mean it.
I've always been fascinated that some people don't seem to have any email "voice" - they just can't translate email text into human emotional impact. So they write super abrupt emails, things they would never say in real life, totally different to their actual personality. It's almost like a distinct form of autism. Meanwhile I'm almost the opposite extreme - I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person. It takes me ages to write my emails.
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.
> I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person.
The dedication is admirable, but work emails aren't in-person chats. Imo it's not appropriate to try to retain a singular voice across varied genres. I don't want my emails to sound the way I do in person just like I don't want a programming book I read to sound like a lunchroom discussion.
I admire your quality and I envy it, but I have to say, finesse, even if I could, is not something I would have time for, at least not for professional emails. And I stopped writing personal emails years ago now…
I find that junior engineers like to use it “up the authority” of their arguments when my experience clashes with their desires. OTOH, I am humbly aware that sometimes my experience is wrong and a curse to me. I DO need to be careful to not “hold on to old ways”. But I’m not convinced this is the right way to level the fields between wisdom/experience and innovation/freshtake.
Using an AI response as supporting evidence in a longer discussion is different from what is being called out here.
The issue is pasting verbatim without adding any additional insight, or even a hint you read the response yourself.
I think it depends on the context and also not being deceptive. If someone just spent 4 hours trying to root cause a SEV with Claude and they finally have a nice high-level Claude-generated summary of all that work, just paste it and share it. Don't waste time trying to reword it to make it seem like you wrote it. A simple "After spending a few hours with Claude, here's the conclusion about what the problem was: [paste]".
On the other hand, if you send someone a very personal and heartfelt message and receive a reply like "Yeah, it was so nice spending time with [niece] today!", well, that's a bit different...
True, sometimes a Claude answer is so on the spot, it'd a waste to not post it alongside your short summary.
Had to have this conversation with a Sr. engineer two weeks ago.
Took the entire code review, put it into Claude and then responded in GitLab.
80% of the issues were trivial, only 1 was a minor problem. The post was like 10,000 characters long, including explaining the change.
Huge waste of everyones time.
This really depends on context. Sure, if you're responding to a forum post or StackOverflow question with nothing but the LLM output, then I agree with this. On the other hand, where I've done this at work, it's because I and some peers _together_ are trying to understand something (e.g., debugging), and Claude has some potentially useful input, but I'm not actually sure. And I'm looking to collaborate on interpreting the output together to see if there's anything useful. (Folks can decide to ignore it if it doesn't seem promising.) As another comment[1] said, pasting the output as-is contains other useful metadata.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243331
The page doesn’t state that all copy-pasting of AI response is bad. If everybody intend on analyzing the AI output together, definitely do copy-paste it in the chat
The essence of what this page is stating is: “do not act as a reverse proxy between me and a LLM.” That’s rude and shows that the person in question is acting like a brainless automata.
Back in my day, when people were too lazy to put in effort they would want you to google for them, read results, interpret the data, and tell them what you found out. Lmgtfy.
Well now people are still lazy, but at least they talked to their llm, they just want you to read the result, interpret the data and tell them what you found out.
We might make better software, but we aren't making better humans.
I wonder if we gathered all of the "don't quote the ai" people and all of the lmgtfy people in the same place, would they cancel out? Like matter/anti-matter annihilation?
No, because both positions boil down to "don't waste my time by refusing to think".
Reading the BBC article about poisoning the real time AI well of info yesterday, I was super struck by this point
> "We're moving towards this 'one true answer' world. Before, Google would give you 10 blue links and you would kind of do your own research. But AI just gives you one answer. It becomes so easy to just take things at face value. You need to be careful."
In a world of insecurities, and a world where we crave out-facting or out-proving our fellow discussioners, this “one right answer” is like synthetic drugs to the social experience. And we suspect “it’s not good for us” but it’s just so damned addictive.
https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/
What a rude response to someone's attempt to help someone else out by expending their AI subscription tokens to answer their question. At least they started their comment by disclosing the text was generated by AI - they should be rewarded for that - punishing them for it by insulting them, telling their brain is a gizmo, and telling them not to have children, is aggressive, not going to have the desired outcome, and is only going to make it less likely they disclose that information in future. If you don't want to read an AI response, you can stop reading after the disclosure that it's an AI response. This is a somewhat obnoxious site, in my personal (and human) opinion. Send to others at your own risk I say (of being defriended, fired, or blocked).
You entirely missed the point in the article: Everybody has access to AI. Nobody needs another person proxying it slowly and poorly in a worse medium than direct access.
Replying with AI responses is equal to saying that you're no longer relevant or valuable to the discussion. If you are annoyed by that and want to block people, fine, obviously nothing of value will be lost because they can just go to the source directly next time instead of you.
They're not doing anyone any favors by disclosing it either, and anyone replying with AI verbatim but undisclosed also isn't going to be savvy enough to hide the other tells and quirks. Assuming they're ever asked again for their "input".
On the contrary, I completely understand the point of the article. I disagree that there are no people who benefit from another person using AI on their behalf.
Everybody has free access to Google, Wikipedia, and Bing - that doesn't make sharing quotes from those sources worthy of abusive language telling people they shouldn't have children. Some people really do find value in another person opening up their ChatGPT subscription, crafting a suitable prompt, and passing on the response. There is absolutely some value in that, and many AI models are not even free.
Even just with Google, some people aren't very good at crafting search queries. Crafting a query or a prompt, deciding which model to use, vetting and sharing the response - these all add value beyond just "proxying it slowly and poorly".
Replying with an AI response can absolutely be relevant and valuable to a discussion, just as replying with a quote from Wikipedia or some other authority can be.
On the other hand, flaming people for trying to help you is, frankly, obnoxious, even if you don't appreciate the help or the manner in which it was offered.
Some people are on the bottom 5th percentile of the intelligence bell curve. Some people also enjoy having their balls being smashed in by high heels. Some people... blah blah blah. What a weasel statement. You are describing a straw man scenario that doesn't normally play out in the real world as such.
Replying with AI is the first obnoxious act. People reactive negatively to it should be expected.
> Replying with an AI response can absolutely be relevant and valuable to a discussion, just as replying with a quote from Wikipedia or some other authority can be.
But AI isn't an authority. If you're using AI as a search engine for other media, then I'd much rather you link to the source than make me wade through "Gemini suggested..." first. We should all know by now that "is this true, Grok?" is not a helpful barometer for anyone.
In your search engine analogy, I'd compare it to someone linking their search query instead of the desired link. Making me do extra work to engage with your point doesn't advance either of our understandings.
Seems a bit aggressive to send to someone. Let's spread love, not hate
It's a bit aggressive to send someone mindless AI chatspam. We should consider such behavior a direct affront.
Wtf is with this excuse-making for abandoning the bare minimum of professional competency?
I agree with the sentiment, but this is not something I can send my colleagues.
You can be annoyed and right, and still avoid being crass.
Perhaps this falls into "how to have hard conversations" bucket?
If I told my coworker that his or her "brain is a gizmo" and to "not reproduce" I would expect to be frog marched out the door a few minutes later.
"Your brain is a gizmo" doesn't sound very harsh to me, but "please don't reproduce" would be a problem in any reasonable workplace.
mental health is really important and there seems to be a growing trends of folks making comments on HN like this who sound really burnt out. burn out can be hard to place, ive been through it and in now way do i share this reflection. ide rather reach across the isle and just help someone vs. go on HN and complain like this.
I do think that pasting AI responses gives "reading the encyclopedia entry at someone", which is quite rude and crass, but you can't open peoples' eyes with similar levels of rudeness. Especially when it's an accurate description. I appreciate a good screed and also think we are looking for a subtler tool.
100%. Just because you can plagiarize basic correspondence doesn't mean it's OK.
It's even more aggressive, inconsiderate and boorish to paste multiple paragraphs of LLM output at somebody in response to a question or topic. Let's normalize having no tolerance and calling out people when they're being rude.
The wording is a bit rude but the message is still important.
The point of a message is communication. The most effective means of communication is seldom rude, mean, crass, or blunt.
Tact is not some barrier to clear communication, it is the very thing that allows communication to happen in lieue of violence and savagery.
Pasting AI at me feels like hate. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy.
A bit of crudeness required in this case.
They need to update the site a bit. Seems like they expected to get "dontpastetheai.com" but didn't?
The site has been updated now to use the current domain.
Weird thing is that domain is even available to buy.
Thanks for the heads up! I tried the first domain but cloud flare for some reason didn't allow me to purchase it
But now it's done! Both domains now point to the same place :)
Sending an AI response communicates more than just the response itself:
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."
These are somewhat valid reasons, but I think most of us have seen the use of pasting AI responses that are simply a laziness of communicating.
If you're trying (1), it's easier to say "I don't know, maybe <available ai> can answer". It doesn't save any time to ask an AI that the other party is equally equipped to ask. It just saves the responder time from being genuinely helpful.
If you're (2), at least explain this (or include the prompt so it's self evident and a teaching moment). Of course, if you're a SME, maybe you also have the knowledge to just answer directly - see 4.
For (3), why reply at all: see 1.
For (4), saying this associates your own authority and knowledge, and is valuable, but the omission of such disclaimer makes it indistinguishable from 1.
Sometimes people ask questions on HN off handedly while making some kind of argument where the questions can easily be answered by plugging them into a Google search box. And then I wonder why didn’t they just do that? Usually they don’t do it because it causes whatever argument they are making to implode quickly. I’m guessing they aren’t anti AI they just don’t want to know. It’s not even a “do you trust the AI or not” since the AI is just able to quickly find and present basic data. The fact that their question can be answered quickly and easily is what they find offensive.
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.
tbh some questions deserve the ai response pasted at them. The type that you'd like lmgtfy at them before. The edge cuts both ways; if you put zero effort into your question, sometimes you deserve 0 effort responses. That being said, I always hesitate to do this since I'm an imperfect judge
It's more tactful to tell your conversation partner such, instead of rudely sending them word vomit from a machine.
> The type that you'd like lmgtfy at them before.
Which has always been an equally objectionable thing to do as well.
After reading the comments here I added a "Work-safe" version, along with the angry version so you can send this to your coworker too.
Thanks for the feedbacks!
Off topic, but when I opened the website I was instantly teleported back to a better website design time. This site has character, I will recognize it, it's not like what I was complaining about in https://jeena.net/content-is-king
I feel like there’s a journey from being skeptical about AI, to being wowed when it does something impressive, then to eventual realism about its abilities and shortcomings. Not everyone has completed that journey yet, especially people who are less technical.
I generally think this is a poor take although it mostly hinges in my opinion on whether the answer you're giving them is correct or not.
There's plenty of people who probably remember the "Let me Google That For You". This is a combination of people being rude about giving others answers mixed with some people not spending enough time figuring out the answer themselves (sometimes with just a simple google search).
I've seen plenty of people ask questions that LLMs when given the right context and prompting are able to answer. Providing them the correct answer in any way (via search, via an LLM, or via your own human expertise) is valid. Its certainly annoying if a person is giving you poor answers because the answers come from an AI. And I'd definitely take that to heart and likely ask them fewer questions in the future. But similarly if someone kept coming to me with questions that can be easily answered by AI I'd tell them to spend some more time investigating on their own.
Totally fair argument to make right now. But so funny how this is the opposite movement of "Let me Google that for you".
Opposite in which sense?
I guess this is all about rudeness from being too lazy.
My understanding is 'lmgtfy' is a response to a lazy request for help. Someone's asking for help, but it seems like they could have helped themselves if they just searched Google. -- The corrective action is: it would have been better if the person asking the question had demonstrated thought/effort about their response.
Whereas "don't paste AI slop", merely copy-pasting an LLM's output is lazy. (The asker could have asked an LLM). -- The corrective action is: the response should show more thought/effort.
I’d much, much prefer people were honest about AI answers and text and had the decency to cite it explicitly when they use it.
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!
Early on, when I would try this, it resulted in instant downvotes, and I noticed others that would cite explicitly that AI was used would also receive an unusually large number of downvotes that seemed more correlated to the admission of using AI.
I suspect nobody is willing to admit it anymore because they will lose internet points over it.
Yep. or https://stopsloppypasta.ai
hmm, would be funny if this was AI generated (as per pangram, SoTA AI detection model)
https://www.pangram.com/history/93691929-63c0-4c18-a620-e0b7...
This is not clever. A lot of people do not understand what LLMs are capable of now. It can be learning experience to show a product person how they can leverage LLMs rather than acting like you're the know-it-all by obfuscating the fact that you used an LLM to answer a question
If you want to do it occasionally, sure, whatever. I have a coworker who solely communicates in the form of screenshots of him asking Cursor my question, even when they’re questions that are interested in his motivation or plans, not the code base, and that Cursor does a bad job answering. I’ll ask a Slack channel “does anyone have experience with tools A and B, so they can suggest which matches our use case better”, and he’ll respond with a screenshot.
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.
As a meta note, I'm seeing more downvoted responses in this comment section for reasonable points of view on both sides than I've ever seen for any HN topic.
It's interesting that this is so polarizing.
Assertion: recipient owes the person asking something.
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.
New improved LMGTFY with radio buttons to allow selection of "Let me gemini that for you" coming in 3... 2... 1...
Can I get a version of this without the over-the-top misanthropic "don't reproduce" comment?
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.
Sure: https://noslopgrenade.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992
if someone uses ai to draft they still need to compress it into their own judgment before sending it
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992 - Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (~1 day ago, 414 comments)
stopsloppypasta.ai
"Don't just paste a URL to a search engine query containing my question."
Well, imagine not having the time in the world to read the 40 page docs that are referenced on a forum like this. By the time you read, analyze, absorb and make a conclusion, it is time to hit the sack. So, AI helps to analyze, TLDR, summarize the data. In a lot of cases, it's a question of time, not intelligence. HN is not a message board known for balanced opinions. I've found it to be a place where hate, threats get hurled incessantly. Just ask my Karma ;)
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 :)
Write your own plugin for HN. Just install tampermonkey and get an AI to build the functionality for you.
I have a plugin I made that greys out AI related topic titles.
I am not anti-AI. My issue with HN is that there is no real balance of opinions, no actual policing. Just feels like another mainstream free-for-all media tool :(
That being said, I shall consider your suggestion :)
Sol
>you just proved that there's no difference between asking you or asking the AI.
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.
Typing “I don’t know” saves you more time than asking the AI and pasting the answer.
More keystrokes.
> 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.
Neurotypical members of Generation Z and even many millennials perceive question-asking differently than you or I do. If you tell them on Reddit etc. that they should do some of their own research or consult a FAQ (or now an LLM), they’ll respond that the point of asking wasn’t just to get information, it was to spark a conversation and get feeling of community and interaction with other people. Moreover, you may well get dogpiled with downvotes by the rest of the people reading, who will tell you the same thing.
Remember that younger generations were brought up on corporate social media where things like FAQs were discouraged, because the corporation has to maximize engagement and wants people asking the same basic questions again and again. So, the very concept of a FAQ or a search culture is foreign to them. Add to that the social isolation they report, and you can see why they might be subconsciously desperate to throw a low-effort post out there. Ironically, they would probably better served both socially and informationally by old-school forums, but they are hardly aware now that those existed, and their default internet device (the phone) plays badly with old-school forum culture.
Came here to say this -- humans are not always rational actors. I get asked questions all the time, which I have no special knowledge of, and which the asker could have easily Googled or ChatGPTed. And yet...
Humans. Can't live with 'em, can't serve 'em with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
lmgtfy -> hwcs
Funniest thing about this is that I think it's ~all~ (edit) mostly LLM-generated (and Pangram agrees). I think the biggest tell these days is when the text is generated in a way that seems like it was intended to be funny, but the jokes never land.
> 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.
My parents come to me with questions about how to close a app on their iPad, and frankly I can not be asked to give them a walk through when I put chatgpt on their iPad for that reason.
And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.
My dad (retired network engineer) has ChatGPT, but when he asks me about something, he's trying to keep a connection with me. I value those moments.
and also that when you ask someone stuff, they might have adjacent insights or stories that then give you better insight than just asking an LLM
or some kind of ideas/etc. might come to light.
I don't know what's worse:
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.
No. 1 has been around since the dawn of time. Remember the saying, there are no stupid questions. Asking is how people learn, including learning how to ask good questions. #2 is just rude because everyone has access to the same AIs. You’re not doing anyone a favor or being helpful - if they wanted to ask AI, they would have. And what do you learn from an AI response?
Of course there are stupid questions. Just look at Stack Overflow, it's full of them. The better approach is "Invest as much time answering a question as the other party spent thinking about how to formulate it".
> Asking a question which could be answered by an AI
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.
You should know. I find it hard to believe, in fact, that you don't know.
Telling people they shouldn't even ask questions that can theoretically be Googled/AI'd with enough time or blind trust is hideous in the extreme, and absolutely antithetical to the ideas of humanity and intellectual curiosity. I would like to never hear such a suggestion come out of anybody's mouth, particularly on HN.
If you want to know the truth I find it worse to ask questions that folks can answer themselves.
When you don't know the answer to something you should try to figure it out before asking. That builds important skills. Like it or not LLMs are now a useful tool for that. The first instinct shouldn't be to ask someone else if you haven't expended any effort.
For example, if you don't know 6*27 I'd consider it rude to ask if you have a calculator on your desk but you're too lazy to use it.
2 is far worse. Asking a question that can be answered by AI can also spark a good conversation. That's not bad at all.
If I wanted an AI answer I would have gotten it myself. Some questions can be answered by AI badly.
2. Pasting disregards the reader
Yeah, asking questions you can find an answer to yourself also disregards the reader. It cuts both ways.
1. Often disregards the question's recipient. Particularly for questions that could be easily answered by AI.
Sometimes humans talk not purely to accomplish things but rather for human contact and comradery.
People can just choose to ignore questions they don't feel like answering for whatever reason.
So now that we have AI chatbots, we just never ask any questions to another human again?