Don't just paste the AI at me • Hacker News Board

I think it depends on the context and also not being deceptive. If someone just spent 4 hours trying to root cause a SEV with Claude and they finally have a nice high-level Claude-generated summary of all that work, just paste it and share it. Don't waste time trying to reword it to make it seem like you wrote it. A simple "After spending a few hours with Claude, here's the conclusion about what the problem was: [paste]".

On the other hand, if you send someone a very personal and heartfelt message and receive a reply like "Yeah, it was so nice spending time with [niece] today!", well, that's a bit different...

Re: Don't just paste the AI at me

#76

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 23, 2026, 1:01 AM UTC

dap wrote: post #66

This really depends on context. Sure, if you're responding to a forum post or StackOverflow question with nothing but the LLM output, then I agree with this. On the other hand, where I've done this at work, it's because I and some peers _together_ are trying to understand something (e.g., debugging), and Claude has some potentially useful input, but I'm not actually sure. And I'm looking to collaborate on interpretin…

[deleted]

Re: Don't just paste the AI at me

#77

Post by dabinat » Sat, May 23, 2026, 1:01 AM UTC

I feel like there’s a journey from being skeptical about AI, to being wowed when it does something impressive, then to eventual realism about its abilities and shortcomings. Not everyone has completed that journey yet, especially people who are less technical.

Re: Don't just paste the AI at me

#78

Post by antisthenes » Sat, May 23, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

rayxi271828 wrote: post #59

Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person. At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses. The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and bia…

> At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.

You can say nearly the same of someone obsessed with social media and brain-rot. If you don't actively resist, soon your world view becomes the algorithm that you are being fed.

Very few people are able to resist this.

Re: Don't just paste the AI at me

#79

Post by TFNA » Sat, May 23, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

anonym29 wrote: post #4

>you just proved that there's no difference between asking you or asking the AI. Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Please do not ask me questions that I know nothing more about than AI. Wish there was something like LMGTFY but for AI. Turns out, there is such a thing as a stupid question after all: any question that a chatbot can answer that winds up wasting the time of a real human being because the asker was too la…

> any question that a chatbot can answer that winds up wasting the time of a real human being because the asker was too lazy or inconsiderate to use resources that don't waste anyone else's time first.

Neurotypical members of Generation Z and even many millennials perceive question-asking differently than you or I do. If you tell them on Reddit etc. that they should do some of their own research or consult a FAQ (or now an LLM), they’ll respond that the point of asking wasn’t just to get information, it was to spark a conversation and get feeling of community and interaction with other people. Moreover, you may well get dogpiled with downvotes by the rest of the people reading, who will tell you the same thing.

Remember that younger generations were brought up on corporate social media where things like FAQs were discouraged, because the corporation has to maximize engagement and wants people asking the same basic questions again and again. So, the very concept of a FAQ or a search culture is foreign to them. Add to that the social isolation they report, and you can see why they might be subconsciously desperate to throw a low-effort post out there. Ironically, they would probably better served both socially and informationally by old-school forums, but they are hardly aware now that those existed, and their default internet device (the phone) plays badly with old-school forum culture.

Re: Don't just paste the AI at me

#80

Post by easygenes » Sat, May 23, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

rayxi271828 wrote: post #59

Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person. At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses. The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and bia…

While I endorse the message of TFA (though do find the framing a bit on the overly blunt side), I believe it's unfair to reduce to "losing the person". The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI. The latent space they exposed within the model is still uniquely the result of their words and effort.

We're just missing the establishment of a decorum of, "even if you do feel like you need to prompt the AI before responding, and even if you like the response, you still need to paraphrase and synthesize to avoid coming off rude and inhuman."