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Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

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Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#181

Post by redhale »

wccrawford wrote: post #156
seer wrote: 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.

Not quite, or at least not in my experience.

The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#182

Post by nchmy »

lelanthran wrote: post #162
croon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it. Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happ…

> The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea. The people arguing that round-tripping their thoughts through AI still means that it's their thoughts appare…

I don't think you quite realize the implications of what you're saying.

Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?

If someone is feigning competence via AI, that's the problem. Not Ai.

If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#183

Post by nchmy »

croon wrote: post #158
nchmy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years. Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said i…

> Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothere…

Let's fire all editors, consultants, psychologists, sous chefs, grunts, etc!

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#184

Post by nchmy »

salawat wrote: post #166
jorisw wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't. There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.

There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case. There's something profoundly disrespectful about forcibly scraping the human corpora without asking for permission first, or considering comp…

I agree. But this is a separate conversation, which (unfortunately) seems to be pointless at this point.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#187

Post by Grombobulous »

I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are a lot of people asking obvious questions where they are just abusing your time and offloading work onto you.

Pasting AI output verbatim is the modern day equivalent of “let me google that for you.”

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#188

Post by nchmy »

chronid wrote: post #152
nchmy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree at all. But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts. Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself , which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking). So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communic…

> But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts. There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email. You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to arti…

To be very clear, I NEVER advocated for copy pasting thoughtless LLM output anywhere. Literally quite the opposite.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#189

Post by ModernMech »

croon wrote: post #158
nchmy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years. Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said i…

> Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothere…

Because it can’t do a great job without frequent expert input, that’s the point.

Expert types prompt into Claude , Claude produces fundamentally flawed but close output. Don’t take that output and give it to anyone — first refine it until it’s not flawed, then pass it on.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#190

Post by gabosarmiento »

AI;DR This is the broader symptom of a global toxic corporate culture.

We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.

But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.

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