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.

I’ve distanced myself from a close friend group chat over the past few years as they seem to be more and more like this. They all work in tech at various FAANG companies, and I just mentally hate engaging anymore as it all has turned into “let me prove you wrong in 10s or find nuance in this conversation I don’t already have” by referencing AI. It’s like the Google search nerd snipe crowd 2.0, and I’m not entertaining them. I’ve had to flat out tell them they are wrong as they source a clearly inaccurate AI response, which is even more strain on the friendship.

Seems have to make a face to face appointment, without any online devices in hand.

I can't stand this at all. People are becoming more and more sheepish. They don't know when things are harder than they actually are and the dunning-kruger effect is happening at a pace unbeknownst to our culture on nearly all surfaces.

The stupidity and helplessness are by design.

My stomach churns when I see an e-mail obviously written by AI. It just comes off so disingenuous and disrespectful, as if they couldn't be bothered to respond to me themselves but instead had a machine do it. Even worse, it's usually very verbose, wasting my time further to have to read through all the slop.

Well, I used to Google, and read what real people wrote on the subject, and then answer from what I've found.

Remember when "Google" used to be a synonym for "search"?

This is just a glitch in time. It’ll be agents talking to agents. We won’t be able to keep up.

Hopefully such flagrant usage will be priced out at some point.

What? This is patronizing and maybe a bit insulting.

If you call a helpdesk agent - they have to query the system to pull up your case.

The UX is a bit different now.

That's it.

Your 'anthropomorphising projectION' here is the issue, not the person using basic tools to help you - as they always have.

I don't claim to know the context in which that AI slop communication happens. But when people are really interested in what you ask them, they usually give their own opinions in their own voice.

This is the most infuriating part of dealing with support engineers at companies i've paid giant bills with. They didn't answer my question, i get a wall of text that i read 4 times before i figure out it says nothing, and nothing seems to get fixed.

When they do that (e.g. in customer support) I sometimes do the same. I explain to the AI what my end goal is, and then let it deal with the answers.

There was an insightful post here on HN, a few weeks ago, about "AI hygiene". One of the recommendations is: never share raw AI output with anyone. It's like showing your dirty underwear.

Show them your distillation, your final recommendation, but not the raw output. That's useless, they could have prompted the AI themselves, you're not adding anything but being the middleman. At least share your prompt instead of the output!

I hate it so much. It's one thing to lean on AI for complex or toilsome work, but to openly supplant your own ability to interact thoughtfully with another person. It should be embarrassing.

Frankly it’s just incredibly disrespectful. If I ask for your take on an issue, I want your words and thoughts. You can use an LLM, but vet the results and actually have a hand in it. Otherwise why am I even asking? I don’t need an intermediary between me and ChatGPT

Overly dramatic. It’s not that deep dude

I asked the person responsible for a new integration at work (nominally a Director level person, with a bit of title inflation going on) about a feature that didn't do what we wanted.

They answered with something that looked to be AI slop, and very verbose too. When I politely said "those instructions reference links and buttons that I cannot find in the UI, could you please tell me where to find them?" the Director simply replied "I cannot find them either, disregard. The feature doesn't support what you want after all."

This means they simply prompted my question to the builtin AI and copied back to our conversation without verifying it made sense.

That's the future we must deal with now. A sort of broken "LMGTFY" that only provides wrong answers.

On JIRA ticket discussion threads now involve the liaison for another team copypasta-ing LLM slop as a comment. Makes me feel like Will Hunting. What, is that it or do you have an original thought you'd like to contribute?

This is truly infuriating. "Have you asked AI? - no I thought I'd see if anyone had a real answer from experience first. Someone I can trust. AI should be the fallback, not the first call. Watching people just regurgitate AI responses with zero understanding they've just copy/pasted total BS is becoming far too common in work environments. We've become utterly helpless as a society and things continue to get worse year after year. Whether it's helicopter parenting, inability to navigate anywhere (even places you go every day) without GPS, abject fear at asking someone for help, inability to have a conversation without ending it immediately by Googling...etc. The biggest issue is you can't really fight back now. Regardless of what you do personally everybody else is doing the other thing and you can't avoid it.

I noticed this on the ffmpeg dev list, where one of the core devs was too lazy to write his own proposal and instead used AI slop to autogenerate it, then send it to other people. He will not understand why people don't want to get spammed down via AI slop.

Nothing feels quite as good as getting dumb and drooling literally. Being intelligent is painful, it’s the most painful state of existence. You see everything with mind bending clarity. The inane nonsense of it all

No wonder the mind instinctively recoils and wants to smoothen itself

For past ten years my life consisted mainly of desperately trying to be dumb and happy. AI is really good tool for that. Just outsource the thinking until the organ atrophies, hopefully permanently. some drugs and the life gets actually even pleasurable.

To be aware is a curse, no wonder desperate attempts to lift it take place en masse

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It's like asking someone to deadlift a dresser and move it to another room, even though they have a dolly right next to them. Should they be able to? It depends. Should you expect them to? No, that's just odd.

Well, it's subtly different than a kid calling mum - kids generally do that because they're insecure, an adult using ChatGPT to answer simply can't be bothered to turn on their brain...