i think the idea of blocking someone over that is pretty over the top
My boss can’t wrap his head around why handing me a direct printout of LLM output is not acceptable
I hate how AI is used to make deep fakes, revenge porn, CP - and people tolerate it because “they’re working out the issues.”
How about they work those out BEFORE they give people access to these tools.
They tolerate it because it’s easy, they can copy-paste, and they need even less critical thought about the output than having to search for and choose what might be a viable source of decent information.
The issues aren’t bugs. They’re acceptable flaws in the search for investment capital.
My coworkers are doing this to me. They are even pasting into PR reviews. The threat is real.
It’s even better when they copy-paste slop answers that are flat out wrong without bothering to check.
My org has our PRs reviewed by an AI automatically
Absolutely rude. If you’re using AI to make a point for you, you’ve already admitted you don’t know enough about what you’re talking about to be having a opinion in the first place, let alone be worth discussing an issue with.
I’ve had these interactions with the head of my IT department. I asked to procure a license for jfrog artifactory. He literally copy/pasted a ChatGPT response to me that began like this:
Here’s a breakdown of how JFrog Artifactory compares to using GitHub, NPM, or other language-specific package mangers (like Pypi)…
…
1. Purpose and Functionality
…
2. Workflow & Developer Experience
…
3. Security and Compliance
…
✅ When to use JFrog
…It came with a bunch of theoretical risks that are completely resolved by the simple ability of just not being a complete fucking moron.
It was really frustrating that I tried to talk with my IT leader, and instead found a proxy for ChatGPT.
After that, he created a group chat with him, I, and my colleagues in security. He proceeded to paste ChatGPT output outlining bullshit risks and theories, with the implicit expectation that I rhetorically address each of them via my own response. I’d explain things like,
“[well if you read the fucking request yourself, you’d know that] we aren’t planning to use the software that way, so the concern isn’t relevant. Even if we were though, those problems are easily addressable via …”
In some cases, I even had to explain that the problems he’s raising are already problems faced in the current ecosystem. Completely unrelated to the software I’m talking about… ChatGPT just straight up implying that an architectural problem is a software risk.
I’d reply, and I swear to god he’d just give ChatGPT my text and paste the reply from ChatGPT back to me.
I lost a lot of respect for him. Why the fuck would you do that?
That guy to all his friends: “AI makes me 10x more productive!”
I’m fast coming to the conclusion that AI can indeed replace jobs. The thing is that the only job it can actually replace is that of a lazy middle manager. AI is great at responding to email if A:) you don’t know what your talking about or B:) you don’t respect the other person enough to waste the time formulating an actual response. AI in my experience is only really good at faking that there’s someone on the other end. The fact that there’s an entire management class it can convenienceingly impersonate is a pretty searing indictment as far as I’m concerned.
This gets at my own personal perspective of using LLMs to respond - it’s not just about not putting effort into understanding and responding yourself, rather it is about making yourself a proxy to a tool I could use myself, and doing so *without even having a better understanding of how to use the tool to answer my question*, and still thinking you’re somehow made a positive contribution, that is the most disrespectful.
If you genuinely thought the LLM could help me then you should be explaining your process to me for how to use it and validate responses, or else at least you should ask me for more info and explain how you think it’s responses could help if you really do think you’re better at operating it.
Imagine doing the same in a workshop, and taking a powertool to an object before you even bothered figuring out what the other person wanted. Or trying to be helpful by asking questions on your behalf to other departments, but messing up the context and thus repeatedly producing useless answers that you have to put time into refuting.
Totally agree. When someone sends me some AI slop about a topic I have knowledge about – which I’ve had this happen to me recently during a debug session – and asks me to read it, I think to myself “this person does not respect me, otherwise they wouldn’t be telling me to read stuff that may or may not be accurate that they themselves never read.” It’s like a new, worse version of “let me google that for you” but without the sarcasm, and without the results actually being helpful.
I know that feeling. I experienced it more than one time in areas of law I consider myself a little bit more knowledgeable than the average person. It’s just a slap to the face to try to discuss a topic that you know a little bit about with an AI.
The thing is: I am 100 % sure those people use LLM answer not out of disrespect but because they honestly believe that an LLM produces a better argument than they possibly could themselves.
The thing is: I am 100 % sure those people use LLM answer not out of disrespect but because they honestly believe that an LLM produces a better argument than they possibly could themselves.
And I have zero confidence your 100% because you have zero backing for your claim other than believing people have good intentions.
my mother constantly keeps sending me texts that are just direct copy-paste from llm output. can’t even tell her to stop doing it because she just ignores me if i say something she doesnt want to hear.
Ask chat GPT to come up with a nice message explaining why direct copy pastes of LLM outputs is bad. Copy paste it to her directly.
Maybe she will understand it better that way.no, she just think she is being helpful but doesnt care what i think about it because apparently she knows everything better. She would just ignore that or otherwise make me even more annoyed.
Whenever someone at work says “ChatGPT says this” or “Claude says this” or “I asked Gemini and…” whatever they say after that point is just static and I never take them seriously as a person again.
I appreciate the honesty when they say it’s an AI response and not genuine knowledge.
When I tell someone “an LLM told me that…” It’s usually followed by “Let’s see if there’s any truth to it.” An AI response should always be treated as a suggestion, not an answer.
Hell, Google’s AI still doesn’t know which day the F1 GP is on this week. It was wrong by a whole week a while back. Now it’s only off by a day.
An AI response should always be treated as a suggestion, not an answer
Exactly. An AI response can be a great way to get started on a topic you know little about, but it’s never a definitive answer. You have to verify whether it’s actually true. Whether it works. Never trust it blindly.
I feel like a big barrier is people anthropomorphizing the AI. It’s not “ChatGPT generated this” it’s “ChatGPT said this”. I don’t necessarily blame people for it, machine that speaks to you short circuits something in people’s brains and it’s not like we’ve got better language to talk about it. It’s just that… people treat it as an opinion, not as software output. And so long as that’s how people handle it, I just don’t know if a “healthy” use of the technology is possible.
Exactly. We are extremely social animals, hardwired to recognise ourselves in things around us, which I’m sure is super useful and vital for a tribe of hunter gatherers living in a hostile environment. But it means that now we recognise faces and emotions in power outlets and lawn chairs. It’s really not surprising we see intelligence and awareness in LLMs, because we recognise that stuff in everything. We are really poor at the level of critical thought required to deal with this responsibly.
I never take them seriously as a person again
i dunno dude. i used to be a real piece of shit.
You dismiss the whole person just because they acknowledge using an LLM? That seems a bit harsh - especially since they had the decency to mention the source, which is basically the same as saying “take this with a grain of salt.”
My company hired a consulting firm to help with a transition period. The consulting firm sent my boss an email that outlined the plans for what we should do and how they are going to help. Without directly giving it away, the email was clearly AI output, and my boss instantly terminated their contract. We aren’t exactly anti-AI, but to the point of the post, it’s just so rude… and my boss is pretty fuckin cool.
Especially rude if you want to charge money for it. If your boss wanted an AI answer, they would have asked an AI. You don’t need an expensive consulting company for that.
Few days ago a friend linked me a danish research paper and claimed it shown that higher wages for women lead to decrease in children being born, and that higher male wages led to the opposite. I don’t have the skills required to parse this kind of paper quickly nor understanding of a lot of the terminology. I told chatGPT to read it and contrast it with the arguments being made, to which it responded with pointing out that the term “marginal net-of-tax wage” meant something different from “wage”, and that this paper suggested that tax laws incentivizing working more hours led to lowered fertility rather than higher salaries for women. I was asked to point exactly where in the paper it was said like that, and again, I had to lean on LLM to get me page numbers. I eventualy convinced my friend that he got duped by right wing talking points and got him to think a bit.
So, if I didn’t do that and just read the conclusion from the paper I’d probably have to agree with him instead, as just googling it led to the right wing trolls making those claims. Was this a good use case of LLM to get me some counter arguments, or would it have been better if I stayed true to my ideals and not to use those tools? Was I rude by arguing against the point made about a research that neither of us understood from the get go by using genAI to parse through it? While I do agree that companies developing those tools are evil and need to be stopped, there is an utility to it that I don’t think is available elsewhere. Would me losing that argument and believing that women should have lower salaries to increase fertility (because I believe in science, and this paper seemed to be referenced a lot, also if anything capitalism would be to blame, so probably not as bad) be better than normalizing the use of the devil-tech but having myself and my friend better informed? I am legitimately not sure, but I think I did the right thing? What should’ve I done? I don’t have the skills nor time nor will to read scientific papers that aren’t related to my area of expertise, especially when someone linking them didn’t do any research either. I am also genuinely exhausted from defending my left-wing points of view from the constant barrage of underhanded and often completely baseless arguments some of my coworkers and friends make to convince me I’m wrong and the default consensus is right. Is it bad to use genAI to figure out some counterpoints? Or should I give up and admit I’m not good or commited enough to make them myself? Right wing people often argue in bad faith and don’t take the counterpoints to heart, but sometimes they do, even if the original point they made was just to rile me up. So, am I the asshole? Am I wrong? I seriously don’t know.
a layperson cannot be relied upon to draw meaningful conclusions from a scholarly article. i learned this when i tried to do it. have you ever tried to read a spanish book, without knowing spanish, with nothing but an english-spanish dictionary? it’s very slow going and it works alright until someone speaks in idiom or metaphor, but even then you can mostly still get it. this is not always the case with scholarly articles.
moreover, it’s a waste of time. if it takes you 30 hours to look up every term and graph, but it would have taken your biology friend 20 minutes to synthesize it for you, there’s an obvious solution here. if an LLM can save you 30 hours, and your biology friend 20 minutes, it’s a useful tool.
its not no. its fine
Something that some coworkers have started doing that is even more rude in my opinion, as a new social etiquette, is AI summarizing my own writing in response to me, or just outright copypasting my question to gpt and then pasting it back to me
Not even “I asked chatgpt and it said”, they just dump it in the chat @ me
Sometimes I’ll write up a 2~3 paragraph thought on something.
And then I’ll get a ping 15min later and go take a look at what someone responded with annnd… it starts with “Here’s a quick summary of what (pixxelkick) said! <AI slop that misquotes me and just gets it wrong>”
I find this horribly rude tbh, because:
- If I wanted to be AI summarized, I would do that myself damnit
- You just clogged up the chat with garbage
- like 70% of the time it misquotes me or gets my points wrong, which muddies the convo
- It’s just kind of… dismissive? Like instead of just fucking read what I wrote (and I consider myself pretty good at conveying a point), they pump it through the automatic enshittifier without my permission/consent, and dump it straight into the chat as if this is now the talking point instead of my own post 1 comment up
I have had to very gently respond each time a person does this at work and state that I am perfectly able to AI summarize myself well on my own, and while I appreciate their attempt its… just coming across as wasting everyones time.
Oof, I don’t even get what they are trying to accomplish there. Maybe they had some kind of social training that told them “Summarize and reply what you understood first to show that you listened and avoid miscommunication, then add your response.” and their brain short circuited and started to think a ChatGPT summarization is the same.
I’d get pretty hostile at work if someone started to do that…
I’d leave the appreciate the attempt out. You don’t.
More importantly, would enquire if they use corporate or free AI. Second one is used for training and has no or low protection of (perhaps sensitive) corporate info/data.We have extensive corporate AI systems (software engineers), we have an entire wing of our company dedicated to AI exploration and development.
I think at some point it will come out that the corporate subscription is no different and the LLM companies have been scraping everything for training data.
This is sad, really. People are fed the lie that AI is objective, and apparently they think that they will get the objective summary of what you said if they run it through a chatbot.
And the more people interact with chatbots, the harder they find it to interact outside of the chatbots. So they might feel even more uncomfortable with asking you to summarize yourself. So they go back to the chatbot. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Exactly. To your point, AI output is probabilistically the average opinion of everyone on the internet so it shares the common biases of the general public. Even with a bit of RLHF to “balance out” the models. Also it probably doesn’t help to anthropomorphise them. They don’t have opinions, they just autocomplete based on prior input
It seems pretty clear after a few years of people getting AI psychosis that LLMs are an addictive psychological hazard
I hate people so fucking much
I already think that it’s insulting when people accomplish/do/implement/… something and want to inform the others and do that by generating a 1-2 pages long wall of text via LLM that is then copy-pasted into an email…
Like… Can’t you just write down the 5 or 10 most important points? Are we not worth the time to do so? Do we have to find the most relevant information ourselves in that text???
You’re supposed to feed it into your own prompt to summarize it duh. /s
Soon we will live in a world where my AI talks to your ai 😅
I sometimes use LLMs to help me with brevity or clarity. But the input is my own words and the output is almost always edited so that I sound like me because sometimes, while the output is serviceable, it’s just… bad and uninspired.
Plus it’s like “this doesn’t sound professional”. Well, fuck you, it sounds how I want to sound.
You should learn how to write better instead of relying on slop.
Who said I rely on it? I accept suggestions when they are good, even if the source of the suggestions is a slop generator. I accept what it is right about and reject what is wrong. And why not? It costs nothing.
And, at 52, I write the way I write. I enjoy the process, I enjoy playing with language. I enjoy the juxtaposition of literary flourishes with a crude fuck you thrown in as punctuation and counterpoint to what might otherwise seem inaccessible or deliberately obtuse.
But do you know what I’ve found? I can be a little overly self-indulgent. For example, you didn’t want all this, you just wanted to throw your glib little “lrn2write” and garner a few upvotes from the vehement AI haters and give yourself a self-righteous pat on the back.
Sometimes I need another perspective to suggest restraint. As you can see, this, like 98% of my writing, is mine alone, else I’d’ve taken what would undoubtedly be good advice and held back on the more acerbic bits, and made sure I wasn’t posting some knee-jerk defensive self-indulgent 100% man-made slop.
But here we are.
The environmental cost is enormous.
It doesn’t expose you to actual creative writing, either. Like people go to museums to see Picasso. This is the equivalent of the art on the wall at Olive Garden.
It costs nothing.
Except for an opportunity to practice getting better at the thing you recognize is an issue.
And, at 52, I write the way I write.
Although I guess you’ve already given up on the getting better part.
It’s more about post/message size for me. If ya post a few sentences that clearly and concisely communicate a point, I don’t really care if they’re crafted or generated. If ya post a wall of text, I wanna know ya put the kind of effort in that made its length necessary if I’m gonna put in the effort to read it.
Just because the final output comes from AI doesn’t always mean a human didn’t put real effort into writing it. There’s a big difference between asking an LLM to write something from scratch, telling it exactly what to say, or just having it edit and polish what you already wrote.
A ton of my replies here - including this one - are technically “AI output,” but all the AI really did was take what I wrote, clean it up, and turn it into coherent text that’s easier for the reader to follow.
spoiler
Original text: Just because the final output is by AI doesn’t always mean human didn’t put effort into writing it. There’s a difference between asking LLM to write something, telling LLM what to write or asking it to edit something you wrote.
A large number of my replies here, including this one, are technically “AI output” but all the AI did was go through what I wrote and try and turn it into coherent text that the is easy for the recipient to consume.
While your use case may not suffer from the problem depicted in the post[1], I don’t think it’s worth weakening the proposed etiquette for. If having a system that can reduce the generated garbage a person can inflict upon another means slightly-worse worded texts - that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
It does exhibit other generative AI issues - like the environmental impact or like how it makes you reliant on companies just waiting to start enshittifing the field - it does not suffer from the issue of forcing humans to read meaningless slop that no one bothered to write. ↩︎
I read your original just fine.
I don’t think the LLM made your response better in a meaningful way. Sure, it cleaned up the grammar a little bit, but the rephrasing in a few places is not necessary.
Trust yourself to communicate without help from external software.
making one dependent on external service is the very point of llm from the point of view of investors. Imagine how much money they will make if everyone just couldnt live without llm in every aspect of their life.
I only did it here to illustrate a point. Typically I only use it on longer posts. I’m not a native english speaker and I often struggle to express my thoughts clearly and I find it immensely useful to run it through AI and see the corrections it made.
Your English is fine and your thoughts there are communicated perfectly.
