alt Hacker NewsWhat I hate about this whole thing, is that there are many reasons someone might reach out to a coworker with questions. Not all require the knowledge in fancy markdown with emojis.
Maybe they want to show respect to a person by asking their opinion before proceeding with a change
Maybe they want to share context and make that person aware of what they're thinking without being so obvious
Maybe they need _that person_ to provide some assurances directly because they are not confident in thier plan (see 1)
Maybe they are just in a rut and need to start a conversation with a person
Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
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I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with:
"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?
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
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.
For me personally, I have co-workers I will not communicate with because all they do is have AI generate their responses and most of the time, don't even check the AI response. I ignore their teams messages and have outlook configured to send their emails directly to the junk folder. My manager knows about this and so far is fine with it.
Agree wholeheartedly. I have actually started introducing small idiosyncrasies into my text to make it clear that my words come from me and not a bot.
I'm reminded of a beer I had with a friend who's involved at change management for some large corporates. He was saying that when a lot of organizations focus on process improvements (more 'agility') they tend to get bogged down in the formality of exactly what to report and how (OKRs etc) when these are just tools through which you have difficult conversations.
The conversations are the point.
Humans are already forgetting how to Human.
And notably, these are still all problems even if the AI is perfect in its response in every way.
In a small team, or an aware team, where AI is being used all the time and we are figuring out the best way to do it, i often just preface my messages with
- "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"
I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that.
Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.
The writing is on the wall. We are headed for a world where everybody interprets everybody through a personalized model. (corporations too.)
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.
> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
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".