My boss can't wrap his head around why handing me a direct printout of LLM output is not acceptable
I hate how AI is used to make deep fakes, revenge porn, CP - and people tolerate it because "they're working out the issues."
How about they work those out BEFORE they give people access to these tools.
My coworkers are doing this to me. They are even pasting into PR reviews. The threat is real.
It's even better when they copy-paste slop answers that are flat out wrong without bothering to check.
My org has our PRs reviewed by an AI automatically
my mother constantly keeps sending me texts that are just direct copy-paste from llm output. can't even tell her to stop doing it because she just ignores me if i say something she doesnt want to hear.
Ask chat GPT to come up with a nice message explaining why direct copy pastes of LLM outputs is bad. Copy paste it to her directly.
Maybe she will understand it better that way.
no, she just think she is being helpful but doesnt care what i think about it because apparently she knows everything better. She would just ignore that or otherwise make me even more annoyed.
Few days ago a friend linked me a danish research paper and claimed it shown that higher wages for women lead to decrease in children being born, and that higher male wages led to the opposite. I don't have the skills required to parse this kind of paper quickly nor understanding of a lot of the terminology. I told chatGPT to read it and contrast it with the arguments being made, to which it responded with pointing out that the term "marginal net-of-tax wage" meant something different from "wage", and that this paper suggested that tax laws incentivizing working more hours led to lowered fertility rather than higher salaries for women. I was asked to point exactly where in the paper it was said like that, and again, I had to lean on LLM to get me page numbers. I eventualy convinced my friend that he got duped by right wing talking points and got him to think a bit.
So, if I didn't do that and just read the conclusion from the paper I'd probably have to agree with him instead, as just googling it led to the right wing trolls making those claims. Was this a good use case of LLM to get me some counter arguments, or would it have been better if I stayed true to my ideals and not to use those tools? Was I rude by arguing against the point made about a research that neither of us understood from the get go by using genAI to parse through it? While I do agree that companies developing those tools are evil and need to be stopped, there is an utility to it that I don't think is available elsewhere. Would me losing that argument and believing that women should have lower salaries to increase fertility (because I believe in science, and this paper seemed to be referenced a lot, also if anything capitalism would be to blame, so probably not as bad) be better than normalizing the use of the devil-tech but having myself and my friend better informed? I am legitimately not sure, but I think I did the right thing? What should've I done? I don't have the skills nor time nor will to read scientific papers that aren't related to my area of expertise, especially when someone linking them didn't do any research either. I am also genuinely exhausted from defending my left-wing points of view from the constant barrage of underhanded and often completely baseless arguments some of my coworkers and friends make to convince me I'm wrong and the default consensus is right. Is it bad to use genAI to figure out some counterpoints? Or should I give up and admit I'm not good or commited enough to make them myself? Right wing people often argue in bad faith and don't take the counterpoints to heart, but sometimes they do, even if the original point they made was just to rile me up. So, am I the asshole? Am I wrong? I seriously don't know.
a layperson cannot be relied upon to draw meaningful conclusions from a scholarly article. i learned this when i tried to do it. have you ever tried to read a spanish book, without knowing spanish, with nothing but an english-spanish dictionary? it's very slow going and it works alright until someone speaks in idiom or metaphor, but even then you can mostly still get it. this is not always the case with scholarly articles.
moreover, it's a waste of time. if it takes you 30 hours to look up every term and graph, but it would have taken your biology friend 20 minutes to synthesize it for you, there's an obvious solution here. if an LLM can save you 30 hours, and your biology friend 20 minutes, it's a useful tool.
Absolutely rude. If you're using AI to make a point for you, you've already admitted you don't know enough about what you're talking about to be having a opinion in the first place, let alone be worth discussing an issue with.
I’ve had these interactions with the head of my IT department. I asked to procure a license for jfrog artifactory. He literally copy/pasted a ChatGPT response to me that began like this:
Here’s a breakdown of how JFrog Artifactory compares to using GitHub, NPM, or other language-specific package mangers (like Pypi)…
…
1. Purpose and Functionality
…
2. Workflow & Developer Experience
…
3. Security and Compliance
…
✅ When to use JFrog
…
It came with a bunch of theoretical risks that are completely resolved by the simple ability of just not being a complete fucking moron.
It was really frustrating that I tried to talk with my IT leader, and instead found a proxy for ChatGPT.
After that, he created a group chat with him, I, and my colleagues in security. He proceeded to paste ChatGPT output outlining bullshit risks and theories, with the implicit expectation that I rhetorically address each of them via my own response. I’d explain things like,
“[well if you read the fucking request yourself, you’d know that] we aren’t planning to use the software that way, so the concern isn’t relevant. Even if we were though, those problems are easily addressable via …”
In some cases, I even had to explain that the problems he’s raising are already problems faced in the current ecosystem. Completely unrelated to the software I’m talking about… ChatGPT just straight up implying that an architectural problem is a software risk.
I’d reply, and I swear to god he’d just give ChatGPT my text and paste the reply from ChatGPT back to me.
I lost a lot of respect for him. Why the fuck would you do that?
That guy to all his friends: "AI makes me 10x more productive!"
This gets at my own personal perspective of using LLMs to respond - it's not just about not putting effort into understanding and responding yourself, rather it is about making yourself a proxy to a tool I could use myself, and doing so *without even having a better understanding of how to use the tool to answer my question*, and still thinking you're somehow made a positive contribution, that is the most disrespectful.
If you genuinely thought the LLM could help me then you should be explaining your process to me for how to use it and validate responses, or else at least you should ask me for more info and explain how you think it's responses could help if you really do think you're better at operating it.
Imagine doing the same in a workshop, and taking a powertool to an object before you even bothered figuring out what the other person wanted. Or trying to be helpful by asking questions on your behalf to other departments, but messing up the context and thus repeatedly producing useless answers that you have to put time into refuting.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that AI can indeed replace jobs. The thing is that the only job it can actually replace is that of a lazy middle manager. AI is great at responding to email if A:) you don't know what your talking about or B:) you don't respect the other person enough to waste the time formulating an actual response. AI in my experience is only really good at faking that there's someone on the other end. The fact that there's an entire management class it can convenienceingly impersonate is a pretty searing indictment as far as I'm concerned.
Totally agree. When someone sends me some AI slop about a topic I have knowledge about -- which I've had this happen to me recently during a debug session -- and asks me to read it, I think to myself "this person does not respect me, otherwise they wouldn't be telling me to read stuff that may or may not be accurate that they themselves never read." It's like a new, worse version of "let me google that for you" but without the sarcasm, and without the results actually being helpful.
I know that feeling. I experienced it more than one time in areas of law I consider myself a little bit more knowledgeable than the average person. It's just a slap to the face to try to discuss a topic that you know a little bit about with an AI.
The thing is: I am 100 % sure those people use LLM answer not out of disrespect but because they honestly believe that an LLM produces a better argument than they possibly could themselves.
The thing is: I am 100 % sure those people use LLM answer not out of disrespect but because they honestly believe that an LLM produces a better argument than they possibly could themselves.
And I have zero confidence your 100% because you have zero backing for your claim other than believing people have good intentions.
Chat is just the wrong interface to AI, period. If you use it as an agentic tool with human review, it either works or doesn't and you can keep improving it for the task at hand.
My company hired a consulting firm to help with a transition period. The consulting firm sent my boss an email that outlined the plans for what we should do and how they are going to help. Without directly giving it away, the email was clearly AI output, and my boss instantly terminated their contract. We aren't exactly anti-AI, but to the point of the post, it's just so rude... and my boss is pretty fuckin cool.
Especially rude if you want to charge money for it. If your boss wanted an AI answer, they would have asked an AI. You don't need an expensive consulting company for that.
I asked chatgpt and it told me:
Wrong network configuration
Just because the final output comes from AI doesn't always mean a human didn't put real effort into writing it. There's a big difference between asking an LLM to write something from scratch, telling it exactly what to say, or just having it edit and polish what you already wrote.
A ton of my replies here - including this one - are technically "AI output," but all the AI really did was take what I wrote, clean it up, and turn it into coherent text that's easier for the reader to follow.
spoiler
Original text: Just because the final output is by AI doesn't always mean human didn't put effort into writing it. There's a difference between asking LLM to write something, telling LLM what to write or asking it to edit something you wrote.
A large number of my replies here, including this one, are technically "AI output" but all the AI did was go through what I wrote and try and turn it into coherent text that the is easy for the recipient to consume.
I don't think the LLM made your response better in a meaningful way. Sure, it cleaned up the grammar a little bit, but the rephrasing in a few places is not necessary.
Trust yourself to communicate without help from external software.
there are many use-cases, and you've neglected one: linguistic analysis can be used to identify a person and to link them to other accounts. i'm not saying it's likely or apocalyptic, but it is true and present. using an LLM to "sanitize" your outputs can prevent this.
from a privacy perspective, everyone should do this using a locally hosted LLM. from a person-that-uses-the-internet perspective, i would absolutely hate it if every article and every comment looked like an identical brand of ai slop.
making one dependent on external service is the very point of llm from the point of view of investors. Imagine how much money they will make if everyone just couldnt live without llm in every aspect of their life.
I only did it here to illustrate a point. Typically I only use it on longer posts. I'm not a native english speaker and I often struggle to express my thoughts clearly and I find it immensely useful to run it through AI and see the corrections it made.
Your English is fine and your thoughts there are communicated perfectly.
Seriously, your text was good enough for a comment, and for everything else just put in some effort? It's really not that hard, and using ai actively harms people.
I read your original just fine.
While your use case may not suffer from the problem depicted in the post[^1], I don't think it's worth weakening the proposed etiquette for. If having a system that can reduce the generated garbage a person can inflict upon another means slightly-worse worded texts - that's a price I'm willing to pay.
[^1]: It does exhibit other generative AI issues - like the environmental impact or like how it makes you reliant on companies just waiting to start enshittifing the field - it does not suffer from the issue of forcing humans to read meaningless slop that no one bothered to write.
Whenever someone at work says "ChatGPT says this" or "Claude says this" or "I asked Gemini and..." whatever they say after that point is just static and I never take them seriously as a person again.
You dismiss the whole person just because they acknowledge using an LLM? That seems a bit harsh - especially since they had the decency to mention the source, which is basically the same as saying "take this with a grain of salt."
As a source it's rude. As a piece of unreliable help of the kind "we both don't know the syntax of that programming language, let's ask Ollama how to draw such and such a shape in it" it's kinda fine.
I appreciate the honesty when they say it's an AI response and not genuine knowledge.
When I tell someone "an LLM told me that..." It's usually followed by "Let's see if there's any truth to it." An AI response should always be treated as a suggestion, not an answer.
Hell, Google's AI still doesn't know which day the F1 GP is on this week. It was wrong by a whole week a while back. Now it's only off by a day.
An AI response should always be treated as a suggestion, not an answer
Exactly. An AI response can be a great way to get started on a topic you know little about, but it's never a definitive answer. You have to verify whether it's actually true. Whether it works. Never trust it blindly.
I feel like a big barrier is people anthropomorphizing the AI. It's not "ChatGPT generated this" it's "ChatGPT said this". I don't necessarily blame people for it, machine that speaks to you short circuits something in people's brains and it's not like we've got better language to talk about it. It's just that... people treat it as an opinion, not as software output. And so long as that's how people handle it, I just don't know if a "healthy" use of the technology is possible.
Exactly. We are extremely social animals, hardwired to recognise ourselves in things around us, which I'm sure is super useful and vital for a tribe of hunter gatherers living in a hostile environment. But it means that now we recognise faces and emotions in power outlets and lawn chairs. It's really not surprising we see intelligence and awareness in LLMs, because we recognise that stuff in everything. We are really poor at the level of critical thought required to deal with this responsibly.
I never take them seriously as a person again
i dunno dude. i used to be a real piece of shit.
red flag
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