>you just proved that there's no difference between asking you or asking the AI.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
Please do not ask me questions that I know nothing more about than AI. Wish there was something like LMGTFY but for AI.
Turns out, there is such a thing as a stupid question after all: any question that a chatbot can answer that winds up wasting the time of a real human being because the asker was too lazy or inconsiderate to use resources that don't waste anyone else's time first.
>If they wanted the generic LLM answer, they'd have gotten it in four seconds without involving you, which is, in fact, easier.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but... while it can be seductively tempting to assume all humans act this logically, I must unfortunately be the one to inform you that, no, they do not, and no, they often don't get the answer that they were able to get themselves in four seconds without me, and instead choose to waste my time instead.
tbh some questions deserve the ai response pasted at them. The type that you'd like lmgtfy at them before. The edge cuts both ways; if you put zero effort into your question, sometimes you deserve 0 effort responses. That being said, I always hesitate to do this since I'm an imperfect judge
I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.
( When he starts his own threads, they're now of the form "I asked gemini question X and this several-page-long attached markdown file is how it answered" )
My parents come to me with questions about how to close a app on their iPad, and frankly I can not be asked to give them a walk through when I put chatgpt on their iPad for that reason.
And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.
As a meta note, I'm seeing more downvoted responses in this comment section for reasonable points of view on both sides than I've ever seen for any HN topic.
Funniest thing about this is that I think it's ~all~ (edit) mostly LLM-generated (and Pangram agrees). I think the biggest tell these days is when the text is generated in a way that seems like it was intended to be funny, but the jokes never land.
> Well... Hate to disappoint
Hmm, the capital H is a grammatical error, so this is likely not entirely LLM-generated. But the hundreds of words explaining something as basic as how to read AI output doesn't seem likely to be written entirely by a human.
Sending an AI response communicates more than just the response itself:
1. "I'm not entirely sure, but this is what it says to save you some time."
2. "You didn't ask the question precisely because you are not an SME, but I reworded it using the jargon that would allow the AI to answer better and here is the response."
3. "This response is AI, but in general my other ones are not"
This is not clever. A lot of people do not understand what LLMs are capable of now. It can be learning experience to show a product person how they can leverage LLMs rather than acting like you're the know-it-all by obfuscating the fact that you used an LLM to answer a question
Well, imagine not having the time in the world to read the 40 page docs that are referenced on a forum like this. By the time you read, analyze, absorb and make a conclusion, it is time to hit the sack. So, AI helps to analyze, TLDR, summarize the data. In a lot of cases, it's a question of time, not intelligence. HN is not a message board known for balanced opinions. I've found it to be a place where hate, threats get hurled incessantly. Just ask my Karma ;)
HN Wishlist:
HN can help with this by providing an option to TLDR the posts, or long-winded linked stories or documents on demand. Would also be great to have a tool to figure out who up-votes or down-votes users. Some of the down-votes appear to be malicious, without reason, but hey in a few months, that won't matter to me__Veni__Vidi__Vici__:)
Can I get a version of this without the over-the-top misanthropic "don't reproduce" comment?
I hate it when you quote the AI at me because you stop treating both yourself and me like humans who are communicating. I want to pull you up out of that dehumanization, not drop down into it myself in retaliation.
I wonder if we gathered all of the "don't quote the ai" people and all of the lmgtfy people in the same place, would they cancel out? Like matter/anti-matter annihilation?
Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.
At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?
It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?
I've always been fascinated that some people don't seem to have any email "voice" - they just can't translate email text into human emotional impact. So they write super abrupt emails, things they would never say in real life, totally different to their actual personality. It's almost like a distinct form of autism. Meanwhile I'm almost the opposite extreme - I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person. It takes me ages to write my emails.
I'm starting to get a feeling there is a phenomenon like this with AI - some people just genuinely don't hear the AI "voice" at all. They really can't distinguish why sending AI written text is going to impact the person at the other end. It's going to be an interesting ride as these people start using AI and are completely baffled why people are offended by their perfectly reasonable responses.
> I can't hit send on something unless I've finessed it until it sounds exactly like how I would communicate in person.
The dedication is admirable, but work emails aren't in-person chats. Imo it's not appropriate to try to retain a singular voice across varied genres. I don't want my emails to sound the way I do in person just like I don't want a programming book I read to sound like a lunchroom discussion.
This really depends on context. Sure, if you're responding to a forum post or StackOverflow question with nothing but the LLM output, then I agree with this. On the other hand, where I've done this at work, it's because I and some peers _together_ are trying to understand something (e.g., debugging), and Claude has some potentially useful input, but I'm not actually sure. And I'm looking to collaborate on interpreting the output together to see if there's anything useful. (Folks can decide to ignore it if it doesn't seem promising.) As another comment[1] said, pasting the output as-is contains other useful metadata.
There are also cases where I think I know the answer, and I ask the AI, and it produces a more complete answer than I would but I know enough to assess it. It seems like a waste of time to paraphrase the whole thing. That's the "Here's how Claude phrased it and I can attest that it's right" case.
44 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadDing ding ding, we have a winner!
Please do not ask me questions that I know nothing more about than AI. Wish there was something like LMGTFY but for AI.
Turns out, there is such a thing as a stupid question after all: any question that a chatbot can answer that winds up wasting the time of a real human being because the asker was too lazy or inconsiderate to use resources that don't waste anyone else's time first.
>If they wanted the generic LLM answer, they'd have gotten it in four seconds without involving you, which is, in fact, easier.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but... while it can be seductively tempting to assume all humans act this logically, I must unfortunately be the one to inform you that, no, they do not, and no, they often don't get the answer that they were able to get themselves in four seconds without me, and instead choose to waste my time instead.
1. Asking a question which could be answered by an AI
2. Pasting an AI response to something
If 1 is fair game, I'd say 2 is too.
( When he starts his own threads, they're now of the form "I asked gemini question X and this several-page-long attached markdown file is how it answered" )
And yes, my boss also uses AI and replying to their emails with this is frankly going to do nothing lol.
It's interesting that this is so polarizing.
> Well... Hate to disappoint
Hmm, the capital H is a grammatical error, so this is likely not entirely LLM-generated. But the hundreds of words explaining something as basic as how to read AI output doesn't seem likely to be written entirely by a human.
1. "I'm not entirely sure, but this is what it says to save you some time."
2. "You didn't ask the question precisely because you are not an SME, but I reworded it using the jargon that would allow the AI to answer better and here is the response."
3. "This response is AI, but in general my other ones are not"
4. "I trust the AI's response in this scenario."
HN Wishlist:
HN can help with this by providing an option to TLDR the posts, or long-winded linked stories or documents on demand. Would also be great to have a tool to figure out who up-votes or down-votes users. Some of the down-votes appear to be malicious, without reason, but hey in a few months, that won't matter to me__Veni__Vidi__Vici__:)
Sol :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992 - Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (~1 day ago, 414 comments)
I hate it when you quote the AI at me because you stop treating both yourself and me like humans who are communicating. I want to pull you up out of that dehumanization, not drop down into it myself in retaliation.
At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?
It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?
Authenticity earned through proof of work: invest your neurons and time to demonstrate fealty! Context switch for me!
Buried lede: much of the time the person asking could do all the work suggested.
This is like LMGTFY but backwards, it shames the person whose time is being asked for.
I'm starting to get a feeling there is a phenomenon like this with AI - some people just genuinely don't hear the AI "voice" at all. They really can't distinguish why sending AI written text is going to impact the person at the other end. It's going to be an interesting ride as these people start using AI and are completely baffled why people are offended by their perfectly reasonable responses.
The dedication is admirable, but work emails aren't in-person chats. Imo it's not appropriate to try to retain a singular voice across varied genres. I don't want my emails to sound the way I do in person just like I don't want a programming book I read to sound like a lunchroom discussion.
There are also cases where I think I know the answer, and I ask the AI, and it produces a more complete answer than I would but I know enough to assess it. It seems like a waste of time to paraphrase the whole thing. That's the "Here's how Claude phrased it and I can attest that it's right" case.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243331