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by tyleo 20 days ago
I don't know what's worse:

1. Asking a question which could be answered by an AI

2. Pasting an AI response to something

If 1 is fair game, I'd say 2 is too.

6 comments

No. 1 has been around since the dawn of time. Remember the saying, there are no stupid questions. Asking is how people learn, including learning how to ask good questions. #2 is just rude because everyone has access to the same AIs. You’re not doing anyone a favor or being helpful - if they wanted to ask AI, they would have. And what do you learn from an AI response?
Of course there are stupid questions. Just look at Stack Overflow, it's full of them. The better approach is "Invest as much time answering a question as the other party spent thinking about how to formulate it".
> Asking a question which could be answered by an AI

I don't think this is something we should be encouraging people to do if they don't know they answer to something. I recently had someone post quite confidently in Slack "I found the problem after some GPT research", followed by an absolute nonsense solution that would have cost us significant time and money if they tried to implement it.

If you don't have an understanding of the domain you're asking questions in, it can be dangerous to ask the plausible sounding answer generation machine.

You should know. I find it hard to believe, in fact, that you don't know.

Telling people they shouldn't even ask questions that can theoretically be Googled/AI'd with enough time or blind trust is hideous in the extreme, and absolutely antithetical to the ideas of humanity and intellectual curiosity. I would like to never hear such a suggestion come out of anybody's mouth, particularly on HN.

If you want to know the truth I find it worse to ask questions that folks can answer themselves.

When you don't know the answer to something you should try to figure it out before asking. That builds important skills. Like it or not LLMs are now a useful tool for that. The first instinct shouldn't be to ask someone else if you haven't expended any effort.

For example, if you don't know 6*27 I'd consider it rude to ask if you have a calculator on your desk but you're too lazy to use it.

2. Pasting disregards the reader
Yeah, asking questions you can find an answer to yourself also disregards the reader. It cuts both ways.
1. Often disregards the question's recipient. Particularly for questions that could be easily answered by AI.
Sometimes humans talk not purely to accomplish things but rather for human contact and comradery.
People can just choose to ignore questions they don't feel like answering for whatever reason.
So now that we have AI chatbots, we just never ask any questions to another human again?
2 is far worse. Asking a question that can be answered by AI can also spark a good conversation. That's not bad at all.
If I wanted an AI answer I would have gotten it myself. Some questions can be answered by AI badly.