Again within the 2010s, a web site known as Let Me Google That For You gained a notable quantity of recognition for serving a single objective: snark.
The location helps you to generate a customized hyperlink that you would be able to ship anyone who asks you a query. After 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 simple it could have been for them to simply search for the reply themselves.
It is an insult, principally. It is humorous and impolite.
Now, there’s nothing improper with a bit of rudeness in the precise context. If an brazenly hostile particular person is losing your time on social media by asking simply researched questions, I feel it is best to go forward and revel in a bit of 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 possibly can 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 way in which 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, however it’s not useful. I might put copy-pasting or screenshotting a dialog with ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI agent in the identical class: not useful and sort 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 individual or there’s specific consent from the receiving celebration.” I feel this can be a fairly good framework for AI etiquette.
If somebody asks you a query, once they may have requested the machine as an alternative, it is as a result of they needed your perspective. The web exists, no less than in idea, in order that people can join with one another, and in order that we will profit from one another’s data. Responding to a query with AI output ignores this dynamic, particularly if you happen to do not say that is what you are doing.