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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"

#221

Post by radu_floricica »

passwordoops wrote: post #215
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 agree with your sentiment. But coming from a generative AI company that says "career development" and "communication" are among their two most popular use cases... That's like a tobacco company telling employees they are not permitted to smoke tobacco

Well, they probably aren't permitted to smoke tobacco indoors.

I honestly fail to see even the irony. "Company that makes hammers doesn't want you to use hammers all the time". It's a tool.

But if I squint, I _can_ see a mean-spirited "haha, look at those hypocrites" coming from people who enjoy tearing others down for no particular reason.

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

#222

Post by jusssi »

passwordoops wrote: post #215
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 agree with your sentiment. But coming from a generative AI company that says "career development" and "communication" are among their two most popular use cases... That's like a tobacco company telling employees they are not permitted to smoke tobacco

A brewery telling their employees to not drink the product while at work?

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

#224

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

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 aren’t making your comms friendlier; they’re just making them more vapid. When I see the language that ChatGPT spits out when you tell it to be friendly, I immediately think ‘okay, what is this person trying to sell me?’

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

#225

Post by radu_floricica »

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 :)

I did check the conversation thread before I commented. At the time, and without looking very carefully, this particular view seemed missing.

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

#226

Post by yosito »

How much you wanna bet they're using AI to evaluate applicants and they don't even have a human reading 99% of the applications they're asking people to write?

As someone who has recently applied to over 300 jobs, just to get form letter rejections, it's really hard to want to invest my time to hand-write an application that I know isn't even going to be read by a human.

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

#227

Post by gjulianm »

jusomg wrote: post #119

I do lots of technical interviews in Big Tech, and I would be open to candidates using AI tools in the open. I don't know why most companies ban it. IMO we should embrace them, or at least try to and see how it goes (maybe as a pilot program?). I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never wa…

> So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.

Candidates could also have an AI listening to the questions and giving them answers. There are other ways that they could be in the process without copy/pasting blindly.

> To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc).

Exactly, that's why I feel like saying "AI is not allowed" makes it all more clear. As interviewers we want to see these abilities you have, and if candidates use an AI it's harder to know what's them and what's the AI. It's not that we don't think AI is an useful tool, it's that it reduces the amount of signal we get in an interview; and in any case there's the assumption than the better someone performs the better they could use AI.

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

#228

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

jaggederest wrote: post #195
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I think we're agreeing on the aim—good results—but disagreeing on what those results consist of. If I'm acting as a 'company', one that wants a beneficial relationship with a productive programmer for the long-term, I would rather have [ program that works 90%, programmer who is 10% better at their job having written it ] as my outputs than a perfect program and a less-good programmer.

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

#229

Post by pinoy420 »

Applejinx wrote: post #139
pinoy420 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like the sort of person of old who “Why would you use the internet. Look in an encyclopaedia. ‘Google it’ is just lazy” This trope is unbecoming of anyone sensible.

It's 2025, not 2015. 'google it and add the word reddit' is a thing. For now. Google 'reflections on trusting trust'. Your level of trust in software that purports to think for you out of a multi-gig stew of word associations is pretty intense, but I wouldn't call it pretty sensible.

What on earth does that drivel even say. Did you generate this from a heavily quantised gpt2?

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

#230

Post by apprentice7 »

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…

It's like when you play World of Warcraft for the first time and you have this character boost to max level and you use it. You didn't go through the leveling phase and you do not understand the mechanics of your character, the behaviour of the mobs, or even how to get to another continent.

You are directly loaded with all the shiny tools and, while it does make it interesting and fun at first, the magic wears off rather quickly.

On the other hand, when you had to fight and learn your way up to level 80, you have this deeper and well-earned understanding of the game that makes for a fantastic experience.

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