Live data from Hacker News

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

441–450 of 566 posts

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

#441
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

Currently they are inferior.

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

#442
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Perhaps a less-brittle version would be to replace "we don't know X" with "we can't easily prove X to the extent needed to deter it."

We dont need to prove it to deter it.

If in doubt, treat it as a bad writing and give that feedback. It is a bad writing.

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

#443
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I wanted to receive copy paste from a bot I wouldn't message you, why are you trying to sneak this in?" You reminded me of American colleagues that lie and say things are good when they are bad lol. Unable to be straight to the point. You're upset at the waste of time yet you thank them?

Just curious: would you consider yourself autistic?

Is that a tell? Sounds very much like my reaction to that behavior, but I always assumed it's because I'm german.

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

#444
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. From funny quote to litmus test.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought the 3D-printing analogy is pretty apt for about a year now. It had a lot of promise at first but it never quite has the impact people thought it would. There are still 3D printers for sale, and people still prototype with them, but nobody's printing out a dustpan when they need one.

Um, have you heard about the drone warfare in Ukraine?

There is a lot more then 3d printing going into that.

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

#446
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

> I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet.

have you asked these people how they feel about this? have you asked them for permission, for their consent to do this with their communications to you?

what you’re doing sounds incredibly creepy. like, meta/facebook kinda of creepy. granted, it’s at a more limited scale, but it’s still creepy af dude.

fwiw, if i was your colleague and you asked me how i felt about you doing this with me, i’d be seeing about getting HR involved.

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

#447

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

I wonder what the thought process is? "I only work here because I like to violate everyone else's privacy. Mine has to be respected"? It's not like Meta/Facebook ever had moral concerns about privacy violations or surveillance (or many other things).

Come on, we all know why they work there...

"I only work here because I like money and Meta pays more than $(INSERT_OTHER_FAANG)"

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

#448
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point…

> It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. "big machine farm" reminds me of folding@home, which needed the same and got it. "manual curation" is what Wikipedia did, as well as the free software…

I also thought of these after writing my comment. The main problems that I see with these solutions are:

- Training seems to need a lot of data available at the same time, which is difficult to handle on commodity hardware.

- Manual curation can be a mind-numbing task, it might need to be gamified somehow.

There is a chance that the curation could be higher quality than the current corporate stuff. Pretty sure that it's not an intrinsic property of LLMs to write like TED talks.

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

#449

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

The infamous "Nuremberg defense".

Meta employee chose to work there. Each day, they choose to keep working there. With Meta on their resume, they could find work pretty much anywhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

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

#450
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your argument is effectively saying "how can lowering the quality of my product affect customers when they freely use it?". If you use Facebook regularly, you are locked into it because unless you manage to convince your entire friend network to move to some other social media with you, you will have to "leave them behind".

Or you could do what I, and many millions of others have, and just…stop using it.
Post reply on HN