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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

#501

Post by avidiax »

zmmmmm wrote: post #369
Eufrat wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. I really doubt this. There’s too many people who suffer from motion sickness to make this payoff. 33% of the population suffers from motion sickness to varying degrees and current mitigations including blowing a fan at suffering users, is an unrealistc barrier to causal usage.

i think the key is, about half of that 33% can tolerate certain elements of it (stationary experiences etc) and another slice suffer in a way that will be resolvable or at least somewhat mitigated by technology improvements. And then another slice will accommodate it if exposed early enough. Put it all together and you probably are talking more like 10% of people residual. It is still a lot but I think it's just bear…

You can't have a modality that leaves someone out for a mass social or business product.

It's the vegetarians that constrain a shared restaurant choice.

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

#502

Post by anon84873628 »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #446
anon84873628 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Um, I absolutely expect my colleagues to update their internal model of me every time we communicate, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much that communication deviates from their expectations, or how much new information it contains. In fact, that is essentially the purpose of communication.

Do you think you are not constantly being "influenced" to do what people want from you?

What do think happens during a peer review or promotion decision?

What do you think the pile of data in SharePoint / GDrive represents?

You think HR will care about someone taking prolific detailed notes at work?

I did phrase my comment in a glib way to draw out this type of reaction. But this type of stuff is what "intelligence augmentation" will include, and the corporate panopticon is already alive and well anyway.

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

#503

Post by nytesky »

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.

I actually regularly used emdashes in my writing —- my kids complain I write like AI in fact — and now I have to consciously remove them.

Likewise, I often used literary flourish and pleasantries like that above article about email decompression; I’m from the south so I think structured formality comes with territory.

I do think using LLM to turn notes and bullets into narratives should be considered no different than rendering CSV text into an excel format, just making it more digestible by recipient.

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

#504

Post by rurp »

anon84873628 wrote: post #500
BlackFly wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As these products improve, one person sending the output and not the prompt will remain useless. The prompt captures the intent and level of real consideration of the person sending it, the receiver can augment that with additional information if they want to.

That's like saying I should just send the English teacher a description of what my essay will be about, instead of actually writing it. It seems like no one responding to this understands scoped context retrieval.

Professional communication has a completely different goal than a student essay, and it's weird you conflate the two. A student paper is useless as an artifact, the actual value is for the student to learn how to write the paper. If a coworker sends me a long email for me to read it should provide some actual value.

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

#505

Post by sph »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #404
vasco wrote: 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?

No, perhaps continental European. When I moved to Britain I had some adjusting period at work because English-speaking countries are terrified of disagreement and confrontation, and I am not used to dancing around the point, especially in stressful settings where efficiency is key. Mind you, I was always polite and respectful to anybody.

I got better at it, but I can’t say I ever got to like the pervasive hypocrisy. To my understanding the American/West Coast is even more fake on this aspect.

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

#507

Post by dijksterhuis »

anon84873628 wrote: post #502
dijksterhuis wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Um, I absolutely expect my colleagues to update their internal model of me every time we communicate, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much that communication deviates from their expectations, or how much new information it contains. In fact, that is essentially the purpose of communication. Do you think you are not constantly being "influenced" to do what people want from you? What do think happens dur…

their mental model. the human being’s mental model. the one in our private head. not some model on a corporate server, some secret “dossier” on every interaction you’ve ever had with them. you’re basically creating your own black book / surveillance tool on everyone you interact with dude.

just because the corporations do this to us doesn’t make it okay to do it to each other. just because your employer does it doesn’t mean it’s okay to do to your co-workers. like, there has to be a degree of trust between colleagues dude.

compiling a record of every single thing anyone has ever said to you, an individual human being who is not a corporation or a machine, all for the purposes of “it makes my emails better” is just plain fucking creepy.

i think you might need some time away from the screen. seriously.

> i did phrase my comment in a glib way to draw out this type of reaction.

maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to take a bit of time to seriously think about why being glib about this super creepy thing you’re doing is not a good thing.

bit of self-reflection. the thing us humans are supposedly still capable of doing and the machines are not.

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

#508

Post by coffeefirst »

anon84873628 wrote: post #379
dodu_ wrote: 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…

Oh I know. In the past month I’ve moved several thousand dollars in spending away from companies that turned their support into a useless understaffed AI program.

The disease has spread to six figure enterprise contracts hallucinating about their own APIs.

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

#509

Post by FireBeyond »

Mars008 wrote: post #293
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…

I've seen manager obviously reading copilot's advises as his own thoughts on meetings.

At a previous position I got frustrated at a manager who'd characterize multiple team members, including myself, I suspect, as "creating AI slop" when he was posting multiple times a week about how his Jira tickets, PRDs etc, were all being "supercharged" (ugh) with AI.

Meanwhile, I was absolutely using AI, but not to write documents but to do first pass critical reviews, the "what am I missing here, what haven't I accounted for here?" but the writing was all my own.

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

#510

Post by Henchman21 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #278
Henchman21 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

You're saying it is impossible for good people to exist. I can't accept that?
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