alt Hacker NewsI suspect this will be an unpopular take but I don’t care. I don’t see what the big deal is. Someone is using an LLM to speak to you. Apart from it being generic sounding, there is still someone out there that is trying to communicate with you. The LLM didn’t initialize itself. As a human, your job is to communicate back, not determine if the entity responsible for the communication is worthy of your 5 minutes of time to respond, I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life. Is that so hard?
The amount of time I have wasted reading complaints about LLMs easily tops the amount of time lost being solicited by one. Which isn’t really even accurate to say, because a person is directing that LLM, and a person is the last who will read your response. An LLM is simply acting as the bridge. So it turns out, in a world where more people are enabled to do what fewer people could do before… they send more pitches. So congrats, you have discovered that with more people, comes more spam.
Specific to the article, look at all the interaction from real people this has generated. I think that we should spend more time responding to these LLM contacts if only for the purpose of staying relevant. Like it or not I think it’s safe to say, this is the new way of doing things, and we can complain about it, or we can adapt to it. If we adapt to it, we are better positioned to help shape it into something that is less offensive to original thought and intellectuality later on. What does one accomplish by refusing to be a part of that process? It is akin to burying your head in the sand and it isn’t productive. It is arguably less productive than what it is supposed to be against.
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It’s a bit rude to put no effort into creating extra work for someone. Effort should be reasonably reciprocal.
Also, many of these are outright scams trying to trick me into giving them money or information. It’s the same kind of “communication” as someone in the street demanding your wallet.
> Someone is using an LLM to speak to you. Apart from it being generic sounding, there is still someone out there that is trying to communicate with you.
The LLM cannot know anything about what this person intended to communicate that they did not tell it. So why not just say it to me directly? Could it be because then they can't have their trivial idea blown up into a 5-paragraph essay with 3 bullet-pointed lists to make it look like they did their homework?
> I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life. Is that so fucking hard?
Compared to the effort they put in? Yes. The problem isn't absolute effort, it's asymmetry of effort. Recently a salesman had an LLM scan my LinkedIn and my employer's website and send me a cold email filled with irrelevant and mostly incorrect details about my personal background and our product, trying to create the impression that he did a great deal of research about us. I replied to tell him that it was obvious what he was doing and received a classic Claude-generated non-apology in response. The whole thing was automated from start to finish. Zero effort on the part of the actual dirtbag behind it.
> An LLM is simply acting as the bridge.
What bridge is necessary? If you have my email address and something to say, then say it! The only reason to use an LLM is to fake effort in the hopes that I'll feel obliged to put actual effort into my response.
Please understand that this is spam. Spam that passes both automated filters, and the eye of an intelligent, skeptical human. A scraper found an email in a post, and is playing a numbers game looking for a sucker.
>I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life
What's 5 minutes multiplied by hundreds of emails? We're talking about a human vs a sea of infinite text generators here.
>What have you really lost?
The ability to see if the person on the other side of the communication is trying, or a person at all. There is no way to distinguish a friendly thoughtful email from a stranger from a robot trying to take your money until you've wasted substantial time on them. That makes all communication with new contacts risky... perhaps prohibitively so.