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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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

#81

Post by zmmmmm »

I've never yet accepted an AI written answer when responding to my emails all though I try it routinely. Mostly it just doesn't capture my style. But even when it does, there's some kind of essential spark missing.

I think a lot about the concept that the AI output is still 99% regression to a mean of some kind. In that sense, the part it can generate for you is all the boring stuff - what doesn't add value. And to be sure, if you're writing an email etc, a huge amount of that is boring filler, most of the time. But the part it specifically cannot do is the only part that matters - the original, creative part.

The filler was never important anyway. Physically typing text was never the barrier. It's finding time and space to have the creative thought necessary to put into the communication that is the challenge. And the AI really doesn't help at all with that.

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

#82

Post by pjc50 »

ryandrake wrote: post #30

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…

It's amazing how US business culture has reinvented Soviet Stakhanovism.

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

#83

Post by kingstnap »

Macha wrote: post #39
cjbgkagh wrote: post #36

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.

Make it long enough that it's not worth any human's time reading it. Like full-on balls to the walls slop. Pass it between different LLMs to add additional conclusions and subheadings.

In fact, do it in parallel where one chatbot is adding another few pages here, and simultaneously and independently, another is adding different pages somewhere else and concatenate the results together.

Once you get about 25 pages of dense slop, just conclude that AI made writing this report 1000x more efficient.

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

#84

Post by 2THFairy »

arwhatever wrote: post #58
nphardon wrote: post #53

The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.

The AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?

AI criticism and pushback.

When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]" Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation".

The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees.

This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.

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

#85

Post by contingencies »

ryandrake wrote: post #30

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…

News just in, Nvidia dumped $100B in OpenAI to pump the failing bubble.

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

#86

Post by lazide »

Zanfa wrote: post #54
fzeroracer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or n…

Reviewing code is basically applying the Chesterton’s fence principle to everything. With AI code there’s typically so much incidental noise that trying to identify intention is a challenge. But then again I’ve found a lot of people are not bothered by overly convoluted code that is the equivalent of using a hammer for screws either…

Worse - there is no actual intention, so attempting to grok it from the code is even more wasted energy.

You have to nitpick everything, because there is no actual meaningful aim that is consistent.

I ran across an outsourcer that did the same thing about 20 years ago (near as I could tell he was randomly cutting and pasting random parts of stack overflow answers until it compiled!). We got him away from the code base/fired ASAP because he was an active threat to everyone.

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

#87

Post by scrumper »

belval wrote: post #74
ryandrake wrote: post #30

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 was in a lovely meeting where a senior "leader" was looking at effort estimates and said "Do these factor in AI-tools? Seems like it should be at least 30% lower if it did." Like I use AI tools, I even like using them, but saying "this tool is so good it will cut our dev time by 30%" should be coming from the developers themselves or their direct manager. Otherwise they are just making figures up and forcing them o…

I was that manager. I dunno about your senior leader but with me it was coming from a healthy place. After a few months of ra-ra from the C suite about how we were now an AI-first company (we're a tech consultancy building one-off stuff for customers) and should be using it in all our customer projects, I asked the question, quite reasonably I thought, "so am I going to offer lower prices to my clients, or am I going to see much higher achieved margins on projects I sell?"

And, crickets. In practice I haven't seen any efficiencies despite my teams using AI in their work. I am not seeing delivery coming in under estimates, work costs what it always cost, we're not doing more stuff or better stuff, and my margins are the same. The only difference I can see is that I've had to negotiate a crapton of contractual amendments to allow my teams to use AI in their work.

I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype up and running which is like 5% of any project. Most technical work in enterprise isn't going from zero to something, it's maintaining something, or extending a big, old thing. AI stinks at that (today). You startup people with clean slates may have a different perspective.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #30

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…

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by cowpig »

pjc50 wrote: post #82
ryandrake wrote: post #30

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…

It's amazing how US business culture has reinvented Soviet Stakhanovism.

What do you mean by this? My understanding is that Stakhanovism is kind of the opposite of US work culture in that it lionizes the worker and social contributions

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

#90

Post by jjk166 »

Macha wrote: post #39
cjbgkagh wrote: post #36

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.

Their ability to convince themselves they are geniuses far exceeds your ability to convince them they're not. They've already decided that the decision was a success. The only question is are you still going to be around to suffer the consequences when their delusions collide with objective reality?
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