…without informed consent.
For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.
Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can’t rely on proof-of-thought anymore.
This is what makes AI so insidious. It’s like email spam. It puts the burden on the reader to determine and sort ham from spam.
I am not sure the kind of people who think using the thieving bullshit slop machine is a fine thing to do to can be trusted to have appropriate ideas about rudeness and etiquette.
The worst is being in a technical role, and having project managers and marketing people telling me how it is based on some chathpt output
Like shut the fuck up please, you literally don’t know what you are talking about
Sadly we had that problem before AI too… “Some dude I know told me this is super easy to do”
I work in a Technical Assistance Center for a networking company. Last night, while working, I got a ticket where the person kept sending troubleshooting summaries they asked ChatGPT to write.
Speedrun me not reading your ticket any%.
This is exactly something that has annoyed me in a sports community I follow back on Reddit. Posts with titles along the lines of “I asked ChatGPT what it thinks will happen in the game this weekend and here is what it said”.
Why? What does ChatGPT add to the conversation here? Asking the question directly in the subreddit would have encouraged the same discussion.
We’ve also learned nothing about the OPs opinion on the matter, other than maybe that they don’t have one. And even more to the point, it’s so intellectually lazy that it just feels like karma farming. “Ya I have nothing to add but I do love me them updoots”.
I would rather someone posted saying they knew shit all about the sport but they were interested, than someone feigning knowledge by using ChatGPT as some sort of novel point of view, which it never is. It’s ways the most milquetoast response possible, ironically adding less to the conversation than the question it’s responding to.
But that argument always just feels overly combative for what is otherwise a pretty relaxed sports community. It’s just not worth having that fight there.
Old reddit would have annihilated that post.
Why? What does ChatGPT add to the conversation here? Asking the question directly in the subreddit would have encouraged the same discussion.
I guess it has some tabloid-like value. which if counts as value, tells a lot about the other party.
Treating an LLM like a novelty oracle seems okay-ish to me, it’s a bit like predicting who will win the game by seeing which bowl a duck will eat from. Except minus the cute duck, of course. At least nobody will take it too serious, and those that do will probably see why they shouldn’t.
Still annoying though.
If only the biggest problem was messages starting “I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said:”
A far bigger problem is people using AI to draft text and then posting it as their own. On social media like this, I can’t count the number of comments I’ve encountered midway through an otherwise normal discussion thread, and only clocked 2 paragraphs in that I’m reading a chat bot’s response. I feel like I’ve had time and braincells stolen from me in the deception for the moments spent reading and attempting to derive meaning from it.
And just this week I received an application from someone wanting work in my office which was very clearly AI generated. Obviously that person will not be offered any work. If you can’t be bothered to write your own “why I want to work here” cover letter, then I can’t be bothered to work with you.
Have seen emails at work that were AI generated, but they made no disclaimer. Then someone points out how wildly incorrect it was and they just say “oh whoops, not my fault, I just ask ed an LLM”. They set things up to take credit if people liked it, and used the LLMs are just stupid as an excuse when it doesn’t fly.
You’re damn right, if somebody puts slop in my face I get visibly aggressive.
Yes. I am getting so sick and tired of people asking me for help then proceeding to rain unhelpful suggestions from their LLM upon me while I’m trying to think through their problem. You wouldn’t be asking for help if that stuff was helping you!
This is a good post.
Thinking about it some more, I don’t necessarily mind if someone said “I googled it and…” then provides some self generated summary of what they found which is relevant to the discussion.
I wouldn’t mind if someone did the same with an LLM response. But just like I don’t want to read a copy and paste of chatgpt results I don’t want to read someone copy/pasting search results with no human analysis.
I have a few colleagues that are very skilled and likeable people, but have horrible digital etiquette (40-50 year olds).
Expecting people to read regurgitated gpt-summaries are the most obvious.
But another one that bugs me just as much, are sharing links with no annotation. Could be a small article or a long ass report or white paper with 140 pages. Like, you expect me to bother read it, but you can’t bother to say what’s relevant about it?
I genuinely think it’s well intentioned for the most part. They’re just clueless about what makes for good digital etiquette.
What a coincidence, I was just reading sections of Blindsight again for an assignment (not directly related to its contents) and had a similar thought when re-parsing a section near the one in the OP — it’s scary how closely the novel depicted something analogous to contemporary LLM output.
I’m amused by the 14 oxygen-wasting NPCs who are in this picture and didn’t like it.
