Back to the In the 2010s, a website called Let Me Google That For You gained remarkable popularity for serving a single purpose: snark.
The site allows you to generate a custom link that you can send to someone who asks you a question. When they click the link, it plays an animation of the process of typing a question into Google. The idea is to show the person asking the question how easy it would have been for them to look up the answer.
It’s an insult, basically. It’s funny and rude.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little rudeness in the right context. If an overtly hostile person is wasting their time on social media asking easy probing questions, I think you should go ahead and enjoy some passive aggression (as a gift).
In more personal contexts, however, using Let Me Google That For You clearly indicates that you don’t respect the person you gave the link to and that their question is a waste of time. If someone in your workplace or personal life asks you a question, it’s because they want to your specific contributionso it’s better to just give the answer, ideally with the context that only you can provide, than to send a link to a Google search results page.
Now, being 2025, the people behind Let me look this up for you also offer Let me chat GPT for youthat works exactly as you think it does. And its existence points to something new: how rude it is to respond with AI output in response to a question, especially in a more professional context.
waste time
Telling someone something on Google can be fun and satisfying, but it’s not useful. I’d put copy-pasting or capturing a conversation with ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI agent in the same category: unhelpful and a bit rude.
Developer Alex Martsinovich talked about this a while back in a blog post called It’s rude to show AI output to people: “Be polite and don’t send AI text to humans,” he writes. “My own view of AI etiquette is that AI output can only be transmitted if it is adopted as its own or there is explicit consent from the receiving party.” I think this is a pretty good framework for the AI tag.
If someone asks you a question, when they could have asked the machine, it’s because they wanted to your perspective The Internet exists, at least in theory, so that humans can connect with each other, and so that we can benefit from the knowledge of others. Answering a question with AI output ignores this dynamic, especially if you don’t say that’s what you’re doing.
