It's rude to show AI output to people • Hacker News Board

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#101

Post by mook » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #39

>> "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said: ". > Whoa, let me stop you right here buddy, what you're doing here is extremely, horribly rude. How is it any different from "I read book and it said that..."? Or "Book has the following quote about that:"? I definitely want to know where people are getting their info. It helps me understand how trustworthy it might be. It's not rude, it's providing proper context.

To me, it's different because having read a book, remembered it, and pulled out the quote means you spent time on it. Pasting a response from ChatGPT means you didn't even bother reading that, understand the output, thought about it to make sure it makes sense, and then resynthesize it.

It mostly means you don't respect the other person's time and it's making them do the vetting. And that's the rude part.

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#102

Post by scarface_74 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

lvl155 wrote: post #38

While I understand this sentiment, some people simply suck at writing nice emails or have a major communication issue. It’s also not bad to run your important emails through multiple edits via AI.

I work with a lot of people who are in Spanish speaking countries who have English as a second language. I would much rather read their own words with grammatical errors than perfect AI slop.

Hell I would rather just read their reply in Spanish and if they need to write it out really fast without struggling trying to translate it and I use my own B1 level Spanish comprehension than read AI generated slop.

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#103

Post by yoyohello13 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

z3c0 wrote: post #44

lvl155 wrote: post #38

While I understand this sentiment, some people simply suck at writing nice emails or have a major communication issue. It’s also not bad to run your important emails through multiple edits via AI.

Is it too much to ask them to learn? People can have poor communication habits and still write* a thoughtful email.

Seriously. If you can’t spend effort to communicate properly, why should I expend effort listening?

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#104

Post by lxgr » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

marliechiller wrote: post #78

> "For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading" Such a great point and one which I hadn't considered. With LLMs, we've flipped this equation, and it's having all sorts of weird consequences. Most obviously for me is how much more time I'm spending on code reviews. Its massively increased the importance of making the PR as digestible as possible for the reviewer, as now both author and reviewer are m…

Yes, just like painting a picture used to be extremely time-consuming compared to looking at a scene. Today, these take roughly the same effort.

Humanity has survived and adapted, and all in all, I'm glad to live in a world with photography in it.

That said, part of that adaptation will probably involve the evolution of a strong stigma against undeclared and poorly verified/curated AI-generated content.

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#105

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

herval wrote: post #72

phito wrote: post #4

I really wish some of my coworkers would stop using LLMs to write me emails or even Teams messages. It does feel extremely rude, to the point I don't even want to read them anymore.

have you tried sharing that feedback with them? one of my reports started responding to questions with AI Slop. I asked if he was actually writing those sentences (he wasn't), so I gave him that exact feedback - it felt to me like he wasn't even listening, when he clearly jut copy-pasted clearly AI responses. Thankfully he stopped doing it. Of course as models get better at writing, it'll be harder and harder to tell…

[deleted]

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#106

Post by accrual » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

gigatree wrote: post #31

Someone telling you about a conversation they had with ChatGPT is the new telling someone about your dream last night (which sucks because I’ve had a lot of conversations I wanna share lol).

I think it's different to talk about a conversation with AI versus just passing the AI output to someone directly.

The former is like "hey, I had this experience, here's what it was about, what I learned and how it affected me" which is a very human experience and totally valid to share. The latter is like "I created some input, here's the output, now I want you reflect and/or act on it".

For example I've used Claude and ChatGPT to reflect and chat about life experiences and left feeling like I gained something, and sometimes I'll talk to my friends or SO about it. But I'd never share the transcript unless they asked for it.

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#107

Post by lxgr » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

hks0 wrote: post #79

> "I vibe-coded this pull request in just 15 minutes. Please review" > > Well, why don't you review it first? My current day to day problem is that, the PRs don't come with that disclaimer; The authors won't even admit if asked directly. Yet I know my comments on the PR will be fed to the cursor so it makes more crappy edits, and I'll be expecting an entirely different PR in 10 minutes to review from scratch without…

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. If somebody asks for my time to review slop, especially without a disclaimer, I'll simply not be reviewing their pull requests going forward.

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#108

Post by mook » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

lysace wrote: post #55

cm2012 wrote: post #29

I couldn't disagree more. Its like someone going to Wikipedia to helpfully copy and paste a summary of an issue. Fast and with a good enough level of accuracy. Generally the AI summaries I see are more topical and accurate than the many other comments in the thread.

They are mostly posturing. I don't see any problem sharing a human-reviewed LLM output. (I also figure that human review may not be that necessary in a few years.)

But it's the human review that makes it not rude; not bothering to review means you're wasting the other person's time. If they wanted a chatbot response they could have went to the LLM directly.

It's like pointing to a lmgtfy link. That's _intentionally_ rude, in that it's normally used when the question isn't worth the thought. That's what pasting a chatbot response says.

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#109

Post by craftkiller » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

hks0 wrote: post #79

> "I vibe-coded this pull request in just 15 minutes. Please review" > > Well, why don't you review it first? My current day to day problem is that, the PRs don't come with that disclaimer; The authors won't even admit if asked directly. Yet I know my comments on the PR will be fed to the cursor so it makes more crappy edits, and I'll be expecting an entirely different PR in 10 minutes to review from scratch without…

Show their manager?

Re: It's rude to show AI output to people

#110

Post by lxgr » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

GPerson wrote: post #89

lvl155 wrote: post #38

While I understand this sentiment, some people simply suck at writing nice emails or have a major communication issue. It’s also not bad to run your important emails through multiple edits via AI.

Seems like there are potential privacy issues involved in sharing important emails with these companies, especially if you are sharing what the other person sent as well.

Almost all email these days touches Google's or Microsoft's cloud systems via at least one leg, so arguably, that ship has already sailed, given that they're also the ones hosting the large inference clouds.