Askholes and Low Effort AI Answers
← Back to MicroblogAskholes and Low Effort AI AnswersSeptember 24, 2026by Dennis Forbes7 min readIf you ask someone’s opinion or expertise, and they answer “ChatGPT says…”, it can seem obnoxious. I’m going to propose a hypothesis on why this is happening, at least some of the time. This is based upon personal experience1 frequently being asked for input and advice, usually technology related, and where experience has taught me to offer minimal effort responses2 to the small number of people who make answering sincerely something I regret.
- ▪← Back to MicroblogAskholes and Low Effort AI AnswersSeptember 24, 2026by Dennis Forbes7 min readIf you ask someone’s opinion or expertise, and they answer “ChatGPT says…”, it can seem obnoxious.
- ▪I’m going to propose a hypothesis on why this is happening, at least some of the time.
- ▪This is based upon personal experience1 frequently being asked for input and advice, usually technology related, and where experience has taught me to offer minimal effort responses2 to the small number of people who make answering sincerel
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Record
| Original publisher | Dennis Forbes on Software Development |
| Canonical URL | https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/09/askholes_and_low_effort_ai_answers/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:38:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T21:45:27.513Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T21:45:27.513Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | flot3L_LDoPd · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
← Back to MicroblogAskholes and Low Effort AI AnswersSeptember 24, 2026by Dennis Forbes7 min readIf you ask someone’s opinion or expertise, and they answer “ChatGPT says…”, it can seem obnoxious. I’m going to propose a hypothesis on why this is happening, at least some of the time. This is based upon personal experience1 frequently being asked for input and advice, usually technology related, and where experience has taught me to offer minimal effort responses2 to the small number of people who make answering sincerely something I regret. The Askholes Walk Among Us Some people are askholes. People give the chatbot response as a defensive response to these people, and instead of learning that this is a consequence of their own behaviour, they hold it as a fault of everyone else.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Dennis Forbes on Software Development.
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