Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 419 posts

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#191

Post by latexr »

xnorswap wrote: post #145
radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'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'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the…

> I think I'm just very much out of tune with the zeitgeist, because I can't imagine not going along with what's a polite request not to use AI.

No, what you are is ignoring the context.

This request comes from a company building, promoting, and selling the very thing they are asking you not to use.

Yes, asking you not to use AI is indeed a polite request. It is one you should respect. “The zeitgeist” has as much people in favour of AI as against it, and picking either camp doesn’t make anyone special. Either stance is bound to be detrimental in some companies and positive in others.

But none of that matters, what makes this relevant is the context of who’s asking.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#192

Post by Draiken »

madeofpalk wrote: post #54
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

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.

If the company is doing behavioral Q&A interviews, I hope they're getting as many bad applicants as possible.

Adding a load of pseudo-science to the already horrible process of looking for a job is definitely not what we need.

I'll never submit myself to pseudo-IQ tests and word association questions for a job that will 99.9% of the time ask you to build CRUD applications.

The lengths that companies go to avoid doing a proper job at hiring people (one of the most important jobs they need to do) with automatic screening and these types of interviews is astonishing.

Good on whoever uses AI for that kind of shit. They want bullshit so why not use the best bullshit generators of our time?

You want to talk to me and get a feeling about how I'd behave? That's totally normal and expected. But if you want to get a bunch of written text to then run sentiment analysis on it and get a score on how "good" it is? Screw that.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#193

Post by Muromec »

sho_hn wrote: post #85
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

I have a feeling that "almost getting there" will simply become the norm. I have seen a lot of buggy and almost but not exactly right applications, processes and even laws that people simply have to live with.

If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal state of everything digital being broken 10% of the time insteaf of hald percent

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#194

Post by mattigames »

xnorswap wrote: post #145
radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'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'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the…

The ones paying are in their vast majority the most selfish of them all, for example it would be reasonable to say that Jeff Bezos its one of the most selfish people on the planet, so at the end it doesn't boil down to "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat" but more like "Well I can cheat, get away with it and the victim is just another cheater, so therefore I should cheat"

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#195

Post by jaggederest »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #188
jaggederest wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

Agreed, but I as the "end user" care not at all whether you're running a local LLM that you fine tune, or storing it all in your eidetic memory, or writing it down on post it notes that are all over your workspace[1]. Anything that works, works. I'm results oriented, and I do care very much about the results, but the methods (within obvious ethical and legal constraints) are up to you.

[1] I've seen all three in action. The post-it notes guy was amazing though. Apparently he had a head injury at one point and had almost no short term memory, so he coated every surface in post-its to remind himself. You'd never know unless you saw them though.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#196

Post by bayindirh »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'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…

> 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.

Sorry, the thought process of thinking that using an LLM for a job application, esp. for a field which requests candid input about one's motivation is acceptable, is beyond me.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#197

Post by latexr »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #150
radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'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 love it when the "contrarian view" is absolutely not the contrarian view :)

See “contrarian dynamic”.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#198

Post by jack_pp »

hollowturtle wrote: post #46
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

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…

Let me give you an example from yesterday. I was learning tailwind and had a really long class attribute on a div which I didn't like. I wanted to split it and found a way to do it using my JavaScript framework (the new way to do it was suggested by deepseek). When I started writing by hand the list of classes in the new format copilot gave me an auto complete suggestion after I wrote the first class. I pressed tab and it was done.

I showed this to my new colleague who is a bit older than me and sort of had similar attitudes as you. He told me he can do the same with some multi cursor shenanigans and I'll be honest in that I wasn't interested in his approach. Seems like he would've taken more time to solve the same problem even though he had superior technique than me. He said sure it takes longer but I need to verify by reading the whole class list and that's a pain but I just reloaded the page and it was fine. He still wasn't comfortable with me using copilot.

So yes, it does make me lazier but you could say the same about using go instead of C or any higher level abstraction. These tools will only get better and more correct. It's our job to figure out where it is appropriate to use them and where it isn't. Going to either extremes is where the issue is

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#199

Post by xnorswap »

latexr wrote: post #191
xnorswap wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the…

> I think I'm just very much out of tune with the zeitgeist, because I can't imagine not going along with what's a polite request not to use AI. No, what you are is ignoring the context. This request comes from a company building, promoting, and selling the very thing they are asking you not to use. Yes, asking you not to use AI is indeed a polite request. It is one you should respect. “The zeitgeist” has as much peo…

I didn't miss that context, I understand who Anthropic are.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#200

Post by rmgk »

Muromec wrote: post #193
sho_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

I have a feeling that "almost getting there" will simply become the norm. I have seen a lot of buggy and almost but not exactly right applications, processes and even laws that people simply have to live with. If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal sta…

Using faxes is much more streamlined than the more modern Scan, Email, Print process.
Post reply on HN