What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis.

Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change

Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious

Maybe they need _that person_ to provide some assurances directly because they are not confident in thier plan (see 1)

Maybe they are just in a rut and need to start a conversation with a person

Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.

Just yesterday I had to attend internal "office hours" of an expert team to get a question answered - I had done extensive research of my own, both manual and using AI leveraging internal resources. What did the "expert" do when they couldn't answer my question right away? They said "let me ask {insert AI tool}". I cut them off stating that this is an insult to my intelligence. I am in the office hours for expert advice not someone else performing the same AI prompts that I already performed.

True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you".

Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them.

I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first.

EDIT:

By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover what they need but they don't go there first and not something I have some deep domain knowledge of that would take them a long time to find or figure out.

I would personally still not reply with an AI answer but I am tempted sometimes...

The worst part about this to me is if someone routes a response through AI, I have no idea what they, personally, are trying to tell me that they may have included specifically in their prompt, what is hallucination, and what is something in-between.

It makes it hard to pick apart hallucinations from the miscommunications and disagreements. Picking apart every single point and treating it with the same tact you have to treat human output with, while still accounting for the fact that it could be a hallucination, takes an extremely skewed amount of effort compared to the effort of sending someone AI output. The worst part is, it's probably going to be pasted right back into the LLM chat box.

It's astonishingly bad form to send someone AI output, and this is only one of the reasons.

> that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.

I've seen this happening a lot in the recent times: people who are generally not very good at their job tend to offload disproportionately more to LLMs, and it's so damn annoying that their incompetence now comes sugarcoated in lengthy LLM babble for the sake of desperately trying to sound convincing. This is wasting me high single digit hours every week, not to mention the frustration of battling an asymmetrical fight: it takes them seconds to produce something that will take me minutes to read and hours to react upon. This needs to stop.

Edit: typo -le+me

Letting AI answer a personal question for you feels deeply disrespectful to the person asking the question, but also to yourself; you're signalling you don't know anything. If I wanted an AI answer, I could ask it myself. I'm not asking AI, I'm asking you. If you're going to give me an AI answer, it may be the last time I'll ever ask you anything.

The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines.

- Louis de Bonald

Someone does that to me and they go on the spreadsheet and I work around them every time in future. It's not worth interacting with those people.

I was talking to someone about a possible clutch issue on their car and they pinpointed to with a screenshot saying my diagnosis was wrong. I've been a car guy all my life and so I am not some amateur. I just wished them good luck and went about my business.

6 hours later guess who is stranded in the middle of the road? Not me.

It's also very surprising to me. This whole deal where humans instantly started taking AI answers at face value, as sources standing on their own legs, or delegating their own mind to a third party, not even a human, but an algorithm.

It's like they're just... Fine?

AI became their god over a few months and it's... Fine?

I thought I knew humanity pretty well and I'm rarely surprised at human large scale behavior these days as I'm hitting 50 myself, but this took me by surprise.

Most people are not self-sufficient entities. 10% are so unable to think that they are simply not able to be a net positive in any job, it takes more energy/time to micromanage them, even for simple tasks, than they put back into the business. 50% are incapable of real innovation.

Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.

There's something refreshing and endearing about my wife's family not using AI at all (at least, not intentionally). My in-laws don't really know how to Google and my wife will do interesting stuff like Google an actor's or movie's IMDB and scroll through the list to figure out who a specific character was in a show (instead of Googling show name character name).

I can see that that could be kinda fun because it's not about the answer, it's about the discovery. AI and even smarter searches removes the sense of discovery. You'll never get to see "oh did you know that such and such actor was also in such as such movie in 2010??" if you just skip to the answer with AI.

That said, when they ask me a question that I don't immediately know the answer to, I'll use AI, ask it for sources, check those sources. In these cases it's more of a smarter Google search — just like couldn't always just use the first search result of Google in 2010, you can't always just use the AI response in 2026. Gotta be extra careful too because even the AI's sources can be AI.

I’ve seen this at work and it drives me nuts. I don’t value my time extraordinarily highly but even still I find it disrespectful to offload my question and make me read something they didn’t even bother to read.

It feels like commoditising intelligence because they think an AI screenshot is some kind of currency of truth. The truth doesn't even really matter anymore, its just whatever ChatGPT says it is

I have the same experience! When I asked someone for help, they (on my face), opened claude and started asking it.

I recount it here: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch

It's at this point you have zero empathy for someone and just shame them personally and report to some higher up.

I can (very marginally) understand running the argument over an LLM if you've difficulties communicating in the language, but never copy paste

I have been saying for a while that when AI gets smarter than us we will be like 5 year old children totally dependent on our AI mommy and daddy to interpret and understand the vast and mysterious world of things that are too complicated or obscure for us to comprehend. We'll spend all day experiencing the natural world and watching kids shows. Any hard questions go to mommy and daddy.

At least we'll be able to tell people our authentic emotions without AI, and AI will listen to our emotions, much like parents listen to their children's feelings.

I feel like we went through something similar to this early in the era when Google's search engine was new. People posted engine results, but pretty quickly, people got tired of doing that, and would say google it. Part of that was if the answer was as easy as a google search away - the social validation became lower to negative if you just provided low effort copypasta service.

Now, response of "google it" could be take many ways depending on where you are in a conversation, it could be a range of being polite to quite rude. Google it could mean "I don't know, but I think thats findable on google", or it could mean "Im not going to help you". I wonder if we will settle back to having a real conversation with "ai it"/"google it" occasionally.

And the killer killer issue is that even if you would manage to talk to them, their opinion will be shaped but what AI told them and AI opinion will always be perceived as superior, your real world experience and instinct will be disregarded quickly.

It doesn't feel so different to me than the early days of google, when google worked pretty well - people often would say things like "do you want me to google that for you?" the implication being you were wasting their time by asking them a question they could find the answer to themselves.

The major difference now though, is when you get sent a chatGPT response, the implicit question often is now "Can you check this is correct for me?" which is exhausting and a little rude.

I remember a moment at the very onset when chatgpt was just opened to the public. A manager sent us a congratulations text chatGPT had prepared for his kid's graduation from high school. He said that he was not much of a writer and that was miles better than he could have said. We had a discussion about the moral side of that (though moral might not be the word), pointing out that bad words that come from a genuine place and required effort from you are better than great words that are manufactured by a robot. He didn't see the issue.

I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.

And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.

At least to me, this seems like a pretty logical progression based on how education is handled today.

We teach children from a very early age that there's always a right answer and that someone smarter/older/etc knows it. They're told to ask that person and largely memorize the answer for a test.

With LLMs we're being told they are, or will soon be, as smart or smarter than any human. Its no surprise to me that people with access to LLMs that can already answer a question would just blindly use it and trust the response.

"This is the killer issue"

I have to ask - did you use AI to generate this response?

“cognitive surrender”

It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves

Implicit in the human to human to AI conversational chain is the second person’s assumption that the first person didn’t think to ask AI.

The mere fact of asking another human a question (absent a strong pattern of behavior to the contrary) should be strong evidence the interlocutor wants a human answer! Sending an AI answer should have the same social valence as sending a lmgtfy link; appropriate for bad actors but a pretty insulting response to an earnest question.

That's when you realize you're not important enough to talk to a human.

I FEEL this. It's empowered lazy devs to defer thought and accountability. To some degree, I understand. It softens the imposter syndrome feeling one can get. But, I see it as a character barrier; not a moral one.

This behavior from people is the one thing that makes me wonder if we all wouldn't be better off just chucking AI off the proverbial cliff. It should be useful tool for enhancing the tasks we have to do, not something to fully replace thinking and human interaction completely.

It's not that sad, it'll probably go away. Anyone remember when Google first got popular and for like 5-10 years after everyone did the same with that, there was even the "let me google that for you" meme + site.

It was forgotten. Time heals all wounds.

It's very insulting. I don't need them to talk to an AI. I talk to AI all day already. If all a person is doing is forwarding messages to AI why do we need them? Just have an AI do their job.

This was the main thing I took from the movie Her. Wild to see it materialize so quickly.

Absolutely. But I’m afraid people are forced to do this because management wants to see AI usage otherwise they’re gonna go on the chopping block. Leadership is ultimately to blame.

Off the cuff analysis by AI is often wrong. Lately I've been feeling bad for Casey Handmer whose latest blog post contains an illustration with the caption

   (I asked AI to make a better version of this diagram but it wasn’t right. Motion is into the page. 200 kg of moon rocks can fit in a container 40 cm on a side.)

It is the ultimate cop-out to avoid having any involvement in anything. "AI said so..." then shrugs or more AI answers, ultimately removing oneself from any form of commitment to an opinion or knowledge (even partial).

On the other hand, I think it's perfectly good that latent natural idiots who happened to seem like normal people among us would just drop their masks and disclose themselves in such an obvious way by delegating what little left of their brain power to the artificial one.

OK I am bracing for the downvotes..

What about when the llm is smarter than the person? Sometimes I get material that is so bad I wish they had had AI do it. Then it would be poor to mediocre.

There was an episode of the podcast “Question Everything “ where they talked about how LLM s can sometimes talk people out of conspiracy theories by patiently refuting the arguments with facts. There have been academic studies on this.

I think people hate AI because it is often mediocre and flawed but sometimes it’s replacing humans that are inept.

My "favorite" as a sysadmin is when I explain why something should be done differently, or shouldn't be done at all, and I get back "but ChatGPT said..." followed by a no-context, incorrect AI slop paragraph.

One of the more dangerous things LLMs have enabled is people feeling like they are suddenly experts on topics they would have never touched otherwise.

Why does this read like written by AI?

>There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.

It makes you feel that way because it is that way. They're not self-sufficient.

I don’t think all ai generated responses are bad though. They need to be brief. People need to iterate on the content and understand their response.

Oneshotting a response just because ChatGPT said so is super annoying.

I will a lot of times write and email and give it to an LLM to soften it or round it out since I have a bad habit of being overly direct.

One of the reasons my co-founder (CEO) and I (CTO) are now going different ways. AI slop bombs are one of the most disrespectful things you can do to another human. Well, just my opinion.

Not trying to defend ai but I observed another mode: what used to be bored dev chats where people avoided topics or started feuds, now it's "well Claude suggests...". It's not great but it's a short form of improvement somehow. (Sure I'd prefer passionate convos steering toward innovation, but that's been a rare sight in my career)

Exactly, people want to talk to AI when they choose to, as a tool, but not reaching out to other human beings. There is no easy way of solving this sadly

If this is already happening among adults, what's left for the current or next generation? Kids that can no longer think by themselves? I believe this is really scary.

This says more about you than the other person. Some people like giving good answers and are less concerned about being the source themselves.

I'll sometimes do the exact thing you are talking about. The reason is that I basically know the answer, but also know there is a nicer explanation to the question. I'll type in the question, often iterate a few times, get an answer that I basically knew but couldn't explain as clearly, and respond with it.

Humans haven't been "self sufficient" in 100,000 years. We've been building/using tools and specializing since the start. If you went back just a few hundred years some people (the version of you basically) would be profoundly sad you couldn't build your own house.

It depends on the situation. If you were just talking then sure. Pretty rude to just check out of the conversation and replace the human you were talking to with an LLM.

That's sad, but you know what's infuriating? It's humans who come at you sarcastic and dismissive and without spending any effort actually engaging with what you've said in good faith. Imagine writing a well reasoned out post or comment, only to get a sarcastic dismissive literal oneliner reply instead. I've decided that those people will absolutely get the LLM from now on.

Matching the amount of effort that others around me are putting in is pretty important to me now. Don't want to end up trying too hard for people who don't give a shit.

Is that a feeling you battled a lot growing up or something? It's very specific, and not actually very connected or sensible.

It feels insulting when discussing something serious, they respond back with a highly inaccurate ChatGPT response.

These people don't know the answer, but they are trying (generally) to be helpful. The former reality of the article's author would be posting and getting no replies and/or links to the wrong answer you already read.

Where are these people?

I have never met any of these human copy/paste bots. Guess I am lucky.