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.
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.
> 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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
In my professional experience. About 1 in 10 people does that. Maybe, 2 in 10.
Robot experience this tragic irony for me
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.
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".
You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job
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 "ai it"
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
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.
Probably more under-developed that psychotic.
ie not really using their adult thinking any more
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Being known as an RTFM type of person, I usually appreciate when a super nonspecific question is met with a link to the docs.
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...
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.
Anarchism / destabilisation.
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.
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.
[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
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
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.
Just the fact that we have some level of doubt means we already lost something.
That being said, sure, live in the physical world and build social contacts. I’m all for it.
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...
Throughout them being available I've tried them every now and then, both with AI generated trash and my own pre-LLM writings, and had about 0% success in getting them to accurately report what it actually is. Maybe my writing style and what specific LLM you use matters a lot, I'm sure these platform's training data is mostly from the mainstream models so as soon as you use anything else, they'll get trivially lost. But again, I don't have any evidence and proof behind this, based only on when I've tried to evaluate them myself in the past.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?
Turtles all the way down.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you 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 I just couldn't find people to talk to) 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.
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.
Hence my first message
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.
The screenshots part is crazy.
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.
Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.