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Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by rickydroll on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:41AM (#48294225)
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?

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by sixtyj on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:11AM (#48294685)
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 :)

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by lazystar on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:54AM (#48295309)
> 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?

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by batshit_beaver on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:25AM (#48295752)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by true_religion on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:49PM (#48296938)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by sixtyj on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:28AM (#48295800)
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?

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by nradov on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:03PM (#48296289)
Work is not school. Within certain legal and ethical constraints, at work we only care about results.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by hoistbypetard on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:30PM (#48296675)
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.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by nradov on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:22PM (#48300074)
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.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by hoistbypetard on Friday May 29, 2026 @12:41AM (#48319124)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by abalashov on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:29PM (#48297534)
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?
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by dbalatero on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:11AM (#48295551)
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"
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by jimbokun on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:45AM (#48295185)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by __david__ on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:52AM (#48296117)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by autoexec on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:46PM (#48296894)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by autoexec on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:38PM (#48296786)
> 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

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by kjreact on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:47PM (#48300425)
> 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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by PearlRiver on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:53PM (#48303392)
If the only thing people can do is regurgitate an AI agent than what good are they?
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by kjreact on Thursday May 28, 2026 @03:02PM (#48313820)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by LeifCarrotson on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:52AM (#48294397)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by jimbokun on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:46AM (#48295203)
I’m just wondering how those people don’t understand they are strongly signaling their job can be fully done by an LLM.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by JohnMakin on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:29PM (#48296659)
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.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by zbentley on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:47PM (#48296910)
My experience aligns with that. But there’s no guarantee that the criteria for layoffs, when they happen, will include these people.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by palmotea on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:06AM (#48295470)
> 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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by mschuster91 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:55PM (#48299684)
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

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by LizzM on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:56AM (#48296179)
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.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by sumanthvepa on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:01AM (#48294538)
But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by LeifCarrotson on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:14PM (#48299936)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by holden_nelson on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:21AM (#48294837)
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

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by jimbokun on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:47AM (#48295209)
Maybe it’s part of the things required by their job description to understand.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by jamespo on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:10AM (#48294681)
Maybe they are hoping for a tiny bit of research / looking into things
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by footy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:26PM (#48298368)
This is an interesting comment for me because if someone said that to me I'd lose all respect for them I think.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by mekoka on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:28AM (#48295792)
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.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by 48terry on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:56AM (#48295339)
...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.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by LizzM on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:53AM (#48296132)
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?
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by Hugsbox on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:36PM (#48296758)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by waisbrot on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:18PM (#48297385)
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.

Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI by II2II on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:18AM (#48295657)
> 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.