The irony is nearly perfect: an essay warning that AI tells leaders what they want to hear rewrites research until it tells the author what he wants to hear.
AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
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Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#62"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights" it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leade…
C* can mean anything. The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second. I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month. I fixed the SQL query…
Most things get done in spite of management, not because of it.
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#63Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#64> Because what loosened those patients’ grip on reality was prolonged exposure to a voice that sounded informed and assured, and always felt supportive and patient.
Elites have been surrounding themselves by Yes Men for centuries. Is this any different, I wonder, or has there always been such a psychosis?
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#65It’s been wild watching smart people have their brain cooked on a constant diet of X and LLMs in the past two years.
Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.
Cal Newport was right.
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#66"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights" it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leade…
> it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else.
I believe this counts as having “more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues”
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#67At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
We are so ******, am I right?
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#68Article reads AI generated, or maybe those are the kind of publications is where they got this from?
Yes, it's pure, horrible, AI slop. And as usual, all the people that mentioned this got downvoted here. Unfortunately, HN users can't even tell this crap from useful text.
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#69"74% of executives said they had more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues or friends, and 44% said they would defer to its reasoning over their own insights" it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leade…
C* can mean anything. The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second. I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month. I fixed the SQL query…
> I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.
It runs because there are just enough people who know what they are doing and quietly do it often against headwinds in just about all the places they need to be.
Which works until it doesn't, We've gradually been removing those people in the name of "efficiency" with somewhat predictable systemic results across the board.
Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
#70> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us. Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time. There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good…
> There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort.
Quoting the article...
"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."
If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.
The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.
So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).