Stop Being an AI Proxy: Why Your Perspective Matters

Copy-pasting AI responses is unhelpful because people value your personal insight over generic model output. Use AI as a drafting partner to refine your thoughts and only share the most relevant, personalized parts. Authentic communication requires your own context and judgment rather than acting as a proxy for a chatbot.

Key Points

• Recipients value your unique context, taste, and judgment over generic AI-generated answers.
• Directly copy-pasting AI output is unhelpful because the recipient likely has access to the same tools.
• AI should be used as a drafting partner to help you write your own take, not as a replacement for your voice.
• It is better to provide a brief, honest response or admit to having no opinion than to share a wall of AI text.
• If you use AI content, quote it specifically and explain why it is relevant to the conversation.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment is mostly aligned with the article's core point but critical of its framing. Hacker News largely agrees that unedited AI copy-paste is inconsiderate, low-signal communication, especially in workplace or interpersonal contexts where judgment and accountability matter. At the same time, many commenters resist a blanket anti-AI rule, arguing that supervised, context-aware AI assistance can improve communication and that the article's own style weakens its case.

In Agreement

• Raw chatbot output shifts the burden of comprehension from the sender to the recipient and lets the sender skip the work of understanding their own answer.
• People ask a person because they want that person's judgment, context, and accountability, not a generic response they could obtain themselves.
• AI is acceptable as a drafting, editing, cleanup, or thinking aid when the sender reviews the result, makes it concise, and owns the message.
• The same norms that applied before AI still apply: do not forward material, code, citations, or recommendations you cannot explain.
• Communication tools should not optimize only for sender convenience; voice notes, long unedited text, and AI walls can all impose unnecessary work on recipients.

Opposed

• The article's claim that the recipient has the same tools is too broad because some AI environments contain private context, workflow history, and tuned behavior that others cannot reproduce.
• A concise, context-rich AI-assisted answer can be better than a poorly written human answer, especially when the sender's AI setup is deeply integrated with their work.
• The site was criticized as sounding like the kind of AI-generated prose it condemns, making the presentation feel hypocritical or unpersuasive.
• Some commenters argued that provenance matters less than whether the answer is relevant, verified, useful, and endorsed by the sender.
• A few saw the advice as a skill issue: the real fix is better context engineering and shorter model outputs, not avoiding AI-mediated responses.