To me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.
Yeah, you’re spot on, and I hope people catch up on this soon (it’s already taking too long). I think one thing that most people haven’t realized yet is that reading AI slop bombs is really time consuming and stressful. We’re still operating on the assumption that reading is “free”, which came from the fact that writing took time and effort and written words were mostly meaningful before (at least you read something that you know took someone some time to write). But now that “writing” slop is so easy, reading can’t keep up. We can’t just keep reading all the meaningless crap people dump everywhere. It’s not scalable or even doable.
Some years ago, answering "just google it!" was considered rude in some forums. It was asumed that some people didn't have enough googlefu, so googling for them was considered a good help. Also, almost all StackOverflow could be boiled down to a "RTFM" and close the questions.
Today there might be people who can't extract enough juice from LLMs, so it is not entirely useless to say "I was able to extract this info from a LLM, because I am good at it and you seem to struggle", instead of throwing "just ask Claude!".
In my experience slopbombers are inevitably the worst llm users-- returning a pile of hallucinations because they use some polluted context, don't know how to ask the LLM to double check it (aren't running in an environment where the llm can tool call to check facts or run a test), haven't directed it to write a simple and to the point response, and/or are using some ulraglzing sycophantic chat interface.
This is not my experience at all. Getting a LMGTFY or an RTFM response really did mean that your question was easily answered by Google or the "fine" manual. It wasn't rude, it was an education, even a confidence boost saying, "you can figure this out, I believe in you!"
I was once downvoted to oblivion in reddit for answering a question with "If you asked google instead of reddit, you will already have the answer". I remember the question being something like "Who is the CEO of Facebook?". The logic of the downvoting was that some people don't trust Google answers, or don't know how to ask so they can't tell in advance if some question is for Google or needs a human.
IMO they were right, I changed my approach to those kind of questions, and since that I try to answer like "A quick search in Google says that the CEO is Mark Zuckerberg (link to the search)". In StackOverflow I tried to go "As it says in the <a href='manual.html#section'>manual</a>, the params for that function are A, B and C, blah, blah...", so a mild RTFM. And now I do the same quoting the LLM paragraph that gave me the key info. It is like you say "this is how you can figure it out on your own the next time", and feels less aggressive than "go figure that on your own".
Except 99% of the time they are asking it's because they explicitly need a real opinion or the info couldn't be found via LLMs. But instead of giving an "I don't know", they paste back an wall of text with an incorrect answer that the sender hasn't even read or verified to be true.
At least with "I don't know" the asker can move on to someone who might know faster.
It reminds me of how LLM hallucination is attributed to "I don't know" being underrepresented in training data, and it being a better strategy to guess on evaluations rather than admit not knowing.
Different reward function, but the same behaviour emerges.
We'll see that improve as people move onto synthetic training data-- something now possible that we have sufficiently smart LLMs to create enough of it.
The idea is that you generate fake llm transcripts using your classical training data. E.g. look at some training data, generate q/a transcripts. Generate radom questions, RAG against your whole dataset and look for relevant stuff, if there is nothing there, train a "I don't know." reply.
A moderately sized LLM operating some tools to access more information behind the scenes, perform tests and correct its own errors can write transcripts simulating a much larger and smarter llm.
That's how I'm finding I feel, too. It's not that I don't use LLMs myself, but I trust myself enough to know how to filter that data that comes back from them and compare it to actual facts. I don't necessarily know the processing of this information from the other person, to trust that they vet the information properly. So instead of it being helpful to me, it becomes incredibly irritating. Especially because I just know they're going to expect me to take that data at face value quite often. And then it's going to be on me to vet the data. How about you just let me get the data myself and cut out the middleman?
It's going to be exactly like Wikipedia on schools. People don't like me using AI for answers? Ok I'll use AI for the answer ask it to cite the source it used and then skim and paste the source. AI sti did all the work but the anti-ai crowd can't reflexively say it's probably wrong or a dream or whatever people are on about ITT.
No. "I don't know" may be interpreted as "I don't care". Adding additional info may be a way to say "I do care". Similar to sometimes we say "I don't know, but I googled it, and I got this".
Also, LLM's answers can be good if the prompts are good, so can still be helpful.
Turning up to a potluck with no food says "I don't care".
Turning up to a potluck with a bag of garbage you got for free in the dumpster on the way says "I don't care, and I'm so dumb I think you're too dumb to know this is trash".
This is more like bringing fast food burgers. Yeah, it's a bit lazy, but some people do actually appreciate the effort. And post of the people complaining aren't even part of the potluck.
There is whole range of requests or questions that I don’t care but I don’t want to reply „I don’t care” especially when someone asks for something easily googlable/llmable.
This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect.
Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
I understood the point, and I think it's a flimsy one. Hiding behind "in my culture" is not a sufficient excuse to hide antisocial behavior.
There are cultures that believe the number of chromosomes you are born with determines your autonomy in society. I think most people on here would reject that framing, even if they're met with the same excuse.
When I started managing international teams (long ago) the first months were painful for us all because I didn't understand some culturally didn't feel they could tell me 'no'. I was used to American devs that would happily flat out tell me 'I'm not doing that' or calling me out when I was being too phb style oblivious. Made me change my initial one on ones with new team leads to focus on 'how should we communicate'. I didn't realize how much I was requiring co-workers under me in the org chart to meet me where I was. Huge eye opener.
I realized the same obliviousness on my part made some of my people feel like I was 'good old boys club' because I was more relatable to other white guys into sports (I used American sports analogies up to that point because that was how the management I rose up with talked). I felt awful for making people feeling bad/stressed/in an out group.
If you were acting in good faith, no reason to feel awful. Some people are stressed out in a group or in the spotlight, no matter what. Some people thrive there and love it.
And while different regional cultures may tend one way or the other, one will find direct and indirect personality types everywhere.
Common, if you are in indirect culture, you will HINT that you dont know or that the answer is no and the other person will get it.
These stories are not about people who are from indirect cultures being frustrating to the direct person. They are about people who paste stuff into claude and unnecessary large wall of text - written in direct style.
What's culture got to do with it? If I wanted LLM responses, I'd have prompted for them myself. This is true in every single culture. The very fact that I asked a person means that I want the information they can provide, not LLM information. There is no culture in which that is false. So there is no culture in which providing LLM content is a useful response.
How you politely communicate that you don't have anything to add? That varies by culture. That LLM content is not a useful response? That does not vary by culture.
If in my culture I can't tell the boss 'I don't know' 'I can't do it' and I am handed a machine and told it's an answer machine, I can understand this conflict coming up. OP specifically said " I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on". OP is saying there might be dynamics that can be resolved with understanding why you are getting AI.
Or just "I don't know, but researching quickly right now maybe 'xyz'"? Agreed that you need to at least read the response and summarize... Not just copy and paste
