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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

#271

Post by notatoad »

asib wrote: post #132
gumby271 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run into a similar thing where I'll be cc'd on support tickets with one of our customer support agents and they'll then reply to me with what is clearly an ai summary of the single email from the customer that I can already read. I do think they're trying to be helpful, but it's hard to not feel like they think I'm a child or an idiot. Back in the day we agreed that Googling something for someone was rude (letme…

That’s not the intent of letmegooglethatforyou. It’s a pointed way of telling the recipient they should do the bare minimum research on their own before asking someone else for help. It’s not about being angry that someone told you something they found from a cursory google search

You’re right, but Lmgtfy links are incredibly similar in tone to sending somebody ai output.

Lmgtfy was a passive-aggressive (but not really passive) way to say “hey, are you too dumb to google this?”. Sending somebody ai output feels the same to me - the message you’re sending to the recipient is “here, you’re obviously too dumb to ask an LLM about this yourself”. Except some people don’t seem to realize that’s the message they’re sending

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

#272

Post by rdtsc »

threecheese wrote: post #219
Avicebron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate a…

I follow the same strategy, but loosely - I need those emdashes to signal that I’m using the tools.

That’s my latest joke — that we’ll have to pretend like we used the tools so they can feel validated they’ve spent all this money on hyped up technology. So, yes, it’s em-dashes and “it’s not just this, it’s that …” so they can hopefully leave us alone.

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

#273

Post by ceejayoz »

senordevnyc wrote: post #257
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you steal time from humanity when they freely chose to use your product? You don’t owe people a perfect product that doesn’t “waste” their time when compared to some arbitrary standard of how it should be.

> How can you steal time from humanity when they freely chose to use your product?

By employing psychologists who figure out how to make it addictive?

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

#274

Post by zmmmmm »

munificent wrote: post #142
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.

No surprise. People like being more productive when they reap some of the benefits of that increased productivity. If you're expected to be 10x more productive but don't get a raise, all you're doing is stuffing money in some executive's pocket while your job security goes down.

I'm being heavily consulted to advise management on culture change towards AI. And my number one message is this: make the number one, first and potentially only beneficiary of AI use the individual staff members themselves. If they have more time now, DO NOT start filling that with more work for them to do. If they do more all by themselves accept it as a bonus (experience says this is overwhelming what will happen anyway). Whichever way it goes, let them experience directly the benefit, and let the culture change happen organically downstream from that.

I think all these companies front-loading staff reductions are actively sabotaging themselves in the worst possible way in this regard.

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

#275

Post by notatoad »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #202
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…

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…

I’d go a step further and say there is never a good reason to share unedited ai output.

The closest acceptable thing to share is the full chat, including your prompts. If the output is useful enough to share, then the human thought process that led to the ai output is almost always more useful than the output itself.

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

#276

Post by stingraycharles »

nlawalker wrote: post #236
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…

You have to call it out when you see it, politely and charitably. "Hey, thanks! This is a great overview, and I actually asked ChatGPT before asking here and got a lot of the same information, but what I'm really looking for is..."

This is what I do, slightly more explicitly saying “just be the real you”. About 50% of colleagues take it well. The other 50% don’t understand the problem, and don’t understand when (and when not) to use AI.

They are at high risk.

Employees using ChatGPT to renegotiate their salary are showing a serious lack of cognitive awareness.

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

#277

Post by scruple »

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.

LLMs are Brandolini's Law taken to an entirely different plane of existence.

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

#278

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Henchman21 wrote: post #201
loeg wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to prevent leaks, or achieve some other goal? If you want to prevent leaks, this isn't an effective approach. If you want to achieve a different goal, that's fine, too, but orthogonal to the stated goal. For leaks, it's probably better to just restrict communications to the necessary distribution and understand that anything widely distributed is more or less public.

You can prevent all the leaks by having nothing bad to leak. That is what is being suggested.

I get why people have this idea, but it doesn't work. A culture of "don't have anything bad to leak" quickly and inevitably leads to "keep your mouth shut so there's nothing bad to leak".

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

#279

Post by stingraycharles »

pinkgolem wrote: post #268
Avicebron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate a…

I mean, i struggle with spelling/wording and ask the LLM to proofread a lot. I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. It's not a bad way to extend your vocabulary & catch spelling mistakes

> I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly.

Please don’t do this. You probably aren’t aware of how bad this can land. It’s not just about containing your original thoughts, it’s about the verbosity, repetitiveness, and absurdity of it all.

Grammarly is a much better tool for these kinds of purposes, and it actually guides and teaches you to improve your writing along the way.

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

#280

Post by scruple »

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…

Yeah I write prompts asking it to misspell a few words, break a few grammar rules, forget to capitalize once in a while, miss some punctuation once in a while. No one will ever catch on.
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