I'm Tired of Talking to AI

>But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

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.

> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer.

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.

One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.

I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.

I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!

I called the local Apple Store, got what was probably an AI. I just needed the hours, so that was OK, but then it asked if I needed anything else. I asked for winning numbers to the lottery. It thunk and thunk and thought some more and came back with, I’ll have to pass you to a store employee. Now I know how to avoid 1,000 questions and get a live person.

> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer.

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.

I have five Gen-Z kids that are pushing back on GenAI hard and they claim their peers are getting angry about how it’s impacted their lives.

As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.

But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.

I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.

I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.

GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.

I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt here. It reminds me of the Google search phenomenon others have mentioned, which culminated in the joke website "let me google that for you." But, I don't think the cause is necessarily that people are dumb or lazy. Both are factors, but another big one is that people are overwhelmed at work. Another question coming in may not be viewed as an opportunity to learn or help a colleague but as just another task to complete as quickly as possible so the task mountain doesn't grow higher. I'd like to think that we'll eventually use AI to automate a lot of the mundane stuff at work so people have the opportunity to dig into questions from colleagues and provide real answers and genuinely have a conversation when they do. I realize that's pretty optimistic and it may take a while to get there but people stopped sending me google search results years ago. That phenomenon was relatively short-lived and hopefully this one is too.

I dont even ask people questions anymore. I'm tired of the sneer and the "Did you ask Claude?" responses. I had a manager say "I'm here to help in any way I can", and then every way I brought up was "We expect a Senior to be able to answer that themselves" or "Did you ask claude"... thanks for the help, so much for teamwork.

A bit off topic, but I am currently travelling through Europe by train. It is such a boon to just be outside everyday and meet locals and fellow travellers. Highly recommend.

AI makes it apparent that the only value some people bring to the table is that they have access to information that you do not. If now they fold that one advantage by just delegating everything to AI (which is in the same position as you informationwise), they will remove themselves from the worker pool soon.

I work on a small team. I talk to coding agents a lot. I also talk to my human team members a lot. So I have decent experience with interacting with both LLMs and humans.

My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.

I remember when working for one of my old clients last year that the business as usual slack conversation was:

- lead AI engineer asking tech advice - me proposing something (out of my experience and knowledge) - he invoking inline slack bot to ask if what I said made any sense - me telling that the AI arguments were kind of off - he invoking again the same both asking why I said that - .... so on... - third developer kicking in responding with obviously ChatGPT generated message

I left the company shortly after.

"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit — a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."

- Wendell Berry

AI has "just" greatly accelerated/amplified dysfunction that was already there previously.

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.

I agree and on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life working from home, talking to a machine, and not enriching any person's life directly. It's just so gruesomely LONELY.

This has been my experience as well.

- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.

- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.

- Claude does the PR review.

- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".

We're just passing butter at this point.

Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.

I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?

The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.

I told some of my coworkers that they should keep in mind that if their job becomes "passing messages between an AI Assistant and their co-workers", sooner or later someone will realize they can just cut the middle man and build an agent that does their job. Use AI assistants all you like but don't forget to add value.

For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?

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.

Funny enough the post is machine-translated by AI - from the Russian original at https://orchidfiles.com/ru/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers-...

It generally helps when one is not surrounded by tactless buffoons.

I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.

Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.

Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.

I just had a maddening convo with Amazon's AI https://share.zight.com/o0udw54W (i had mentioned before that in 5 minutes it would be time to get my refund according to some other policy message they sent me). A convo before this Amazon's bot didn't even recognize the reply the forced me to give from their button. I clicked "Entire package is missing". and they replied "Couldn't understand your response". It's a brutal, antagonistic experience. The kicker is how Amazon keeps saying "we're passionate about customer experience". You were Amazon. You were. But you've given that up.

The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.

You're absolutely right! This isn't just tiring <em-dash> it's _insulting_.

> I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot.

If this happens to me, it's a sign that they don't want to talk to me and I'm going to be let go.

Humans delegating tasks to AI all over the place like that, i.e., without adding value from their own, suggests ultimately that the middle humams should soon be cut out, irrespective of whether those humans are more capable than AI or not.

Don't worry. It happens to many of us, but it's not that serious. It's really like talking to yourself, given that they're still great language models, LLMs. Just imagine what it will be like in 10 years.

That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer. Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.

Nearly half of online articles are now AI-generated. [0]

[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...

>He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

This should be grounds for firing someone.

When you ask people for an answer you are asking for their help. But if they delegate to AI they are in essence saying they don't want to make the effort to help you. They are making it LOOK LIKE they are doing something to help you by hiding the fact the answer is direct from AI. It is cheating.

In Neal Stephenson's fall or dodge in hell there's a timeline where the internet is so flooded by fake AI generated news that characters have their own agent both filtering info and maintaining their fake social presence.

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.

Fair. But it's getting harder to tell the difference. LLMs tell you what you want but others are getting better at imitating humans which is something.

I've recently been connecting some machines to a new switch and my colleague has been monitoring web logs at the same time using Claude. He send me a Claude-generated observation that the machines that I was able to put my hands on simultaneously must be in different buildings due to high pings. Surreal experience.

I work in the "AI Center of Excellence" as an lead engineer at a public traded company and I haven't had this experience at all. Just my anecdotal experience but this article is just the author's anecdotal experience. Are lots of people having the experience that nobody they send messages to are responding themselves, it's usually an AI crafted message at a minimum? That's brutal.

--EDIT--

I should add though that I am still tired of talking to AI. Not because people are giving me AI responses but b/c 95% of my communication is routed through Claude Code. :/

Just double the amount of words in the follow up. That might make people think.

I'm not tired to talking to AI because I specifically instructed my agents to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross, so i constantly reminded that coffee is for closers only.

I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.

Face reality my friend, Internet is now hostile to humans. Time to leave this place for good.

How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?

You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.

When you are online and ask any question - especially technical, most likely you will get an AI generated answer.

Local meetups, library, walks, and local coffee shops (not places that offer free wifi where people are anyway buried in their devices) are where real human connections happen.

Perhaps part of the issue is that people feel compelled to respond, even though they don't have anything to say. Maybe people think if they burn some tokens for you that's somehow a more polite way to ignore you and hope you go away?

We’re optimizing the soul out of human interaction.

Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?

I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.

As a person running a network of CTOs that meet in person and interact very human-ly.... I agree and see the value now more than ever in human interaction.

(to be clear, i do a lot of things, but this is one of them, and boy is it wild how important it feels)

Best part is when you know the answer is wrong, however the person on the other side is all in for the AI's answer to be correct.

I found a GitHub that was spreading malware. I chatted to AI and it cloned it into a vm, did some static analysis, pulled the usernames of the bad guys and the guys they were impersonating and gave me a summary and an email address I could contact. The guy replied with a note of appreciation.

I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.

I love chatting to AI.

The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.

We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective

As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions. But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.

You can't blame AI for people outsourcing talking to you. That's not a technology problem, it's a much worse problem, it's a social-cultural collapse.

You inspired me to write this: https://ivanlugo.dev/writing/first-words/

Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.