Again within the 2010s, an internet site known as Let Me Google That For You gained a notable quantity of recognition for serving a single function: snark.
The location permits you to generate a customized hyperlink you could ship anyone who asks you a query. Once they click on the hyperlink, it performs an animation of the method of typing a query into Google. The concept is to indicate the particular person asking the query how straightforward it will have been for them to simply search for the reply themselves.
It is an insult, mainly. It is humorous and impolite.
Now, there’s nothing incorrect with slightly rudeness in the best context. If an brazenly hostile particular person is losing your time on social media by asking simply researched questions, I believe it’s best to go forward and revel in slightly passive aggression (as a deal with).
In additional private contexts, although, utilizing Let Me Google That For You states clearly that you do not respect the particular person you gave the hyperlink to, and that their query is a waste of your time. If somebody out of your office or your private life is asking you a query, it is as a result of they need your particular enter, so it is higher to simply give the reply—ideally with context solely you may present—than it’s to ship a hyperlink to a Google search outcomes web page.
Now, this being 2025, the individuals behind Let Me Google That For You additionally supply Let Me ChatGPT That For You, which works precisely the best way you assume it does. And its existence factors to one thing new: how impolite it’s to, in response to a query, reply with AI output—particularly in a extra skilled context.
Losing Time
Telling somebody to Google one thing may be humorous and satisfying, nevertheless it’s not useful. I would put copy-pasting or screenshotting a dialog with ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI agent in the identical class: not useful and form of impolite.
Developer Alex Martsinovich touched on this some time in the past in a weblog submit known as it is impolite to indicate AI output to individuals: “Be well mannered, and do not ship people AI textual content,” he writes. “My very own tackle AI etiquette is that AI output can solely be relayed if it is both adopted as your personal or there’s specific consent from the receiving occasion.” I believe this can be a fairly good framework for AI etiquette.
If somebody asks you a query, once they may have requested the machine as a substitute, it is as a result of they wished your perspective. The web exists, at the least in concept, in order that people can join with one another, and in order that we will profit from one another’s information. Responding to a query with AI output ignores this dynamic, particularly when you do not say that is what you are doing.
