Don't Paste the AI, please
dontpastetheai.com
August 20, 2026
2 min read
67/100
Summary
Don’t Paste the AI is a website urging people not to send unedited chatbot responses when answering others’ questions in direct messages, Slack conversations, or pull-request reviews. It argues that people ask specific individuals for their context, taste, and judgment rather than generic answers that they could generate themselves with the same AI tools. The site recommends using AI as a drafting partner, then reading its output and writing an original response. It advises extracting only the portion that answers the question, suggesting that three sentences can be enough. Useful model-generated material can be quoted when accompanied by an explanation of why it is relevant, such as noting that a point was checked with Claude. The site also says that saying “No strong opinion here” can be a helpful response when the sender has nothing to add. Don’t Paste the AI provides a link intended for sharing with people who send large blocks of model output and offers a separate, more confrontational “angry version.” It describes itself as written by a human on purpose.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t Paste the AI urges people to avoid forwarding unedited chatbot output as their response to someone else’s question.
- The site recommends using AI for drafting, then adding a concise response based on the sender’s own judgment and context.
- Useful AI-generated passages can be quoted if the sender explains their relevance or how they were checked.
- The site offers shareable links, including a stronger “angry version,” for responding to people who paste large blocks of model output.
What the discussion said
The thread mostly accepted the core workplace norm: raw LLM output should not be dumped into coworkers’ inboxes as a substitute for thought. Several readers argued that verbatim pastes make recipients do the hard work of judging relevance, accuracy, and intent, while letting the sender skip comprehension. In that view, AI is valuable for research, structuring a response, or surfacing missing context, but the human still owes a concise answer in their own judgment and voice. The strongest pushback was practical rather than anti-AI. Some commenters said AI-assisted messages have improved communication from colleagues who previously sent cryptic fragments, because a model can turn scattered facts into a usable incident report. They also rejected the claim that recipients can simply ask their own chatbot: a sender’s model may have project history, personal preferences, or agentic access to the exact codebase and prior work that the recipient lacks. The useful distinction was between sharing context-rich AI work and blindly forwarding unverified prose. A large side discussion mocked the article itself as likely AI-generated, with awkward metaphors and padded language undermining its anti-slop message. Others located the problem beneath the tool: anxious corporate cultures reward overly polished, indirect communication, giving AI a natural role as a reputational shield.
Where opinion split
Whether AI-generated text is inherently an irresponsible handoff or a legitimate way to provide fuller context. Critics say unedited output offloads verification and interpretation onto colleagues; defenders say a context-aware assistant can turn otherwise useless messages into actionable explanations that the recipient could not reproduce with their own model.
Community Sentiment
Positives
- Using an LLM to organize scattered facts can turn a colleague’s cryptic bug report into enough context to diagnose the problem immediately.
- Personalized model history, project context, and agent access can make one person’s AI-assisted answer materially better than a recipient’s fresh prompt.
- Treating AI as a drafting and research partner while rewriting the conclusion preserves human accountability without discarding the tool’s speed.
- AI-generated structure can reduce the mental overhead of repeatedly extracting missing context from terse workplace messages.
Concerns
- Verbatim model output makes coworkers sift through relevance, correctness, and intent, effectively transferring the sender’s thinking job downstream.
- Unverified AI-expanded explanations can conceal a sparse original prompt behind confident invented context, making debugging harder rather than easier.
- The article’s allegedly LLM-like prose and clumsy metaphors were seen as a glaring contradiction: an anti-slop argument delivered as slop.
- AI can become a corporate euphemism machine, encouraging people to optimize for reputational safety instead of speaking plainly or challenging bad decisions.
