use AI for everything
get fucked
who could have foreseen this
Management: Use AI everywhere! Also management: Why does everything sound like a chatbot? The real failure is executives confusing mandatory adoption with actual productivity, then blaming workers when the resulting mountain of nonsense lands in their inbox.
I started a new role at a multi national corporation a couple months ago. My “onboarding” to try to get caught up on a new project involved shifting through thousands of pages and slides of AI generated content that had been created on this project… Which ironically is about creating systems to try to make AI return more relevant results. The company have paid me a small fortune in the hours I spent reading material that held no value but to make someone somewhere look like they were being productive at some point in time.
Don’t make me tap the sign
In theory, LLMs can help people do better quality work faster, but the productivity boost is modest when quality work is the goal. However, what seems to be happening to a great extent is that people are putting in a lot less effort and employers are now paying for salaries and AI tokens while getting worse quality work and slower progress in return.
And yeah, anyone who actually is trying to do a good job will get pissed at their co-workers half-assing it and pumping out low-effort AI slop while pawning work off on them. I think the only sustainable path forward with AI is instead of token usage being a badge of honor, there’s a culture of shame around AI where people put in a lot of effort to make sure nobody can tell they used AI out of fear of ridicule.
there’s a culture of shame around AI where people put in a lot of effort to make sure nobody can tell they used AI out of fear of ridicule.
Earlier this year there was a whiteboard in one section of my office where some people had a tokenmaxxing leaderboard. Now it suddenly disappeared.
I use ai at work to handle low-value, high-effort bullshit.
I have to plan out a quarter ahead for my team of about 20 people. The expectation was to sit with them during multiple planning meetings, haggle out plans based on estimates and vibes for what we might be able to get done.
I hated that so I loaded all of our work data (agile) into an agent I created. I had it create plans based on historical data. I tuned those plans based on what I needed to. It would take me about two hours to do the entire quarterly planning. I sent it to the teams for modifications, fed those back through for final tuning. Then the agent would create and schedule all of the work, dates, assignments, set up all the admin stuff to make it go.
Took planning from probably about 60 labor hours per quarter to maybe 10.
Because my boss was a twat, he would not log into the system to view the plans, he could only read PowerPoint. I had the ai make his dumb ass slides from the content.
So you can use these things effectively. You can also make endless work slop. Keep in mind, work slop is not new. Ever hear of a “walking deck”? It is as fucking stupid as it sounds. You make a presentation about what you and your team does for nobody in particular. It is usually self promotional marketing wank that nobody ever looks at. Been a thing for ages. Now I can just use my work data to generate one if I wanted (I don’t want one).
This levels the playing field for all the busybodies who don’t really work, but do make a lot of slop. I hope they drown in it.
Yeah, LLMs are useful for delegating work that is labor intensive and bullshit in nature. I bet Peter from Office Space would have no problems with his TPS reports if a LLM were helping out.
Or they could just actually not use it?
Using it and then obfuscating it’s use is just creating more unnecessary work to end up with a lower quality finished product.
It’s not really that difficult to just not use it, I’ve gone literally my entire life without it and nothing has been “too difficult”.
Thousands of generations have passed before me without using it.
There is no element of inevitability to this. You can just not use it.
But then I’d have to think about the task, instead of just rephrasing a few things.
Most people didn’t really care about their jobs before LLMs, and now management has basically given them permission to show it overtly. If it’s a bullshit waste of time, then just have the LLM do it. Nobody cares, nothing about our economy has been real since 2008.
There are people who should care
If you have a bullshit job then fuck it (except you’re still damagibg both the environment and the economy just to be lazy) but I’m talking about people in roles that are actually useful to society.
If you put no effort into making something, why does it have value and why should people put effort into consuming it?
To be pedantic, value is in the eye of the beholder. Cost is how much goes into something, Price is how much someone wants to pay, Value… that is much more subjective.
Oil costs $50 a barrel to pump, priced at $100 on the market but when it comes to value could be seen as providing $20,000 of human labor.
Not trying to defend AI junk, like seriously people, just do the work yourself. But value is such a hard thing to quantify.
I think there’s a presumption from the industrial boom. A ton of textiles is useful whether it is gathered, cleaned, spun, woven, dyed and printed by hand or by machine. And that might extend to practical complex products like printed parts or buildings constructed by robots.
One problem, is the whole point of art is human expression. LLMs might be okay for design, except there’s art in design. AI is cultural appropriation extended to all human expression.
Another problem is a lot of the practical content made is flawed. Imagine if machine-woven textiles were holey and had structural weaknesses that tore open easily, so we made fabric by machine anyway and had seamstressed sew patches over the holes.
(Not all industrial age machines were perfect, and sometimes we had issues, which would be corrected by better machines, but in this case, human interaction is allegedly part of the magic, with recorded human work being used to train future AI models. But we’re being forced to worship the dark gods an awful lot for the meager blessings being returned.)
The third problem is machine thinking is unexpectedly resource intensive. We once imagined smart (conscious) agentic AI running on our PC or our smartphone. Now it takes immense data centers that gobble up more power and water than we have, during a water crisis. And the industry is so desperate about it they’re polluting the air like it were, well, the industrial age. While we’re in a pollution-driven climate crisis and mostly to make slop and faulty vibe code.
our management didn’t force it on us, we requested it
maybe this is the difference
When employees ask for AI, they’re solving problems they actually understand. When management pushes it from above without training or clear goals, they’re often just chasing a productivity headline.
I would agree with this nuance. As a software developer who is now heavily using LLMs for my job, I’ve wondered about how different people see LLMs and come to a similar conclusion.
I like them because it’s a low-level tool I reach for whereas many people forced to use “AI” are using crappy solutions hacked into their existing tools, à la Microsoft Copilot.
AI/LLMs can be a very useful tool, but when it’s just slapped onto existing products you use, it’s often limited or only supports very contrived use cases.
I’d hate AI too, if my only/main exposure to it was Microsoft copilot, or even Gemini in Google Drive/Docs.
Depends on the coworkers. Some does, some gets in over their head.
LOL
It’s like asking a rando to write a Rust program. Just not going to happen at the level necessary to be good. There are people getting very, very good results with Claude.
That’s because they do not know how to use AI correctly, it is always the case. Remember when people didn’t know how to search in google. It looks to me the same thing. They pretend to ChatGPT do this work for me and the management thinks ohh amazing job John Doe!!! Here is a raise!!! 🙄
And that’s exactly where management fails! You can’t demand AI adoption, provide no training, no guidance, no quality standards, and then blame employees for poor results. If workers don’t know how to use AI effectively, that’s a leadership failure. Management wanted instant productivity without investing in skills.
Yeah exactly I agree. Weird my comment has a down vote 😬
Your comment above is being downvoted because this:
That’s because they do not know how to use AI correctly,
seems to imply that there is a correct way to use AI.
In the context of the current generation of labor theft algorithms and surveillance tools, the only correct way to interact with them is as a conscientious objector - which is to say, abject refusal on moral grounds.
Failure to abstain from the use of LLMs and their ilk indicates either:
- Ignorance of the damage being done by these algorithms, their training, and the corporations that develop and operate them (have you somehow been living under a rock?)
-or-
- Complete moral and good sense judgment failure of the individual.
“AI” is continually improving prediction models. There are excellent use cases for prediction models, like weather forecasting, or planning distribution of emergency resources ahead of impending disaster.
But expecting a desk jockey to expect any prediction model to accurately create anew thing based on a human description of what that thing should be like would require the prediction model to possess its own creativity. That’s just not a thing.
and llms are suited for none of those examples you gave.
I can only assume that you didn’t fully read my comment, because it is specifically not talking about such prediction models. It is specifically talking about LLMs and the related corporations around which all of the current VC hype nonsense is centered.
The early part of your comment said
seems to imply that there is a correct way to use AI.
LLMs are universally hugbots, telling you what they think you want to hear. That’s always going to be a bad way to get accurate solutions. I think we agree on that.
There are prediction models that aren’t LLMs which can be useful. Your comment was unclear on whether you considered LLMs to be the entirety of “AI” or not.
I suppose I’ll never understand why comments are upvoted or downvoted. Sometimes I get the impression that it’s more down to chance or mistakes.
The correct way to use AI is to not use it, and instead use your brain.
There might still be time to change course before the cognitive atrophy sets in.
