Live data from Hacker News

AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

hbr.org

131–140 of 184 posts

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#131
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept…

If the corporate directive was to share "if AI has helped and how" I would agree. But my company started that way and when I tested the new sql query analysis tool and reported (nicely and politely with positive feedback too) that it was making up whole tables to join to (assuming we had a simple "users" table with email/id columns which we did not have due to being a large company with purposefully segmented databas…

I know you don't want to hear this, but I also know you know this is true: you would genuinely need to look at the full dataset that team collected to draw any meaningful conclusion here. Your single example means pretty much nothing in terms of whether the tool makes sense at large scale. Not a single tool or technology exists in this entire field that never fails or has issues. You could just as well argue that because you read something wrong on Google or Stack Overflow that those tools should be banned or discouraged, yet that is clearly false.

That said, I don't agree with or advocate the specific rollout methodology your company is using and agree that it feels more abusive and adversarial than helpful. That approach will certainly risk backfiring, even if they aren't wrong about the large-scale usefulness of the tools.

What you're experiencing is perhaps more poor change management than it is a fundamentally bad call about a toolset or technology. They are almost certainly right at scale more than they are wrong; what they're struggling with is how to rapidly re-skill their employee population when it contains many people resistant to change at this scale and pace.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#132

The AI revolution 2022-2030 is a speed run of the IT revolution of 1970-2000. In other words, how to 1000x management overhead while reducing real productivity, meanwhile skyrocketing nominal productivity.

The monetary analogy of nominal vs real productivity is so good — I’m stealing it for some undetermined use in the future.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#133
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe chatgpt can help us understand it better

chat can't grasp what it hasn't been trained to automate.

I don't think you actually grasp what you're writing either, or at least you can't explain it in any coherent way, so LLMs are no worse on that score.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#134

My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…

Soundslike a case of Republicanism.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was that manager. I dunno about your senior leader but with me it was coming from a healthy place. After a few months of ra-ra from the C suite about how we were now an AI-first company (we're a tech consultancy building one-off stuff for customers) and should be using it in all our customer projects, I asked the question, quite reasonably I thought, "so am I going to offer lower prices to my clients, or am I going…

Another possibility: your teams are working less now.

[deleted]

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#136
This is similar to how the internet destroys productivity with YouTube. Humans are masters of compensating productivity gains with time retrieval.

Now that ai makes my programming 10x more efficient, I will work 5x less destroying “half of my” productivity.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#137
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged. "Explain to me in detail exactly how and why this works, or I'm not merging." This should suffice as a response to any code the developer did not actively think about before submitting, AI generated or not.

I think you might’ve missed this part from the post: > AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to qu…

Why would he merge any code from his non technical boss? Writing code obviously isnt his role so I dont know why he would expect his code to be getting merged all of a sudden. Just straight up tell him this isnt useful please stop.

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#138

The AI revolution 2022-2030 is a speed run of the IT revolution of 1970-2000. In other words, how to 1000x management overhead while reducing real productivity, meanwhile skyrocketing nominal productivity.

The monetary analogy of nominal vs real productivity is so good — I’m stealing it for some undetermined use in the future.

I appreciate that . I do spend a lot of time trying to be illustrative

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#139
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

chat can't grasp what it hasn't been trained to automate.

I don't think you actually grasp what you're writing either, or at least you can't explain it in any coherent way, so LLMs are no worse on that score.

There are vast, unexplored sums of knowledge that LLMs can't automate, mimic or regurgitate. This is obvious simply from meme-culture. Try asking Chat GPT to derive meaning from Kirk's shooters casing engravings. Listen to the explanations unravel.

Once you attach the nearly limitless loads of meaning available to event-perception (use cognitive mapping in neuroscience where behavior has no meaning, it simply has tasks and task demands vary wildly so that semantic loads are factors rather than simple numbers), LLMs appear to be like puppets of folk psychology using tokens predictably in embedded space. These tokens have nothing to do with the reality of knowledge or events. Of course engineers can't grasp this, you've been severely limited to using folk psychology infected cog sci as a base of where your code is developed from, when in reality, it's almost totally illusory. CS has no future game in probability, it's now a bureaucracy. The millions or billions of parameters have zero access to problems like these that sit beyond cog sci, I'll let Kelso zing it

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oK0E4siLUv9MFCYuOoG0Jir_65T...

Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

#140
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the corporate directive was to share "if AI has helped and how" I would agree. But my company started that way and when I tested the new sql query analysis tool and reported (nicely and politely with positive feedback too) that it was making up whole tables to join to (assuming we had a simple "users" table with email/id columns which we did not have due to being a large company with purposefully segmented databas…

I know you don't want to hear this, but I also know you know this is true: you would genuinely need to look at the full dataset that team collected to draw any meaningful conclusion here. Your single example means pretty much nothing in terms of whether the tool makes sense at large scale. Not a single tool or technology exists in this entire field that never fails or has issues. You could just as well argue that bec…

> I know you don't want to hear this, but I also know you know this is true

I wasn't sanctimonious to you, don't be so to me please.

> you would genuinely need to

> look at the full dataset that

> team collected to draw any

> meaningful conclusion here

I compared notes with a couple friends on other teams and it was the same for each one. Yes it's anecdotes but when the same exact people that are producing/integrating the service are also grading its success AND combine this very argument while hiding any data that could be used against them, I know I am dealing with people who will not tell the truth about what the data actually says.

Post reply on HN