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Comment by reticulates | Hacker News Reader

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real-ish, as real as Reddit can be) it is stark, people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

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Writing and videos produced before 2022 are the information equivalent of low-background steel (steel produced before the atom bomb era). Not all are precious, but they are important. AI influences are so pervasive at this point, even in informational writing from domain experts.

Relentless grounding is my personal solution for my AI epistemic crisis, but it's an expensive solution in terms of time and effort, and triage is hard too.

What is "grounding"?

I do mean "grounding" as seeking the primary source of information by hand as my sibling commenter said.

If an LLM says something about history, have it give you source documents so that you can verify. If it says Earth's gravitational constant is 98 [sic] m/s^2, have it generate a prediction of a timed 1m paperclip drop test, and go do it yourself.

It's perhaps excessive in the case of gravity, but for things that matter like medical stuff I tell LLMs to expose their step by step causal reasoning / inference, and then check whether I buy it myself. SotA models' biochemistry + neurochemistry is often pretty solid. Often their answers are based on a slightly hallucinated understanding if it's a spatial anatomy question. It's fun when you get some research paper citations and then upon reading them decide you don't agree with the underlying research (eg. fMRI studies often make broad / interesting claims based on small sample sizes or sample populations that are clearly biased).

To be clear, I don't think that the LLM's self explained reasoning in a single turn is how it actually arrived at a given conclusion, but I just want to expose and bind the final conclusion to a verifiable epistemic chain.

It's when the models outputs are connected to sources.

So for example, you might have a company chatbot that responds with a summary of a Confluence page it was trained on and a link to the source.

Doesn't eliminate hallucinations, but it does reduce them and gives you a chance to verify.

That works ok until the citation material ends up with LLM output being fed in. Already there are many examples of this happening.

Yes, the trick is having a "ground-truth" KB it can link to, and trying to avoid citogensis from happening. I'm not sure if it's a technique that's every going to scale because of that.

I don’t think this is correct, as we’re talking about all online discourse being influenced by AI, and you don’t know what to trust anymore, rather than generating AI output yourself (which is what you are referring to).

In this context, it would mean building a knowledge base the model can link to that is considered authoritative. So maybe the LLM is has some slop in it's training, and that causes it to try and output some junk, but if it can't match it to it's verified ground-truth KB it doesn't end up outputting it.

The problem is figuring out what is the authoritative sources.

But we're talking about AI writing and/or influencing other people's online discourse, not?

I think in this context, they mean seeking the primary source of the information by hand.

responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off. they get very mad and ive had some even use ai to tell me why that's wrong.

what differentiates you? you could tell me "type xyz into chatgpt" or even share a structured document link from their site. but when you're copy/pasting, then you're basically useless in the equation.

> responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off

That’s crazy, it seems like such an obviously fair policy to me. They rarely even read their own generated text. I don’t understand this mentality

Another human being took time from their life to try and help you

It wasn't as much time as you felt entitled to from them, so you responded by minimizing their contribution and being condescending. That upset them.

The problem here was not the other person.

Someone is drowning and calls for help.

I throw a bucket of chum into the water and walk away, putting my headphones on.

Well I did take the time to help, better than nothing, right?

No… they took time from YOUR life to try and take credit for what an LLM produced when asked. And took over from you when you'd apparently chosen not to ask an LLM, as if to say 'thank me for knowing better because you were supposed to be asking the LLM about this'.

> Another human being took time from their life to try and help you

By copying and pasting my question into ChatGPT, and then copying and pasting the answer back?

It would have been more helpful, and still trivial, to remind me that ChatGPT exists.

> It wasn't as much time as you felt entitled to from them

No entitlement is implied by posting a question. The other human being could have just as well ignored the query entirely.

Sometimes a well-meaning fool is worse than no help at all.

That doesnt excuse you from the obligation to be civil. Especially given that the other party was trying to help.

There was nothing uncivil in the response the above commenter gave.

I suppose that "civil" is relative. Personaly, I wouldn't speak to someone who just tried to help me that way.

Instead I would restate the question to avoid bad answers. If you start by saying what you've already tried, and how it worked, it cuts off most of those "lazy answers."

In my experience most lazy answers are provided as response to lazy questions.

Sending that “lazy answer” because you assumed the other person hasn’t tried solving the question themselves seems like the “uncivil” action. You should probably assume your colleague has tried before asking for help, and probably tried the same lazy route you used to respond.

> You should probably assume your colleague has tried before asking for help,

Spoken like someone who has never worked in a customer support role.

You can never assume competency, from anyone. Even the best amd brightest have bad days.

this is why all my emails start with "PLEASE DO"

It's more uncivil to waste another human's time with slop, it's extremely insulting. There is a massive public backlash against the tech for many reasons now.

replying with LLM generated text without clearly labelling it as LLM generated text is inherently dishonest

I'm a pretty civil person, but I won't go out of my way to be extra polite to someone who is being actively being dishonest towards me

When it comes to the specific case of people just mindlessly copy/pasting LLM’s:

No, I asked them to help and they offloaded it without applying any of the expertise I specifically asked for. If they don’t want to give their opinion or their expertise they should say “no.” It’s a valid response! If I’m asking for you to give your time and you don’t have time to give, that’s fine! But don’t just throw my question into an LLM and then paste the results to me. I too have access to LLM’s. I didn’t ask for a middleman.

It’s the same reason I never like it when people on hobby/interest forums tell people “Google it.” No dude, we all gathered here to discuss this topic. If people are going to ask basic questions, that’s part of the gig. They are asking the community. Perhaps they got bad results via search. People need to get over themselves lmao I don’t know what else to say.

We’ve just got this wild culture where everyone puts such a premium on their own time but now doesn’t value anyone else’s, as evidenced by all the slop dumping. By all means use LLM’s. They’re a tool, they’re there to be used. But use your own brain too. Give the results your attention. Don’t just dump them on me.

> We’ve just got this wild culture where everyone puts such a premium on their own time but now doesn’t value anyone else’s

My favorite example of this is dropping a random acronym into a message board reply and repeating it five times without ever defining it, expecting every single person who reads your post to google it themselves to understand what you’re talking about, thus saving you having to type three words yourself.

“I tried BDI for a while, and I found the important thing is to focus on biased BDI and not just the vanilla BDI that you see so much of in the BDI community”

… tossed into a 30 comment thread where no other comments mention anything similar.

Its the same root cause. The asker has no "theory of mind".

Often they are neurodiverent. Sometimes they're just overwhelmed with whatever it is they're asking about and dont have time to consider other peoples perspectives.

Its why after decades of having Google in everyone's pocket people still post questions a simple Google search would have solved.

> I too have access to LLM’s.

You should have stated what you already tried then. You didn't, so they did the obvious thing for you... to do you a favor. If you'd tried something before asking them surely you'd have told them that at the start, right?

> as evidenced by all the slop dumping

I see more evidence of lazy questions. A good question includes what you've already done to help understand the issue (often refereed to as the proof of work). If you don't do that the other party must assume you are either don't now how, or didn't have time to. If they are kind they do the obvious thing for you. If they are not kind, they just ignore your lazy question.

I mostly ignore the lazy ones these days. Tell me what you tried or I assume you're just trying to get me to do the reading so you don't have to.

You should value the people who take the time to answer your inadequate question at all, rather than bemoaning them for not doing ENOUGH free labor for you when you weren't even willing to type a few lines about what you'd already tried.

Now if you say "I've already Googled it and asked all the AI's, but can't find anything" and they still dump some slop on you then there's a problem.

> You should have stated what you already tried then. You didn't, so they did the obvious thing for you... to do you a favor. If you'd tried something before asking them surely you'd have told them that at the start, right?

I’m not sure what you mean here, might be a misunderstanding. My point is don’t use your LLM and simply paste it. I have an LLM, I can use it too. We all have access to them. We should all operate under that assumption. Also, it’s not like I gave people a detailed list of everything I tried before asking them prior to LLM’s. Generally we should assume the person is asking us for a reason, we don’t need to run an audit here.

At the the day my point is I am asking you, not chat gpt. Feel free to use it just like I’d use a search to make sure I’m giving an accurate, comprehensive answer sometimes. But just like I don’t simply dump links on people when they ask for help, don’t dump your unvetted outputs on people who ask you for help.

> We should all operate under that assumption

We've all had access to Google for decades. People still don't Google things.

If you go around assuming that other people are competent and did the work you would have done you will be disappointed a significant percentage of the time and waste a lot of everyone's time.

So every time someone asks you a question you open with “did you google it?” or you expect them to detail all the effort they’ve put into searching already? Am I reading this right?

Also I do live like that and I’m not disappointed. I don’t mind giving people around me my time and rarely do I feel it’s being abused. People have all sorts of reasons for seeking human input, plus I see it as a nice compliment when they ask for my expertise. If you feel the folks around you are more often wasting your time than not than that strikes me as a different issue with several potential explanations.

Can we save everybody having to put “I know about ChatGPT, but I’m asking for advice from an actual human who has experience with this so please refrain from answering if you’re not one of those” on every post they make, and just have that be a baked into the etiquette when discussing things online?

Right? I feel like this isn’t that complicated unless one has a very hostile, zero-sum view of relationships. If you ask me a question I assume you have a reason for asking me. I don’t need you to prove it to me.

The biggest problem with that saying is that it's completely ironic. "If you couldn't be bothered to think for yourself, don't bother speaking to me" is what people wish it meant, but what it signals to people outside of the haters club is "if you don't copy from the sources I like, don't communicate with me."

An LLM isn’t a source. If someone wanted to hear what an LLM had to offer on the topic, they would have asked it themselves. And they probably did before asking you.

There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding. They would jump straight to Why Don't You Google That and shut down any conversation we might have had.

Yes I could get some of this information off of IMDB or a DIY video but I'm looking for color commentary and regional advice, and also in some of these situations, the people I asked know me. They know the sorts of things I don't need help on and the ones I struggle with. So maybe they can tell me this movie or trick isn't for me and I should try this other thing instead. Or which store I should go to for this.

I do agree that most LMGTFY was obnoxious, and I'm not defending that.

At the same time, we have historically seen a lot of "conversational bidding" lead to low quality shitposting at best. At worst, we see wildly out of touch echo chambers fueled by bots, guerilla marketing, and political agendas.

You did solve your problem by seeking higher quality people to talk to. I'm just saying there is more to rejection than the other party "not understanding".

In the context of work chat or certain events, I could understand a LMGTFY response as steering conversation out of the mud and saving everyone the headache. It also helps you, the recipient of that response, save face.

They're the ones looking like an asshole while you get another chance to try somewhere else. I've met some of the most sociable people upon realizing their usage of these "jiu-jitsu moves" were not meant to be hostile.

> There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding.

To you the "bid" feels like a genuine attempt to connect, that may be a bit indirect.

To some people it feels more like you are being disingenuous or awkward. They instinctively feel that your intent doesnt match your words and it sets off alarms bells.

The fact that you're on the internet judging the other party negatively for having a different communication style is an indicator of which party was least willing to adapt.

And you're going to right that wrong by making assumptions.

It's usually not the person who gets asked who acts like an asshole, and if you don't don't want to be judged by people for your behavior, start by not openly and loudly judging them for theirs.

No sympathy for this sort of behavior and you're out of line. Or you're the problem. I'll let you decide since I don't know you.

> Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage.

Most of the advice and information subreddits I previously visited collapsed into bad posting even before AI.

The few I still follow are oddly fine.

The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate. Once the subreddit gets past a critical mass of junk-posting users, the good users leave and there's no coming back.

>The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate.

Sometimes the mods are the junk posting users.

A bunch of the car subs were modded for a long time by some tow truck driver who'd mod them while sitting around waiting for dispatch. Exactly the kind of guy you want refereeing a dispute between some guy who's lived it and a bunch of lube techs who are quoting textbook best practices.

Completely agree. A community lives or dies by its moderators. Once the limit drops past a certain point, the experts just quietly leave.

I have seen that many times here on HN: "I don't know but I stuck this in CrapGPT and this is what it said...".

I would encourage anyone considering a reply like this to ask themselves what value they have brought to the table over the OP using AI themselves.

Yeah as if someone wouldn't have done that if they wanted to. Some people still think AI is some novelty people don't know about.

This did happen before, and still does to some extent, with people googling and giving the answer. "Let me Google that for you" lmgtfy.com was even a thing, again lacking any introspection about why someone might be asking instead of googling.

I don't know why you were deadvoted, it's a good point.

Though I feel that especially in the latest decade Google was a terrible source for finding things like the best product for usecase xyz and other recommendations. Because not only was the internet full of SEO clickbait fake comparison sites, but Google promoted the fake ones because they paid for it. They deeply undermined their own credibility. It was pretty much impossible to find real info with all the fake clickbait stuff around. Not to mention that even legit news outlets do a lot of paid "advertorials" these days.

I'm sure this will happen with AI too but with stuff like deep research I feel like I get better answers than Google has given me for years. Despite hallucination.

I think some may think they're helping like that, but I'm sure there are quite a few who enjoy the feeling of being a notable figure in the community because they answer so many questions.

These people have always existed and gave bad answers, but now they can do it so much faster, and with so much less actual thinking.

I did that when I was younger and internet forums we're still a thing. The difference is that I had to do actual research, which often took me half an hour or more, to solve the problem for the asker. I got knowledge and "the feeling of being a notable figure" as you have said. The other side for the answer. I believe my answers were good.

The difference is that nowadays people can just skip the research part and copy-paste Llama. No value added.

>The difference is that nowadays people can just skip the research part and copy-paste Llama. No value added.

and why would the person doing that do that? if the person asking the question wanted to know what an llm thought, wouldn't they have just asked the llm for an instant response instead of having to wait for someone else to respond? i'm at a total loss of being able to understand the point. it's obviously different if the response is a bot posting just in case that needs to be explained to a bot.

Do you consider the possibility that some of those people gave good answers?

Oh, there were absolutely people giving good answers. I'm just talking about the same kind of person who now just posts what an LLM says, rather than do any research.

We had to officially set the culture in the work slack. If you're just piping through raw AI response without any input of your own, you're being rude.

It goes a long way.

Like you just have a pinned message or something?

How did people respond to that?

I remember reading a travel thing a long time ago (before gps was a thing).

They cautioned that in some cultures, if you asked for directions, people would rather be polite/helpful and give you an answer rather than saying "I don't know" and giving you no answer. (They recommended that you ask more than one person to be more certain you were getting good directions)

In other cultures they were more likely to say "I don't know" at the cost of seeming more impolite.

So, we don't know the intent. :)

And then the AI gets trained on the advice and information subreddits, and we see an exponential growth downwards in quality?

Isn't AI getting more accurate over time though, as per benchmarks?

> as per benchmarks

That seems to be the key and its risky when the measure becomes the target itself. When you already know the benchmarks, and that drives the definition of success outcome then there is every incentive to just chase them

Yes, but that's with mostly the same data as before, just with more of the preexisting dataset and more RLHF. We haven't seen the ouroborous eat itself yet.

Reddit has always had the dynamic of people misrepresenting their knowledge and just repeating what other people said on that subreddit. I find myself doing that when I spend too long on there - posting very authoritatively on something I'm honestly clueless about.

One big pet peeve of mine on reddit is on any kind of immigration-related subreddit it is absolutely filled with people talking about how it's impossible to migrate and you'll never get a visa. Yet, meanwhile, people do migrate successfully and legally all the time.

Reddit has been trash for a very long time. But you know it's worse, because you get punished for criticizing AI comments on those subreddits.

It gets better. Kagi search summary likes "people also say..." and then refers to a random LLM reddit thread.

When there's weakness in not knowing, it's no surprise. How many of us work in a corporate environment where pretending to know is better than being honest about not knowing?

> Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage

>but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight.

>people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

What? This is a joke right? Advice and information subreddits have been shallow blind leading blind crap like that and have been for at least a decade. The vote mechanism plus local culture rewards shallow "teennager just googled it" type responses (that AI is basically replacing here) that even people who don't know anything can agree on and punishes nuance and serious understanding.

Eventually the people who know their shit make a joke subreddit (which is inherently exclusive because you can't joke about something without knowing about it) and then at some point later people figure out that's where all the smart people are, start asking questions there instead and then it goes to shit in the same way.

AI is absolutely a lateral move here.

Why limit this critique to one side of the reddit marketplace. If more and more answers are AI authored, it stands to reason more and more questions are as well.

I had to exit the major Home Assistant facey groups due to this behavior.

That and all the stupid questions.

And let's not forget that the bots doing most of the upvoting and downvoting are more likely to upvote bot comments, driving the algorithm.

The internet as a public forum is dead. And given the purpose of something is what it does, this is the true goal of AI. I'm certain blowing up the internet benefits very many wealthy and powerful people.

Exactly the same thing happened when Google appeared on the scene. (Not that this makes it any better!)

Sort of, but I think this was a mix of "I want to sound smart" and "I actually want to know the answer", because summarizing Google search results still required you to read the content, form an opinion, and then rephrase it.

With AI, people literally just act as token proxies and are doing it purely for internet points (upvotes, followers, etc)... I guess on some level, they're just providing a service that the "market" implicitly values. But also, in Bob Slydell's voice: "what would you say you do here?"

I mean that's this entire thread in a nutshell. Armchair experts emboldened by their $100 ChatGPT University Diploma.

The advice subreddits were absolutely horrible before AI. The entire 2016-2024 period was utter madness there, likely as a result of globalization. As AI gets smarter, it may make the comments better, sadly!

Maybe, but isn't it likely the models are being trained on those same subreddits?

They are, and they'll also see a random reddit comment in their web search and treat it as fact.

You mean like this? https://xkcd.com/903/

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