Technology

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.

Every now and then I see a guy barging in a topic bringing nothing else than "I asked [some AI service] and here's what it said", followed by 3 paragraphs of AI-gened gibberish. And then when it's not well received they just don't seem to understand.

It's baffling to me. Anyone can ask an AI. A lot of people specifically don't, because they don't want to battle with its output for an hour trying to sort out from where it got its information, whether it represented it well, or even whether it just hallucinated half of it.

And those guys come posting a wall of text they may or may not have read themselves, and then they have the gall to go "What's the problem, is any of that wrong?"... Dude, the problem is you have no fucking idea if it's wrong yourself, have nothing to back it up, and have only brought automated noise to the conversation.

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.

Personally, I don't mind the "I asked AI and it said..." Because I can choose to ignore anything that follows.

Yes, I can judge the sender. But consent is still in my hands.

Otherwise, I largely agree with the article on its points, and also appreciate it raising the overall topic of etiquette given a new technology.

Like the shift to smart phones, this changes the social landscape.

Here's a question regarding the informed consent part.

The article gives the example of asking whether the recipient wants the AI's answer shared.

"I had a helpful chat with ChatGPT about this topic some time ago and can share a log with you if you want."

Do you (I mean generally people reading this thread, not OP specifically) think Lemmy's spoiler formatting would count as informed consent if properly labeled as containing AI text? I mean, the user has to put in the effort to open the spoiler manually.

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

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.

I like the premise behind this.

But how do we differentiate? Unless explicitly mentioned, it might be hard to tell the difference between AI and native human message.

It's enough for the other side not to mention the message is AI-generated to fool us for quite a while.

Blindsight mentioned!

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

This has been my biggest problem with it. It places a cognitive load on me that wasn't there before, having to cut through the noise.

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.

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.

You're damn right, if somebody puts slop in my face I get visibly aggressive.

Sometimes people are my old job post AI stuff and I just tell them "stop using the lie machine"

I think sometimes when we ask people something we're not just seeking information. We're also engaging with other humans. We're connecting, signaling something, communicating something with the question, and so on. I use LLMs when I literally just want to know something, but I also try to remember the value of talking to other human beings as well.

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.