A bare-bones, one-page website with a blunt message — "Don't paste the AI, please" — has become the internet's newest etiquette flashpoint, drawing more than 900 upvotes and hundreds of comments on Hacker News within hours of being submitted on Thursday.
The site, dontpastetheai.com, is addressed to anyone who answers a real question by pasting a wall of unedited chatbot output into a chat, email or code review. "When someone asks you something, they want your answer. Not a wall of unedited ChatGPT output," it reads. "A short reply from you beats a long one from a model, every time." It is the latest sign that as chatbots spread into everyday work, the way people use them is becoming a social question in its own right — a tension we track regularly in our AI culture coverage.
What the Site Actually Says
The argument is simple: the person on the other side has the same tools you do. "If they wanted the generic answer, they would have gotten it in four seconds," the site argues. "They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement."
The site is not anti-AI. It encourages visitors to use chatbots freely — as a drafting partner. "Just read what it gave you, then write your own take on it," it advises. "Pull out the bit that actually answers the question. Drop the rest. Three sentences from you is plenty."
It even endorses quoting a model when the quote genuinely adds something: "I checked with Claude and this part lines up" works great, it says. And it gives permission to bow out: "No strong opinion here" is a real, helpful reply.
The page is designed to be weaponized, politely. If someone drops a wall of model output in your DMs, Slack or pull request review, you can send them the link — "No lecture required." For stronger cases there is an "angry version" of the page, with the warning: "Not safe for sending to your manager. Probably."
A Lineage of Internet Etiquette Pages
The site calls itself the "spiritual cousin" of nohello.net and dontasktoask.com, two long-running single-page etiquette sites that tackle adjacent sins of digital communication: nohello.net addresses people who message "hi" and then wait, instead of including their actual question, while dontasktoask.com advises asking the full question outright rather than first asking permission to ask. Like its cousins, Don't Paste the AI compresses a genuine workplace frustration into one shareable link — a social correction delivered by URL instead of an awkward conversation.
It is also, pointedly, "written by a human, on purpose" — a line that lands in a week when readers are increasingly suspicious of prose that reads like it came from a model.
Why It Struck a Nerve
The Hacker News thread, at more than 900 points with hundreds of replies by Thursday afternoon, turned into an unscheduled referendum on AI etiquette. Several commenters pushed back on the site's premise. "What if English is not your first language and you are afraid of sounding silly when you email or text someone?" one asked, pointing to a real constituency that leans on AI to write.
Others defended tactical pasting. One commenter argued that sending an AI answer can be "a form of 'Let Me Google That For You'" — a reasonable response to questions the asker could have looked up themselves.
And some found the meta-irony irresistible. "Did they really just say 'genuinely useful' in a post decrying the blind copy-pasting of AI text?" one commenter wrote, calling the phrase "a strong Claude indicator." Another said they had just finished writing — by hand — a "Principles of AI Use" document for their AI enablement firm, whose first rule was: "Write as yourself. You're being paid for your expertise and insights."
The debate is landing at a moment when AI assistants are being positioned to take over ever more of the mechanics of daily communication, with OpenAI itself pushing ChatGPT toward operating users' browsers and computers on their behalf. The more the machines write, the more the rare human sentence seems to be worth — and the more visibly people bristle when a reply turns out to be borrowed.
Satire, Mostly — and Free to Remix
The site labels itself "Satire, mostly," and it is licensed for anyone to share, remix and translate, with pull requests welcome. That openness is part of the point: the authors are not selling anything, and the site's only ask is that the next reply you send be yours.
Whether or not dontpastetheai.com outlives the news cycle, the frustration it channels is not going away. As AI assistants take over more of the mechanical work of writing, the human part of communication — judgment, taste, accountability for what you actually think — is becoming the thing readers notice first.
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