This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.
I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.
I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.
For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all. I lightly polished each email and fired 'em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).
If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)
You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lol
Nope, I used a minute fraction of the technology they have, along with open records as is my right in this country, to stand up for my Fourth Amendment right to travel without creeps stalking my every move. I need to make my specific framework a bit more generic and then I'll put it here on HN. Or just offer a platform where people can bring an OR key and it can run on their city.
I grant the lol-concept, but citizens monitoring their government is extremely different from governments monitoring their citizens.
We just need bots to read all these facebook posts and then we can put the phone down and go back to doing something real.
My last post [0] has proof-of-work: video evidence of my physical notes. How many people are willing to draft a complete essay on pen and paper first?
Play silly games, win silly prizes
Oligarchs gotta pay rent on those data centers somehow.
The serfs will till and sow the server fields!
More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways.
Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
AI -> Human
AI -> AI
For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there's no injection of security risks. But quite often instead of getting a human response to my AI generated emails, it would actually be nicer to hear from their AI which could give a better context/details. It would be really nice to be able to go, can you have your AI talk to my AI :) (security is a major issue here)
This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”
In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.
s/demonstrate/perform/g
Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"
> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated
Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.
I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.
I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.
Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.
With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.
It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to the next.
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> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.
For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit first.
This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.
And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.
I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my time in those projects building hard guardrails.
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> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates
I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.
So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.
Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really internalise the choices made.
When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role is just being a sub-agent.
Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.
One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.
Brevity is the big disaster of human-generated text since the rise of the phone as default device and the appearance of Twitter. To discuss matters with sufficient depth and nuance, one often has to write a few solid paragraphs.
If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.
If you want human attention, do what everyone has done for the past hundred years to get human attention, pay advertising.
Before you downvote me, think about what a "starving artist" is, means, and represents. Think about all the artists who died poor and broke. Nothing has changed.
The topic is about person to person communication when collaborating. Advertising isn't relevant at all
I think the real problem is that AI quality falls short of the wild promises.
Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less boneheaded.
Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.
I think this is because a lot of people think more is more. Wow look at all the detail and bullet points! No one on the receiving end actually wants that though. When I use AI to write, it's to boil it down to the minimum bits needed. I wish more people would use it that way.
Nah on the receiving end an AI makes a summary of it.
It's the empty calories of literature. More would be more if there actually was more but AI writing is making it bigger without adding anything actually more. It inserts loads of fluff and repetition that takes longer to read but doesn't exchange more information or ideas.
Which is why so many people want to see the prompt that generated the text.
Because the prompt is the quintessence of intent regarding the information to be conveyed.
AI having poor quality is a bad take like over a year ago.
Depending on what you or another means by "quality", it may not have any at all.
Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.
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Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote:
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.
I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it's useful and doesn't waste my time, it's fine if you received it by the use of seer stones for all I care.
However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:
1. Don't send me a big long string that is merely LLM output resulting from pasting a trivial prompt + text I already have access to (or my own words!). I know about Claude too, and if that's what I wanted I'd have done it myself.
2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even fully understand.
3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if it's obviously human. This is basically the article's point. The asymmetry of wasting an hour of my time reading a bunch of crap that took 15 seconds of your time should make it clear why this is antisocial behavior.
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Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would look different in different contexts.
Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."
Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.