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

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 566 posts

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#461

Post by chistev »

hnfong wrote: post #447
throwaway7356 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the thought process is? "I only work here because I like to violate everyone else's privacy. Mine has to be respected"? It's not like Meta/Facebook ever had moral concerns about privacy violations or surveillance (or many other things).

Come on, we all know why they work there... "I only work here because I like money and Meta pays more than $(INSERT_OTHER_FAANG)"

I've heard the rebuttal that it's not necessarily that, but that getting jobs if they quit the one they already have is hard. So they stay.

Check out this Ask HN thread for example about how bad the Job Market is -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988268

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#462

Post by Corrado »

“There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,”

I've heard this before in previous corporate jobs and the data ALWAYS ends up being used somewhere else. Usually in job performance reviews or tax documents about new vs maintenance work.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#463

Post by footy »

anon84873628 wrote: post #379
dodu_ wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

This is a pretty gross privacy violation but it's also just... So depressing.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#464

Post by ffsm8 »

bennyelv wrote: post #431
ffsm8 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is the owner though. If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior... The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook…

Why is the problem assumed to be middle management? Maybe middle management is the only thing preventing the company going from successful dumpster fire to unsuccessful dumpster fire…

Because the issue is the culture, and the culture is entirely in the responsibility of middle management.

If an IC behaved like this then it's would've been the responsibility of the middle management to let them go when it started. So it'd still be on them.

And that's ignoring that issues like this have historically always started in middle management.

Also I suspect you're looking at it from an individual level: one middle manager on their own obviously cannot have enough impact to change this culture, so it's not the "fault" of any one manager. And that's the reason why the heavy handed approach is necessary, because the bad culture has settled. Anything any one manager may try to improve their ICs work life will inevitably get soured by the next level.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#465

Post by trollbridge »

solid_fuel wrote: post #459
trollbridge wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

This puts the LLM providers in a great position of: -> [PROVIDER] -> -> [PROVIDER] -> They're getting paid to encode some inane prompt into paragraphs of text, and then they're getting paid again to summarize that back into something with even less value than the original prompt. And they're making money hand over fist because people are happier to play that game rather than just pushing back on the jerks sending the…

I would agree with you, except right now the walls of text come from people using the free or very cheap versions of ChatGPT, et al. So there's not even anyone making money off of it.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#466

Post by trollbridge »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #446
anon84873628 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

> I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet. have you asked these people how they feel about this? have you asked them for permission, for their consent to do this with their communications to you? what you’re doing sounds incredibly creepy . like, meta/facebook kinda of creepy. granted, it’s at…

Well, implicit in the TOS of things like Gmail, etc. is already permission to do this.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#467

Post by trollbridge »

philipswood wrote: post #381
dodu_ wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

He's describing a 4 step process: 1) >I simply run it through an LLM, 2) >paste the summary, 3) >and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" 4) >and then I ask the for their original prompt. Agreed that just step 1 or step 1 and 2 would be depressingly pointless, but step 3 and 4 make this the equivalent of sending someone a let-me-google-that-for-you kind of link, does it not? Caught out like this I imagine many peo…

Worse still, the person that is the most egregious about doing this seems to appreciate it and responds with "Yes, that's right!" and just ignores (or has no idea what I'm talking about) when I ask for the original prompt.

I simply ask for a positive affirmation of the summary so that I can act on that, instead of other things.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#468

Post by scotty79 »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

> She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.

What you are seeing is a seed of the future of communication.

Communication is one of the hardest things people do. The goal it to pass idea from the sender to recipient in a manner that is least lossy. Look at how many things need to be aligned for that to even barely succeed. You have to speak the same language, dialect, have similar enough personal vocabulary, have sufficiently aligned mindsets in the domain you are communicating about, have the same current context and ability to convey context update, then the sender must serialize their ideas into actual words with correct enough spelling and in correct order to get the idea into recipients mind. All that while knowing only very little about recipients mind and having to predict what effect the words will have on it, assuming they don't misread the text.

In the future barely anyone will produce raw text themselves. At least not in professional contexts. World will be way more mixed. People will come from very different cultures and use very different languages. Most people you will encounter in professional setting will not be sufficiently aligned with you to communicate anything beyond the simplest ideas. And neither you nor them are going to be willing to align with others.

You know what will align with you? Your AI. So any message from a human will go through your AI and any message crafted by you for a human will go through your AI as well. And when it's received, through theirs. Messages will not be written. They will be constructed in a dialog with senders AI. And they won't be read. They will be interrogated in a dialog between recipient and their AI.

The future is going to be way more diverse. People will use their own communication styles they were taught when they grew up. But the bulk of out-of-family communication will be done through AI. And the AI language will be verbose. Not really fit for routine human consumption. Because words are cheap for AI and not losing details is a communication priority. It's starting as a corporatese English. But I think it will evolve rapidly to increase signal to noise ratio (while still being impractically voluminous for humans).

They issue now is just that you are trying to read rudimentary machine code of future human communication directly.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#469

Post by dxdm »

omgitspavel wrote: post #402
giancarlostoro wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is I would be surprised if I even got through the interview hellscape that these companies put people through. I'm not interested in talking about algorithms and things that no dev in my entire decade+ time on the industry ever tal…

A decade+ is plenty of time to spend a few weeks brushing up on CS basics. There is really only a handful of algorithms and data sctructues and none of them are rocket science. And what's the alternative? Quizzing people on some random C# framework methods? The "I don't use algos in a day to day job" argument has been around forever, but nobody making it ever proposes a better filter.

The better filter is to spend the precious interview time talking about actual experience solving real work problems, it has a high signal to noise ratio, because it gives you information on many independent axes.

I guess for candidates fresh out of school, you have to fall back to things they should know out of school as a proxy.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#470

Post by vasco »

sunrunner wrote: post #460
luckylion wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a tell? Sounds very much like my reaction to that behavior, but I always assumed it's because I'm german.

Perhaps a quick visit to https://german.millermanschool.com could sort this out

Funny! I'm autistic enough that I went to do it and got 51% German and 27% autistic. In reality am portuguese and never diagnosed (outside of internet comment sections).
Post reply on HN