Don't just paste the AI at me
dontquotetheai.com
dontquotetheai.com
( 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" )
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.
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?
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?
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.
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."
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...
But the highlighted examples demonstrate the complete opposite. Shuttling things between a model isn’t engaging with another human meaningfully.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
The issue is pasting verbatim without adding any additional insight, or even a hint you read the response yourself.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Replying with AI is the first obnoxious act. People reactive negatively to it should be expected.
Wtf is with this excuse-making for abandoning the bare minimum of professional competency?
You can be annoyed and right, and still avoid being crass.
Tact is not some barrier to clear communication, it is the very thing that allows communication to happen in lieue of violence and savagery.
> "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.
But now it's done! Both domains now point to the same place :)
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."
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.
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.
Which has always been an equally objectionable thing to do as well.
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.
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.
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!
I suspect nobody is willing to admit it anymore because they will lose internet points over it.
https://www.pangram.com/history/93691929-63c0-4c18-a620-e0b7...
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.
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 :)
I have a plugin I made that greys out AI related topic titles.
That being said, I shall consider your suggestion :)
Sol
Thanks for the feedbacks!
It's interesting that this is so polarizing.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992 - Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (~1 day ago, 414 comments)
> 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.
And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.
or some kind of ideas/etc. might come to light.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.