>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.

  - "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.

    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

    Small minds create work; average minds do work; great minds talk about work.

   (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.)

> 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 but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.

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 down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.

I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.

I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!

Humans delegating tasks to AI all over the place like that, i.e., without adding value from their own, suggests ultimately that the middle humams should soon be cut out, irrespective of whether those humans are more capable than AI or not.

I dont even ask people questions anymore. I'm tired of the sneer and the "Did you ask Claude?" responses. I had a manager say "I'm here to help in any way I can", and then every way I brought up was "We expect a Senior to be able to answer that themselves" or "Did you ask claude"... thanks for the help, so much for teamwork.

I called the local Apple Store, got what was probably an AI. I just needed the hours, so that was OK, but then it asked if I needed anything else. I asked for winning numbers to the lottery. It thunk and thunk and thought some more and came back with, I’ll have to pass you to a store employee. Now I know how to avoid 1,000 questions and get a live person.

> 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.

Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."

We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.

I remember when working for one of my old clients last year that the business as usual slack conversation was:

- lead AI engineer asking tech advice - me proposing something (out of my experience and knowledge) - he invoking inline slack bot to ask if what I said made any sense - me telling that the AI arguments were kind of off - he invoking again the same both asking why I said that - .... so on... - third developer kicking in responding with obviously ChatGPT generated message

I left the company shortly after.

I work on a small team. I talk to coding agents a lot. I also talk to my human team members a lot. So I have decent experience with interacting with both LLMs and humans.

My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.

I have five Gen-Z kids that are pushing back on GenAI hard and they claim their peers are getting angry about how it’s impacted their lives.

As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.

But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.

I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.

I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.

GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.

I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt here. It reminds me of the Google search phenomenon others have mentioned, which culminated in the joke website "let me google that for you." But, I don't think the cause is necessarily that people are dumb or lazy. Both are factors, but another big one is that people are overwhelmed at work. Another question coming in may not be viewed as an opportunity to learn or help a colleague but as just another task to complete as quickly as possible so the task mountain doesn't grow higher. I'd like to think that we'll eventually use AI to automate a lot of the mundane stuff at work so people have the opportunity to dig into questions from colleagues and provide real answers and genuinely have a conversation when they do. I realize that's pretty optimistic and it may take a while to get there but people stopped sending me google search results years ago. That phenomenon was relatively short-lived and hopefully this one is too.

A bit off topic, but I am currently travelling through Europe by train. It is such a boon to just be outside everyday and meet locals and fellow travellers. Highly recommend.

AI makes it apparent that the only value some people bring to the table is that they have access to information that you do not. If now they fold that one advantage by just delegating everything to AI (which is in the same position as you informationwise), they will remove themselves from the worker pool soon.

Just double the amount of words in the follow up. That might make people think.

"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit — a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."

- Wendell Berry

I agree and on my death bed I'm going to realize I spent my life working from home, talking to a machine, and not enriching any person's life directly. It's just so gruesomely LONELY.

AI has "just" greatly accelerated/amplified dysfunction that was already there previously.

Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.

So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.

I'm honestly tired of these articles lamenting their personal grievances against AI or experiences.

AI is here to stay its permeating through all of our communication layer and this is the worst its going to be

Think about that. Anything fault you find with AI or experiences are not going to wait and sit around , its going to get better faster.

It's like shouting against the wind eventually people stop paying attention and learn to adapt as they always do with technology

This has been my experience as well.

- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.

- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.

- Claude does the PR review.

- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".

We're just passing butter at this point.

Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.

I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?

The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.

> 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.

If this happens to me, it's a sign that they don't want to talk to me and I'm going to be let go.

I told some of my coworkers that they should keep in mind that if their job becomes "passing messages between an AI Assistant and their co-workers", sooner or later someone will realize they can just cut the middle man and build an agent that does their job. Use AI assistants all you like but don't forget to add value.

I work in the "AI Center of Excellence" as an lead engineer at a public traded company and I haven't had this experience at all. Just my anecdotal experience but this article is just the author's anecdotal experience. Are lots of people having the experience that nobody they send messages to are responding themselves, it's usually an AI crafted message at a minimum? That's brutal.

--EDIT--

I should add though that I am still tired of talking to AI. Not because people are giving me AI responses but b/c 95% of my communication is routed through Claude Code. :/

For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?

A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.

>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. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

This should be grounds for firing someone.

When you ask people for an answer you are asking for their help. But if they delegate to AI they are in essence saying they don't want to make the effort to help you. They are making it LOOK LIKE they are doing something to help you by hiding the fact the answer is direct from AI. It is cheating.

I just had a maddening convo with Amazon's AI https://share.zight.com/o0udw54W (i had mentioned before that in 5 minutes it would be time to get my refund according to some other policy message they sent me). A convo before this Amazon's bot didn't even recognize the reply the forced me to give from their button. I clicked "Entire package is missing". and they replied "Couldn't understand your response". It's a brutal, antagonistic experience. The kicker is how Amazon keeps saying "we're passionate about customer experience". You were Amazon. You were. But you've given that up.

The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.

Perhaps part of the issue is that people feel compelled to respond, even though they don't have anything to say. Maybe people think if they burn some tokens for you that's somehow a more polite way to ignore you and hope you go away?

It generally helps when one is not surrounded by tactless buffoons.

I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.

Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.

Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.

When you are online and ask any question - especially technical, most likely you will get an AI generated answer.

Local meetups, library, walks, and local coffee shops (not places that offer free wifi where people are anyway buried in their devices) are where real human connections happen.

You're absolutely right! This isn't just tiring <em-dash> it's _insulting_.

Don't worry. It happens to many of us, but it's not that serious. It's really like talking to yourself, given that they're still great language models, LLMs. Just imagine what it will be like in 10 years.

That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer. Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.

I'm sick of Ai show'n tells. It feels like I'm in kindergarten.

As a person running a network of CTOs that meet in person and interact very human-ly.... I agree and see the value now more than ever in human interaction.

(to be clear, i do a lot of things, but this is one of them, and boy is it wild how important it feels)

Nearly half of online articles are now AI-generated. [0]

[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...

In Neal Stephenson's fall or dodge in hell there's a timeline where the internet is so flooded by fake AI generated news that characters have their own agent both filtering info and maintaining their fake social presence.

The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.

huge +1, i also just hate reading large HTML reports that AI spits out.

I've recently been connecting some machines to a new switch and my colleague has been monitoring web logs at the same time using Claude. He send me a Claude-generated observation that the machines that I was able to put my hands on simultaneously must be in different buildings due to high pings. Surreal experience.

I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.

I'm not tired to talking to AI because I specifically instructed my agents to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross, so i constantly reminded that coffee is for closers only.

Best part is when you know the answer is wrong, however the person on the other side is all in for the AI's answer to be correct.

How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?

You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.

Face reality my friend, Internet is now hostile to humans. Time to leave this place for good.

We’re optimizing the soul out of human interaction.

Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?

I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.

There should be a common agreement that synthetic text should have a specific color, for example, blue.

You can't blame AI for people outsourcing talking to you. That's not a technology problem, it's a much worse problem, it's a social-cultural collapse.

You inspired me to write this: https://ivanlugo.dev/writing/first-words/

Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.

As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions. But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.

OP clearly is out of the loop and hasn't tried out the latest frontier models. SOA labs have specifically tuned the new models to counter the "I'm tired of talking to AI" issues using even less tokens and power!

I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.

Did we all forget "let me google that for you"? The cycle continues.

I'm tired of talking ABOUT AI.

I think a lot of people are tired of talking to an Amnesiac AI, and would prefer memory consolidation into the network weights.

I think a lot of people are actually tired of having to explain their situations practically from scratch every now and then.

South park called this out in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_(South_Park)

Humans will get their Vinyl moment. We will come back.

In my documents I usually preface with "This document is 100% typed by Aperocky". And then where ever part of it is generated by LLM, it is clearly marked (e.g. SVGs). It is necessary these days.

Would be ironic that I am now replying to a bot, while everyone else assumes the contrary.

Talking to ai sometimes always gets me all worked up and frustrated when it keeps hallucinating and going in circles

I feel sorry for people who have to use strong AI agentic agents all day long for their jobs. I just came off of a 30 day experiment using Gemini Ultra (all the Antigravity+Claude Opus I could use) and while it was great to re-work a few dozen of my open source projects and to check my Open Content books for inconsistencies and make improvements, the awful thing was it felt dehumanizing. I am now just using DeepSeek v4 for less than 1 hour a day and that feels better: a good mix of getting help when really needed and doing my own thing by myself.

The article is spot on. It's so disrespectful to just forward an AI output to someone. The logical conclusion and end game to this is everything becomes AIs talking to each other, writing code, reviewing code, using applications. What are we doing in the end?

A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.

It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.

AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.

Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".

Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.

The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.

I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.

I found a GitHub that was spreading malware. I chatted to AI and it cloned it into a vm, did some static analysis, pulled the usernames of the bad guys and the guys they were impersonating and gave me a summary and an email address I could contact. The guy replied with a note of appreciation.

I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.

I love chatting to AI.

The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.

We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective

Not going away. Next time it happens, employ The Gay Jailbreak

https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...

It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.

We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.

Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….

My partner had issues with an online retailer and contacted support, which happily went around in circles since it was an AI agent and wasn't well prompted.

I did get a cookie recipe out of it, though.

Aren't we all getting sick of it?

This is just the modern equivalent of "just google it". Which at the time was a rude but effective way of telling people to get off their ass and figure it out themselves instead of being lazy and expecting others to solve their issues.

You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.

The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.

People say using it is lazy but you're not going to outperform it yourself. The resistance to reality by people is what's crazy. Being a developer now means being a code reviewer. That's just the way it is now.

My career was using C# and JS, and LLMs have caused me to lose interest in learning more. I was always a hobbyist Python and Ruby user. I prefer to put my efforts towards skills that are still useful. Software as a craft is dying, no different than being an expert at riding a horse.

The important part now for a developer is a very strong command of the English language, for both the LLM as well as the rising importance of client interactions. As the space is very competitive, so you need to offer value or form a union so you can regain back some of your lost negotiating power.

Most of the developers I worked with were very poor in that area. I worked hard and was deemed a "top performer" in my last job, but it was equal parts perception management. This is what you should be thinking about and focusing on going forward. Improving your linguistic skills, and polishing your social skills.

Otherwise, for someone like me who grew up in a machine shop and mechanic's environment, anything new I learn is more brawn and brain going forward so I stay relevant as a human being. And no longer just brain like software was.

When I think about a PGP-style web of trust that shows that you're human, this is the showstopper I come up against. Provably human people can just parrot the bots.

Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?

It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?

The worst part of this is the person that doesn't even bother copying the text, rather just screenshot the AI answer and send it. That's the new lowest level of not giving a crap about the question.

I go back and forth on this one.

Yes, I'm with the author. I'm absolutely sick of constantly reading AI content.

But if I have to really dig into it deep, a lot of the people who send me AI content now, weren't sending me anything meaningful to begin with (pre ai).

The number of organizations I have been around where most people just copy paste each other's messages is no joke. This was happening long before AI came along. AI has just made it so much more obvious.

Previously they might have copied it from Joe in Product. Now it all sounds like Claude or GPT.

There's a feeling of abandonment online, and the optimist in me is wondering if maybe people would rather be doing something else. This is pollyannaish, but I'd love to imagine that people are discovering the real world, sitting alone or otherwise, and leaving this version of themselves on the internet to an empty shell.

You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:

In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.

I didn't talk to AI wayyy before it got popular not to talk to AI ;)

> But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.

Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.

Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.

At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.

This is the sad reality we live in I suppose, I feel that the trajectory that our species is moving towards is one of over-reliance. It seems like people are slowly becoming more and more dependent on AI, and to be honest, that was always the goal of technology whether we like it or not. Things are invented to make other things easier, but of course this case is just sad.

When you work in STEM fields you tend to interact with people with higher non verbal reasoning skills (often called Performance IQ) who generally have lower verbal IQs (not always). These people are definitively less articulate and cannot see the linguistic inconsistencies and inhuman demeanor of LLM outputs. Much in the same way that non creative people cannot tell why some AI art is unappealing, they can't easily comprehend the value of the human dimension of art. Similarly, people with poor non-verbal/performance reasoning skills cannot understand the difference between AI produced code and human produced code.

Probably what you want is answers.

If the computer (AI or not) provided you with that convenience, you'd never want to deal with a human for a given task.

The 'mischaracterization' of AI as human - now that's annoying. We probably should not submit answers by AI in the form of human identities.

Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"

But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!

AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.

It's a good thing we're ruining the climate so that we can also erode job quality and social interactions.

I can only hope aerospace and medical industries are raising strict constraints against this slop otherwise I fear for the future. Eroding engineering AND communication? Thats a good formula for success

We are cooked. Bots and automated answers should be banned permanently from GitHub etc., I mean the networks based on human conversation.

OP is right. I don’t want to talk with AI.

BTW this will be insane in next years as LLM usage in customer care has not reached the peak yet…

What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)

We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.

A solution to this is to actually insist on calling people. At least then you'll get the person's immediate inputs to your question.

Its happening with me too since around a year. When I ask a solution from one of my senior he just reply by pasting the response from ChatGPT. Now I have stopped asking him.

I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.

Unfortunately this is a skill issue. The information is in the machine, you just need to figure out how to get it out. Most people are very far behind on this.

The tiring part for me is the waiting and/or context switching to fill that time. When agents of this intelligence or better can get you results in seconds instead of minutes we can start thinking single threaded again and it will be more enjoyable.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230104

We just have to keep calling it out. Lazy thinking has always been an issue, but at least it could be coachable.

I remember late into my master's degree in a ethic's class about AI we had discussed the possibilities of the butterfly effect of not letting it transpire. He had given us a tricky word, and I don't remember what it was, but he asked us to create a definition for it.

I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,

Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.

>granted she was significantly older

I said, "Why don't you believe it?"

"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.

"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."

"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."

She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.

> Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.

My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents

I'm tired of talking about AI

You're tired of AI? Buddy, I'm tired of AI. We're all tired of AI.

  Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.

How would this happen? I thought most of these things used random seeds when returning responses. I understand similar, but exactly the same seems pretty odd if 2 people use the same prompt in 2 sessions.

Similar and even more relevant to HN is when I ask an engineer to fix something, complete a task, document something, etc. and it's clear the work was done with AI in the wrong way. A 60 line PR that should be 4 lines, an overly verbose and off-topic README, a function that misses important edge cases, probably because the engineer thought it too hard to explain the business logic to the AI... It's very tiresome to spend 20 minutes reading a PR only to realize it's crap because someone was sloppy with how they used their AI agent.

Urge to paste this into ChatGPT and tell it to create a reply is so high right now.

> What you’re describing is a real social shift, not just annoyance with a tool.

> AI is useful as a tool. But when it replaces attention, judgment, and personality, conversations start feeling empty.

I pasted your article into ChatGPT and it gave me the most depressing statements. The above and also about 800 more words.

Two months ago I responded to my nontechnical business partners asking me what do I expect from AI in the future couple of months or years - people will cherish and value in person talk and meeting other people much more and even this will hold true for minor share of human population and only until we augment human body to hide its permanent connection to AI.

I think the root reason of the rising of AI chatbot is that many people are tired of talking to people.

I don't know who this person is that they wants to talk to real people. Real people are basically not worth it for me these days, in the sense that:

1. they're insensitive

2. they're too sensitive

3. they're rushed

4. they're not rushed but I am

5. they don't pay attention

6. they pay too much attention

7. they're below my paygrade

8. they're above my paygrade

I'm pretty exhausted by the "real people" I meet these days. Talking to AI is a repetitive average wash, but at least it's drama-free and chill. In my experience, real people are as much full of shit as AI, just in scarier human ways. AI won't turn most conversations into some conspiracy theory or ignorant political rant. AI has never told me that Biden controls the weather and then looked at me to see if I agree. I can't really emphasize how much that appeals to me in 2026.

Crucially, if your boss is sending you copy/pasta from ChatGPT, that says all you need to know about your boss. They were sending you copypasta before ChatGPT too, it was just more marginal and less polished, because it was being generated by the same brain that now sends you GenAI screenshots. But its value was, I would guess, just about the same, if not lower.

A year ago (or so) I had a colleague whose messages were all obviously AI-generated. I told them that it felt weird that they were sending me AI answers in Slack and code reviews, and they stopped doing it.

Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.

Keybase. Keybase was/is a trust network that was unceremoniously and unduly strangled. (You were the chosen one!)

I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.

AI has made my experience as a fully remote worker in a not-fully-remote company worse. It is adding a layer of indirection between myself and the juniors I'm mentoring, or the product manager I'm working on a feature with, and many other mundane facets of work. The opportunity to passively pick up on my coworkers' idiosyncrasies is now gone and all I can do is guess at what prompt they might have used.

I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.

You are absolute right, would you like to talk about something else?

I think new norms will develop around this behavior - it's rude to show someone else your AI output, and I think long term that will be broadly recognized.

The business owner was just being rude.

For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.

Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.

It doesn't worry me at all. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’ll adapt by switching to different means of communication to keep finding what you’re looking for. AI is simply carrying out natural selection.

I like the way how you have written this text. It’s short and clear. Not a wall of text. Very easy to read and comprehend.

I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings

- you use AI-generated argument in a discussion. - your co-worker counters with AI-generated argument. - you re-counter with AI-generated rebuttal. - the co-worker counter the re-counter with another AI-generated… etc.

Turtles all the way down.

Does it matter though.

So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?

In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, the "Net" is overrun by rouge AI and eventually humanity has to quarantine itself from them, ironically, using another AI.

I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?

I totally understand! Started getting AI fatigue for a few months now. I find myself constantly questioning if content I interact with is AI generated or not.

My barber recently had some serious health issues and has been closed for probably over a month now.

His wife posts only AI images that are not real in any way. The images are not modified, they are completely fake.

I'm exhausted of all A.I. output replacing normal human interactions.

Many people retired because of AI

I think using AI to help you write or rewrite something you want to convey is fine, the difference is using it as a replacement of thinking instead of a tool.

The screenshots part is crazy.

Log off, go outside, problem solved.

that's a real issue, nowadays people are so depended on Ai that they canno even think themselves and for being so called "i know everything" uses Ai to make conversation.

My buddy has 10+ years directly supporting customers. He supported millions of MRR. they hired a new "MBA" boss over him. The boss' first demand was to run everything through chatgpt before talking to customers, then report to the boss. Then boss ran the reports through chatgpt before sending the reports to the customer.

BEFORE: my buddy : customer -- 1 day turnaround

AFTER: my buddy : chatGPT : MBA guy: Chat GPT: Customer -- 1 week turnaround

Efficiency!

I feel that if there was a startup that would tackle automating copy&paste, they could take over the world. ;)

That's funny. Why use the brain if tokens are cheap nowadays? (This is not AI btw)

This feels to me like a transitional problem. People will learn not to do this. I hope.

go to the streets, meet your friends, the internet is now an echo chamber

The thing is that to externalize your thought process is very dangerous because you feel you know things, but you really don't.

On the other hand, I recently had a problem with my grocery order from Sam’s Club (the onions were smashed) and had to call to get it hopefully addressed. Talked to an LLM for 30 seconds after 0 wait and it was resolved. No accent I could barely understand, no potato microphone, no being put on hold for 5 minutes in the middle while they do whatever.

Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.

Give it a few years and the web will be AIs talking to other AIs ad infinitum

Preach! No one wants AI!

Me too, which is why I do my best to keep KPIs, and do everything else as always.

I'm tired of sorting out what github link is worth clicking, considering the deluge of vibecoded [I dont like this verb] new repos, the pride of minor accomplishments, no matter how meaningless: 'Look Mom. I made it say hello!'.

I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.

Same.

AI is a hugely powerful tool, but I’m sick of having to treat a human’s AI-based verbatim reply as a real thing.

Anybody that does this is going to be calmly corrected as much as possible, and if the behavior doesn’t change then something will have to change.

Opus 4.7 has been outright obstinate to me lately

thinking becomes a commodity

We're building a cage for ourselves

The ChatGPT screenshot part is mind-blowing.

This is all downstream of people not giving a shit about what they do.

It’s not about AI. If it wasn’t AI, it would be some other convenience.

There are a myriad of reasons why people generally give less of a shit now, that we can all opine about, but that is ultimately what has to change.

Same guy also had another #1 on HN days ago. Low score account, mildly interesting content ... I wouldn't discard manipulation.

Anyway, his other "essay" was about how he doesn't take phone calls or something, so seeing this note a couple days after is just fun.

This is your peer's natural reaction to "my time matters more than yours"; you're getting it back.

Your value to them amounts to forwarding your musings from/to an LLM. This does not happen by chance. Enjoy it.

I want to talk to real people as well

Yeah, I have dropped out of the tech biz completely. I'm unemployed and kind of screwed now. I couldn't take it anymore. I used to work with intellectuals and thinkers. This is why I was in the industry for 20+ years. I liked the stimulation. Communication with humans is dead in the workplace. Now it's just a bunch of mindless automatons asking AI. No thinking about the problems at hand. No interest in understanding the solutions. It's all just "get it done as fast as possible." I refuse to work in that environment. Tech people are becoming about as skill-leveled as a fast food worker's level of training. Just pressing buttons on a screen as the screen tells the to press them. It's a meaningless existence to sit there an be forced to communicate with f'n AI models. No thanks. All you AI bros can have it. We'll see how useless you are in a few years when you realize you know absolutely nothing and couldn't work yourself out of a paper bag without AI guiding you.

Try talking to grok its more entertaining.

These are not situations a human would have given you a response on in the past. it's the same irrational ai phobia. we've had automated phone agents for decades. even on reddit, automod has been a thing for a long time. it's always been the case for many tech companies that unless you get someone on HN or twitter, you're out of luck. plenty of HN posts about people who've had google business accounts disabled or locked out with no explanation or recourse.

a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.

Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.

I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.

It seems that a lack of respect is the real issue here. A few years ago, you would have been met with silence, which is probably equally infuriating.

Increasingly happy with ability to simply avoid this entire debacle. Interfacing with machine extruded text, or even people re-wording such text, isn't something I've had to deal hardly at all in or our of work. Ensuring that did take quite a bit of effort though...

sounds like a Monty Python sketch ...

in a couple of years you can not trust if you write someone. bot? Ai? Human?

I think this is more reflection of how important you are to those people so it is more social thing then anything.

I know you think your questions are legitimate but look it in broader context. Use AI to craft questions for them that they will find engaging as a exercise.

I recently had someone send me a PCAP file with a network package dump suggesting that the error is on my side.

I threw it to Claude and a minute later had a "look at packet 131 and 136, it's on their side."

Yeah, it is exhausting to read verbose slop. But you're the author.

I used to be extremely verbose, and AI has helped me appreciate brevity because now I'm being exposed to it.

I would love to be without the "Top 5 Kubernetes commands" slop images LinkedIn feeds me.

Go outside

Have encountered this too - we really need new social norms around this.

Bombarding others with pages of slop that took you 10 seconds to generate (and not even read) yet take minutes to untangle for the recipient is obviously downright rude.

...unfortunately every office has a small number of people that are dumb as rocks and don't recognise this - in fact think they're helping

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.

Sounds like a nightmare.

K

I despise when someone just passes my prompt to an AI, but I do honestly think that there are a minority of people who do better work with it. Not that the work is good, but they don't care to try and at least the AI is eager.

I hate to say it, but I'm becoming less and less interested in structured content, and more interested in disorganized, messy content over time. I don't like the thought of how this may end up in a few years for me.

I hate getting AI generated emails from people. They probably haven't even read or understood the slop they're sending me, the chances of them understanding and contextualizing what I reply are slim, I might as well reply with AI slop. What's the point of any of this.

Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.

What a weird first world problem this guy has …

If the power dynamic allows it, I tend to just reply "Sorry, I'm not reading that".

(Unless it's a) trivially short or b) there's a solid reason to send me it. It's the "wall of AI text" that I generally nope out on)

Maybe this is a signal the author themselves needs to get better at adopting AI...

I was actually thinking of how tired i was talking to real people and how refreshing AI was to talk something through with.

Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.

Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.

I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.

I already saw this starting to happen when I wrote the following almost a year ago: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

> I’m tired of talking to AI. > I want to talk to real people. > But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

I don't use AI, but I rarely respond to any PMs. There are many reasons for this; for instance, I remember in the old days, when I first heard about MMA, I registered on sherdog for a discussion. I don't recall when that was, but it was many, many years ago. Then, after many years of not using it, I logged in and found a PM merely insulting me. I very politely and skillfully correct that PM - however had, ultimately this is not really "interaction", this is just wasting my time (and, admittedly, I already was not using sherdog for many years before that either). Since then I have very decreasingly used PMs in general. It's a difference when I know someone, of course, but random people on the internet ... the barrier to want to talk via PMs for me is very low in general. I simply dislike the format of it.

I find it much easier when it is an open discussion, such as was the case on reddit (before moderators censoring everyone killed that). It's interesting to see how much censorship happens nowadays. That's very different to the 1990s era. Either way I think AI is not solely at fault here, because I could see problems way before AI emerged already. I very rarely use webforums these days, and Discord is no alternative either - Discord is even worse since it is all a private company controlling discussions. IRC was easier than that.

Benveniuto!

I've started to go low-tech and ask noai.duckduckgo.com first, and then, gasp, go to the local library for some books on my hobbies.

Using AI to learn objective things is acceptable. However, as long as it's combined with your own experience, because AI can't possibly understand your entire world, any subjective answers will be disgusting, disastrous, obsequious, and boring.

I'm tired of talking to people telling them to stop talking to an AI

AI generated slop has exploded across reddit. Last year I would see about 1 obvious AI generated post and report it. Today I've already reported 5 posts and it is 7am here.

The posts are some technical topic but there isn't even really a question in the post and then it ends with "thoughts about this?" and people try to clarify with the OP what the question is.

I reply to them to stop wasting their time because it is a bot. Sometimes there are 20 comments and nothing from the OP bot. Sometimes the OP bot says "Interesting, thanks" but never any real followup question.

We had this discussion 3 weeks ago "AI Slop is Killing Online Communities"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053203

What's so great about talking to real people?

The company I work at tries to solve it right now, not promoting, just want to share.

Slop is no fun to deal with, so we have a thesis that slop should be left for agents to read and human-to-human communication should happen outside of passing empty fluffy docs to one another. To realise that, we have a workspace with group chats where multiple agents and humans can work together and agents can engage with humans for additional information when needed. The challenge is, of course, to find the right level of autonomy for the agents and let the agent learn and follow user's workflows well enough to be useful.

I work with a handful of offshore devs and it’s basically just talking to Claude now with a delay measured in timezone differences. What is even the point of having offshore Claude middle men when I can just orchestrate remote agents directly without giving a crap about timezones?

The meatsack agents do the same thing anyway - I give them requirments and they build it exactly as specified with zero question, and in the laziest get-it-done method possible with no thought about complexity, architecture, technical debt, etc…. If there is a mistake in the spec they don’t question it, they just build the mistake. If they aren’t going to use their brains WHY SHOULDNT I replace them with Claude?

Managers send me AI generated specs and AI generated slop mock-ups. They answer questions about how the product should work by giving me AI generated responses they didn’t even spot-check for correctness. AI generated bug reports with hallucinated STR. Offshores send me slop they not only didn’t read, they didn’t even run once because it’s OBVIOUSLY broken. Absolute madness.

None of this sh*t is actually helpful. It’s work SLOP. It’s not more productive. It’s a productivity tar-pit that once you’ve gotten stuck it’s almost impossible to escape.

I hate all this garbage and the total rotting out of people’s minds and abilities it has inflicted upon humanity.

Nothing has made me hate billionaires more than AI. It helped me realize that I could never be a successful multinational corpo man because I’m not a morally bankrupt POS and I look at people much different now because of this realization. There is no way one could get to the place that people like Altman, Amodei, Nadella, Ellison, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, etc…are without being giant pieces of rotten excrement.

>I’m tired of talking to AI.

>I want to talk to real people.

Good luck with that while on the internet - that's only going to get worse. The bright side is that this may make all of us touch grass more often.

"Let me google that for you" has been replaced by "Let me AI that for you"

Refuse. Reject. Rebel.

The tragedy is we could just stop, but we won't.

Hot take - who still actually uses the actual chat features for general conversation in the dev community?

I’m tired of seeing GitHub filled with vibe coded slop.

On Reddit and Hacker News, I often see new projects that look exciting at first. But when I start reading the source code, I realize there’s a ton of messy code, and it was clearly written by Claude or another AI tool.

It feels like some beginners are using vibe coded projects just to brag: “Look, I built this tool,” even when the code quality is abysmal.

I feel the same as the article author. Worse, every Diary/Journaling app is now including AI, so the place where original thoughts are supposed to be written for posterity is now also AI generated slop. I've canceled subscriptions because of it.

Now people are seeing why in-person matters.

I know its going to cause angst, but the net we knew of is dead.

The incentives to keep it the way it used to be are gone. AI is cheap, and it sounds better than what a majority of users write.

Humans adapt. Maybe we shift from communites and moderation, to predefined rules of engagement. If a commenter can follow some pre agreed upon rules of debate, then it doesn't matter if they are silicon or not.

We went from a cave of wonders to a dark forest in a single life time. It would be amazing if it wasn't so fucking frustrating.

Get used to it. This is the "task inflation" phase of the process. When you get a mechanized harvester that can harvest 20x the produce of a human produce picker, do you get done in 5% of the time, or grow 20x the produce to pick? Right, it's always more more more. Now that the business owner can answer your email in two seconds with his ChatGPT screenshot, he stacks more tasks in the free time. You're not getting a human response anymore. Enjoy the slop.

AI made writing cheap, but it's a human thing to validate, research and respond! It's human slop! Not AI slop!

this is quite dystopian

I put people who do some of the BS listed here on mute or block.

Life is better with people who actually engage and are curious about improving things human-to-human.

AI (LLM) responses are catered towards the lowest common denominator / average type shit responses.

The best use for AI/LLM agents is to do work I tell them to do, like a servant who obeys my orders and executes them.

A human using AI/LLM to respond to another human (who has already used AI/LLM to come up with a v1 he wants to discuss) is a moron and not worth engaging with further. Even if they're your friend, it is a good signal that you need better friends.

My employer's IT guy is now just someone who searches Claude for solutions, finds a company that does a niche thing and say "we spent X dollars discussing it, let's just hire this company and pay them $13,000 every year to handle the problem."

The problems are usually nothingburgers the IT guy doesn't understand (cookie banners). I cannot fight: 1. IT guy constant stupid takes on why we should throw money at a problem 2. a company that's only goal is to tell us we need X verification for $13k/yr or we'll be screwed

The verification is a cron job that checks cookies. Any time you try to discuss the issue he copy and pastes an AI text wall.

A lot, a lot, a lot of companies are going under because the fake-it-to-make-it people do not know what to do. And the C-Suite wants to contract out all expertise to some pointless corporation that won't help.

am I the only one who always replies to people manually? I don't think I've ever done the "send back a chatGPT screenshot" or copy paste a response from chatGPT to a message I know was from a human.

why? They are useful

Get a grip! If you want to talk to a human then pickup the phone or go meet them in person

lol

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AI is a new medium. It's used and going to be used for everything. Including communication.

More and more people won't be talking directly but use AI for their messages. AI writing style is inconvenient for reading directly. So you need to have your own AI that helps you interface with the world including other people. To read messages from them and provide you with the best possible translation on it into text that is easy to read for you and contains the information relevant to your interests.

About a week ago I got frustrated with news "algorithms" serving me this and that. I vibecoded for myself AI powered app that pulls news from dozens of source in topics that interests then reads them all and for purposes of ranking them according to my preferences, creates a short summary of the main content of the news item. It also inspects the article and the title and if the tile is even mildly clickbaity it extracts the answer to the clickbait and provides it right along the title so I don't have to dig for it. I can also indicate my interest with upvoting and downvoting news pieces on the scale of -2..+2

When I browsed my custom newsfeed I noticed that for most articles I don't even need to click the link because AI summary contains exactly the information that I'd like to get from this article.

If I had a problem with receiving AI crafted messages from some people I'd put automatic AI filter between them and me in a blink of an eye. You don't even need frontier models for this. Gemma4 running on my laptop, with the correct prompt (written and tuned completely by Codex) does a great job with extracting information from the news. It should suffice for translating communication.

the fallacy is not recognizing ai is interpolating the human body of work. all the people decrying ai slop: this is our sythesis. ai is not a separate thing from human work. whwt the author is really saying is "I am tired of individuals no longer having the leverage they once did."

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