…without informed consent.
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.
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.
Old reddit would have annihilated that post.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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!
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.
I really dont like “I asked AI and it said X” but then I realise that many people including myself will search google and then relay random shit that seems useful and I dont see how AI is much different. Maybe both are bad, I dont do either anymore. But I guess both are just a person trying to be helpful and at the end of the day thats a good thing.
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.
You’re damn right, if somebody puts slop in my face I get visibly aggressive.
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.
