It's rude to show AI output to people

Clippy is rolling in his grave.

Seriously you should respond to the slop in the email and waste your coworkers time too.

“No I don’t need this formatted for Outlook Dave. Thanks for asking though!”

I see two things people are not happy about when it comes to LLMs:

1. The message you sent doesn't feel personal. It reads like something written by a machine, and I struggle to connect with someone who sends me messages like that.

2. People who don't speak English very well are now sending me perfectly written messages with solid arguments. And honestly, my ego doest’t like it because I used to think I was more intelligent than them. Turns out I wasn't. It was just my perception, based on the fact that I speak the language natively.

Both of these things won't matter anymore in the next two or three years. LLMs will keep getting smarter, while our egos will keep getting smaller.

People still don't fully grasp just how much LLMs will reshape the way we communicate and work, for better or worse.

Best thing you can do is quit LinkedIn. I deleted my account immediately once I first noticed AI-generated content there.

> now the interface deliberately suggests AI-generated responses to posts

This feature absolutely defies belief. If I ran a social network (thank god I don't) one of my main worries would be a flood of AI skip driving away all the human users. And LinkedIn are encouraging it. How does that happen? My best guess is that it drives up engagement numbers to allow some disinterested middle managers to hit some internal targets.

AI Content that doesn't appear AI today will have to be the type that doesn't appear like AI in 1, 2 years.

Folks who are new to AI are just posting away with their December 2022 because it's new to them.

It is best to personally understand your own style(s) of communication.

Wow. What a good giveaway.

I wonder what others there are.

I occasionally use bullet points, emdashes (unicode, single, and double hyphens) and words like "delve". I hate it think these are the new heuristics.

I think AI is a useful tool (especially image and video models), but I've already had folks (on HN [1]!) call out my fully artisanal comments as LLM-generated. It's almost as annoying as getting low-effort LLM splurge from others.

Edit: As it turns out, cow-orkers isn't actually an LLMism. It's both a joke and a dictation software mistake. Oops.

[1] most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482876

> If it’s slop or they have incorrect information in the message, then my bad, stop reading here.

"my bad" and what next? The reader just wasted time and focus on reading, it doesn't sound like a fair exchange.

I really don’t think they’re the same thing. Email or letter, the words are yours while an LLM output isn’t.

I can see the similarity yes! Although I do feel like the distance between handwritten letter and an email is shorter than between email and LLM generated email. There's some line it crossed. Maybe it's that email provided some benefit to the reader too. Yes, there's less character, but you receive it faster, you can easily save it, copy it, attach a link or a picture. You may even get lucky and receive an .exe file as a bonus! LLM does not provide any benefit for the reader though, it just wastes their resources on yapping that no human cared to write.

Same thing with photography and painting. These opinionated pieces display a false dichotomy which propagates into argument, when we have a tunable dial rather than a switch, appropriately increasing or decreasing our consideration, time, and focus along a spectrum rather than treating it as an on and off switch.

I value letters far more than emails, pouring out my heart and complex thought to justify the post office trip and even postage stamp. Heck, why do we write birthday cards instead of emails? I hold a similar attitude towards LLM output and writing; perhaps more analogous is a comparison between painting and photography. I’ll take a glance at LLM output, but reading intentional thought (especially if it’s a letter) is when I infer about the sender as a person through their content. So if you want to send me a snapshot or fact, I’m fine with LLM output, but if you’re painting me a message, your actionable brushstrokes are more telling than the photo itself.

Just be a robot. Sell your voice to the AI overlords. Sell your ears and eyes. Reality was the scam; choose the Matrix. I choose the Matrix!

I mean that's fine, but the right response isn't all this moral negotiation, but rather just to point out that it's not hard to have Siri respond to things.

So have your Siri talk to my Cortana and we'll work things out.

Is this a colder world or old people just not understanding the future?

One thing is it's less about change. It's more about quality vs quantity and both have their place.

It is, which I'd argue has a time and a place. Maybe it's more specific to how I cut my teeth in the industry but as programmer whenever I had to ask a question of e.g the ops team, I'd make sure it was clear I'd made an effort to figure out my problem. Here's how I understand the issue, here's what I tried yadda yadda.

Now I'm the 40-year-old ops guy fielding those questions. I'll write up an LLM question emphasizing what they should be focused on, I'll verify the response is in sync with my thoughts, and shoot it to them.

It seems less passive aggressive than LMGTFY and sometimes I learn something from the response.

It's the conversational equivalent of an amplification attack

I think the issue is that about half the conversations in my life really shouldn't happen. They should have Googled it or asked an AI about it, as that is how I would solve the same problem.

It wouldn't surprise me if "let me Google that for you" is an unstated part of many conversations.

> Rather than close or ignore PRs, you should start a dialogue with them. Teach them that the AI is not a person, and if they contribute buggy or low quality code, it’s their responsibility, not the AIs, and ultimately their job on the line.

I’m willing to mentor folks, and help them grow. But what you’re describing sounds so exhausting, and it’s so much worse than what “mentorship” meant just a few short years ago. I have to now teach people basic respect and empathy at work? Are we serious?

For what it’s worth: sometimes ignoring this kind of stuff is teaching. Harshly, sure - but sometimes that’s what’s needed.

I never heard of Roko's Basilisk before, and now I entered a disturbing rabbit hole. Peoples' minds are... something.

I mean, it's basically cheating. I get a task, and instead of working my way through the task, which might be tedious, you take the shorter route and receive instant gratification. I can understand how that is causing some kind of rush of endorphines, much like eating a bar of chocolate will. So, yeah - I would agree, altough I do not have any studies that support the hypothesis.

Almost all email these days touches Google's or Microsoft's cloud systems via at least one leg, so arguably, that ship has already sailed, given that they're also the ones hosting the large inference clouds.

If you work in a big enough organization, they have AI sandboxes for things like this.

Ha, did you see the outrage from people when they realized that them sharing their deepest secrets & company information with ChatGPT was just another business record to OpenAI that is total fair game in any sort of civil suit discovery? You would think some evil force just smothered every little childs pet bunny.

Tell people there are 10000 license plate scanners tracking their every move across the US and you get a mild chuckle, but god forbid someone access the shit they put into some for profit companies database under terms they never read.

Maybe yes, it's too much?

I'm a non-native English speaker who writes many work emails in English. My English is quite good, but still, it takes me longer to write email in English because it's not as natural. Sometimes I spend a few minutes wondering if I'm getting the tone right or maybe being too pushy, if I should add some formality or it would sound forced, etc., while in my native language these things are automatic. Why shouldn't I use an LLM to save those extra minutes (as long as I check the output before sending it)?

And being non-native with a good English level is nothing compared to people who might have autism, etc.

Seriously. If you can’t spend effort to communicate properly, why should I expend effort listening?