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If I ask you a question and you turn around and ask AI you get to replace me with AI for all future interactions.
If you ask me to "check what AI says", I will ask you to do it yourself and to kindly replace me with your AI for all future interactions.
Hasn't the same always applied to googling on behalf of others? That's why LMGTFY exists too...
It even updated to let you choose the search engine. Surprisingly they haven't updated it to include OpenAI/Claude/Copilot/... guess he should've named the domain "lmFtfy" (s/Google/find/g)
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I think we have the moral imperative to document all "out of distribution" information somewhere. By this I mean anything that is tribal knowledge or principles that just exist within our heads.
> I think we have the moral imperative to document all "out of distribution" information somewhere

This is more or less why writing was invented thousands of years ago, the amount of knowledge exceeds human memory

> Maybe they care about you, and want an excuse to talk to you, and free associated from their problem to you because they think of you as generally competent.

This is why I hate when people paste a response from Claude/ChatGPT to me when I ask them a question.

This is when you paste https://dontbeameatproxy.com/ right back at them.
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I would find that rude... at least the AI answer is the other person attempting to help me find an answer to something they don't know either (or can't be bothered with).

Why punish someone for trying to help you?

Do you use Claude/Chat? Terra/Sol?

I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools. And the only people I’m inclined to reply are also the people that don’t use the tools.

For people that do, the question is usually formatted differently - either it’s obvious Claude wouldn’t help, or they explain why it wasn’t helpful.

> I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools.

Could we stop doing this? There is nothing in the world that every single person likes and LLMs are definitely not something that everyone who uses it turns off their brains to valid criticisms.

It is perfectly congruent that you might use AI tools but not want AI answers pasted back at you, just like it’s perfectly congruent that you may enjoy playing music in the privacy of your home but don’t appreciate strangers (or even friends and acquaintances) blasting music in public.

> It is perfectly congruent that you might use AI tools but not want AI answers pasted back at you, just like it’s perfectly congruent that you may enjoy playing music in the privacy of your home but don’t appreciate strangers (or even friends and acquaintances) blasting music in public.

In theory - sure. But in practice - do you use paid gpt/claude and receive slop from people when asking them questions? I will seriously revisit my statement if you are such a person. So far I haven’t found such a case.

And if so, what is an example question you had to someone that they replied to with a slop grenade? Why aren’t people that complain about this sharing their questions?

Can you blame them when so many people really are just lazy and didn't even think about asking google/claude/etc. without a better reason not to? It's one thing to want to have a personal conversation, but if getting it is a challenge, maybe state your intentions more clearly?
The author's a sucker. YT premium pays for itself many times over.
Ironic comment as YT Premium is for suckers.

Firefox with uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the correct move.

If on mobile, Duckduckgo app has Duck Player.

Yes. For everyone saying just install this or that, it’s not straightforward for the TV and every other device in your house, including your family’s. Sometimes just paying brings a lot of convenience.
> it’s not straightforward for the TV

Entirely depends on the TV IMO... I have no issues installing third-party YT clients on mine.

If people would rather pay money for the convenience, that's fine, I'm not going to stop them... that's what all software is anyway, even FOSS. Every abstraction layer in computing is just another level of saving time.

Nobody gets upset because your C or Python program wasn't written in Assembly, and then claims you're "just coding for convenience." Or when you use someone else's library.

Or, you didn't build your own house brick by brick... and make the bricks yourself, etc.

> YT premium pays for itself many times over.

NewPipe/PipePipe are free

You are welcome

The fact that I can get (and consistently use) 120+ hours of 2160p/1440p video every month for $10, on a platform with extremely high quality, deeply researched videos/shows is a modern marvel.

Youtube music is also serviceable enough if you're not picky about mobile UX. Comes included with a basic yt premium subscription.

I'll always tell people, no other subscription - software or otherwise - comes close to providing the real-world value that yt premium does for that little money.

Except when the question is actually interesting and has less about it written, whatever frontier model you are using may confidently give some partially correct or completely wrong answer. Unless you're an expert who wouldn't need to ask AI in the first place, you cannot tell if it's false. "Oh but it's good enough, it's correct most of the time."

This gradual accruing of more and more falsehood will hurt us in the coming years, big time.

Do you think AIs are really much worse than humans in this respect?

Go check out the collective social knowledge of some political groups, and it's clear that we don't need to wait for "coming years" to be hurt by misinformation and disinformation. AI had very little to do with this.

Also, a good Claude-asker should be capable of a decent level of fact-checking, and shouldn't in fact be a pure meat proxy.

This is whataboutism. "Well others aren't any better" is a common thought pattern in places where corruption is rampant.

Corrupt actors have always existed, of course, but AI automates, normalizes, and scales this to a fundamentally different level.

If you think that's whataboutism, you missed the point.

I'm pointing out that we already deal with issues like this. You're speculating that we won't be able to deal with this latest incarnation. That remains to be seen.

We've seen this song and dance with Google already.

Clearly, for some people, "type into a search bar" is some sort of cognitive obstacle, and "go bother another person" isn't.

Now that I'm thinking about it: maybe the likes of OpenAI have the right idea when they invest into conversational models? Does it meaningfully reduce the workload of meat proxies?

I look forward to the LLM equivalent of lmgtfy in its original form.
Let me Gemini that for you
Another comment: you can just tell the person asking you that you don't know the answer. You don't have to look it up for them in any way; it's nice if you do, but you're allowed to just say "Sorry, I don't know! I'd look online, or maybe ask an LLM or something."

You don't have to start doing their research for them, or copying and pasting or transcribing Claude's answer.

A certain type of person (quite common in tech) really dislikes saying "I don't know". They seem to have a strong need for always having an answer, even if that answer is from google or a chatbot or simply pulled out of their arse.
I think this is why consider the willingness to say "I don't know" a trust signal
Exactly. I'd rather have a quick "I don't know" than wait for them to generate a reply that is likely to be wrong because I already asked the same models myself before consulting a human. If they generate a reply, I get to tell them exactly how the response is wrong, since the core content is usually the same. Only then do I get the "I don't know."

There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.

The problem is that for most questions "I don't know" isn't correct. You ofetn know part of the answer but it will take work to get a full answer or one you're confident of.
I was thinking the other day as a kid I would always pester my parents with questions like "how does lightning work?" etc etc. My world view was formed with answers based on what they understood. And sometimes I'm sure they'd just make something up when they didn't know the answers.

Anyway, I guess that's so different now when kids have internet devices in their hands and now even moreso with an AI assistant that has the worlds knowledge

Fun fact ... if we continue training LLMs on human data, in the future when you ask Claude a question it will say: "Have you asked Claude?"
Don't worry they'll run a patch just for that.
The "taking credit" thing rings true for sure.

I have trouble saying "I" when an LLM has done the leg work.

"I found a report with this info..." turns into "There's a report with this info". heh.

That comment on the substack is incredibly depressing. And the author liked it! That commenter should call his mom more.
It’s like when someone asks you for directions. They can easily use Google Maps, but they like your input.
This many levels of irony and insincerity and condescension just seem... not very useful? Why did you want me to read this?
You'd be surprised how many people, and I'm not talking about 80 year olds, have a hard time using search engines, or general knowledge of finding information.

If you're not careful, it is also super easy to extrapolate your own skills - and your peers skills - to the rest of the population.

Try being technical support to some non-tech people over the phone, it'll really open your eyes to the general computer knowledge of people.

I've found that many "skills" with regard to using AI become obsolete very quickly. It's really hard to stay ahead of the curve, IMO. I was using agents over 2 years ago and felt way ahead of the curve [1]. Today, Claude will spin up agents without even having been asked.

Feels a bit like a fools errand.

[1] https://www.loom.com/share/aa6e55acb18c445e9186637ac763c08d

There's another problem with people who know enough to ask an LLM to do something, don't know how to actually turn that into something useful, but want to act like they already did the heavy lifting.

"I had an idea for a new app. Here's a set of screen mockups and a requirements doc I did with Claude. Can you go ahead and finish that off now that I've done the design?"