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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.

They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.

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I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.

> I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.

Lots of people aren't very thoughtful or wise, including some supposedly very intelligent people.

For further proof: think of all the workers proudly parroting their bosses' anti-union rhetoric, like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

This used to horrify me, until I started noticing the type of person that mindlessly spits crap out for me to deal with are the exact type of people I had already identified as being at most neutral or dead weight anyway. Sounds harsh but if your first reaction to solving a problem is to turn off your brain entirely and dump the thinking onto something/someone else for you, you're likely already layoff fodder, even pre AI. Maybe we'll all get there eventually, but for now, there's a clear distinction I see between types of people that use these tools, and one is very exhausting to deal with.

My experience aligns with that. But there’s no guarantee that the criteria for layoffs, when they happen, will include these people.

A lot of jobs don't need a human for anything from 80-99% of their work tasks and can be replaced by an LLM or other form of AI/ML. As an employer, you hire the human for the 1-20% where you actually need the experience - to quote the punchline of an old but gold joke [1]:

> The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.

In many a company, the "old neckbeards" and "dead weight" are the first ones to be cut or eventually be driven off by ever more outright bullshit - and often enough, it is only realized way too late that important "institutional knowledge" is gone [2].

[1] https://calvincorreli.com/blog/1397-knowing-which-screw-to-t...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35821782

I personally feel using AI to reply personal chats is extremely bogus. Worse is those that do not even bother to remove the AI watermark. Like, pasting directly from the AI without removing the AI's personal thoughts.

But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?

Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things

Not the person you’re replying to, but, because I don’t know what they know.

“I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation

Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.

It's usually an email chain that they're CC'ed on, or for which they're the point of contact: Sales, project management, or (worst) a VP getting pinged by a customer who wants to jump to the front of the line: "Our new X keeps showing a message that says the brobillator needs to be froodicated, and worse it now runs at 1/4 speed, but we don't want to froodicate it already because that's expensive and our maintenance guys are busy. Can you change the interval from monthly to annually? This is a critical issue that might impact our budget to purchase 3 more X units in Q3."

The right way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to the ME who designed the brobillator and calculated the 1-month maintenance interval, CCing the controls engineer who helped ensure that machine wouldn't eat itself with the fault and low-speed mode.

The wrong way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to ChatGTP[sic], which might mindlessly suggests maintenance-free sealed bearings (that are totally inadequate for the temperatures and contaminants). If he asks the mechanical engineer to redesign it like ChatGTP suggested, that situation may be salvageable. If he told the customer that they'd have an engineer out in 3 days with new sealed bearings it's bad.

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