Spot on.
The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.
People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.
Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
I think it's only appropriate when you are trying to insult the asker. Like if an employee asks a really dumb question that indicates that they didn't even bother googling the question or asking AI first, then sending them back an AI response is appropriate specifically because it's a bit insulting to do.
In fact it does exist for gpts: https://letmegpt.com/
Personally, If I'm asking for help it's because I've surely exhausted other avenues of approach like googling it or asking chatGPT. I've come to the person because I need their input specifically. The people I work with are professional enough and I've developed such a relationship with them that I don't have the problem the OP is discussing very much.
Agreed, but you’re swimming against the current.
Long before AI my tech peers grew more strategic than trustworthy, veering from efficiency OKR’s to victimization dramas, as a natural result of the incentive extremes and lack of a common culture from finding the best talent worldwide to do highly-leveraged products.
The rules haven’t changed since the Stone Age: the person fits themselves to the work, not vice versa.
"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)
That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)
and what if i tell you i asked stack overflow?
What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.
Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.
Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.
And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.
We don’t usually tolerate copy-paste answers at school so why should it count at work?
What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?
And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.
Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.
But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.
It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.
On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.
Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it
They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
Lots of people aren't very thoughtful or wise, including some supposedly very intelligent people.
For further proof: think of all the workers proudly parroting their bosses' anti-union rhetoric, like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
“I don’t really know much about that, go ask _____” is the desired response in that situation
AI answers may or may not be completely hallucinated, and often the people copy/pasting them didn't even read them.
Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.
At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.
Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
I've been driving my friends nuts cuz we're all neurodivergent little goblin people and now I just call them. And they aren't actually mad they're just like "what's wrong with you" and it's just like, look, sometimes I just need a fuckin answer to a fuckin question, and faster is better. And phone calls are instant.
I think they're coming around now cuz two of em do it to me.
Even in the depths of corporate life, the last beacon of light was interacting with a person who may be similarly philosophically placed as you, sharing something. Artisanal home made slop may be more underrated that people think, its a proxy for human connection, which surprise surprise, is a big basis of life
The conversations are the point.
- "from my ai to yours" where ive pointed my ai at some relevant context, and asked it to transform it for other ai context that a coworker needs
- "my thoughts prettied by AI" where i just polished up my own words, often for outside coms, but indicating that i wrote the bones of it.
- "i wrote this myself" in my case i tend to be very casual with my written coms, and ive been leaning into this in the past year rather than looking to correct it, as it gives the personal feel. but for cases where ive written more thoughtfully, i just flat out say that.
Helps my team is small. interested in how this could be translated to more widespread "company culture"
Indicating what you’re taking from a prior source and which parts are your individual contributions.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.
I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.
The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to
Nowadays their job is much easier, just two copy pastes and lunch break.
I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.
Our models need to understand each other, we don't need to understand each other. A call and response to the tower of babel. We eventually all learn to speak our own custom language known only to us. Our inner monolog moves externally, and we offload "understandability" to an external entity.