I'm Tired of Talking to AI(orchidfiles.com) |
I'm Tired of Talking to AI(orchidfiles.com) |
I know about several of my friends, non-tech, being directly impacted by AI.
In finance, lots of analysis work is now offset to LLMs, and the people leveraging the tools obviously still have the issue that they need to review everything the AI has analyzed, their formulas, etc. And lots of nuance and things that a human would caught are lost. But in the meantime the expectation is that your analysis output is 5 times what it was before.
My girlfriend works in corporate law for an insurance company. The company is FOMOing hard for LLMs and pushing everybody to write gemini "gems" and notebooklm presets to do lots of the work.
But it absolutely does not scale: you can't keep up with those demands, while also providing the same quality coming from thoroughly analyzing new regulations and such.
Another friend that works in credit has now the company mandate that people update financial statements etc directly to LLMs and those tools come with a yes/no about whether they will finance it or not. Quality of debt has now plummeted, needless to say and the process is longer that it has ever been because re-reviewing the LLM analysis is more expensive than doing it on your own.
My own bank has had a terrific customer care that has been recently replaced by an LLM, tragedy. It is absolutely unhelpful beyond the 80% pareto principle where customer care had already pre-canned answers anyway. But for the 20% of cases that are major issues/bugs, the AI is simply not helpful.
My bank genuinely had a bug with invoice processing and there was no way to tell them nor to resolve my issue (which required somebody to manually void the previous invoice and restart the process that got bugged).
I think it's a tragedy.
AI generated slop has exploded across reddit. Last year I would see about 1 obvious AI generated post and report it. Today I've already reported 5 posts and it is 7am here.
The posts are some technical topic but there isn't even really a question in the post and then it ends with "thoughts about this?" and people try to clarify with the OP what the question is.
I reply to them to stop wasting their time because it is a bot. Sometimes there are 20 comments and nothing from the OP bot. Sometimes the OP bot says "Interesting, thanks" but never any real followup question.
We had this discussion 3 weeks ago "AI Slop is Killing Online Communities"
Reddit makes money from spam accounts. Even before LLMs, they'd ban you for reporting the wrong spambots, those being the ones that pay Reddit for priority access.
The replies to the LLM post are probably LLMs themselves.
I almost never go to the main "popular" page as it is full of garbage.
But I was still enjoying my niche subreddits. But in the last year the amount of AI slop has exploded and it is getting worse every day. Reposts of things from less than a week ago. Really vague technical questions with emdashes, bullet points, and ending in "thoughts?" that generate a discussion but the OP bot never replies or has vague 1 word comments.
I know that reddit makes money from ads so more bots mean more traffic which means more ads and more money.
But it is sad watching communities because useless and die.
a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.
Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.
I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.
Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.
(Unless it's a) trivially short or b) there's a solid reason to send me it. It's the "wall of AI text" that I generally nope out on)
Bombarding others with pages of slop that took you 10 seconds to generate (and not even read) yet take minutes to untangle for the recipient is obviously downright rude.
...unfortunately every office has a small number of people that are dumb as rocks and don't recognise this - in fact think they're helping
I trust myself to be hard headed enough to keep my intelligence from atrophy, but it's going to suck living in a society where most people don't (or who never developed it at all).
The other day I was at the theatre and I overheard the people next to me glad that they had the best tickets because chatgpt had advised what to buy. The big tip was choosing something centered rather than very angled. Sigh.
However, we as a society aren't nearly ready to actually hold a conversation about that. We could probably eliminate half of all non-hands-on (i.e. a human uses their hands to manufacture a thing) employment in a matter of a year or two if we would embrace computers and digital infrastructure and give lower levels of employees more authority - and that's before AI even enters the picture. Government services are a prime example - a lot of "e government" services in Germany aren't truly digital, they generate a PDF that is printed out in some clerk's office and processed manually by copying information from that PDF into some admin program.
But unfortunately, if we were to do that, we'd run into riots faster than we could imagine. We aren't ready for a society in which we still have a small base of people that have to, literally, work (with their bodies) to keep society alive while the rest does not need to work any more.
I threw it to Claude and a minute later had a "look at packet 131 and 136, it's on their side."
Yeah, it is exhausting to read verbose slop. But you're the author.
I used to be extremely verbose, and AI has helped me appreciate brevity because now I'm being exposed to it.
I would love to be without the "Top 5 Kubernetes commands" slop images LinkedIn feeds me.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.
Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.
I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.
More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.
About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2
When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.
If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.
The meatsack agents do the same thing anyway - I give them requirments and they build it exactly as specified with zero question, and in the laziest get-it-done method possible with no thought about complexity, architecture, technical debt, etc…. If there is a mistake in the spec they don’t question it, they just build the mistake. If they aren’t going to use their brains WHY SHOULDNT I replace them with Claude?
Managers send me AI generated specs and AI generated slop mock-ups. They answer questions about how the product should work by giving me AI generated responses they didn’t even spot-check for correctness. AI generated bug reports with hallucinated STR. Offshores send me slop they not only didn’t read, they didn’t even run once because it’s OBVIOUSLY broken. Absolute madness.
None of this sh*t is actually helpful. It’s work SLOP. It’s not more productive. It’s a productivity sinkhole.
I hate all this garbage and the total rotting out of people’s minds and abilities it has inflicted upon humanity.
Nothing has made me hate billionaires more than AI. It helped me realize that I could never be a successful multinational corpo man because I’m not a morally bankrupt POS and I look at people much different now because of this realization. There is no way one could get to the place that people like Altman, Amodei, Nadella, Ellison, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, etc…are without being giant pieces of rotten excrement.
Slop is no fun to deal with, so we have a thesis that slop should be left for agents to read and human-to-human communication should happen outside of passing empty fluffy docs to one another. To realise that, we have a workspace with group chats where multiple agents and humans can work together and agents can engage with humans for additional information when needed. The challenge is, of course, to find the right level of autonomy for the agents and let the agent learn and follow user's workflows well enough to be useful.
The incentives to keep it the way it used to be are gone. AI is cheap, and it sounds better than what a majority of users write.
Humans adapt. Maybe we shift from communites and moderation, to predefined rules of engagement. If a commenter can follow some pre agreed upon rules of debate, then it doesn't matter if they are silicon or not.
We went from a cave of wonders to a dark forest in a single life time. It would be amazing if it wasn't so fucking frustrating.
>I want to talk to real people.
Good luck with that while on the internet - that's only going to get worse. The bright side is that this may make all of us touch grass more often.
One interesting observation from myself: I don't "browse" the internet anymore. I go read specific sites, order something, or do some task. So my internet usage is way down, but I also don't watch a lot of TV or streaming content anymore, because I can't really deal with it. There's to much of it, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, everything is just a rehash (Cinematography is beautiful though). So now I just read, preferably books written before the year 2000.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.
Sounds like a movie plot, or is Bladerunner all over.
I honestly am not sure that one can know that that is true anymore. Probably the only place left that I have any confidence in is maybe the small discords I'm in with various friend groups with <30 people that all know each other IRL.
Reddit has a lot of AI generated stuff
Youtube comments are even worse.
Twitter seems 99% AI garbage
I think I need to find old school forums to discuss things.
Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.
You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.
The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.
I don't think that is always the case. Sometimes it is. Other times the social cues and later follow up makes it seem the person thought they were being really helpful, not sarcastic, by sending the response. Yet other times, the person acts as if it was their own response and not the AI's, almost akin to passing off the AI's work as their own.
This is most notable when the original question shows effort was put into it and it isn't a simple case.
> original question shows effort was put into it
What matters is how the other side interprets it, not your level of effort or your expectations. If the other side apparently doesn't get what you wanted to happen, that's a communication issue.
I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?
Turtles all the way down.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.
Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.
Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.
At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.
So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?
The screenshots part is crazy.
Think the difference between AI saying "This paragraph seemed muddled and lacks a clear point. Consider rewriting it." vs "Here, I rewrote this paragraph to focus it more on bridging the previous and next paragraphs."
The problem with this as a metric is that it is loosely defined so it becomes quite easy for a person to twist it to justify almost any level of AI usage as "well, it is still more effort than <X>".
Hence my first message
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.
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.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
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...
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.
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. :-)
An AI answer that isn't the answer or is unrelated is not that
The troubling thing is they are at least partially correct. But, like everything else, they're letting a skill atrophy.
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.
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.
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.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.
I recount it here: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch
- Louis de Bonald
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
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.
It costs you seconds to ask the question, and you want them to invest minutes in answering it?
You invest seconds in a question, they invest seconds in the answer. Seems like a fair deal to me.
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.
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.
It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
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.
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.
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 oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.
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.
That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.
It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.
Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."
We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.
Not saying that's the very specific case, but I regularly encounter in my daily life at work people delegating the kind of information seeking that can be done independently.
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.
So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.
Digital opioid crisis, this tribalism thing.
A lot of people do not seem to be doing well, which seems to be the foundation of many of the business models of the employers of people here on HN.
Digital copioid crisis.
A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
I could be wrong, it's just a guess.
Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.
I can't. And the only reason you can, is because we've been accustomed to rote script-based zero quality human customer service first.
I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.
Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.
Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.
- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.
- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.
- Claude does the PR review.
- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".
We're just passing butter at this point.
A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.
It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.
Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.
I'm just speculating though.
[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.
> AI is useful as a tool. But when it replaces attention, judgment, and personality, conversations start feeling empty.
I pasted your article into ChatGPT and it gave me the most depressing statements. The above and also about 800 more words.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
Others call it a proud tradition (as opposed to a useful tradition).
With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.
Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...
They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.
Probably more under-developed than psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
I prefer silence over that tbh.
I have been pasting screenshots of NS international to ChatGPT and getting from A to B.
I wouldn’t be so confident without ChatGPT
I wrote about how ChatGPT can help even more in this space https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/ai-can-fix-the-fragmented-o...
/dystopia
Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
I would hope these people are AT A MINIMUM screening the responses they get before passing them off. There's value in that if they are, as if they really are experts they can filter out bs and reprompt better than you likely could if you're not an expert - and in rare cases, who knows, maybe they could actually do it themselves.
AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
There have always been people that did the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
AI will just make it more obvious.
And those people will be at the front to be let go when AI inevitably kills white collar jobs as it creates other jobs. They just might not be able to get one of those new ones because they rotted what little brain cells they had to begin with.
> Try prompting Claude to fix an arbitrary code base better than someone who knows it, when you're a random non-technical person.
I've seen people employed working on some code bases that couldn't code at all.
> Try prompting Claude for legal advice and getting as good of results as Lawyer would if you're a layperson.
Some lawyers are downright incompetent and don't know what they're talking about / just want your money.
> Try prompting Claude for medical advice if you're not a doctor...
Some doctors are downright incompetent or malicious. You'd generally find that out by vising another doctor and finding previous diagnostic was bullshit and you lost time.
> AI is just going to speed run bringing out the best and worst in coworkers.
It does help people overall, the worst coworkers are probably going to still be there, just a bit better hidden.
The rest just have a new-age search engine to augment their capabilities.
The co-founder of Anthropic isn't even doing this when preparing statements to say after the Pope has spoken about AI, I think you're expecting a bit too much here.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that's a must too, but I also think people should test software extensively before deploying/releasing it, seemingly nowadays I'm in the minority about these sort of things.
While most of us actually commenting are obviously firmly on the "don't do this" side, for any lurkers who may have done this in the recent past or are considering doing it in the future, I would advise you to consider this point for your own actions. If all you are is an AI proxy, you are volunteering to step to the front of the firing line. For all that companies are just starting to recoil from the costs of AI, AI is still much cheaper than you are.
Someone informed can tell the content is generated. I don't really care, that's still my knowledge and I can discuss content in depth.
I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.
This is all bullshit, none of those actually work, and the false-positives rates are sky-high. I'm not sure how any serious person have tried out any of those services and came away with the impression of "Well, better than nothing" because literally, it seems the opposite.
We are building a future where human contact will be scarce
1. Find some nicher but interesting topic (e.g. some historical event like Lepanto's battle)
2. Have AI generate the content of the 20 minutes video by collecting information about it online
3. Have AI generate the video
4. Have AI generate a realistic voice to comment on the video
5. Upload it without mentioning it's all AI generated
6. Have me get mad 4 minutes into the video because footage/paintings referring to that battle...do not exist at all...slowly realize it was all AI generated
I highly recommend using an extension like Unhook and disabling all algorithmic recommendations such as the Home feed, sidebar/endscreen recommendations etc. The only way I interface with YouTube now is through the subscriptions page which shows me videos from creators I follow in chronological order.
Yes, until you remember there is a world outside of the screen, where people build things with their hands, use their physically to play instruments for others, paint beautiful things for others to see physically and so much more.
"Humanness" online been dead for decades already, if you want humanness you need to step outside, or at least invite other humans home.
The same way the online world has never actually been that distinct from the offline world, one is merged with the other and they influence each others.
There has been of humanness online of you do not look for it on social medias. But that’s now breaking down, because we developed a technology designed to impersonate human communication
There is so much humanity in the world outside of the screen, and it's really easy to see what is authentically made, ignore the rest. Find live events with real other humans, there are a ton of them out there, doesn't really matter how people find the events, as long as we put our bodies in the same physical space.
I've copied-pasted comments I made on HN from like 2020 and had it tell me it's "100% AI". I've seen examples where the services claim "100% AI" because there was no normal dashes, only em-dashes. Even have a recent example from HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165690
> This reads very AI. Pangram [0] agrees [1]. [0] Not perfect, but I think as good evidence as any: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 [1] https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a626...
Said Pangram report literally citing the single evidence of em-dashes...
It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.
Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.
But if I'm the askee, I honestly don't know how to navigate those waters yet.
If someone asks me for help and I can find, through AI, a thread to explore, but I don't have time to explore it myself, should I not share?
Do I say "Have you tried X?", where X is the thing the LLM suggested? Should I pretend that I did not ask the LLM?
In the past, I could find some source and send them the link, and I wouldn't assume the person had exhausted the entire Google index. Sending a link isn't the same as LMGTFY.
Analogously, while "Claude says X" does sound as rude as lmgtfy, disclosing that your suggestion was found via llm is more akin to linking to a source, or "take this with a grain of salt".
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799035/
Smart people drink and smoke more; not less, potentially to self sooth/deal with the oppressive reality they find themselves in.
Firing them on the spot and telling them: "Thanks for opening our eyes to the fact that asking you is just asking Copilot with a middleman" will send the right message to the rest...
AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.
> and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want
To expand on this idea, there are books designed specifically for travels which are pocket sized and contain a bunch of images so you can point at what you want.
If you're 10/10 smart, you're getting a 7 figure sign on bonus to go work at Meta as an AI researcher.
If you're 6-9/10 smart, you're probably miserable somewhere.
If you're 4-5/10 smart, you are one of these people.
confidence man
Maybe this is a problem at huge companies.
Let me Claude that for you.
Maybe it's because I haven't worked in gigantic corporations, but things like this seems really passive-aggressive, and the times I've experienced that, I've literally asked them "Did you try to look this up yourself before asking me? Just so I don't spend time doing something you probably could find the answer to yourself", and when it has happened repeatedly, bring that up in a face-to-face conversation asking them to stop.
Why not be upfront about how you're feeling, instead of "I'm gonna reciprocate this behavior they might not even know I think is bad"? People are generally clueless about how other's perceive them and their behavior, and you can actually influence this directly by providing them with constructive feedback, and then eliminate what's troublesome upfront instead of "They're bad to me, I'm gonna be bad to them because of that".
Anarchism / destabilisation.
Long experience. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce who ask their boss or a more senior coworker a question the moment they think of it, with no attempt to find the answer via tools at their disposal. Maybe not as many as 80%, as implied by @sdoering below in a sibling thread, but quite a few.
They're usually pretty courteous in their interaction, which makes it all the more difficult to be "rude", in my case, by adding an exponential falloff in response times - after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.
If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.
"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
Programming is an intense job, in that it takes a lot of focus and time to build up a mental model of what you're working on to make progress
It’s important to not make everybody do your research for you, but what you’re describing is not at all typical.
If this is not typical for you, then you are surrounded by people who disrespect you and your time.
You aren't going to be able to convince others to be upstanding coworkers that actually give a damn, but you can be that person yourself.
not rude. not implying anything about the questioner. still the general sentiment of "google it; that's not my job". if you admonish people as being "incredibly rude", you should be talking about things that people actually do with enough regularity to make the point worth making. that is pretty widely understood.
Using AI reflexively assumes that you have a tool that they do not, or that they are not motivated or smart enough to use before coming to you. LMGTFY is directly a laziness-rebuff for this reason - everyone has and already uses google. Why would you assume that your coworkers are lazy or not smart as a first step in any interaction?
There are millions of reasons a genuine conversation should happen when a coworker reaches out, and many of these, if exercised in good faith, would be a trust-building interaction. LMGTFY and AI copypasta both are snide, cost-free rebuffs of a coworker who approached you with a question - and that's just shit culture if it becomes common.
I have no idea why anyone would let an AI dictate the response - you lose your entire voice and depersonalize your response. Do you keep a markdown of your communication style and past inside jokes? Or did you start so early with AI that you dont even have those to keep?
In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.