GoKawiilMar 1, 2026
Let’s talk about that moment when AI output shows up unsolicited in a human interaction. It happens a bit much for my taste. What should the etiquette be? I’ve arrived at a principle I call:
Don’t make me talk to your chatbot.
It’s fine that people talk to chatbots, but they should not expect me to listen to theirs. When I want to talk to a chatbot, I have plenty of my own.
Why are we talking?
When I talk to a person, I expect that they are telling me things out of their head — that they have developed a belief and are trying to communicate it to me. As a result, the energy I spend trying to understand what they’ve written will give me insight into what they believe. That’s my reason for showing up.
They may have used a chatbot while arriving at that belief, which is fine. But their chatbot interaction was helpful to them in a context, and pasting from it doesn’t reliably bring me there.
Is this controversial?
Although I feel like I’m explaining common sense, I’ll be as charitable as I can to potential pushback.
When we say something is noticeably AI-generated, we usually mean it’s generated and bad communication. Not that one completely implies the other, but it’s a pattern.
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