I used to work for a small digital strategy consultancy. All the senior consultants up were expert in pretty much everything digital marketing and did their own data manipulation and analysis. SEO, technical SEO, link building, paid search, paid ads, Facebork ads, Youtube ads, social listening, search research… you name it. New consultants sat with experts, learned from people who genuinely knew their shit. We were expensive compared to, eg. Accenture’s off-shore teams, but our results were far stronger, and offered genuinely actionable insights (relevant to our clients’ business strategies and goals), compared to Accenture’s off-shore teams.
Then we got bought up. Quite apart from the devastation that wreaked upon our ops staff as we were ‘integrated’ into the larger company, we were instructed to start using AI for all data analysis. For efficiency. So, our junior consultants no longer did any of their own data aggregation, cleaning, manipulation, or analysis. They didn’t understand the data. They just spewed out whatever the AI told them the data said. Which, admittedly, was quicker. But there was no insight beyond the fucking obvious.
And, one by one, all the experienced people left the company.
Including me.
What had been a company of experts became a small department of AI users who didn’t understand what they were doing, or why, or what it meant.
Workers don’t hate LMM’s capabilities, but the notion that they won’t be needed anymore that most industry execs dream together. Which is not what LLM’s are capable of. Instead it will streamline certain things and workers will have to do the rest. Might that be used to push salaries down? They will try, so unionize.
“closer to the opposite” is a funny way of saying “the opposite”
I hate AI with a passion.
For me AI represents a decline in cognitive ability.
In the past when I solved a problem, I actually learned something, and I felt great about that.
When using AI, I don’t get the same satisfaction of having learned something.
Blindly hating a tool is a you issue. Thousands of people needing to solve the same problem over and over is inefficient. Learn and practice for learning sake and then keep going researching new solutions in academia as in any other field. Or start applying proven solutions in industry as any other field does where experience which solution to apply makes the value proposition.
Thousands of people needing to solve the same problem over and over is inefficient
Sure, we have a name for that: Not-invented-Here (NIH) Syndrome. AI is not solving that Inefficiency.
Or start applying proven solution
Let me know when you find them, please.
When a tool is a hindrance to the solution, while also making people more stupid and consuming vast resources and contributing to climate change, then the hate is deserved.
A tool is only as good as the person using it. There is literally a saying about a hammer being the only tool and every problem looking like a nail.
The hammer salesman has infiltrated every corporate marketing team on the planet. It is a requirement to use the hammer at a shit load on companies.
Valid criticism.
It’s pretty pervasive, and that campaign was way more successful than I ever thought it would be.
It’s gonna be a wait and see type deal, but imo not going great
You’re right. Time to pull myself up by my
Bootstrap.jsand really apply my creative self to academia. I’m going straight to the nearest science building to innovate.Edit: they told me to go home
Ignoring environmental issues, the issue at the moment is the tool is not production ready. If I design a tool to measure length of something but I can’t be confident the measurement will be right within a specific tolerance the tool is useless. If the tool is just guessing, well I can do that without the tool. Yeah it may be 85% accurate but I still have to employ someone to verify each one or risk selling bad product, because I can’t trust the tool.
People don’t “solve the same problem” over and over again, they learn what the solution is. You probably know a^2 + b^2 = c^2 or the Pythagoras theorem. You learned that. You didn’t “solve” it.
Now in addition you may have learned some uses of it. Things like measuring a shadow or knowing how long a road is going up a mountain. You also probably learned it won’t work to calculate how to shoot a basketball. Yes you know height of hoop and can measure the distance from you to hoop but the result is wrong because you throw on a parabolic curve not in straight line(not to mention gravity and air resistance etc). Ai doesn’t recognize those differences. If you tell it “given the height of a hoop and distance from the hoop, how can I tell how hard to throw a ball to get it into the hoop” it will give you an equation, probably calculate the distance with Pythagoras, then gathering average mass of standard basketball, and incorporating them into an equation for force required to push that mass to that distance.
From a software developer perspective another issue is context. I’ve seen alot of Ai slop where they calculate a value(say distance to monster in a game) each time it’s needed. Any software dev would calculate it once, store in variable, use it as many times you need, recalculate on next frame.
Again this is all ignoring the environmental, legal, societal, medical, mental effects. Just focusing on the fact the technology is several generations behind hoping to be production ready.
Is this comment ai? It stops making sense about halfway through.
“Everything I don’t like is AI”
Okay but this comment specifically. Did you read it? What is it saying?
It is a tool for making billionaires more billions, that is about it. It can write sloppy code for you, and give you inaccurate and often directly erronous answers stolen from the people who actually provided those answers in the first place. It is not helping you in research, it is just making you forget how to actually research anything and making your brain lazier and lazier until your only source of information is its gaslighting.
It can’t do anything of the sort you are claiming it can do.
The way I see it, is that it’s a great tool for people that already know their shit and don’t want to bother writing the code for it. There are some other use cases which are nice, like updating documentation or helping with pull/merge requests.
But it sure isn’t worth all the downsides we currently know of with the way it’s being implemented.
It is perfect for producing garbage that should never have been produced in the first place. Marketing wank. Nobody cares what it says, so long as it is aesthetically pleasing to the intended audience. It’s perfect for doing shit that never needed to be done in the first place. Perfect for busywork.
It is worse than useless for any technical purpose. Verifying its output requires more effort than manually producing that output.
Yep, used it on my year-end self assessment. Told it what I would have written and it bullshitted it up to the appropriate length. I reviewed it and fixed where it invented some accomplishments out of nowhere that would have been awkward if I ever got called on it. Knowing that my performance assessment would only be glanced at and never read.
Similarly, a design document owed to management for something they have no actual interest in. No one honors the design doc, no one expects it to be informative that actually uses the tech, but non-technical management feels ‘included’. Didn’t even need to be reviewed, because all the ones it concretely matters know not to bother with it.
Stuff I always hated and was pointless, but someone wanted to check some boxes.
Though just had someone clearly just feed my email into a prompt and told the AI to use my points to agree with me, and that was annoying to see someone using AI to try to be a sycophant to me. If you are going to be a suck-up, at least suck-up in your own words. I won’t do it to something someone will read in earnest.
Exactly the kind of horseshit I’m thinking of. The demand for mindless busywork is truly amazing.
I can only hope that the next big idea in business is a widespread push to “replace” AI production with “nothing”.
Meh, LLMs and GenAI as tools themselves and as technologies, are not that bad. There are definitely some legitimate and extremely useful use cases.
But it should never have been released to the general public, it will bring extreme harm to the world.
At my company we have an internal AI bot that uses Anthropic. We use it to investigate bugs by comparing code to expected behavior or finding things in data.
For example, I don’t write code. But when I need to find how data from a client is being mapped. I could either ask the engineer who’s busy with other work with my menial task, I could look though a bunch of code with bitbucket, or I could ask the bot which will give me the code and any ticket related to the code and pull requests.
When finding something in the raw data. I could take a bunch of files and text strings and pull them into excel and spend a bunch of time doing lookup, matches, and index equations in Excel. Something I did for years in the past. Or have the bot do that in 2 minutes. When I’m just trying to find and validate a few things.
the problem with ai isn’t the concept, wikipedia is great
the problem is it is not deterministic, often factually wrong and being used by the rich to steal workers pay
It’s peculiar as a thing that acts the same whether it’s right or wrong. That is a pretty big drawback when trying to use it for anything vaguely fact based. The fact that if you don’t know yourself, it sounds credible either way, is super tricky. Particularly when managers that are used to gauging credibility without knowing the material come along. They are complete suckers for AI output since they don’t have good ways to know better.
Exactly my company is heavily pushing for full agentic development and while that does save time a bit, it comes at a cost, for one I’m no longer getting the deeper understanding of the codebase that I would if I did the work myself, and secondly the number of PRs that AI pushes out creates a review bottleneck because people can’t keep up, but management doesn’t care, they’d rather you push something out fast and if it breaks things it’s your job on the line not the AI subscription.
AI has multiplied the workload and management is in psychosis
I swear to god, as much as I used to be pro ai from like 2019 to 2023, AI has made my coworkers so fucking stupid. So many of them are like useless without AI now and I keep getting sideways looks when I say I don’t use AI for my job.
I get it to some extent as I work IT, but come on! You can’t even make a fucking email without CoPilot telling you what to say!? Use AI as in Actual Intelligence! It’s found in that place between your ears, god damn it.
You mean putting water on plants? Like from the toilet?
What is very problematic is not AI in its isolation. But the way how it is (and becoming more) embedded in the society with current socio-economic system. AI probably could very well coexist if our socio-economic system would be more adorned with it. Eg. having tax on AI tokens, Universal Income, or something else that just works.
It’s not coincidental that the word “Saboteur” refers to someone throwing shoes into industrial machinery in an effort to cause it to jam or break.
Not spanners?
glassdoor of all sites allowing astroturfing of thier reviews by said companies and worsening the layoffs.
If it generated wealth that workers could share in, then they might like it. But it’s not generating wealth for anyone.
It’s probably burning more wealth than it creates anyway
Check out the Better Offline podcast. You’ll like it.
This is likely why the Chinese appear to be more positive to AI. They’re not forced to use AI for ridiculous tasks and they’re not as worried that AI will displace them.
sounds delusional as fuck
Oh come on. Like a dozen old white dudes who have no morals are making a TON of money off of it
I wonder to what degree the Glass Door reviews are mentioning AI in the context of regular duties vs AI in the hiring process.
Indeed. Whilst I very much hope that people are turning against using LLMs, that’s not what this chart shows. As you allude to, it’s just the sentiment of reviews mentioning AI, of which a large number are probably complaining about the results, rather than expressing opposition to the use of LLMs.
The socially awkward CEOs of these companies went out giggle farting about how AI was going to replace everyone. Everyone starting thinking about how that would mean nobody could eat because they see what’s happening in politics. Everyone decided to nope out of that.
If they had let their PR dept handle things everyone would be oblivious and happy right now.
Good thing they could not keep their mouths shut.
It’s funny how the chart correlates to stupid assholes saying stupid things. How’d that happen?
Unless this results in a workers strike none of this blathering matters. It’s all just loud complaining.
Organize and do something about it!
Already unionized.
Who doesn’t love having a dumbass client tell you, the industry professional of 10-20 years and a senior member of their department, that they figured out the problem you’ve been working on for over a year, and the answer is <barely fucking related to the task at hand>?
No joke, had TWO clients within a week send me slop telling me that ThEy TaLkEd WiTh ChAtGeMaUdE and basically tell me that to solve a issue with a specific vendor app that I really need to check the firewall for blocks for some operating system functions that aren’t even in use.
Like fuck dude, read your own goddamned slop and use your Alleged Intelligence to see if it even sounds remotely applicable…
