Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 632 posts

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#201

Post by ipython »

mscbuck wrote: post #48
disillusioned wrote: post #17

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.

Agreed and it’s more than that. Comprehension, understanding, and validation. It also erodes trust in the person pasting the information.

You asked a human for their advice- based on their judgment. If they don’t take the time to validate the answer provided by ai, they literally have no judgment. A transparent proxy has zero value.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#202

Post by alchemism »

khaosdoctor wrote: post #140
Aerolfos wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deeply ironic that it sure looks like taking the original post, pasting it to an AI with the message "make this angrier" and then simply copy-pasting the output back to the website. In direct violation of their own (supposed) principles. And the result isn't even very angry at all. It's like mildly peeved internal company communication (also in direct violation of "don't send this to your manager")

I actually wrote it all myself... The original version was the angrier one only, but people complained that it was too angry, so I tried to smooth it out with another version people could use.

Half the audience perceives it as AI anyway. Does it matter if you spend the time or do not spend the time to write it? The result is the same.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#203

Post by stratospheric72 »

gabosarmiento wrote: post #190

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…

Completely agree. I wonder how much this varies across cultures on the country level (like how people say the Dutch are blunt).

I think that indirectness emerges when a critical mass of people decide that they're better off in an indirect culture. i.e., thinking "nobody is straightforward with me, but that's worth it because it means I don't have to be straightforward with anyone else". And of course that's infuriating for anyone who would rather take the opposite deal!

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#204

Post by woliveirajr »

disillusioned wrote: post #17

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…

I'd love the link to all those Principles

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#205

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #187

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.”

[dead]

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#206

Post by ModernMech »

nchmy wrote: post #141
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.

Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something. Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, so…

> I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc

I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as “profoundly disrespectful towards the receivers”. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment:

“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.”

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#207

Post by alchemism »

Hugsbox wrote: post #168
robinei wrote: post #77

The article says they could have asked an AI themselves, but that is missing that I may have an agentic context with exactly the right information to answer the question well, which they do not have. For example because I worked on something closely related. Such an agent output is very useful, and taking the time to rewrite that to a short personal answer is not always worth it.

Your agentic context is still going to shit out 3 pages where a sentence would suffice. Use AI all you want, and then WRITE THE ANSWER IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

If I’m answering your question, and you are not directly paying me for being an information desk, you are definitely getting the AI reply.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#208

Post by alchemism »

Ekaros wrote: post #147
usaphp wrote: post #11

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

Don't be. Read it through a few times and fix anything you think needs fixing. Go simpler if needed. You might just use shorter sentences. They are fine. And then you can use some pre-AI tool like Word that has some suggestions.

Don’t use a calculator, either.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#209

Post by lelanthran »

nchmy wrote: post #182
lelanthran wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

My point is that it is still a problem, regardless whether they are asking an AI to write it for them or a human to write it for them.

Round-tripping a message through a 3rd party changes the message; in this specific context ("Don't Paste the AI, please"), there is no pretense of understanding or review from the human.

In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#210

Post by christophilus »

ModernMech wrote: post #197
coldtea wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write yourself and tell the AI: "Fix the spelling and grammar. Do not change the structure or meaning" then.

Agreed that’s a good practice but for some very hardline people even that’s not considered acceptable. It’s very hard to understand what people consider right and wrong so I’ve just stopped listening. Also people are weirdly hypocritical about it. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths…

Well, those people would be opposed to using spellcheck and grammar tools, too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument against using AI to spellcheck/check your grammar other than that it’s hugely inefficient.
Post reply on HN