Don't just paste the AI at me (opens in new tab)

I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.

( 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" )

Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.

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?

I've always been fascinated that some people don't seem to have any email "voice" - they just can't translate email text into human emotional impact. So they write super abrupt emails, things they would never say in real life, totally different to their actual personality. It's almost like a distinct form of autism. Meanwhile I'm almost the opposite extreme - I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person. It takes me ages to write my emails.

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.

I find that junior engineers like to use it “up the authority” of their arguments when my experience clashes with their desires. OTOH, I am humbly aware that sometimes my experience is wrong and a curse to me. I DO need to be careful to not “hold on to old ways”. But I’m not convinced this is the right way to level the fields between wisdom/experience and innovation/freshtake.

I think it depends on the context and also not being deceptive. If someone just spent 4 hours trying to root cause a SEV with Claude and they finally have a nice high-level Claude-generated summary of all that work, just paste it and share it. Don't waste time trying to reword it to make it seem like you wrote it. A simple "After spending a few hours with Claude, here's the conclusion about what the problem was: [paste]".

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...

Had to have this conversation with a Sr. engineer two weeks ago.

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.

This really depends on context. Sure, if you're responding to a forum post or StackOverflow question with nothing but the LLM output, then I agree with this. On the other hand, where I've done this at work, it's because I and some peers _together_ are trying to understand something (e.g., debugging), and Claude has some potentially useful input, but I'm not actually sure. And I'm looking to collaborate on interpreting the output together to see if there's anything useful. (Folks can decide to ignore it if it doesn't seem promising.) As another comment[1] said, pasting the output as-is contains other useful metadata.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243331

Back in my day, when people were too lazy to put in effort they would want you to google for them, read results, interpret the data, and tell them what you found out. Lmgtfy.

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.

I wonder if we gathered all of the "don't quote the ai" people and all of the lmgtfy people in the same place, would they cancel out? Like matter/anti-matter annihilation?

What a rude response to someone's attempt to help someone else out by expending their AI subscription tokens to answer their question. At least they started their comment by disclosing the text was generated by AI - they should be rewarded for that - punishing them for it by insulting them, telling their brain is a gizmo, and telling them not to have children, is aggressive, not going to have the desired outcome, and is only going to make it less likely they disclose that information in future. If you don't want to read an AI response, you can stop reading after the disclosure that it's an AI response. This is a somewhat obnoxious site, in my personal (and human) opinion. Send to others at your own risk I say (of being defriended, fired, or blocked).

Seems a bit aggressive to send to someone. Let's spread love, not hate

Reading the BBC article about poisoning the real time AI well of info yesterday, I was super struck by this point

> "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.

They need to update the site a bit. Seems like they expected to get "dontpastetheai.com" but didn't?

Sending an AI response communicates more than just the response itself:

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."

tbh some questions deserve the ai response pasted at them. The type that you'd like lmgtfy at them before. The edge cuts both ways; if you put zero effort into your question, sometimes you deserve 0 effort responses. That being said, I always hesitate to do this since I'm an imperfect judge

Off topic, but when I opened the website I was instantly teleported back to a better website design time. This site has character, I will recognize it, it's not like what I was complaining about in https://jeena.net/content-is-king

I feel like there’s a journey from being skeptical about AI, to being wowed when it does something impressive, then to eventual realism about its abilities and shortcomings. Not everyone has completed that journey yet, especially people who are less technical.

I generally think this is a poor take although it mostly hinges in my opinion on whether the answer you're giving them is correct or not.

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.

Totally fair argument to make right now. But so funny how this is the opposite movement of "Let me Google that for you".

I’d much, much prefer people were honest about AI answers and text and had the decency to cite it explicitly when they use it.

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!

Yep. or https://stopsloppypasta.ai

hmm, would be funny if this was AI generated (as per pangram, SoTA AI detection model)

https://www.pangram.com/history/93691929-63c0-4c18-a620-e0b7...

After reading the comments here I added a "Work-safe" version, along with the angry version so you can send this to your coworker too.

Thanks for the feedbacks!

This is not clever. A lot of people do not understand what LLMs are capable of now. It can be learning experience to show a product person how they can leverage LLMs rather than acting like you're the know-it-all by obfuscating the fact that you used an LLM to answer a question

As a meta note, I'm seeing more downvoted responses in this comment section for reasonable points of view on both sides than I've ever seen for any HN topic.

It's interesting that this is so polarizing.

Assertion: recipient owes the person asking something.

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.

Can I get a version of this without the over-the-top misanthropic "don't reproduce" comment?

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.

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992 - Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (~1 day ago, 414 comments)

if someone uses ai to draft they still need to compress it into their own judgment before sending it

stopsloppypasta.ai

"Don't just paste a URL to a search engine query containing my question."

Well, imagine not having the time in the world to read the 40 page docs that are referenced on a forum like this. By the time you read, analyze, absorb and make a conclusion, it is time to hit the sack. So, AI helps to analyze, TLDR, summarize the data. In a lot of cases, it's a question of time, not intelligence. HN is not a message board known for balanced opinions. I've found it to be a place where hate, threats get hurled incessantly. Just ask my Karma ;)

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 :)

>you just proved that there's no difference between asking you or asking the AI.

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.

lmgtfy -> hwcs

Funniest thing about this is that I think it's ~all~ (edit) mostly LLM-generated (and Pangram agrees). I think the biggest tell these days is when the text is generated in a way that seems like it was intended to be funny, but the jokes never land.

> 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.

My parents come to me with questions about how to close a app on their iPad, and frankly I can not be asked to give them a walk through when I put chatgpt on their iPad for that reason.

And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.

I don't know what's worse:

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.