A bit of a non sequitur, but am I the only one finding the use of "she" to refer to the AI in the post jarring?
[deleted]
We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
91–100 of 312 posts
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#92> John and Jill are not at risk. This is a controlled experiment and everyone working at Andon Market is formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed pay, fair wages, and full legal protections. No one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone. I'm not sure what sort of labor regulations exist in San Francisco, but presumably they can be fired as easily by an AI as a real person, right? If Luna decides to fi…
I assume if they get fired by the AI during the experiment they are still paid to sit at home. It would not invalidate the experiment.
Why do you assume that?
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#93Marketing stunt. If they actually cared about this as an experiment, they wouldn't have broadcasted this so early, because now that the public knows that the store is designed and run by AI, many people aren't going to support it (i.e. many people who would have shopped there now won't).
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#94A bit of a non sequitur, but am I the only one finding the use of "she" to refer to the AI in the post jarring?
Probably not the only one, but it's pretty much the least interesting thing to find jarring about the whole experiment. People anthropomorphize. Nobody really finds it "jarring" in most contexts.
[flagged]
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#95Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#96There is a word for this kind of thing: Trendslop. Asking LLMs for advice consistently generates average responses as if the questions were being asked of the training sample population. It is reversion to the mean as a service.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine the data won't be very useful considering it's public knowledge the store is run by AI and most of the customers will be people specifically interested in that aspect of the business. Much like that meetup organised in Manchester, where the people who showed up were there for the novelty: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/05/ai-bot-pa...
Recognizing a unique selling proposition and capitalizing on it should count for the AI, not against it.
The AI didn't recognize anything. It didn't come up with the project or publicize it.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#98is sucks to be John and Jill
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#99Disgusting, I could not finish writing after the AI making interviews to hire people. What a dehumanizing shit.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you kidding me? Who’s going to align synergy and hold accountable KPIs and vision plan the 3rd quarter and.. and.. other MBA talk. Certainly AI could never.
large language models are great at language tasks like "bullshittify this message"
I'm noticing one major early effect of them is making extensive, visually consistent, very impressive slide decks accessible to individual workers who need to actually do real work and wouldn't ordinarily have time to make those.
The result is an explosion of pretty bullshit-heavy documents flying around our org, which management loves but which is definitely, so far, net-harmful to productivity.
This comes out if you start asking questions about the documents. "Which of a couple reasonable senses of [term] do you mean, here?" they'll stumble because that was just something the LLM pulled out of the probability-cluster they'd steered it to and they left in because it seemed right-ish, not because they'd actually thought about it and put it there on purpose. They're basically reading it for the first time right alongside you, LOL. Wonderful. So LLM. Much productivity. Wow.
Anyway, since a lot of what managers and execs do is making those kinds of diagrams and tables and such in slide decks, and their own self-marketing within the company is heavily tied to those, I expect they see this great aid to selfishly productive but company un-productive activity as a sign these things will be at least as big a boon to real work. Probably why they still haven't figured out how wrong that is. I suppose they're gonna need a real kick in the ass before they figure out that being good at squeezing their couple novel elements into a big, pretty, standardized, custom-styled but standards-conforming diagram padded out with statistical-likelihoods doesn't translate to being similarly good at everything.