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Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

231–240 of 632 posts

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#231
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sentime…

Yeah, Ive had similar negative responses a few times to things that are obviously Ai assisted, but also obvious that human thought was guiding it. Frankly, it says more to me about that person than it does about me - they seem to be the same sort who were/are staunchly anti-ai for coding, which reveals someone who has little ability for judgment, discernment etc. Just black and white.

Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate.

I had such an experience last week, and in hindsight I probably should have written the issue differently. I used Ai there primarily to help me be more thorough and have the whole thing be better-formatted than I would have otherwise done myself (ain't no one got time for markdown tables etc).

I should have made it less thorough and more plainly formatted, because it did, admittedly, scream AI. That undermined an otherwise thoughtful and important issue. Though, the people who actually mattered didn't take exception and replied thoughtfully - perhaps partly because I had already gained some degree of trust with them, via thoughtful, useful issues and PRs.

In the end, Ai is a magical tool that can be enormously helpful with almost anything. But we have to use it consciously, like anything.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#232

Don't make the "Don't paste the AI website, please" site. You can rather use some kind of search tool to find one of the many that already exist. If it's not quite saying what you want, maybe just reach out to the author with an ask for them to update it. Then we get one place everybody knows about, rather than the many many sites (likely all AI generated anyway) that dilute the message.

Wow it’s actually that bad… I was looking for https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ but it appears people have co-opted the original phrase and out SEOed the original article… only to make a less concise, AI generated copy of it mimicking nohello…. https://dontbeameatproxy.com

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#233
> (1) Just read what it gave you, (2) then write your own take on it

completely agree except a crucial step is missing here:

(1.5) validate the accuracy/truth/relevance of it

your own sincere and human take on rubbish will still be rubbish. validating is indeed the more uncomfortable/demanding task here but if you omit it you become just a "human ai beautifier", and this will actually undermine the trust in you as a human. if you are going to omit validation just paste away, be honest and let it be obvious, you can then blame the ai.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#234
post #177
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe you’re defending something that nobody here has a problem with.

Using AI to rephrase things is perfectly fine.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The argument as I've heard it explained to me by someone with a banhammer: "One use of AI no matter how benign is not acceptable because usage is infectious; after even the most minimal use of AI, we can't tell what was AI and what wasn't, therefore the only acceptable position is no AI whatsoever"

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#236
The site owner me doesn't work with incessantly helpless people. Good for them.

I do. "They all have the same tools as I do" is exactly what's infuriating. They either blatantly don't use them, or are too incompetent to do so effectively, which would track.

I have been making an effort to provide an "AI;DR" section as well, even before the term existed, because of brevity. But sending along the full(er) text as reference I think is perfectly fine in such cases.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#237
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…

> The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room

For me, the origin of this sentiment is the culture for certain departments at $LARGE_CORP I used to work for. People would ping me on the internal instant messaging tool to ask for help with things. Sometimes they'd take the nohello approach and just fold everything together in a single message: "Hello, hope you are having a nice day. I'm trying to do X, and I see Y instead of Z. What am I doing wrong?"

And sometimes, they... don't.

"Hello."

"How are you today?"

A conversation that could have been done in 30 seconds drags on for many minutes, and the message trickle feeds just fast enough that I can't do anything of any complexity in between the IM app's alert lighting up again. Extracting what they actually want from them feels like pulling teeth. It's a complete waste of their time and utterly disrepectful of mine.

They are there to ask a question. I know they are there to ask a question. They know they are there to ask a question. I'm happy to answer the question, when they finally get around to asking it. Just ask the bloody question, ffs.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#240
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…

The irony is that this is the exact opposite of the "let me google that for you" meme of the previous decade. If you have a question that could've been answered by AI, maybe you should've used AI in the first place.

I have the totally opposite sentiment from the previous LMGTFY meme. It was easier before to ask humans rather than do some research using Google, that's not true anymore with LLMs.

Now if I ask a question to humans I'm looking for their personal opinions drawn from their personal experience, be it ticket size for a feature on a legacy codebase, a design decision or a product strategy decision.

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