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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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

#41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just make shit up, or even better have the AI make shit up for you

The problem is, the shit that's made up will be used to justify the decision as a success and ensure the methodology continues.

If they’re mandating use like this I doubt it’s their only dysfunction. At least this one has a built in scapegoat.

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

#42

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…

Just ask an Ai to write how it made you more productive in daily work. It's really good at that. You can pad it out to 1m words by asking it to expand on each section of with subsections.

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

#43

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…

Ways AI have made me more productive: Spellcheck has reduced the number of typos I've made in slack threads between 4 and 10%.

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

#44
post #9

My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready. Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working w…

> The amount of [mental] energy needed to refute ~bullshit~ [AI slop] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it

I see this in code-reviews where AI tools like code-rabbit and greptile are producing workslop in enormous quantities. It is sucking up enormous amount of human energy just reading the nicely formatted bs put out by these tools. All of that for finding an occasional nugget that turns out to be useful.

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

#45
Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your employees to produce PowerPoints about the TPS reports, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you get meaningless LLM argle-bargle in return.

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

#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.

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

#47

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…

« AI has made me productive by writing most of the answer to this question. You may ignore everything after this sentence, it is auto-generated purely from the question, without any intersection with reality. »

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

#48

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 went through this shit an year ago. The reports had to be weekly, though.

Everything sounded very mandatory, but a couple of months later nobody was asking about reports anymore.

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

#50

Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your employees to produce PowerPoints about the TPS reports, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you get meaningless LLM argle-bargle in return.

Fair point,

The thing about companies asking for slop is that a middle manager maintaining usual stream of vacuous text is a proxy for that person paying attention to a given set of problems and alerting others. AI becomes a problem because someone can maintain a vacuous text stream without that attention.

So it's likely to become an arms-race.

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