Exactly! When someone does it at work, I get a bit sad because my conclusion is that whoever does it can't like their job very much. But that's ok – not liking your job very much is compatible with an otherwise happy life.

When people start doing it in an entirely voluntary human-to-human situation, like having a conversation online about a topic of interest, I'm gobsmacked.

> What the hell is the point of human interaction if ...

Sadly, the point is validating the human worth of the human who can't do any better than this.

But, assuming you're not stuck on that human's Self Esteem Care Team, it can be tricky to tell them that they need to seek validation elsewhere.

At least those (at least the detectable ones) seem to be downvoted en masse, called out, or flagged. They aren't even allowed as per the guidelines[0]:

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response

Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.

I think you're overthinking it. People generally want to be helpful, and do actions they think are "useful" so most likely; these people think they're actually being helpful and useful when they do things like that. Similarly to "no one thinks they're evil" I suppose.

Specifically they subconsciously think they're special - it doesn't occur to them that everyone else can also query an LLM just as easily.