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I'm Tired of Talking to AI

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Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#521

Post by Tangurena2 »

p2detar wrote: post #17

> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior. It's still a bit better at my workplace bu…

There's an old computing maxim: GIGO. It used to mean "garbage in, garbage out" meaning that if you put garbage into a computer, then the output was garbage. Nowadays, GIGO means "garbage in, gospel out" meaning that no matter how bad the input was, the output was to be treated as The Word of God.

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#522

Post by impjohn »

sdoering wrote: post #164
sschueller wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but how many times have people sent someone "let me google that for you". Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them. I still think sending someone an AI answer is terrible but then again, if you are going to ask me for help, at least make some effort first. EDIT: By laziness I mean that there are known places (they know of) with documentation that cover…

> Some people are inherently lazy and unload their laziness to someone else to do the thinking for them. Exactly this. I am not willign to be the "can you google this for me" person to anybody's laziness. And when I get a BS request, I just screenshot that, put it in a chat interface, have the bot slop out a reply and paste it back. If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate. If they want a hum…

>If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.

Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#523

Post by twolegs »

wateralien wrote: post #53

One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back…

Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#524

Post by sodic »

metalliqaz wrote: post #488
My_Name wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are not self-sufficient entities. 10% are so unable to think that they are simply not able to be a net positive in any job, it takes more energy/time to micromanage them, even for simple tasks, than they put back into the business. 50% are incapable of real innovation. Having met people in my life, an AI is better than most of them by any objective measure IMO.

I agree with your assessment of people. I find that there is a lot of overlap with this old quote: Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. AI is the perfect product for that third group. However I disagree in that I don't want to "talk to AI" either. Any time anyone sends me AI output, I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.

> I simply reply that I can prompt GPT myself, if I want; just send me the inputs.

I didn't quite get this, you ask them to send you their prompt? Does this disincentivize them from sending AI responses in the future?

P.S. I always found it ironic that this quote does the very thing it classifies as small-minded - discusses people :)

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#525

Post by lanfeust6 »

Growing pains. We haven't yet established norms surrounding use of LLMs, and people are lazy. We will have to learn from mistakes first, unfortunately. In this case that means diminishing trust.

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#526

Post by PaulHoule »

torben-friis wrote: post #60

>But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer. This is the killer issue. It's so profoundly saddenning, it feels like watching an adult being asked a question and calling mom to answer for them. There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.

Off the cuff analysis by AI is often wrong. Lately I've been feeling bad for Casey Handmer whose latest blog post contains an illustration with the caption

   (I asked AI to make a better version of this diagram but it wasn’t right. Motion is into the page. 200 kg of moon rocks can fit in a container 40 cm on a side.)
Like what did you expect?

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#527

Post by theturtlemoves »

cjs_ac wrote: post #326
p2detar wrote: post #17

> I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior. It's still a bit better at my workplace bu…

Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a s…

Maybe unrelated but this memory pops up: I once worked with a mechanical engineer who could not visualize anything in his mind and had quite some trouble with word finding and explaining his ideas. He just couldn't say what needed to be built, he could only evaluate after it was built (often "argh, no not that").

It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:

"Why didn't you build what I said?" "I did. This is exactly what you said." "No it's not! I said x y z" "Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z" Silence. "Then that's not what I meant"

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#528

Post by simpaticoder »

tardedmeme wrote: post #384
cjs_ac wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a s…

This is why executives think LLMs can replace everyone. They can see it can replace them , and project that onto everyone else. And they don't see the gaps in knowledge because they don't care about the facts, only the presentation.

I have a theory that most people at most levels of work deal with the same amount of mental complexity. The difference is that as you move up the unit of abstraction gets larger, so your decisions and knowledge cover more scale. E.g. the engineer thinks about functions; the business owner thinks about products; the investor thinks about companies; the president thinks about nations; etc.

But people at the higher abstraction levels have a problem because they often never had (or lose) the ability to zoom in anywhere. And even the ones that can don't have time to learn to zoom in everywhere so they have to learn how to trust others, aka recognizing shibboleths. AI is great at sounding trustworthy and making reasonable looking output. In so doing, however, it's undermining the utility of shibboleths for large scale thinkers! That is the powerful are now deluding themselves that they have access to infinite reliable experts, and have gained the ability to zoom in everywhere, for only the cost of a data center. In a sense programmer experts like us are lucky because we have objective verification as a feedback loop to temper the exuberance. They do not.

If this is true, the kinds of error modes we'll see will be novel and catastrophic to a large fraction of businesses. If the feedback loops for correction are damaged or destroyed, we'll see firms gleefully, optimistically and energetically committing obvious mistakes until they die.

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#529

Post by tomp »

bauldursdev wrote: post #381
jvanderbot wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis. Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious Maybe they need _that person…

Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.

Same. I no longer fix spelling mistakes (I never used auto-complete or "smart" keyboards).

Re: I'm Tired of Talking to AI

#530

Post by fullstop »

frank_nitti wrote: post #289
wateralien wrote: post #53

One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back…

This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years. Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life. It was amazing that we had become so di…

I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.

There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.

A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.

There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.

Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".

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