alt Hacker NewsI'm Tired of Talking to AI
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Talking to ai sometimes always gets me all worked up and frustrated when it keeps hallucinating and going in circles
South park called this out in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_(South_Park)
There should be a common agreement that synthetic text should have a specific color, for example, blue.
The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?
A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.
It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.
I feel sorry for people who have to use strong AI agentic agents all day long for their jobs. I just came off of a 30 day experiment using Gemini Ultra (all the Antigravity+Claude Opus I could use) and while it was great to re-work a few dozen of my open source projects and to check my Open Content books for inconsistencies and make improvements, the awful thing was it felt dehumanizing. I am now just using DeepSeek v4 for less than 1 hour a day and that feels better: a good mix of getting help when really needed and doing my own thing by myself.
I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.
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.
It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
OP clearly is out of the loop and hasn't tried out the latest frontier models. SOA labs have specifically tuned the new models to counter the "I'm tired of talking to AI" issues using even less tokens and power!
This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it". Which at the time was a rude but effective way of telling people to get off their ass and figure it out themselves instead of being lazy and expecting others to solve their issues.
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.
Did we all forget "let me google that for you"? The cycle continues.
Not going away. Next time it happens, employ The Gay Jailbreak
https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
In my documents I usually preface with "This document is 100% typed by Aperocky". And then where ever part of it is generated by LLM, it is clearly marked (e.g. SVGs). It is necessary these days.
> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" 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 online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) 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.
When you work in STEM fields you tend to interact with people with higher non verbal reasoning skills (often called Performance IQ) who generally have lower verbal IQs (not always). These people are definitively less articulate and cannot see the linguistic inconsistencies and inhuman demeanor of LLM outputs. Much in the same way that non creative people cannot tell why some AI art is unappealing, they can't easily comprehend the value of the human dimension of art. Similarly, people with poor non-verbal/performance reasoning skills cannot understand the difference between AI produced code and human produced code.
When I think about a PGP-style web of trust that shows that you're human, this is the showstopper I come up against. Provably human people can just parrot the bots.
Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?
It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?
AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.
You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
There's a feeling of abandonment online, and the optimist in me is wondering if maybe people would rather be doing something else. This is pollyannaish, but I'd love to imagine that people are discovering the real world, sitting alone or otherwise, and leaving this version of themselves on the internet to an empty shell.
This is the sad reality we live in I suppose, I feel that the trajectory that our species is moving towards is one of over-reliance. It seems like people are slowly becoming more and more dependent on AI, and to be honest, that was always the goal of technology whether we like it or not. Things are invented to make other things easier, but of course this case is just sad.
My partner had issues with an online retailer and contacted support, which happily went around in circles since it was an AI agent and wasn't well prompted.
I did get a cookie recipe out of it, though.
Aren't we all getting sick of it?
Humans will get their Vinyl moment. We will come back.
What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)
The worst part of this is the person that doesn't even bother copying the text, rather just screenshot the AI answer and send it. That's the new lowest level of not giving a crap about the question.
I'm honestly tired of these articles lamenting their personal grievances against AI or experiences.
AI is here to stay its permeating through all of our communication layer and this is the worst its going to be
Think about that. Anything fault you find with AI or experiences are not going to wait and sit around , its going to get better faster.
It's like shouting against the wind eventually people stop paying attention and learn to adapt as they always do with technology
Probably what you want is answers.
If the computer (AI or not) provided you with that convenience, you'd never want to deal with a human for a given task.
The 'mischaracterization' of AI as human - now that's annoying. We probably should not submit answers by AI in the form of human identities.
A solution to this is to actually insist on calling people. At least then you'll get the person's immediate inputs to your question.
We are cooked. Bots and automated answers should be banned permanently from GitHub etc., I mean the networks based on human conversation.
OP is right. I don’t want to talk with AI.
BTW this will be insane in next years as LLM usage in customer care has not reached the peak yet…
We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.
Its happening with me too since around a year. When I ask a solution from one of my senior he just reply by pasting the response from ChatGPT. Now I have stopped asking him.
I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.
Would be ironic that I am now replying to a bot, while everyone else assumes the contrary.
The tiring part for me is the waiting and/or context switching to fill that time. When agents of this intelligence or better can get you results in seconds instead of minutes we can start thinking single threaded again and it will be more enjoyable.
I remember late into my master's degree in a ethic's class about AI we had discussed the possibilities of the butterfly effect of not letting it transpire. He had given us a tricky word, and I don't remember what it was, but he asked us to create a definition for it.
I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,
Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.
>granted she was significantly older
I said, "Why don't you believe it?"
"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.
"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."
"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."
She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.
Two months ago I responded to my nontechnical business partners asking me what do I expect from AI in the future couple of months or years - people will cherish and value in person talk and meeting other people much more and even this will hold true for minor share of human population and only until we augment human body to hide its permanent connection to AI.
Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.
> Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.
My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents
> What you’re describing is a real social shift, not just annoyance with a tool.
> AI is useful as a tool. But when it replaces attention, judgment, and personality, conversations start feeling empty.
I pasted your article into ChatGPT and it gave me the most depressing statements. The above and also about 800 more words.
A year ago (or so) I had a colleague whose messages were all obviously AI-generated. I told them that it felt weird that they were sending me AI answers in Slack and code reviews, and they stopped doing it.
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.
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
Unfortunately this is a skill issue. The information is in the machine, you just need to figure out how to get it out. Most people are very far behind on this.
We just have to keep calling it out. Lazy thinking has always been an issue, but at least it could be coachable.
I didn't talk to AI wayyy before it got popular not to talk to AI ;)
AI has made my experience as a fully remote worker in a not-fully-remote company worse. It is adding a layer of indirection between myself and the juniors I'm mentoring, or the product manager I'm working on a feature with, and many other mundane facets of work. The opportunity to passively pick up on my coworkers' idiosyncrasies is now gone and all I can do is guess at what prompt they might have used.
I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.
I think new norms will develop around this behavior - it's rude to show someone else your AI output, and I think long term that will be broadly recognized.
It doesn't worry me at all. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’ll adapt by switching to different means of communication to keep finding what you’re looking for. AI is simply carrying out natural selection.
I'm tired of talking about AI
I think the root reason of the rising of AI chatbot is that many people are tired of talking to people.
I think a lot of people are tired of talking to an Amnesiac AI, and would prefer memory consolidation into the network weights.
I think a lot of people are actually tired of having to explain their situations practically from scratch every now and then.