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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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

#161

Post by scrumper »

utopiah wrote: post #150
scrumper wrote: post #87

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…

> I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype Have you actually tried that? Because my bet is that if your "prototype" is a anything that is very VERY traditional, e.g. a CMS, online shop, or anything that has examples online, yes it will be quick, but if it's genuinely new, namely something NOT available out there, maybe because it is relying on the latest stack that is not yet well documented, th…

I've only seen it do prototypes of CRUD apps, e-commerce storefronts, dashboards - vanilla stuff in other words. Get an end-to-end skeleton up and running fast; it's really good for that.

Never seen it used for anything novel so I can't refute you.

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

#162

Post by bitlax »

mallowdram wrote: post #158
bitlax wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one — human or LLM — actually knows the meanings of the phrases that Tyler James Robinson wrote on his cartridge casings. But of course we do! The right-wing groyper theory crashed on the rocks so we're left with a deranged leftist who killed in the name of his leftism.

No, memes subvert politics in general. They're references of nihilistic chaos that dissolves left and right.

"Your Honor, have you ever heard of Marcel Duchamp?"

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

scrumper wrote: post #160
stiglitz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possibility: your teams are working less now.

Yes true, that is a possibility and something that's quite hard to police remotely. It doesn't feel likely, everyone's working kind of the same, booking the same hours and overtime is no different, but I can't rule it out. It'd mean that hundreds of people would all be goofing off silently. I'd expect at least overtime bookings to decrease and they haven't - even with our strong incentives to not book o/t.

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by nilkn »

arwhatever wrote: post #58
nphardon wrote: post #53

The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.

The AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?

Front-line workers have a conflict of interest (AI making their jobs easier may lead to layoffs); they're incentivized to be productive, but not so productive that they or a peer they like ends up without a job. That conflict of interest becomes extremely strong when most companies around them are already conducting layoffs, they already know people personally who've been laid off, and hiring remains at a low level compared to the 2010s and early 2020s.

Executives don't care about any of that and just want to make the organization more efficient. They don't care at all if the net effect is reducing headcount. In fact, they want that -- smaller teams are easier to manage and cheaper to operate in nearly every way. From an executive's standpoint, they have nothing to lose: the absolute worst-case scenario is it ends up over-hyped and in the process of rolling it out they learned who's willing to attempt change and who's not. They'll then get rid of the latter people, as they won't want them on the team because of that personality trait, and if AI tooling is broadly useful they won't even bother backfilling.

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

#165

Post by mallowdram »

bitlax wrote: post #162
mallowdram wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, memes subvert politics in general. They're references of nihilistic chaos that dissolves left and right.

"Your Honor, have you ever heard of Marcel Duchamp?"

Duchamp played the status game of arbitrary signals as representations for high status. He's not a chaos agent. He's a relic of a generation trying to get into galleries and museums for status. It's not even close to meme-culture.

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

#166

Post by ManlyBread »

ramoz wrote: post #56

My CEO sent an ai generated blog today. I've never felt more frustrated reading something in my life. "x happened, here's what it means", "groundbreaking", "game-changer", "significant", "forefront of a technological shift"

I refuse to read anything that seems to be obviously AI generated. If they can't be bothered to write down what they think then I don't have any reason to bother with reading what they've posted either.

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

#167

Post by duxup »

ryandrake wrote: post #30

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…

I wonder how much this has to do with the LinkedIn world where everyone is making "I made us 100% more efficient last week with AI!" type stuff.

I'm not normally on LinkedIn but recently was and with the AI stuff the "look at me" spam around AI seems like an order of magnitude more absurd than usual.

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

#168

Post by duxup »

everdrive wrote: post #123
ramoz wrote: post #56

My CEO sent an ai generated blog today. I've never felt more frustrated reading something in my life. "x happened, here's what it means", "groundbreaking", "game-changer", "significant", "forefront of a technological shift"

I hope you learned an important lesson about reading the next email from the CEO.

At one company I worked at the executives sent out constant emails to everyone. It was part of the culture. After some layoffs HR leadership sent out a THREE PART email about how they were working on a very important project and how it took many many hours and meetings and so on.

The project was renaming the HR department ...

After that I sent all executive emails to a folder and did not read them, my mood improved drastically by not reading those emails.

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

#169

Post by bitlax »

mallowdram wrote: post #165
bitlax wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your Honor, have you ever heard of Marcel Duchamp?"

Duchamp played the status game of arbitrary signals as representations for high status. He's not a chaos agent. He's a relic of a generation trying to get into galleries and museums for status. It's not even close to meme-culture.

Ok, so Tyler Robinson is a sincere Dadaist in a way that the founders were not.

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

#170

Post by jennyholzer »

vkou wrote: post #52
romaniv wrote: post #46

We call these workers “pilots,” as opposed to “passengers.” Pilots use gen AI 75% more often at work than passengers, and 95% more often outside of work. Identify a real issue with the technology, then shift the blame to a made-up group of people who (supposedly) aren't trying hard enough to embrace the technology. Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism Thanks for the career advice.

A pilot has ultimate authority of how a plane is flown, because it's their ass in the fire if the plane can't land. If you're a low-level office drone, you are not a pilot.

Embody a slave mindset
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