They are hyping themselves. So is Fortune.
We all told you it was vaporware and you wanted to ride that bubble. Don’t pretend any of this was a surprise.
You shouldn’t expect AI to generate a finished work product yet. If you’re forcing employees to use it, teach them to used it as a starting point and then put their own personal touch on it.
If you’re making a deck, have AI generate the bones, you add the details, then polish it up with AI if you want it to look fancy. If you expect it to turn a bunch of docs into a presentation only using prompts, you’re going to have a bad time.
The problem in my experience isn’t as much the work forcing it, it is the people who are very enthusiastic because they didn’t know what to do and now they think the AI does it for them, but they still have bad ideas.
Think of the person who has this “great app idea” but just needs a developer to write it. Well now these messes are having GenAI churn out… something. They don’t know if it works or not, but now all they need is someone to help finish off the “essentially done” work, or to accept the pull request the AI generated for your project.
Similar story for the creative content like videos and text. These people were limited by not having enough care to bother to learn or invest the time, but they thought they had amazing ideas. Now we see their uninspired slop bright to life in painful time killing form. The ones that might use it as just an accelerator but care about the output are drowned out by the “prompt and it’s done” folks that just don’t care.
Or, or - now hear me out - ban the use of AI to do a job that requires a human thought process.
Yeah bc that worked for the Amish Empire.
Weird comment considering the Amish are still around and, if anything, get proven right every day (except for the sexism and racism)
Get proven right about what? Plenty of Amish sects explicitly use technology if it’s in the course of their work or business. They use power tools for furniture making, have computers to handle payments, cell phones, trucks, etc.
They just don’t use it in their personal lives.
Correct, glad you agree.
Aw, now kith
Dude you’re getting paid to not have to use your brain. I finish my work in an hour and spend the rest of the day doing a bunch of corporate culture BS that gives you visibility to the bosses that actually decide your pay. Put effort where you get the most return. Hang out with your friends in the cafeteria and talk about WoW. Tell your boss you are in a mentor circle and slap that on your quarterly review.
Other than chatting with friends, that sounds like a nightmare. I’d rather be just doing the job that I enjoy and doing it well.
Now I think I’m the problem. Great.
What I really want to know is, were the people putting out workslop, putting out anything better BEFORE AI. I mean, maybe they are just using a different tool to suck.
I think instead of stating that their performance was going to be measured by the quantitative measure of how much AI they used, instead of the qualitative measure of output, while making AI available to them, the CEO might have seen different results.
It’s almost like malicious compliance. “Hey everyone, do this.” Then they all do JUST that. What would you expect? LOL.
In my experience in a way it was better, because they had very low volume of output. Yes, pretty bad already but the GenaAI turned to their volume to 11.
This is one of the biggest downside, the worst people get the most volume out of it because they don’t know or carevto curate the output.
Looking at my last job before I left when AI was being pushed heavily I think I can see what you mean actually.
Before the incompetents would look at something and pass it on to second line without thinking. Now they copy paste the idiot AI outputs. It makes their stats look way better, wastes customer time much more and doesn’t help when it finally gets to me after 2 weeks of bullshit.
Customer satisfaction would be higher if you didn’t use it and did nothing. You are a net drain to the company now because you are trying to do things you don’t understand because of blind reliance on LLMs.
“What separates workslop from low-quality work done by humans is that workslop looks legitimate on the surface while lacking the components that would make it useful.”
Lacking optional things like the truth/verifiable fact, substance/depth of any kind, a basic contextual understanding of the shared reality of the broader team or vendors, an actual point of view beyond the status quo and any creative thought or truly new ideas.
You asked for it, you got it.
Yeah, good employees state their grievance, but if management insists, they just go into bot mode and do what has been commanded until they switch jobs. And bad employees are happy to blame AI.
So if management demands use of AI rather than just offering AI as yet another tool that may or may not be used at the discretion of the employee, output quality will either stay the same or degrade because AI can’t do the actually important job - quality assurance.The moral of the story: if you aren’t actually experienced doing the job yourself, do not tell your workers how to do the job. Trust your senior workers to do that.
This is actually an argument I was having about two hours ago with my managers. They want to replace a bunch of low level workers with AI, and have the remaining low level workers use the AI to do the job of the lost workers. Their justification for this is that the engineers have been using AI for over a year now and performance has improved, (I don’t actually know if performance has improved, but they say it has).
And what you said was basically my point, sure performance improves when engineers use AI because the people using the AI, are engineers, they can tell when the AI has given them something worth working with, and they can tell when it hasn’t. The low level workers can’t do that, I had an argument with one of them this morning because they kept insisting that the computer tower was a CPU, and kept calling it that. How is someone like that going to be able to tell if the AI has given them good output or not?
I think it’s more likely the engineers are made to spend a bunch of time writing meaningless fluff emails nobody reads and now they use AI to generate emails that the manager summarises with AI and pretends to read.
Literally a meeting at work today.
Director: “Why was this requirement missed?”
PM: “Well, my understanding is that AI was used to write the requirements and that AI was also used to generate the code and perform code reviews. …So there were no actual people who understood the requirements involved in the process. Also, this seems to be becoming more and more of a problem.”
Director: “Oh. Uh… Ok. Maybe don’t bring up “AI” whenever you discuss this with senior management because I’m not sure how well that will go over. Just say, ‘the requirements were missed.’”
PM: …
Yeah, you shouldn’t blame AI. You should directly blame the person who implemented the LLM system used.
“AI didn’t realise meeting requirements was important”
“John implemented a system which routinely misses requirements and has wasted 50 hours of work which could have been easily avoided with the previous system”
We need to stop replacing software devs with LLMs and instead replace managment with LLMs!
Couldn’t be any worse
Is the AI is being used what’s the Project Manager for?
No one read the PRD in detail! Shocking
Edit: This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo
This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo
That would actually make meetings a valuable use of our time which is exactly why it won’t happen.
Maybe you shouldn’t have insisted your employees use it then, in the hopes that you’d be able to fire most of them.
The hope is to fire all of them. The plan is to fire most of them.
Then after the company crashes they’ll pull their golden parachute and take a position at the next doomed company.
Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?
Well, yeah, the problem with LLMs in a professional context is exactly that the second order effects of using them are so bad that they wipe out the direct effect gains (the time saving in creating the text).
It’s fine for entertainment if all you want is to be distracted for a while with some somewhat bland chewing-gum for the brain.
CEO Tobias Lütke… told employees last year that using AI is “a baseline expectation,” and they should first prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more resources.
Isn’t this an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
It looks like an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Just playing uhm angels advocate? Not sure how to call it, the naive optimist perhaps!
Not necessarily: the statement (in isolation) is a call to learn and become capable to explain limitations. The criticized effect is basically “people not being able to explain the limits”.
I suspect that “finding limits” wasn’t incentived though (and I mean things like positive feedback, not money). And then you get shit-in-shit-out factories.
Or to rephrase your statement: If you want to play a game then stick to the rules you’ve set up - otherwise everyone’s allowed to cheat.
A hammer makes a poor substitute for a knife & fork.
Ok, sure
However
In this case everyone that had a connection to reality told him that’s not a reasonable baseline.
You can force everyone to use it, but then you are working against that
Not exactly setting up your workforce for a win
I would love to find anything that had a more positive outlook … but alas perhaps I should ask OpenGrok because my creativity is not enough.
Fuck em.
how else is ai slop going to be monetized? more slop more hallucinations more bubble.
Lmao I am living this right now at work 🥲
Yep. We have a guy on the team who generates document after document for us to review and it’s all slop that he has no understanding of (not that anyone could understand the mostly nonsense)
Did you not get to reject all of that yet?
I wish. Our company is still at the “you must adopt and use AI” phase. I’m looking forward to the “Holy fuck that’s expensive! Be careful of your usage” phase
We passed the “Holy fuck that’s expensive!” phase a few months ago and have moved on to the “Use AI for everything but don’t actually do that just use it for some things why [didn’t/did] you use AI for that we can’t afford the [additional time/Azure bill] hahahahahahahaha.” phase. Swap the values in brackets at random on any given day.
My org saw AI as a threat and immediately banned it (blocking websites and restricting features in apps) until our IT folks could evaluate it and implement safeguards. Incidentally, they missed the window when vendors were more or less offering it for free. Now any AI solution doesn’t just have to be vetted against our security and privacy needs, but most likely requires a darn good business case, RFP’s, quotes, and contracts.
It never became a part of the culture here, much to our benefit.
This is also what I don’t get. At worst people start ignoring the documents or requests for review (or code changes) because they have better things to do than review generated text.
At best you push back.
This is happening everywhere. My job is about 2 months behind schedule at the moment and theyre still pushing for AI solutions
“SHIP MORE CODE!!! NO NOT LIKE THAT!!!” - CEOs
More lines = better
max-line-width: 20gotta get them klocs boiiiiii
