alt Hacker NewsI'm Tired of Talking to AI
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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.
sounds like a Monty Python sketch ...
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.
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.
in a couple of years you can not trust if you write someone. bot? Ai? Human?
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...
You're tired of AI? Buddy, I'm tired of AI. We're all tired of 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 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.
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)
Go outside
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.
K
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.
What a weird first world problem this guy has …
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"
Benveniuto!
Hot take - who still actually uses the actual chat features for general conversation in the dev community?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
"Let me google that for you" has been replaced by "Let me AI that for you"
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.
The tragedy is we could just stop, but we won't.
Maybe this is a signal the author themselves needs to get better at adopting AI...
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.
Refuse. Reject. Rebel.
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.
AI made writing cheap, but it's a human thing to validate, research and respond! It's human slop! Not AI slop!
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.
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.
this is quite dystopian
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.
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
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.
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.
lol
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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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