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Don't Paste the AI, please (dontpastetheai.com)
disillusioned 49 minutes ago [-]
Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is:

Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)

mmikeff 51 seconds ago [-]
Any chance you would publish that guide and share here?
numlock86 18 minutes ago [-]
Nice. This is exactly how I mostly use AI. Doesn't matter if it's code or an e-mail. I have the AI do the tedious work of ... well, uh, "working", and then ideally learn from it and then transform it into my own work, as I would have done it without AI, but just being much faster now. It also establishes a natural threshold of time/work ratio for me that keeps me from using AI for every little thing. Also it feels like I am learning something new with every prompt/response.
mscbuck 27 minutes ago [-]
Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.
nchmy 10 minutes ago [-]
But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...

As such, isn't the question really about

1) whether it was communicated clearly/effectively 2) whether it should have been communicated to others at all (rather than something that you just dealt with yourself)

As for the writer being paid to use their expertise, learn more things etc: absolutely. But they could spend whatever time is required to think about the issue and then still have Ai write it at their direction.

I'm not defending AI over-usage, but you folks evidently haven't thought about any of this nearly sufficiently enough... and the policy doesn't seem to be addressing what it ought to be: whether everyone is actually thinking, learning, discerning, deciding etc... If you need someone who can do that, let me know ;)

thewhitetulip 18 minutes ago [-]
It's sad that there is a chance people put your guide into AI and ask it to "summarize"
seer 39 minutes ago [-]
I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions.

Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.

Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself.

And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things.

Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc.

And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before…

It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic

scandox 9 minutes ago [-]
If you're absolving the other person from any understanding of the issue and the alternative is "stuff broken" then yes what you say makes sense. But that's an incredibly low bar and one would have to say - that's not a colleague, that's an end user type relationship.
gwd 28 minutes ago [-]
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…

And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails:

> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.

Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1]

The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?"

[1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.

Semaphor 12 minutes ago [-]
> Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess

I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful.

I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output.

Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.

lucideer 13 minutes ago [-]
I take your point but I have two counterpoints:

1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter

2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.

dr_dshiv 36 minutes ago [-]
Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.

Context is everything.

Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.

seer 12 minutes ago [-]
Hah, I guess we are not far away from the “Avogadro Corp” future - and that book was written just _before_ LLM, chatgpt and the attention is all you need paper :) That author had quite the insight
ra 23 minutes ago [-]
> sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me

I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication.

In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.

chrisjj 14 minutes ago [-]
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…

Really? How does Claude gather that context?

erelong 2 minutes ago [-]
Actually tbh AI outputs can be pretty good and I have been surprised to see a lack of copy / pastes of them in the format of:

Unique human prompt + AI output which is useful and does a good job expanding on the prompt topic and which when pasted saves people the time of having to go prompt AI on the same topic (fully reviewed by a person before sharing it, to ensure the content has relevance)

RugnirViking 47 minutes ago [-]
yes, its all ai writing. A bunch of the metaphors here dont make sense.

"read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets"

if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for?

"It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email."

this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to someone and they forwarded to someone else? but thats useful, theyre literally sending it to someone who is presumably better placed to help you, or raising it to someone more important because they think what youre saying is important

Interesting to note the page also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"

Nition 13 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it's obvious enough on its own, but I'll add that Pangram also thinks it's 100% fully AI generated.

Hypocritical to say the least, given the message.

sam_lowry_ 8 minutes ago [-]
Pangram sucks
4 minutes ago [-]
bananzamba 15 minutes ago [-]
The angry version is even more obviously AI
bjourne 35 minutes ago [-]
I had the same feeling. The terrible metaphors smells like Claude.
moffkalast 15 minutes ago [-]
> especially the bullets

DS9 Garak "especially the lies" reference maybe?

getfacl 2 minutes ago [-]
Unless I'm your research assistant, why would I be asking AI questions for you when you could do it yourself? If you need an answer I already have I will gladly share it with you. If you need my help to find an answer, then tell me that and I gladly will help.
mkayokay 54 minutes ago [-]
Same but shorter: https://noslopgrenade.com/
robinei 9 minutes ago [-]
The article says they could have asked an AI themselves, but that is missing that I may have an agentic context with exactly the right information to answer the question well, which they do not have. For example because I worked on something closely related. Such an agent output is very useful, and taking the time to rewrite that to a short personal answer is not always worth it.
benrutter 6 minutes ago [-]
I don't really seem to be sent very much unfiltered AI output - do other people? I'd love to hear horror stories.
su8898 54 minutes ago [-]
Ironically, almost all the content on that page sounds AI generated to me!
tmountain 7 minutes ago [-]
Yup, I think the author needs to take their own advice and invest some time into putting it into their own words.
suyash 13 minutes ago [-]
Yup, that's the biggest joke, the website is not worth the weight.
isoprophlex 8 minutes ago [-]
DontMakeWebsitesFullOfObviousAISlopThatComplainAboutUsingAITheIronyIsTooThickForMe.com
singularity2001 8 minutes ago [-]
Worst case you just ignore it. Best case there is something useful in it. Shrug.
pammf 44 minutes ago [-]
Agree that it isn’t nice to just copy & paste, but the assumption that your AI generated answers will the same of someone’s else is wrong. Everyone using AI for a while built a different set of preferences, memories and context in general which influence the answers.
parasti 26 minutes ago [-]
Similar thoughts here. My gut tells me "if I wanted AI responses I would just ask AI", but in truth LLMs are not like Google Search. LLMs are more like a slot machine where you put your prompt in and out comes a combination of insights that are personalized to the inputs.
Barbing 39 minutes ago [-]
Or no memories or history.

Would be interesting if someone said “I spent $2.50 using llm-council with the three top SOTA models and think this reply makes sense: {paste}”

(But better “not sure, though after spending a few bucks on model APIs, perhaps {human-written analysis} is in the right direction”)

Also like you, I did think on the angry version “they have the same AI you do” isn’t likely to be right in the consumer space since their AI is ChatGPT (free version?!) and yours is Claude or something.

user_7832 18 minutes ago [-]
You're giving too much credit to people. The folks who run an LLM council aren't the ones blindly copy pasting things.

There's responsible AI use (which I think you - and I, and many people here) do, and the "I don't care, I've outsourced my brain to OpenAI" type of people.

pammf 22 minutes ago [-]
Even with the same model results are different. I work in a startup where they went bonks with AI ~1 year ago. Every employee got a Claude account that I don’t even know what tier is (we just have what feels like unlimited tokens), they implemented infamous AI usage leaderboards, people were getting “you’re not using AI enough” feedback and all of that…

Over time, it was impressive to see how much the output of the same prompt would differ between us, and it seems to be heavily influenced by the role of the user. I.e. answers coming from the agent of a Data Engineer, a Backend Engineer and a Domain Researcher would not be the same at all. Some of us use harnessing tools, some not, but regardless it we saw differences.

So, for example, when a backend engineer would send a question to a data engineer, there was *some* added value even when it was a lazy copy & paste.

winterbourne 14 minutes ago [-]
This is like an earlier internet era when it was common for people to just copy-paste directly from other websites into a forum response.
skippah 38 minutes ago [-]
same but shorter (already posted on hn): https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

Dont be a meat proxy! simple

15 minutes ago [-]
mickhua 24 minutes ago [-]
Disagree - most people aren't bothered to ask AI and have a conversation with it, they will go to you to get an answer so they have someone to blame when it's wrong.
nusl 20 minutes ago [-]
"written by a human, on purpose."

idk about that

amaldini 47 minutes ago [-]
Give them a second brain so they don't bother you with silly questions: https://github.com/amaldini/maldalang/blob/main/Examples/Age...
DenisDolya 30 minutes ago [-]
I think this text also applies well to code written using an LLM.
ppalata 44 minutes ago [-]
This does feel like responding to rudeness with more rudeness. My personal guess would be that people who do this (pasting AI responses) know what they are doing, not genuinely trying to help. It's the equivalent of sending LMGTFY.
usaphp 53 minutes ago [-]
What if English is not your first language and you are afraid of sounding silly when you email or text someone?
kuboble 39 minutes ago [-]
Ask the ai to point out the egregious mistakes only.

Especially today, I will prefer your slightly funny English to something that feels like AI.

And personally I do Support for people around the world and I often ask people to write in their native language.

Then I can translate myself and if the default ai translation gets something wrong I can add necessary context to improve it - which I can't really do if the only thing I get is the bad ai translation.

xenocratus 50 minutes ago [-]
You write your reply and ask the AI to fix the spelling / grammar for you. It's really not the same thing
whazor 41 minutes ago [-]
Create new chat after step 2, then ask AI to fix the spelling / grammar of those three sentences
myaccountonhn 52 minutes ago [-]
How will you learn if you don't practice?
walrus01 41 minutes ago [-]
خب، در آن صورت، من وقت می گذاشتم و متنی را با دست می نوشتم و دقیقاً همان چیزی را که نوشته بودم از طریق نرم افزار ترجمه ماشینی اجرا می کردم.
benrutter 7 minutes ago [-]
Да, тоа изгледа како среќна средина.
askonomm 44 minutes ago [-]
How did people do it before AI? Spellchecks have existed forever. Also, people have the ability to improve, so if you offload all your work elsewhere, you will never improve.
RugnirViking 44 minutes ago [-]
det sker nogle gange! når man er ny til et sprog, det kan være forskrakkelig at skrive i et professionelt område. Men det er bare en del af dine udvikling - du kan sagtens skrive på hvilken sprog når som helst, og de kan bruge deres værktøj til at forstå det, du siger.

Der skal kom et tid hvor du skal tale på en sprog på dit kontor. Uden hjælp. Du har bruge for at øve dig, og folk er alligevel pænere end du tror.

(this being written in a foreign language I am learning is part of the point)

50 minutes ago [-]
gib444 22 minutes ago [-]
I also suffer from this! But it's called growth. You will not improve language skills if you are too afraid to practice them

And in my experience, us Brits, and USA folk, we tend to be quite understanding of broken English

dragandj 37 minutes ago [-]
At this point I would hold that silly sounding message in a much higher regard than I would hold AI slop.
jesterson 37 minutes ago [-]
Use it to rewrite your OWN thoughts, or translate it to english. Not bloat with phrases sounding fancy but carrying no meaning
totetsu 24 minutes ago [-]
I was recently listening to a podcast about mentalization theory therapy methods for BPD .. for a friend .. Mentalization being the activity of understanding whats going on in other peoples minds, or in ones own. And they idea of pseudomentalizing or "pretend mode" was put forward, where a person looks or sounds like they are .. engaged in mentalizing communication, but are actually checked out. Then I started to think about all the AI slop going around .. and the phenomenon, this meme site is responding to, or AI posting responses.. and I wondered, is this a symptom of.. a global society wide phycological functional deficit, where A) we're none of us communicating as if there is people on the other end.. and B) we're not thinking about our own minds, and taking time to understand things..

[edit] to extend the connections The charm of a messaging board like this is bringing "join attention" to a topic, not just sharing separate monologs.

And also, always wondering if something was written by a human or statistically generated could be seen as Epistemic Hypervigilance, leading to stress, and loss of epistemic trust. This could reduces opportunities for taking on new information of feedback, and cause rigidity and isolation.

Uptrenda 6 minutes ago [-]
I can really only imagine the social context you would want to use this response in would be inappropriate / anti-social. If you had a well-meaning work colleague send you something AI, sending this back is kind of not a good look. If it's meant to be an education piece we got the memo...
Copenjin 38 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand the need of need "Satire, mostly." at the bottom, are opinion on things so dangerous?
_joel 15 minutes ago [-]
Bollocks, the other person DOES NOT have the same tools as you. They may, but to assume they do is incorrect.
jvuygbbkuurx 26 minutes ago [-]
No. Don't ask a question that AI can answer.
derrida 55 minutes ago [-]
People are doing this? Wow, I'm sorry folks.
proee 46 minutes ago [-]
Pasting a blurb of AI is sometimes a form of "Let Me Google That For You" LMGTFY. If someone asks me a dumb question, I will often resort to giving them an AI answer, that they could have easily looked up themselves.
rllj 39 minutes ago [-]
It literally takes you more effort to get an LLM answer, and if it doesn't, it's not really a dumb question, is it?
ForHackernews 55 minutes ago [-]
https://dontpastetheai.com/angry/

Almost certainly written by AI

xenocratus 45 minutes ago [-]
... the page never argues that AI is bad or not useful broadly. Not sure if this getting commented again and again is because people are just that bad at understanding that context matters. Not everything has to be evil / slop or pure / virtuous, regardless of context.
RugnirViking 38 minutes ago [-]
no, but it does argue specifically against presenting people with large amounts of ai written text without reading it or checking that it makes sense.

It also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"

dude250711 40 minutes ago [-]
They did not read AI output, they will not read that page either.
51 minutes ago [-]
reddalo 55 minutes ago [-]
It's the modern era lmgtfy
andrewstuart 25 minutes ago [-]
Weirdly, this post speaks for everyone.
blazarquasar 55 minutes ago [-]
Ironic for this to be full AI Slop.
isqueiros 54 minutes ago [-]
"Angry" version is clearly 1-to-1 ai output. I think I prefer dontbeameatproxy
DC-3 54 minutes ago [-]
that's the joke, isn't it?
avazhi 39 minutes ago [-]
This site is AI slop.
akie 51 minutes ago [-]
Did they really just say "genuinely useful" in a post decrying the blind copy-pasting of AI text? (it's a strong Claude indicator)
chrisjj 17 minutes ago [-]
> A short reply from you beats a long one from a model, every time.

Disagreed. Bad writing from a chatbot beats worse writing from its user every time - regardless of length.

One reason we have so much bot slop is the attractiveness of bad-writing bots to the many people whose writing is even worse.

sarjann 14 minutes ago [-]
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kstenerud 15 minutes ago [-]
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wisty 43 minutes ago [-]
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lijok 53 minutes ago [-]
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hathym 17 minutes ago [-]
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mopsi 47 minutes ago [-]
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asah 45 minutes ago [-]
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cynicalsecurity 40 minutes ago [-]
Okay, boomer.
wiseowise 37 minutes ago [-]
Beautiful theme. Author has style.
tmountain 6 minutes ago [-]
Slop style.
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