this is a reasonable request, provided there is a human on the other side who is going to read the 200-400 word response, and make a judgment call.
Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
181–190 of 419 posts
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#182This application requirement really bothered me as someone who's autistic and dyslexic. I think visually, and while I have valid ideas and unique perspectives, I sometimes struggle to convert my visual thoughts into traditional spoken/written language. AI tools are invaluable to me - they help bridge the gap between my visual thinking and the written expression that's expected in professional settings. LLMs are essen…
I feel very similarly. I'm also an extremely visual thinker who has a job as a programmer, and being able to bounce ideas back and forth between a "gifted intern" and myself is invaluable (in the past I used to use actual interns!)
I regard it as similar to using a text-to-speech tool for a blind person - who cares how they get their work done? I care about the quality of their work and my ability to interact with them, regardless of the method they use to get there.
Another example I would give: imagine there's someone who only works as a pair programmer with their associate. Apart, they are completely useless. Together, they're approximately 150% as productive as any two programmers pairing together. Would you hire them? How much would you pay them as a pair? I submit the right answer is yes, and something north of one full salary split in two. But for bureaucracy I'd love to try it.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen applicants use AI to answer questions during the 'behavioral' Q&A-style interviews. Those applicants are 'cheating', and it defeats the whole purpose as we want to understand the candidate and their experience, not what LLMs will regurgitate. Thankfully it's usually pretty easy to spot this so it's basically an immediate rejection.
You could reasonably argue that they're not cheating, indeed they're being very behaviorally revealing and you do understand everything you need to understand about them. Too bad for them, but works for you… I'm imagining a hiring workflow, for a role that is not 'specifically use AI for a thing', in which there is no suggestion that you shouldn't use AI systems for any part of the interview. It's just that it's an a…
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Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…
AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.
For learning it can very well be. And also it really depends on the tool and task. Calculator is fine tool. But symbolic solver might be a few steps too far. If you don't already understand the process. And possibly the start and end points.
Problem with AI is that it is often black box tool. And not even deterministic one.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use an AI assistant to help you fix grammar and come up with creative reasons why you should work there.
This adds another twist, since I'd bet nowadays most CVs are processed (or at least pre-screened) by "AI": we're in a ridiculous situation where applicants feed a few bullet points to AI to generate full-blown polished resumes and motivational letters … and then HR uses different AI to distil all that back to the original bullet points. Interesting times.
This makes me think about adversarial methods of affecting the outcome, where we end up with a "who can hack the metabrain the best" contest. Kind of like the older leet-code system, where obviously software engineering skills were purely secondary to gamesmanship.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#186I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…
> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…
Making your comms friendlier or whatever is one of the myriad ways to use LLMs. Maybe you personally have "LLMs shoved down your throat" by your corporate overlords. No one in their right mind can say that LLMs were created for such a purpose, it just so happens you can use it in this way.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#187On the face of it it's a reasonable request but the question itself is pointless. An applicants outside opinion on a company is pretty irrelevant and is subject to a lot of change after starting work.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is part of "deliver working things". A car hold together by duct tape is usually not considered a working car or road save. Same with code. "You also need to take into account how to judge if something is "working" or not — that's not necessarily a trivial task." Indeed, and if the examiner cannot do that, he might be in a wrong position in the first place. If I am presented with code, I can ask the person what…
Completely agree. I'm judging the outputs of a process, I really am only interested in the inputs to that process as a matter of curiosity. If I can't tell the difference, or if the AI helps you write drastically better code, I see it as no more nor no less than, for example, pair programming or using assistive devices. I also happen to think that most people, right now, are not very good at using AI to get things do…
Sure, but the output of your daily programming work isn't just the code you write for the company. It's also your own self-improvement, how you work with others, etc. For the record, I'm not just saying "AI bad"; I've come around to some use of AI being acceptable in an interview, provided it's properly assessed.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#189You wouldn't show up drunk to a job interview just because its at brewery, would you?
I guarantee you the lawns at the lawnmower manufacturer are not cut with scissors.
Isn't Anthropic's stated goal to make "nice" self-improving general AI? Cut out the middleman and have the AI train the next generation.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#190I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…
> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…
The LLM companies have always been against this kind of thing.
Sam Altman (2023): "something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points"
3 years ago people were poking fun about how restrictive the terms were - you could get your API key blocked if you used it to pretend to be a human. Eventually people just used other AIs for things like that, so they got rid of these restrictions that they couldn't enforce anyway.