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Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

171–180 of 632 posts

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#171

Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is: Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for your…

Why write all that when just: we do not use AI in client or intercompany communications? Like is your insight that copying and pasting something is not understanding it? Do people seriously not known this? There is no need to Socrates when writing policy docs. Maybe this is why people ignore reading your actual voice messages that you feel a need to also justify this basic request. Sometimes the human voice thinks to…

Because if you think and act as your colleagues are just disposable soldiers that must follow direct, simple orders, then your org will eventually be made of that kind of people.

And maybe GP doesn't want that.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#172
post #11

What if English is not your first language and you are afraid of sounding silly when you email or text someone?

If you respond to me with slightly "off" english, I at least know it was a fellow human who wrote it and I will act accordingly.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#173
post #35

I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions. Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me. Otherwise…

If they user types "x broken" or "i do y" into Claude or ChatGPT with no context, that's absolutely no better than just sending it to you. I'd argue that it's worse because now you have no idea what the actual original context was, just the AI's hallucination of it.

You'd think two decades of StackOverflow would've teached people how to ask a good question.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#174
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying. The fundamental i…

> I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. Theoritically yes. In practice: - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise…

> - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea

Evidently the people you are communicating with are not good writers/thinkers. That's the prerequisite for effectively using AI for writing help. Just as its the prerequisite for using it to produce code. If you can't code, you can't get Ai to produce good code.

So the real issue here, perhaps, is "vibe writing" rather than "Ai assisted writing".

> I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.

Agreed. But if people who don't understand the issue are feigning competence via AI then that's a fundamental problem of not just competence across many domains, but also character. As I said in another comment, the policy should be something to the effect of "you're paid for competence, integrity etc. If you don't have that, we don't need you. Take that into account when you use Ai"

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#175

Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is: Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for your…

Good luck with that, I hope you are in a better org that I am in that regard. I wanted to do that, proposed it in a directors' meeting and got push back from directors already using the Slack MCP to post normal conversations on their behalf (90% of time, pure slop).

What you wrote just seems common sense to me, and I'm hopeful it will emerge as such given enough time.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#177
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. Theoritically yes. In practice: - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise…

> Theoritically yes. In practice: I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it. We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, h…

Yes, so the issue here was not AI but a lack of competence, prudence, integrity, responsibility, discernment etc.

It's the equivalent of vibe coding vs Ai assisted coding.

Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#178
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying. The fundamental i…

The thing is, I expect the person who sent me something to know about and understood what they have sent me. I don’t expect the other person to copy my response to the same chat and paste the AI response back even without reading it. Don’t be a meat proxy.

Well, In any healthy organization or relationship, there should be no problem with someone not knowing about/understanding something.

If someone is feigning competence, that's the fundamental problem, not AI

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#179
post #48

Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is: Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for your…

Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.

This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute.

It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type.

I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks.

I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#180
post #35

I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions. Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me. Otherwise…

I take your point but I have two counterpoints: 1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter 2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good pro…

Well I mean… you didn’t come into this comment section saying “hello” and then waiting for someone to say hello back before commenting, right? And you don’t do that in emails either, right?

Because that would be super out of place, and you understand that intuitively.

That’s all nohello is about. It’s not trying to say “don’t be nice and say hi”, it’s saying “batch your hello and your question in the same message please”. Asynchronous communication mediums need an asynchronous communication style, it’s not that hard.

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