Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants" • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by Double_a_92 » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:22 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #42

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…

> You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. You can't make a rule, if people can cheat undetectably?

You can, but it would be pointless since it would just filter out some honest people.

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

#52

Post by ReptileMan » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

Much better approach is to ask the candidate about the limitations of AI assistants and the rakes you can step on while walking that path. And the rakes you have already stepped on with AI.

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

#53

Post by 0x1062 » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

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…

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

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

#54

Post by madeofpalk » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

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.

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

#55

Post by slaterbug » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

rapidaneurism wrote: post #18

firtoz wrote: post #5

It's also a personal question, not a "why should someone work here", but a "what motivates YOU"

As someone for whom the answer is always 'money' I learned very quickly that a certain level of -how should I call it- bullshit is necessary to get the HR person to pass my CV to someone competent. As I am not as skilled in bullshit as I am in coding, it would make sense to outsource that irrelevant part of the selection process, no?

Maybe it makes sense for you, however from their perspective, it's not an "irrelevant" part of the selection process, but the most important part.

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

#56

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

danw1979 wrote: post #40

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…

> AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. Well, no. Homework is an aid to learning and LLM output is a shortcut for doing the thinking and typing yourself. Copy and pasting some ChatGPT slop into your GCSE CS assignment (as I caught my 14yo doing last night…) isn’t learning (he hadn’t even read it) - it’s just chucking some text that might be passabl…

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by throwawayqqq11 » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

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…

> In life there is no cheating

This really rubs me the wrong way because it reflects the shallow, borderline sociopathic stance of nowadays entrepreneurship.

Obedience to rules and honest attitudes is more than just an annoyance in your way to get rich, its the foundation of cooperation -- our civilization.

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

#58

Post by psychoslave » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:25 AM UTC

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…

>In life there is no cheating. You're just optimizing for the wrong thing. AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent.

No, the homework is a proxy for measuring what the homework provider is interested to evaluate (hopefully). Talent is a vague word, and what we can consider talent worth nurturing might be consider worthless from some other perspective.

For example, most schools will happily give you many nation myths to learn and evaluate how much of it you can restitute on demand. They will far less likely ask you to provide you some critics of these myths, to search who created them, with which intentions and which actual effects on people at large scale from different perspective and metrics available out there.

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

#59

Post by pydry » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:25 AM UTC

sigmoid10 wrote: post #6

This is quite a conundrum. These AI companies thrive on the idea that very soon people will not be replaced by AI, but by people who can effectively use AI to be 10x more productive. If AI turns a normal coder into a 10x dev, then why wouldn't you want to see that during an interview? Especially since cheating this whole interview system has become trivial in the past months. It's not the applicants that are the prob…

If an AI can do your test better than a human in 2025 it reflects not much better on your test than if a pocket calculator could do your test better than a human in 1970.

That did happen and the result from the test creators was the same back then: "we're not the problem, the machines are the problem. ban them!"

In the long run it turned out that if you could cheat with a calculator though, it was just a bad test....

I think there is an unwillingness to admit that there is a skill issue here with the test creators and that if they got better at their job they wouldnt need to ban candidates from using AI.

It's surprising to hear this from anthropic though.

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

#60

Post by dkjaudyeqooe » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 9:25 AM UTC

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…

> careful, responsible use is undetectable

I think that's wishful thinking. You're underestimating how much people can tell about other people with the smallest amount of information. Humans are highly attuned to social interactions and synthetic responses are more obvious that you think.