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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#241

Post by 2wdfsd »

ceejayoz wrote: post #200
Aurornis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Oh, we know. It's pretty clear in many cases.

lol yeeh... its obvious as hell.

And frankly the best signal now is: the shorter it is the greater the likelihood it was at least expensive for the human to produce. Said in another way - a shorter thing is easier to make sense of completely and if its garbage - its garbage. At least the cost borne on you was minimised!

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#242

Post by 2wdfsd »

bandrami wrote: post #223
Forgeties79 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current bar is “if you know I’m expecting to hear from a person don’t paste unedited ChatGPT outputs and hit send.” Everybody wants to send out the efforts of their corner-cutting, but nobody wants to receive them. Most people know when they are doing it. If you feel the need to obscure your LLM usage, it means you didn’t put enough of your own voice and work into the final draft and you need to do something about…

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

Not quite. Ultimately the lions-share of income of model producer's is coming from firms.

Firms are only going to pay out to model producers if they are getting more in excess of the cost of financing projects over time. If a firm does not see this happen, they reduce their spend on tokens. Simple.

Its a whole lot more nuanced than some shitty game theory.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#243

Post by alex1138 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #232
senordevnyc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If that one change requires every user to click on their friends profiles to see updates x 2.1 billion daily users and say 4 family friends checked and it takes 1 second to click that is 291,000 8 hour workdays lost per day to humanity. Around 100,000,000 work days per year humanity looses out on putting to productive use. And I am REALLY underestimating the time lost to this. Facebook is stealing low end 100 million…

It's worse than that, people have reported that even going to someone's page, FB determines the order posted. Also, psychological experiments FB has done; also, it's kind of the definition of addiction, because FB, in the beginning, when you first friend someone, shows posts. These then subsequently drop off. You can post something, assuming it's been read. It might show up for nobody.

It's been said before that it's interesting Zuckerberg for making a social site is pretty introverted. It's because he stole it and he's always been stealing things. He did it to Whatsapp. He copied Snapchat multiple times. He thinks people are "dumb fucks" rather than "look, people shouldn't give info away, but now that I have it I'll do everything I can to keep it secure" (I DON'T like Google but my understanding is they have far fewer data problems). That's the mark of a certain kind of person which I'll, I suppose, not name. It's insulting to the web, what he does

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#244

Post by Forgeties79 »

bandrami wrote: post #223
Forgeties79 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current bar is “if you know I’m expecting to hear from a person don’t paste unedited ChatGPT outputs and hit send.” Everybody wants to send out the efforts of their corner-cutting, but nobody wants to receive them. Most people know when they are doing it. If you feel the need to obscure your LLM usage, it means you didn’t put enough of your own voice and work into the final draft and you need to do something about…

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

>the market always finds a way

That may be the case but every day LLM’s feel less like the next big thing and more like 3D printing. Here to stay, but not nearly as ubiquitous and earth shattering as people made it out to be.

If I had to guess right now, I would say LLM’s are more significant than 3D printers, but less significant than the Internet.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#245

Post by 3fsd »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #69
themafia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ford style assembly lines The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable. > Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I've not once heard anyone in the service industry make this complaint. > as the efficiency benefits are too important. You can squeeze every last drop of productivity from your employees. In the short term this may even evi…

"The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable." The whole innovation was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots. Once you're there, having removed any agency and freedom, pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.

You've described the amazon warehouse. Ive worked in there and trust me, I did not see people displaying exhaustion etc. There were many there who did the job purely because of how simple it was and were ok with it. Perhaps they got conditioned to it.

Yes it was jarring for me to experience that.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#246

Post by amelius »

softwaredoug wrote: post #91

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.

Just wait until Big AI copies those businesses.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#247

Post by trollbridge »

erentz wrote: post #210
Havoc wrote: post #8

I 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…

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#248

Post by atq2119 »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #218
JuniperMesos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condem…

Why is saying things that are true called propaganda? Also, it is not just genetics but that is a part of it. The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc. Honestly, it just completely obvious and is playing out in real time. It's just obvious.

> The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc.

Educated people can neglect their kids. And less educated people can still recognize when education is valued by society.

Now look around. Do you feel like we're living in a society that values education? Did the successful people that kids see in their formative years get there through education, and/or do they visibly value education beyond lip service?

Some of them, yes. But I'd argue that between influencers, teachers' pay, and the increasingly obvious nepotism and corruption by people in power, the situation is looking pretty dire. We don't truly value education as a society and are therefore teaching a new generation that education isn't to be valued. And that has nothing to do with genetics.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#249

Post by trollbridge »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #244
bandrami wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

>the market always finds a way That may be the case but every day LLM’s feel less like the next big thing and more like 3D printing. Here to stay, but not nearly as ubiquitous and earth shattering as people made it out to be. If I had to guess right now, I would say LLM’s are more significant than 3D printers, but less significant than the Internet.

I'd say that's a pretty accurate analysis. Something that is easily generated by an LLM obviously has low value and there is no moat.

Agentic coding is a bit different, particularly if a great deal of effort and intelligence goes into it, but that's a quite different thing than just cranking out slop apps.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#250

Post by CamperBob2 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #216
alex1138 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS

[flagged]

If you go out of your way to get people addicted to your site, you don't get to complain when they take your rug-pull a little too personally.
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