I know you didn't write this

Another copy/paste reason - I can't count the number of times I've written up something for work on my own google account by mistake, then paste it into a new doc on the work account so I can share it.

Yep. I do this because I explicitly do not want a third party to see my thought process. If I wanted the reader to see my edits and second thoughts, I would have included them in the final document.

It's bizarre to me that this didn't occur even slightly to the post author.

> This isn't always a great indicator.

Right. Certainly not dispositive.

> use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

But he did mention tables. You'd think if they weren't just ASCII art, there'd be _some_ google docs history about fixing them up.

I also interact with Google Docs as little as possible. I draft in Notes or Obsidian and copy the text in. I just hate the platform.

Oh, another fun one: I once got an offer letter via Docs. The edit history included the original paste from another candidate’s offer letter, including their name and salary. Useful for benchmarking!

I don’t need everyone seeing the dirty laundry of my first draft and edits. I too work in a working doc and then when completed I drop it at once into the final google doc.

On another similar but different note, I don't think I've ever uploaded any code written by LLMs to GitHub, but I do sometimes upload fully complete projects under my "initial commit". Some people may legitimately just hide the edit history on purpose just because they don't want to "show their work". It's not really a particularly good habit, but I think a lot of us can relate.

It's like burning fuel to till the soil so you can plant corn to make ethanol.

Almost an inverse Kafka universe; there are tools that can empower you to work the system in such a way that the effects of the externalities are very diffuse.

Still not good, but better than a typical Catch-22.

Anyone doing this should be fired. Both for the lack of trust they bring to the team but also because they’re just making themselves a middle man to an LLM. Why not cut out the middle man?

>But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.

The coworker should just give me the five bullet points they put into ChatGPT. I can trivially dump it into ChatGPT or any other LLM myself to turn it into a "plan."

Ever since some non-native-English-speaking people within my company started using LLMs, I've found it much easier to interact and communicate with them in Jira tickets. The LLM conveys what they intend to say more clearly and comprehensively. It's obviously an LLM that's writing but I'm overall more productive and satisfied by talking to the LLM.

If it's fiction writing or otherwise an attempt at somewhat artful prose, having an LLM write for you isn't cool (both due to stolen valor and the lame, trite style all current LLMs output), but for relatively low-stakes white collar job tasks I think it's often fine or even an upgrade. Definitely not always, and even when it's "fine" the slopstyle can be grating, but overall it's not that bad. As the LLMs get smarter it'll be less and less of an issue.

Agreed! I've reached the conclusion that a lot of people have completely misunderstood why we work.

It's all about the utility provided. That's the only thing that matters in the end.

Some people seem to think work is an exchange of suffering for money, and omg some colleagues are not suffering as much as they're supposed to!

The plan(or any other document) has to be judged on its own merits. Always. It doesn't matter how it was written. It really doesn't.

Does that mean AI usage can never be problematic? Of course not! If a colleague feeds their tasks to a LLM and never does anything to verify quality, and frequently submits poor quality documents for colleagues to verify and correct, that's obviously bad. But think about it: a colleague who submits poor quality work is problematic regardless of if they wrote it themselves or if they had an AI do it.

A good document is a good document. And a bad one is a bad one. Doesn't matter if it was written using vim, Emacs or Gemini 3

> I just care whether or not the ideas are good and clear

That's the thing. It actually really matters whether the ideas presented are coming from a coworker, or the ideas are coming from LLM.

I've seem way too many scenarios where I'm asking a coworker, if we should do X or Y, and all I get is a useless wall of spewed text, with a complete disregard to the project and circumstances on hand. I need YOUR input, from YOUR head right now. If I could ask Copilot I'd do that myself, thanks.

Because AI can generate meritless works far faster than anyone can judge their merits. Asking someone to read your AI thing is basically asking someone to do the work for you. If you respect your colleagues time, you should be sharing your best version of inputs, not raw material. Not only that, you should have thought about and be able to defend it. Throwing some AI thing over the fence, you haven’t thought about it either, why would you expect your colleague to?

I’d add to that, long form AI output is really bad and basically unsuitable for anything.

Something like “I got GPT to make a few bullet points to structure the conversation” is probably acceptable in some cases if it’s short. The worst I can imagine is giving someone a “deep research” article to read as if that’s different from sending them to google.

The unstated elephant in the room is that you can't possibly know how much thought the originator has given to this.

You can't know if it has been reviewed and checked for minimal sanity, or just chucked over the fence.

So you have to fully vet it.

And, if you have to fully vet it, then what value has the originator added? Might as well eliminate their position.

> Why can't the plan be judged on its merits? Rigorous verification of the idea is a good thing that should happen anyways.

Situational.

I don't know this blogger or what the plan involved; but for sake of agument, let's say it was a business plan, and let's say in isolation it's really good, 99.9% chance of success with 10x returns kind of good.

Everyone in whatever problem space this is probably just got the same quality of advice from their own LLM prompting. That 99.9% is no longer "in isolation", it is a correlated failure where all the other people doing the same thing as you makes it less viable.

That's a good reason not to use a public tool, even when the output is good.

Correlated risk disguised as uncorrolated risk was a big part of the global financial crisis in the late 00s.

The problem comes from the asymmetry between the effort that went into generating and judging. You can have one person spinning out documents that can keep a whole team busy and dragging everyone down.

Along the same lines as "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."

So many technologists offended at the use of technology. Next they’ll insist on pen-on-paper for truly authentic work product, and after that, 3 days’ wilderness meditation on it, to prove you really internalized it.

Look, it’s now like, email in 2004. You see spam, that it has found email. It doesn’t mean you refuse to interact with anyone by email, write geocities posts mocking email-users. You just acknowledge the technology (email) can be used for efficiency, results, and it also can be misused as a giant time-waster.

The author of the article here is basically saying “technology was used = work product is trash”. The ”spam” folks are seeing must be horrible to evoke this kind of condemnatory response.

Because judging something on its merit is intrinsically tied to judging the underlying amount of effort that was put into something.

> Why can't the plan be judged on its merits?

Because of the difference in effort involved in generating it vs effort required to judge it.

Why are you entitled to "your" work being judged on its merits by a real human, when the work itself was not created by you, or any human? If you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should someone else be bothered to read it?

We literally have to be willing to get taken advantage of sometimes, and we have to come down hard on the "don't hate the player, hate the game" f-you-got-mine assholes.

It is not weakness, but strength, to make yourself (reasonably!) vulnerable to being taken advantage of. It is not strength, but weakness, to let bad behavior happen around you. You don't have to do everything, but you have to do something, or nothing changes.

We gotta spend less time explaining away (and tacitly excusing) bad behavior as unfortunate game theory, and more time coming down hard on people who violate trust.

Ante trust gladly, but come down hard on defectors.

How can you tell the output is solid?

The creation of a plan also implies that some work has gone into making sure it's a good one. That's one human (the author) asserting that it's solid. But now you're not even sure if that one vote exists.

Has this actually been tried? Plenty of people have released AI generated (in part or nearly whole) media as their own, especially in music and fiction literature.

Personally, I'd love to see most of this stuff disappear from services that advertise it on par with human generated media like spotify and amazon (though I'll also admit to having a soft spot for the soul style AI covers of 50 cent and others).