I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that.

Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.

But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust.

AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.

I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.

Well you should probably find a workplace that doesnt punish the “curmudgeons” for directly saying that.

I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.

The people are answering with copy-paste AI are the curmudgeons trying not to get fired for being “hard to work with”

The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to

EVery company that comes up with a product that brings a lot of gravy turns into place where people like this flourish. They have always been there - they would ask your question to many people, get their anwers and pass the response as their own.

Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.

I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'.

I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.

> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.

Spot on.

The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.

People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".

Yes. The role of good management here cannot be understated. Good management (all the way up) is the difference between saying "be more productive, here's an AI subscription" and people understanding what types of usage are actually wanted and useful.

As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.

Exactly great point here.

I was a bit annoyed with an IC recently because he would just respond to peoples messages with "Heres with Claude says".

He didn't understand why I was so annoyed because we have been pushing them to use AI for everything.

I had to explain to him, its like when google first came about, yes you can just send people Let me Google that for you links, or you can respond politely and reasonably to build a relationship. In the end I don't think he got it and it's something I'll need to continue working on with him.

Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether.

Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.

I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f

Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.

I really am not a big fan of this... Hand-waving, I guess? Around this problem. Saying "well the norms are still being established" feels kind of like a "well don't really get mad at the people doing it, they're still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable use" kind of thing to me. People should already know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. The fact that they don't is very, very telling and says a lot about the people doing it IMO.

They should, but they (some) don't. As with most things, it's more attributable to ignorance than malice. Not much I want to do with what this "tells" me.

Maybe. It doesn't help that a lot of corporations are pushing their employees into dark patterns around LLMs. That in turn informs their own personal use of LLMs outside the workplace

Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.

would it blow your mind if I told you there are already idiosyncrasies in the way you write? not you specifically; everyone has them

I know, I could've worded my comment clearer. I meant that I specifically introduce them in a way to make it obvious my text was written by me.

AI will clone your idiosyncrasies before you know it. There’s no point

No point? There certainly is a point. The point is that I don't sound like AI now. Sure, one day, some AI lab might build models so that everyone has a model that's indistinguishable from them, and at that point, this method won't work.

But saying it's not worth it is like going back in time and telling a peasant to stop harvesting their crop manually because in 10 years someone will invent the tractor. I get trust of others now, which is something that is useful now. Any benefits I accumulate don't get undone.

Unless you mean they'd target me specifically... which I find very unlikely.

I caught myself watching an AI video on youtube a few days ago where the narrator's AI voice had deliberate instances of stammering and stuttering. It's definitely simple to have these introduce idiosyncrasies just through specific prompting.

from the AI developers end that has function beyond mimickery.

humans often stutter, stammer, uh uh , uhmm, hmmm, to keep the "ball, conch, etc." in thier posession but gain time to complete a response to edge case dialogue. mimickery none the less, but functional, rather than primarily deceptive.

Why would that matter? You still have to read, understand, and respond. If something is important and specific it takes longer to prompt iterations to generate my response. It's nice for spelling and grammar correction.

I use lots of em dashes and emojis now to blend in.

Same. I no longer fix spelling mistakes (I never used auto-complete or "smart" keyboards).

I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D

Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol

I've gone back to just calling people on the phone like a true savage.

Unfortunately that's not enough, voice AI is very good nowadays,

If someone puts me on with a voice AI i'm never talking to them again lol.

I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.

The fact that you answered and engaged means you’re more likely to get called again.

I think you're right about that.

...which might be exactly what they wanted in the first place.

if you receive an AI call, grab a pen and click it just before every word, be sure to delay cadence between words, to give the impression a mouse is being moved toward the next word to "click" on.

Weirdly, and MAYBE tangentially related to AI, me too.

I've been driving my friends nuts cuz we're all neurodivergent little goblin people and now I just call them. And they aren't actually mad they're just like "what's wrong with you" and it's just like, look, sometimes I just need a fuckin answer to a fuckin question, and faster is better. And phone calls are instant.

I think they're coming around now cuz two of em do it to me.

Aw. A little goblin network.

I never stopped.

Relax, it's niche internet points, you'll be fine lol

Same, I've started adding stylistic (-/; with an odd/imperfect placement- like this) errors to make it clear it's artisanal home made slop, not AI-generated.

When I use my phone, I don't have to... I usually use gesture input and don't proof read before hitting send/reply/post.

>artisanal home made slop

Even in the depths of corporate life, the last beacon of light was interacting with a person who may be similarly philosophically placed as you, sharing something. Artisanal home made slop may be more underrated that people think, its a proxy for human connection, which surprise surprise, is a big basis of life

I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with:

"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?

I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)

If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.

Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)

That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.

The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)

> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

and what if i tell you i asked stack overflow?

Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).

What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.

Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.

Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.

Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.

And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.

Stack overflow or Claude or Wikipedia…it doesn’t matter.

We don’t usually tolerate copy-paste answers at school so why should it count at work?

Work is not school. Within certain legal and ethical constraints, at work we only care about results.

Hard disagree. If I only cared about immediate results, I'd just ask Claude myself, sure. But I care about developing people's judgement, longer term. And if they're just parroting back what Claude says, I'm not doing that.

Another approach is to refuse to hire employees with poor judgment in the first place, or rapidly terminate them if they display bad judgment after hiring.

If you assume that good judgement is an inherent attribute that can't be developed, that might be a sensible option.

I've found that it's a thing that develops over time with experience, though. And I want people I'm training to develop that skill rather than farm it out to an LLM that never gets it right.

I care about developing people's judgment, longer term. You care about developing people's judgment, longer term. Does capitalism, or the managerial-business class that only sees 6 months out?

I mean it was always easy enough to say "Hey not quite sure but I did find this post on SO, in case it helps"

You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.

What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?

And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.

No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).

Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.

But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.

Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.

It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.

> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something. Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.

Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it

> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.

What a waste of time. Do you treat your coworkers like students trying to do homework that you assigned?

> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

I should be upfront about the use of AI when providing an answer. You in turn would learn that you can find the solution using AI yourself next time. You learn something and so do I. What is wrong with this interaction?

> That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.

And don’t get me started with doctors. I hate when someone just tells me to trust them just because they are a professional. If they are worth their salt then they can defend their position without using their costume or degree to intimidate me.

If the only thing people can do is regurgitate an AI agent than what good are they?

I don’t see an issue with quoting an AI and citing it. Are you defending the parent post’s position of rewriting the AI answer to hide the fact that you used AI to find the solution?

I’m not condoning simply taking the first answer that AI spits back at you and regurgitating that as a response. But if the answer is correct then there’s no need to rewrite it. I just feel that rewriting the answer is trying to hide the fact that you had to use AI to help you find the solution, which to me, is dishonest.

The fact that people vet the AI answer before responding is the value added not the process of rewriting the response to protect frail egos.

The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.

They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.

I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.

This used to horrify me, until I started noticing the type of person that mindlessly spits crap out for me to deal with are the exact type of people I had already identified as being at most neutral or dead weight anyway. Sounds harsh but if your first reaction to solving a problem is to turn off your brain entirely and dump the thinking onto something/someone else for you, you're likely already layoff fodder, even pre AI. Maybe we'll all get there eventually, but for now, there's a clear distinction I see between types of people that use these tools, and one is very exhausting to deal with.

My experience aligns with that. But there’s no guarantee that the criteria for layoffs, when they happen, will include these people.

> I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.

Lots of people aren't very thoughtful or wise, including some supposedly very intelligent people.

For further proof: think of all the workers proudly parroting their bosses' anti-union rhetoric, like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

A lot of jobs don't need a human for anything from 80-99% of their work tasks and can be replaced by an LLM or other form of AI/ML. As an employer, you hire the human for the 1-20% where you actually need the experience - to quote the punchline of an old but gold joke [1]:

> The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.

In many a company, the "old neckbeards" and "dead weight" are the first ones to be cut or eventually be driven off by ever more outright bullshit - and often enough, it is only realized way too late that important "institutional knowledge" is gone [2].

[1] https://calvincorreli.com/blog/1397-knowing-which-screw-to-t...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35821782

I personally feel using AI to reply personal chats is extremely bogus. Worse is those that do not even bother to remove the AI watermark. Like, pasting directly from the AI without removing the AI's personal thoughts.

But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?

It's usually an email chain that they're CC'ed on, or for which they're the point of contact: Sales, project management, or (worst) a VP getting pinged by a customer who wants to jump to the front of the line: "Our new X keeps showing a message that says the brobillator needs to be froodicated, and worse it now runs at 1/4 speed, but we don't want to froodicate it already because that's expensive and our maintenance guys are busy. Can you change the interval from monthly to annually? This is a critical issue that might impact our budget to purchase 3 more X units in Q3."

The right way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to the ME who designed the brobillator and calculated the 1-month maintenance interval, CCing the controls engineer who helped ensure that machine wouldn't eat itself with the fault and low-speed mode.

The wrong way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to ChatGTP[sic], which might mindlessly suggests maintenance-free sealed bearings (that are totally inadequate for the temperatures and contaminants). If he asks the mechanical engineer to redesign it like ChatGTP suggested, that situation may be salvageable. If he told the customer that they'd have an engineer out in 3 days with new sealed bearings it's bad.

Not the person you’re replying to, but, because I don’t know what they know.

“I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation

Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.

Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things

This is an interesting comment for me because if someone said that to me I'd lose all respect for them I think.

It would be true if they bothered hiding it. But as the featured author said, people seem increasingly not shy of simply forwarding you a screenshot of the AI answer.

...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.

Do you feel returning an answer that an AI gives is the same as searching it on Google (old fashion way) and just producing an answer from there?

What you're describing still requires that you look at sources and put a little bit of effort into understanding something.

AI answers may or may not be completely hallucinated, and often the people copy/pasting them didn't even read them.

Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.

Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.

> I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question.

At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.

In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with

  - "from my ai to yours" where ive pointed my ai at some relevant context, and asked it to transform it for other ai context that a coworker needs
  - "my thoughts prettied by AI" where i just polished up my own words, often for outside coms, but indicating that i wrote the bones of it.
  - "i wrote this myself" in my case i tend to be very casual with my written coms, and ive been leaning into this in the past year rather than looking to correct it, as it gives the personal feel. but for cases where ive written more thoughtfully, i just flat out say that.

Now im not doing this rigerously, or obsessively, but i am finding it helps with exactly the kind of friction and erosion of trust that comes from reading things by ai as if i should treat it the same as a person and writing things as a person just to have it consumed and spat out again by an ai.

Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"

I could see that being useful. Maybe have a different color or font for each one so that its easy to see them at a glance and you don't have to keep prefacing everything.

It’s in the same spirit of citing your sources in academic writing.

Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.

Sending an AI response to a question that someone asks you is insulting because it's a bit like sending them a link to letmegooglethat where it just animates typing the question you have into google.

I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.

In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/

Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.

honestly a sad state. Obviously there is a reasonable threshold, but trying not to speak to anyone until you've done a ton of work / research when they know the answer is just sad. Like what's wrong with asking a question? We've entered this anti-human hellscape where asking a question in slack (async) is somehow a crime, like posting an opinion without a double-blind study to back it up (burn him!).

And the same people who are complaining about time wasting of having to ask/answer a question from a coworker which might create a modicum of civility and connection in this bitter cruel world are the same shit-posting on social media and doom watching youtube all day. "My flow can't be interrupted, I need all my energy to refactor this column from VARCHAR to TEXT, and to update this button from onClick inline to using a named closure".

Please, the reality is that we sold human connection for an illusion of productivity and the bitter pill of isolation where we all now feel guilt and shame for wanting to talk with other people (through an albeit disconnected and disembodied asynchronous channel).

If anyone responds with "I don't have time to respond I'm so busy", please realize you are proving my point. You are literally doom scrolling YC for no reason and alienating / pushing away coworkers to argue with internet strangers, sad.

My threshold for asking for help might be a little higher than the median, but, I like this operating style personally. Maybe it's just how I was raised, but the thought of not trying to figure something out for myself first is unthinkable. I fill like I get plenty of human connection at work and collaborate with peers and other disciplines plenty.

I'm not in tech, I'm in civil engineering so maybe it's just a difference in the types of problems we have in different industries.

I do find it very frustrating when an EIT asks me how to do something and it's clear that they haven't even read the instructions page to the excel sheet that they literally have open. I have time to mentor peers and subordinates but I want them to treat my time with the same respect that they treat their own.

hey that's perfectly understandable, and yeah, definitely there is a group that wants you to "do the work for them". I was reacting more to a kind of question/chat shaming I've seen -- where engineers act like they're optimizing 99% of their precious time and mental energy and can't be bothered to make a humanized workplace experience for others.

Humans are already forgetting how to Human.

The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.)

Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.

What a nightmare hellscape you’ve described here.

I think this idea is also from an AI thread. I had quite the same sentence/prophecy from chatgpt a year ago as i chatted about the furure of communication

It's trained on the internet so it's wrong just as much as the internet is wrong or misleading.

Maybe the current implementation

I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations.

The conversations are the point.

And notably, these are still all problems even if the AI is perfect in its response in every way.

> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.

Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.

Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.

The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.

“employer culture” is sad in itself. Perhaps there is less or a different nuance in your mother tongue. It’s abhorrent in English to this ESL.

For me personally, I have co-workers I will not communicate with because all they do is have AI generate their responses and most of the time, don't even check the AI response. I ignore their teams messages and have outlook configured to send their emails directly to the junk folder. My manager knows about this and so far is fine with it.

This is some terry pratchett level craziness.