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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

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

#201

Post by arkey »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #39
jon-wood wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. At least in theory that’s not what homework is. Homework should be exercises to allow practicing whatever technique you’re trying to learn, because most people learn best by repeatedly doing a thing rather than reading a few chapters of a book. By applying an LLM to the problem you’re just practicing how to u…

Um, get with the times, luddite. You can use an LLM for everything, including curing cancer and fixing climate change. (I still mentally cringe as I remember the posts about Disney and Marvel going out of business because of Stable Diffusion. That certainly didn't age well.)

It would be great if all technologies freed us and gave us more time to do useful or constructive stuff instead. But the truth is, and AI is a very good example of this, a lot of these technologies are just making people dumb.

I'm not saying they are essentially bad, or that they are not useful at all, far from that. But it's about the use they are given.

> You can use an LLM for everything, including curing cancer and fixing climate change.

Maybe, yes. But the danger is rather in all the things you no longer feel you have a need to do, like learning a language, or how to properly write, or read.

LLM for everything is like the fast-food of information. Cheap, unhealthy, and sometimes addicting.

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

#202

Post by fmbb »

jack_pp wrote: post #186
latexr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

LLMs are sold by corporate overlords to corporate overlords. They all know this is what it will be used for.

The writing was on the wall that the main use will be spam and phishing.

You can say the creators did not intend on this purpose, but it was created with knowledge that this would be the main use case.

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

#203

Post by blagie »

latexr wrote: post #166
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 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…

> It reminded me of the time Roy Wood Jr visited a pro-gun rally where they argued guns make people safe, while simultaneously asking people to not carry guns because they were worried about safety. The cognitive dissonance is worth pointing out.

Well, no. It's irony, but it's only cognitive dissonance in a comedy show which misses the nuance.

Most pro-gun organizations are heavily into gun safety. The message is that guns aren't unsafe if they're being used correctly. Most of the time, this means that most guns should be locked up in a safe, with ammo in a separate safe, except when being transported to a gun range, for hunting, or similar. When being used there, one should follow a specific set of procedures for keeping those activities safe as well.

It's a perfect analogy for the LLM here too. Anthropic encourages it for many uses, but not for the one textbox. Irony? Yes. Wrong? Probably not.

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

#204

Post by amelius »

latexr wrote: post #166
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 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…

Yes, and they should state that they also don't use AI in the selection process.

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

#205

Post by hollowturtle »

jack_pp wrote: post #198
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…

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 a…

Remember though that lazyness, as I learned in computing, is kinda "doing something later": you might have pushed the change/fix faster than your senior fellow programmer, but you still need to review and test that change right? Maybe the change you're talking about was really trivial and you just needed to refresh your browser to see a trivial change, but when it's not, being lazy about a change will only gets you suffer more when reviewing a pr and testing the non trivial change working for thousands customers with different devices

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

#207

Post by dhruvrajvanshi »

exe34 wrote: post #157
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…

> "Well it's not illegal" What's good for the gander.... I promise you they will use AI to vet your application.

> I promise you they will use AI to vet your application.

So?

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

#208

Post by csomar »

Daub wrote: post #135

Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate…

> what is your creative philosophy?

Seriously?

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

#209

Post by numbsafari »

blagie wrote: post #203
latexr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It reminded me of the time Roy Wood Jr visited a pro-gun rally where they argued guns make people safe, while simultaneously asking people to not carry guns because they were worried about safety. The cognitive dissonance is worth pointing out. Well, no. It's irony, but it's only cognitive dissonance in a comedy show which misses the nuance. Most pro-gun organizations are heavily into gun safety. The message is tha…

These are the same people that insist we arm elementary school teachers and expect those teachers to someday pull the trigger on a child instead of having proper gun laws.

There is no irony.

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