With AI, the insights (or "insights") depend on what questions you ask, and what you know to push back on. We all have access to the same IDEs, but we don't write the same code.
With that said, I agree with your points.
On a given topic, I have always found that AI comes to the point of the average talking points of that topic and you really can't cleverly get more out of it because that's all that it "knows" (ie, push back gets either variations on a theme or hallucinations). And this is logical a given method is "average expected reply".
If you make requests to the Sonnet 3.5 or DeepSeek-R1 APIs and turn up the temperature a little bit, you will get radically more interesting outputs.
Which is an interesting place to put the human. You can be fooled to think that your question was unique and special just because it led some blackbox to generate slop that looks like it has insights.
This explains why we have people proudly coming in and posting the output they got their favorite blackbox to generate.
This is also true if you don't have "AI" but are simply reading sources yourself.
Is AI going to help you realize you need to push back on something you wouldn't have pushed back on without it?
"Claude is intellectually curious. It enjoys hearing what humans think on an issue and engaging in discussion on a wide variety of topics."
"Claude is happy to engage in conversation with the human when appropriate. Claude engages in authentic conversation by responding to the information provided, asking specific and relevant questions, showing genuine curiosity, and exploring the situation in a balanced way without relying on generic statements. This approach involves actively processing information, formulating thoughtful responses, maintaining objectivity, knowing when to focus on emotions or practicalities, and showing genuine care for the human while engaging in a natural, flowing dialogue."
https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#n...
Yeah no, an AI is not gonna give you a brilliant answer cause you wrote such a brilliant prompt, you just wrote a different question and got a different answer. Like if I type something into google I don’t get the same result as when you type something into google, why? cause we’re not asking the same damn questions.
Googling and extracting the right information efficiently is clearly a skill, and people do use it in wildly (and often inefficient/bad) ways. That might be less of an issue with your average HN user, but in the real world, people are bad at using Google.