Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.
In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.
Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.
Most ai generated messages or docs are unnecessarily verbose and just reading the prompt would suffice. I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text.
It just wastes my time. And probably only makes it look like it took more effort than it actually did (it may be the exact opposite).
I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.
I’ve become so cynical that I cannot read this phrasing without thinking it came from… an LLM.
This cynicism also negatively impacts human communication. This constant doubt of whether there was a thinker on the other side of the text.
These days I only bother commenting if I really feel I need to get something off my chest, but I don't assume anyone gives a shit. I frequently just delete my responses. I don't generally feel anyone needs what I'm saying.
It takes a bit of self-awareness to realize that no one is interested in what you have to say, so don't bother. And, I think it takes twice as much self-awareness to realize that they certainly don't care about what a bot has to say, unless they're the ones asking.
Couldn't they have used an example aimed at a broader audience?
I'm in IT but even I barely know what Redis or Memcached is about (never used either).
https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec...
The author clearly has never worked with genuine hardcore nerds infodumping.
That does seem rather more polite and respectful of people's time.
I do have this intuition though: some variant of Gresham's law or Akerlof's Market For Lemons may apply [1][2].
It takes more effort to put together a well compressed post or message; it'll drown in the sea of content which is easier to to type or generate; and it is hard to distinguish.
(Also: how many people think to eg. drop a post into an LLM to find the components expanded back out? )
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...
If not…well I don't know what to call this style of writing exactly but I see it all the time on LinkedIn (or some annoying startup landing page) and it's very upsetting to me.
"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."
"Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness."
"Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it."
Why structure sentences like this? Maybe go read some well-written novels, a solid essay or two…or at the very least, write in a normal conversational style?
Use AI as part of the research process, to help understand a concept or problem. Use it to format data, or as a part of the design or brainstorming process. Use it to build manageable portions of code that you can read and understand before committing. But if the output doesn't go through your brain somehow before you unleash it on the world, that's really no different from a seventh-grader Googling the subject of his homework and then cutting and pasting the entire text of the first result, headers and all, and turning it in.
Generates entire websites with AI Slop. Instead of sending a single text mail with three links and the words please make that certificate.
No. He wastes the time of all personnel. Wastes energy. And hides the important message in a wall of text (I was the only person which recognized, that he requires the certificate…it was hidden in a side box).
Right now we re-implementing every frogging tool which was ever developed by more experienced people.
Excuse the long letter, I hadn’t the time to write a short one.Also my main problem with many chat bots. Too many different aspects brought up at once. Short answers would be more eco-friendly too.
It's not that you should never include any AI generated text in a conversation with other engineers, but you mostly shouldn't.
AI is a tool to help you understand/debug/review yourself, but you shouldn't be conferring authority to your AI (because it doesn't understand anything and is often wrong in the text it spews), and you shouldn't be running an AI for other people, they should run it themselves.
" It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness" hello GPT
"Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it." holy slop goddamn
I don't even have an issue with it being AI-generated. However, the content is delivered so fast and monotone that it's impossible to listen to, and every episode is 40 minutes or more, every day.
A brief daily summary, perhaps using the creator's real voice (via ElevenLabs or similar; the creator has a real podcast on the same site), would be so much more valuable.
I could easily write essays in Slack if I wanted to. The reason why I don't has nothing to do with whether I'm capable of it or not.
This morning I asked Claude to find why locale = empty string slipped into some of our customers records. Of course it's something I used to do myself but it did it in less than a minute. I couldn't match that speed, ever. Then I verified the analysis and the suggested fix. Finally I pasted Claude's analysis in a slack conversation, with attribution. I could have summarized what claude wrote to me, but it would be a waste of time because it was already pretty terse.
We decided to solve the problem in a different way but I think that starting with Claude's analysis was the right thing to do.
2. In person, as a human, I have a bad habit of doing this myself.
You decode the signals, and stumble: ... They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.
The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
The signal is an attack.
And it's coming from right about there.”
Because nothing feels more like wasting my time than talking to an answering machine that is working against me. It's exhausting and demotivating.
If I wanted a generic opinion... I wouldn't bother you.
1. Do NOT answer right away. If they wait, there is a good chance the next message is "Oh wait, I figured it out" (e.g. they googled it finally)
2. Send them a google link w/ the search term showing the first result.
While the site makes a good point, they miss the most important point, IMO, which is inferable by the example of a good response. The good response is better principally because it contains business-contextual information, which AI can never provide without proper prompting (and if you know to provide that, you prob don't need the AI answer):
"We need pub/sub for the notifications feature."
Did you slop grenade the slop grenade warning?
> Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.
> It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write
Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.
I get that the solution is in there but it's like you didn't really help me if I have to go through and read something myself. Just tell me your conclusion if I'm asking you the human. Context is a 7 page word doc output or pdf.
That said, I want to make it clear that if people are going to regurgitate LLM results either way, I'd rather get the longer slop than trust a concise "Use Redis" conclusion from a system that doesn't think the way we wish/assume it does.
Ultimately we're using a statistical language algorithm to predict what kinds of words usually come next in a short story we've constructed.
* If you train it for short outputs (or stories where a fictional computer character has short dialogue) you're prioritizing text from places where someone answered without explaining.
* If you run its output through a hidden "summarize yourself" path, you're adding additional potential for error and dropping details you could have used to detect it.
If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:
1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;
2. The message gets deleted.
I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.
Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.
[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.
The actual recommendation: "I'd recommend conducting a proof of concept with your actual workload patterns to make an informed decision." is objectively correct with the context given. There are plenty of real world usecases where you can do polling in Memcached to emulate pub/sub.
To me, a lot of these responses aren't made in good faith; instead, they come from bots that are some kind of training experiment. (Like when a bot responds to one of my HN posts.)
Even if the response isn't a bot, if it's just someone copying and pasting AI, how can someone reasonably think that just shuffling a comment into AI is adding any value?
This is like people hating on em-dash because LLMs use them a lot.
This is not true in the least bit. The page even included an example of calling someone to ask when a meeting was instead of asking an AI assistant to check their calendar. There is a reason why so much of company support can be done using AI or via people following a flowchart. People do not know how to solve problems by themselves.
I can reply. I can push back. I can clarify. I am not helpless.
It's a matter of having good taste. But AI education will help.
What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs.
For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people.
I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.
ps. register slopgrenade.com too
This was a slop grenade btw.
Every time someone uses answer like this it shows that he doesn't even want to discuss something with you and possibly knows nothing about the question asked. So the answer it self could potentionally be bogus or straightforward lie. It's just rude. It's even more rude that when someone tells you to google answer instead.
But I really agree with use AI to make your communication sharper. I think a lot of us, especially in corporate settings could use the help