This is the killer issue.

It's so profoundly saddenning, it feels like watching an adult being asked a question and calling mom to answer for them. There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.

That's just rude and borderline psychotic behavior.

It's still a bit better at my workplace but irritating nonetheless - my boss would "research" a feature and prep notes in our wiki with some gemini chatbot exchanges attached. This is a of course no specification, but it's supposed to be a good base point to start working on the feature. Gemini already chose the coding libraries and concepts, so to the outsider it just seems like all that's needed is to code that into the product. Of course, it's not that simple and it mostly gets in the way rather than help. But now questions arise why is the feature not ready yet, when "the plan" is already there and so obvious.

I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!

Something similar to this happened in a "public" chat space at my company, and, despite the fact that we are leaning into LLMs and agentic workflows quite a bit, the responses were generally "I aint reading all that" and "hey, dude, thats kinda unprofessional."

We should be shaming people who attempt to outsource all of their thinking to chatbots or agents. I think it would be effective.

As a technologist I tend to lean into new things rapidly because that’s how I’ve survived in IT for so long. Since I’m not ready to retire I still have a vested interest in staying informed.

But the OP has definitely identified a psychological issue I think we’re all going through.

I’ve started pumping the brakes on Claude usage. Before I would invent a target to work on. Now I’m filtering existing tasks to needs and not spending nearly as much time in Claude.

I’d bet this is being felt by the AI companies and the correction we’ve been talking about is nearing.

GenAI is great as a tool. But it can’t be everything.

My two ¢: I also get fatigue when reading too much AI generated words. There's something about the over-polished nature of AI text and the missing feeling that you are interacting with a real human that makes it tiring to engage with for long periods of time. I don't have any evidence to support this, but my gut feeling is that - in contrast to AI - there is some "roughness" with interacting with humans that makes it easier for me to mentally "latch on to" their words that doesn't come with AI.

- lead AI engineer asking tech advice - me proposing something (out of my experience and knowledge) - he invoking inline slack bot to ask if what I said made any sense - me telling that the AI arguments were kind of off - he invoking again the same both asking why I said that - .... so on... - third developer kicking in responding with obviously ChatGPT generated message

I left the company shortly after.

Even before AI, you often weren't truly talking with other real people on the web. Even if it was an actual human that responded, online tribalism led to erasure of said human-ness.

So from that standpoint, being exhausted by not talking to real humans might be good or at least necessary.

- Wendell Berry

- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.

- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.

- Claude does the PR review.

- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".

We're just passing butter at this point.

A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.

The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.

I had this happen to me a few times, kindly produced my own LLM output screenshots in response, and the issue resolved itself. I was lucky: I got the kind who - mistakenly - thought they were being helpful. They weren't, got the hint, and buggered off with this. I wasn't really asking them questions though per se, so maybe a bit of a different situation.

Maybe worth trying if you have not. Obviously, if you have a hard-on against LLMs this won't be easy though.

Though I will say, some colleagues of mine are visibly absolutely terrible in using LLMs, so with them it does make sense to prompt on their behalf. Definitely wouldn't lead with the LLM output like this though, not the least because it's always a mountain of prose.

The silver lining is that the pendulum will swing. It's like all thee independent bookstores thriving again. Eventually enough of us will revolt hard with our dollars. And move back towards businesses that aren't employing all these bots they stick in front of us. We'll get there.

[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...

If this happens to me, it's a sign that they don't want to talk to me and I'm going to be let go.

The book in particular is of a debatable quality but I keep going back to those introductory chapters as prophetic the more we go into this.

That's why I suggest and advise seeing AI as a hyper-mega-spatial super-hedge-trimmer. And if we focus on developing our creativity, productivity, communication skills, optimization, development, etc., using the different models in the best way, we can create true works of art with our super-hedge-trimmer. Despite the above, I certainly agree and believe that the harm caused by certain technologies and dependencies will continue to be one of their main problems, regardless of their many other beneficial effects.

This should be grounds for firing someone.

--EDIT--

I should add though that I am still tired of talking to AI. Not because people are giving me AI responses but b/c 95% of my communication is routed through Claude Code. :/

You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.

Remember when you and your friends disagreed about some piece of trivia on the playground and you couldn’t just pull out a phone and resolve the question immediately?

Local meetups, library, walks, and local coffee shops (not places that offer free wifi where people are anyway buried in their devices) are where real human connections happen.

I had a shitty android app that I'm forced to use, I chatted to AI and it reverse engineered a binary that talks to some hardware using Bluetooth and built me a simpler version with only the buttons I needed.

I love chatting to AI.

The people the OP describes are assholes and AI amplifies them. I've met all those people and it annoys me too. The internet and phones made all of these problems worse too but we developed spam filters and trained people not to mass forward stupid meme emails.

We'll learn how to use AI better and develop better controls for people to get away from it too but it's a huge net positive from my perspective

(to be clear, i do a lot of things, but this is one of them, and boy is it wild how important it feels)

Thank you for being honest that talking to AI is tiring. I hope my human words, as angry as they are, afford a little more.. humanness in your life, should that be a thing ya actually still want.

I think a lot of people are actually tired of having to explain their situations practically from scratch every now and then.

A self described "tech entrepreneur" engaged me for some consulting on an app he was working on. It was written for web, and he wanted to run it on the 2 mobile platforms, and was looking for ways to do it. He mostly kept forwarding me stuff he had googled, but had no understanding of "this page looks interesting, can we do this?". "This random forum post says we can do it, did you get it wrong?" etc.

It was a nightmare. I declined the offer of equity and a full-time role. I shudder to think what is must be like to work with him now we have AI.

Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.

The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.

I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.

We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.

Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….

You wanting to talk to someone means you are desiring to occupy their time and attention. Depending on the person, it helps if you actually have a good case for this and if you can communicate that well. Also, have some empathy for the other side being busy or otherwise not that motivated to drop everything and engage with you.

The problem here isn't necessarily people using AI but communication skills. Many developers are not particularly strong at those; or reading between the lines.

https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...

AI is here to stay its permeating through all of our communication layer and this is the worst its going to be

Think about that. Anything fault you find with AI or experiences are not going to wait and sit around , its going to get better faster.

It's like shouting against the wind eventually people stop paying attention and learn to adapt as they always do with technology

Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.

Find people who want to talk to you, and avoid spaces where this is less likely to happen.

Funny thing is, when this happened to me, I asked AI to give me ideas (because online I just couldn't find people to talk to except on HN) and the best idea it had was finding smaller/niche forums and real-world gatherings around me.

At least nowadays, when you see the person talking in real world, it's fairly easy to tell human from android.

Do we eventually get to the point that we only really trust F2F?

It's like The Thing. I know I'm human. But which of the rest of you is The Thing?

I did get a cookie recipe out of it, though.

Aren't we all getting sick of it?

In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.

If the computer (AI or not) provided you with that convenience, you'd never want to deal with a human for a given task.

The 'mischaracterization' of AI as human - now that's annoying. We probably should not submit answers by AI in the form of human identities.

OP is right. I don’t want to talk with AI.

BTW this will be insane in next years as LLM usage in customer care has not reached the peak yet…

I also ask ChatGPT sometimes when a junior ask for a solution, but I always explain him in my own words.

I offered up an answer to my class, giving a reasonable enough answer for both my professor & colleagues to agree; however,

Another girl argued against me saying that she didn't believe it; and that she had a better one.

>granted she was significantly older

I said, "Why don't you believe it?"

"Let me ask chatgpt what I think, so I can come up with a clearer answer." She said.

"You can't use chatgpt to do that! This is about what you think, not about what chatGPT thinks."

"Yea," the professor interjected, "no chatGPT. You have to think for yourself y'know."

She got really quiet after that and offered a subpar answer against mine. And we continued class using my definition of the word.

But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!

AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.

My exact experience. The irony was that we were talking about AI agents

  Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.

> AI is useful as a tool. But when it replaces attention, judgment, and personality, conversations start feeling empty.

I pasted your article into ChatGPT and it gave me the most depressing statements. The above and also about 800 more words.

Not an interesting story, just wanted to share that the other party might not be aware of how this comes across on the people that have to read their AI messages.

I'm trying to have more face-to-face calls, and to talk to people without a bot involved, but can be difficult, frustrating, and not "productive" either.

I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.

For the GitHub discussion, I don't know how you asked the question, but it would be wise to include in your question what sources you have already consulted, so that they don't also consult the same sources. This is true whether we're talking about AI or Encyclopedia Britannica or microfilm.

Asking questions well is a useful skill that is not at all new.

Turtles all the way down.

Yes, I'm with the author. I'm absolutely sick of constantly reading AI content.

But if I have to really dig into it deep, a lot of the people who send me AI content now, weren't sending me anything meaningful to begin with (pre ai).

The number of organizations I have been around where most people just copy paste each other's messages is no joke. This was happening long before AI came along. AI has just made it so much more obvious.

Previously they might have copied it from Joe in Product. Now it all sounds like Claude or GPT.

I believe that being concise is a going to be a new trend. And not just concise, but unique and short, probably even with a lot of mistakes in your writings

So if I have a problem with my telecom provider and I want to get it solved asap, I'd the AI can do this just as effectively as a human operator isnt that OK?

I wonder if a similar fate awaits us?

The screenshots part is crazy.

I can only hope aerospace and medical industries are raising strict constraints against this slop otherwise I fear for the future. Eroding engineering AND communication? Thats a good formula for success

My career was using C# and JS, and LLMs have caused me to lose interest in learning more. I was always a hobbyist Python and Ruby user. I prefer to put my efforts towards skills that are still useful. Software as a craft is dying, no different than being an expert at riding a horse.

The important part now for a developer is a very strong command of the English language, for both the LLM as well as the rising importance of client interactions. As the space is very competitive, so you need to offer value or form a union so you can regain back some of your lost negotiating power.

Most of the developers I worked with were very poor in that area. I worked hard and was deemed a "top performer" in my last job, but it was equal parts perception management. This is what you should be thinking about and focusing on going forward. Improving your linguistic skills, and polishing your social skills.

Otherwise, for someone like me who grew up in a machine shop and mechanic's environment, anything new I learn is more brawn and brain going forward so I stay relevant as a human being. And no longer just brain like software was.

Just I’m an AI, I might fuck this up, what do you need, is this about your most recent order? Yes, my onions got smashed. Ok do you want a refund? Yes. The end.

His wife posts only AI images that are not real in any way. The images are not modified, they are completely fake.

I'm exhausted of all A.I. output replacing normal human interactions.

BEFORE: my buddy : customer -- 1 day turnaround

AFTER: my buddy : chatGPT : MBA guy: Chat GPT: Customer -- 1 week turnaround

Efficiency!

I hate to say that but maybe some kind of vetting on those pages is in order.

It’s not about AI. If it wasn’t AI, it would be some other convenience.

There are a myriad of reasons why people generally give less of a shit now, that we can all opine about, but that is ultimately what has to change.

AI is a hugely powerful tool, but I’m sick of having to treat a human’s AI-based verbatim reply as a real thing.

Anybody that does this is going to be calmly corrected as much as possible, and if the behavior doesn’t change then something will have to change.

a company with a few hundred employees, constantly laying people off, can't support a free service with actual humans. why is that not obvious? if it was a regular automated script or markov chain what would change? Nothing.

Like, there are plenty of good places to direct contempt for AI that are productive. every time i read something like this, it only makes me think how many people also like me think it's silly but won't comment for fear of going against popular sentiment. AI has plenty of good use, one of them is reading natural language input and responding to simple questions.

I too have found malware plenty on Github, they have a reporting form. that's it. you don't get a human, i can't image a human replying to every true and false report. if they get to it within days I'd call that a feat. Even if a human replied to you, they'd have to use canned responses in most of these scenarios.

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.

I threw it to Claude and a minute later had a "look at packet 131 and 136, it's on their side."

Yeah, it is exhausting to read verbose slop. But you're the author.

I used to be extremely verbose, and AI has helped me appreciate brevity because now I'm being exposed to it.

I would love to be without the "Top 5 Kubernetes commands" slop images LinkedIn feeds me.

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

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.

Maybe I can increase the weights on slop in my spam filter.

(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)

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 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.

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"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053203

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.