How to get coworkers to stop giving me ChatGPT-generated suggestions

Question

I work in computer graphics for a small company on our own game engine. We also have an in house team of artists creating content for this engine.

I am often tasked with taking suggestions from the artists and implementing them in the engine. The artists have no technical expertise, so I meet with them to understand their ideas and needs, and do so again to explain the functionality, limitations, and so on of my solution.

Recently it happened quite a few times that after such a meeting (where I explained that their requirements aren't 100% achievable and provided an alternative working solution) I get a message from the artists, along with a screenshot of an ostensible but frankly ludicrous solution proposed by ChatGPT. They then ask why I could not do what ChatGPT suggests.

I then have to take the time to explain why ChatGPT's proposed solution wouldn't work, which is tedious and difficult when the other persons do not understand many of the basic ideas involved. They also seem skeptical, and I get the idea they feel I'm incompetent because as I understand it ChatGPT is very useful in their setting, and they have come to believe it to be the ultimate source of knowledge.

How can I, without being condescending to either my coworkers or their use of ChatGPT, ask them to not make suggestions to me that they personally don't understand and are based solely on ChatGPT?

Answer 1

Thank for your clarifying in the comments, and to bring them up here:

I take the time to understand and consider each suggestion, not rejecting anything out of hand, and share them with my team members (of which there are 17). Their advice has been, thus far, to "just ignore". However, I would not like to treat my co-workers that way.

Sounds like you need to break that pattern, but also you don't necessarily want to be the hammer that drops in order to break it - as that rarely gets received in a friendly fashion, especially when they are used to just getting you to answer and consider the ideas.

The solution in that case is quite simple - reach out to your boss/manager, explain that while you appreciate the suggestions, they are not helpful (have example or two ready here), they drain a lot of your time and focus (example or two) but also that you do not wish to be rude to your well-meaning co-workers (keep your face straight saying that) and ask them to step in and be the hammer to curtail the flow of unhelpful and uneducated advice. Focus on the points you can easily prove - that the advice is wrong and it's a time drain - don't go into motives or anything else.

Ultimately that's the best way, as you are not in the place to tell them what to do, just as they cannot really tell you how to resolve an issue, and trying to pull some imaginary rank would likely alienate relationships further, and speaking in friendly way for them to see error of their way was dismissed. So time to call the actual powers to be, and let them manage as they are hired to do.

If the drain then continues, raise it with your boss/manager again.

Small addendum because it got almost as many upvotes as the answer somehow

Only do this though if you’re certain your manager won’t side with the artists.

If you have a boss that will not act on well documented time waste (even if its coming from a good place) and instead will drive you towards the time waste, that's a great thing to find out as soon as possible, and a whole other problem to rectify. But at least you will be aware that the problem exists now, and can address it.

Answer 2

TL;DR - If you need this to stop, you need to have proof that the suggestions given to you are of low quality or outright wrong / infeasible. You do not need to differentiate yourself between a suggestion generated by a human or a machine. When someone presents a solution, and you have genuine reasons to turn them down, feel free.

Treat this as, they are not learning from their past interactions with you, and keep providing solutions which are not feasible / plausible in your setting / context. Whether the ideas or suggestions are generated by themselves or via prompt engineering, is not really relevant in this case. As needed, document these interactions, and present to your supervisor / manager, as how you are presented with below-par suggestions and you are investing time to prove the suggestions wrong, time and again.

Eventually when they see a "copy-pasted" content is not going to cut it, they'll put real efforts to make the content worthy.

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Edit after the comments:

Yes, at the beginning, it is an uphill battle, as the suggestions can be generated using ChatGPT, (or a simple web search, without context and having proper research and adaptation done) in relatively very less time, but it takes much longer to disprove them. However, this is still necessary for below reasons:

• It creates a document trail of your efforts. This does not only show that you are putting effort to filter out the suggestions, it also shows that you are providing explanations and feedback on why or how the suggestions are unfit for the purpose, and you're trying to help your co-workers to improve on themselves.
• It shows that you are actually evaluating the solutions, not their source. People cannot cry foul that their suggestions are being ignored because they are "smarter" and generated suggestions by "clever" or "efficient" ways (whatever that means).

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On a lighter note: Use ChatGPT to come up with the reasoning why the ChatGPT provided answers cannot be used.

Answer 3

“Sorry, but ChatGPT does not have a deeper understanding of what it is talking about, which is very important in computer programs. It is at best a rough suggestion created by stitching together various snippets and require an experienced developer to debug and fix. This will most likely take longer and be of inferior quality to what we have already. Thanks anyway for your efforts “

I had ChatGPT tell me how to build OS/2 programs with GitHub actions. Everything looked fine except GitHub didn’t support it. Hopefully this will also improve - it is still impressive what we have now.

Answer 4

As a former game engineer, I note the OP's comment to the question:

I take the time to understand and consider each suggestion, not rejecting anything out of hand, and share them with my team members (of which there are 17). Their advice has been, thus far, to "just ignore". However, I would not like to treat my co-workers that way.

If you have a team of 17 all of whom are telling you to "just ignore" it, then I would recommend that you follow the team's consensus. If you must make it a bit more diplomatic, then you could briefly reply, "Our team policy is to not take outside technical suggestions", and/or "If you think this needs escalating, you can address it with our manager".

Edit the exact phrasing to your situation or taste, of course, but I would keep it curt to avoid inviting further interaction on the issue. That is, the further you stray from "just ignore", the worse you're making it for your team. In particular, addressing the ChatGPT-ness invites debate/subterfuge about whether it was really ChatGPT or something else.

Answer 5

Demonstrate it in their own domain

If all else fails, how hard would it be to take one of the artists’ tools that is scriptable and generate scripts for it with ChatGPT? E.g. Blender is scriptable if they use Blender. My guess is many of their tools will be scriptable. Then you could as a teaching moment (maybe as part of a seminar), generate some scripts to create art assets or do something else with the art tool and demonstrate how while the AI gets close and can be helpful for simple tasks, for complex tasks the amount of human intervention is more trouble than it’s worth. This might take a good bit of work on your part finding out which tools are suitably scriptable and coming up with use cases that are of comparable complexity to the code the artists are giving you, and verifying that the AI generated scripts are wrong in a way that the artists will understand, but it could make the case pretty strongly. Obviously don’t do this on the fly—do your homework, verify that the AI really does a consistently and convincingly bad job before hand and run canned examples in the actual seminar; don’t come up with ones on the fly.

The artists may already be using AI but I’m guessing they’re not using it to generate scripts to fully-automate their tools since that’s effectively code and ChatGPT still has a long long way to go to be a competent coder. So if you can show them it’s bad at generating code in their domain, it may click.

Answer 6

How can I, without being condescending to either my coworkers or their use of ChatGPT, ask them to not make suggestions to me that they personally don't understand and are based solely on ChatGPT?

Don't ask your coworkers.

There is a direct conflict in what you want from your coworkers (to not make suggestions that they don't fully understand) and what you have been tasked to do (to take suggestions from artists without any technical expertise). You need to speak to your boss and clearly explain this conflict and follow their guidance on how to proceed.

Answer 7

Document three or four simple real examples: what the artist wanted, the limitations you brought up, what ChatGPT suggested and why it doesn't work, in as friendly layman terms as possible. Have it up in a single link. Hopefully you have the explanations written up already from trying to explain the first ones directly to the artists before you realized they'd just keep coming. But improve them if possible.

Then forever reply with "ChatGPT doesn't really work in our domain, here are four examples. Breaking it down is time consuming and I won't do it again, it just misunderstands everything all over. "

Answer 8

There is an answer (with quite a few up votes) that says

If you need this to stop, you need to have proof that the suggestions given to you are of low quality or outright wrong / infeasible.

This is rather wrong. Your boss expects you to use your judgement about which technologies to use, which to investigate, and how much time to spend investigating different technologies. Go to your boss, present your view on the likely effectiveness of ChatGPT suggestions, and ask your boss how much time they want you to spend understanding them and explaining their problems to other employees. If your boss wants you to waste your time on this, tell them you will, and tell them you expect nothing useful to come from it.

Answer 9

It sounds as if the problem here is that it takes you time to write a detailed response after you've analysed the suggestion. You'll still have to do that analysis, but producing a plausible explanation for why it won't work sounds like a job that GPT would actually be good at.

Ask ChatGPT for a non-technical explanation of why the proposal won't work.

This way you're not discouraging people making suggestions, you're still considering the actual suggestion, and you've satisfied them that the technical solution proposed by GPT isn't valid, without wasting much time.

You could even add something like "I asked ChatGPT to explain why this won't work" to protect yourself from the inevitable errors. You know it means "this is probably wrong" but they'll probably read it as "this authority agrees with me".

Answer 10

You should talk to your boss about the ChatGPT fans.

There is a high chance your amazed-by-ChatGPT colleagues will use it to do part of their work. This implies possible business-critical data leaks, as well as potential copyright infringement.

Answer 11

I think you should write a standard reply for these kind of issues. This should be understanding and not dismissive of ChatGPT as a tool or make them look like idiots for using ChatGPT. If you don't come across as being against AI or condescending then they're far more willing to listen and to not take it personal. Your question already is very understanding and reflective so you seem to be equipped with the necessary social skills to do so.

You then should inform them about the current limitations of AI especially overconfidence. It would also be good if you could include an example for ChatGPT generating something obviously ludicrous in your email, something they can understand. Then just send them this reply every time they send you a stupid suggestion obviously generated by ChatGPT.

Answer 12

Possible approach: Redirect.

"Hey, if you want to use the toy to come up with artistic ideas and render them as examples of what you would ideally like to see in the game, rather than drawing illustrations yourself, that's your call, and I trust you to throw out the proposals that are artistically unreasonable; that's part of your job. But deciding what can be practically implemented or not is my job, and you need to trust my judgement, not try to appeal it to a machine that basically tells you its dreams. I will take your artistic input seriously and try to suggest ways we can get something similar to what you want without breaking the budget, as has always been the practice in this is industry. But many ideas just aren't practical with this technology or in this release. Back off and let me do my job, even if it is sometimes to tell you we can't (or can't afford to) do that."

That could benefit from some wordsmithing, but it's the key point you need them to understand. They know the machine makes stuff up in their domain. It does the same in yours. The difference is that your output isn't finished when there's a guess at how it might work, IF it happened to work that way.

Answer 13

Get a ChatGPT subscription and, with the permission of the company, feed the codebase documentation into it. Create a company-specific version of ChatGPT that might generate better answers.

Get the artists to use that version of ChatGPT to form their suggestions.