I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
161–170 of 566 posts
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#162As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
GMO was the first technology I figured that out. It was heavily pushed in around 2007 as a solution to world hunger, but at the same time it was very easy to see that hunger was a problem of distribution, not technology. Even back in 2007 we made much more food then was required to feed the world population. Furthering the obviousness of the lie was that in reality GMO was (and still is) mostly used for growing feed…
Yes.
We do not need GMO for food, I agree.
But where is the genetically engineered heart muscle that sits in the engine bay of my car running on nutrient solution, excreting C02 and urine while driving my car with a hydraulic motor?
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#163In 2019 I suggested[0] you might reach AGI if you train on computer usage - mouse movement, keypresses, what's on the screen etc. - and it sounds like Meta are kind of trying some form of it.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#164In 2019 I suggested[0] you might reach AGI if you train on computer usage - mouse movement, keypresses, what's on the screen etc. - and it sounds like Meta are kind of trying some form of it. 0. https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/human-imitating-task/
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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.” We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be. Edit: these responses…
Except that it's not preventable. Technology is always an arms race. If you don't create it, someone else will, and then they'll have the advantage and subjugate you, so you might as well be the one to do it first. Whatever it is that you're trying to prevent, someone is going to do it if it gives them power.
What’s not preventable? What do you think I am saying, exactly?
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#166I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…
> She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.
This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw.
LLMs came along and erased that assumption. Now you don't know if that e-mail, that 12-page design document, the 100 or 1000 line PR, or those 10 Jira tickets were written by someone who invested a lot of their own time into producing something, or if they had their AI subscription generate something that looked plausible. You have to actually read and process the work, which takes 100 times more effort than it took them to make it.
For people in the working world who saw the workplace as a game of min-maxing their effort against the appearance of being a valuable contributor, LLMs are the perfect shortcut: They can now generate the appearance of doing a lot of work with no more than a few lines of asking an LLM to produce documents.
If anyone spends the 30 minutes to review the AI slop from their 15-second prompt, they'll copy your feedback into ChatGPT and send another document over with the fixes. Now they've even captured you into doing their work for them!
For teams or even entire companies that were relying on appearances of activity as a proxy for contributions, this is going to be a difficult transition. Everyone e-mail job worker in the world just received a tool that will generate the appearance of doing their job for them and even possibly be plausibly correct most of the time. One person can generate volumes of design documents, Jira tickets, and even copy and paste witty responses into the company Slack and appear to be the most engaged and dedicated employee by volume while doing less actual work than ever before.
I think teams that already had good review cultures with managers who cared about the output rather than the metrics are doing fine because anyone even a little bit engaged can spot the AI copy-and-paste employees with even a little inspection. The lazy managers who relied on skimming documents and plotting number of PRs or lines of code changed are in for a rude awakening when they discover the employees dominating their little games are the ones doing the most damage to the team.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for myself and I absolutely love AI. I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately. My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click. This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your custome…
This is the right way to look at things now. It might not always have the right track record, but AI built coding is more likely to have all the right permissions in place by default, most likely to copy existing patterns in your codebase, most likely to use the highest performance patterns and on top of all that, the spec will match what was asked of it.
What magical AI are you using? That’s not my experience at all.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#168I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
Meta is on the extreme other end of this. The article opens with how they're now using AI to monitor how everyone uses their computers.
It's still insane to me that Meta thought this would be a good idea, or that employees would be comfortable with it even though they claim it's only used for anonymous AI training.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.” We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be. Edit: these responses…
It wasn't "preventable" though. How would you prevent what's been happening ? Pass a law making GPUs illegal ? Just ..."convince" everyone that the machine that can write working software, business letters and render good enough banner and print advertising for nearly free is evil and just don't use it (ask Emily Bender how that's going)? There is no realistic way from stopping any of this from happening. Need a diff…
I proposed literally none of those solutions or even suggested them.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#170Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.