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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

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

#91

Post by jjk166 »

romaniv wrote: post #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.

> Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism

Fly away from here at high speed

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

#92

Post by justonceokay »

cowpig wrote: post #89
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s about making the productivity metrics go up, even if at the expense of real productivity or common sense. The man who it was named after ironically (unironically?) faked his own metrics

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

#93

Post by ryandrake »

justonceokay wrote: post #92
cowpig wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s about making the productivity metrics go up, even if at the expense of real productivity or common sense. The man who it was named after ironically (unironically?) faked his own metrics

It doesn't seem to even be about making metrics go up. It's about telling a narrative-reinforcing story: That AI is great. It's worth it. Leadership is right to be obsessed with it.

I would have thought that in a fight between "fooling ourselves with a story" and "metrics go up" that the metrics would win, but it seems to not be the case.

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

#94

Post by fasbiner »

cowpig wrote: post #89
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your understanding is somewhat incomplete. There is a strong top-down push to celebrate output maximization without inquiring too closely about if this output is meaningful, valuable, repeatable, or even happened at all.

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

#95

Post by meindnoch »

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…

Just give them an AI generated response.

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

#96

Post by didibus »

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…

Does your company have a stake in AI?

I suspect a lot of companies that go that route are pushing a marketing effort since they themselves have a stake in AI.

But I'd love to hear from truly customer only businesses, where AI is pure cost, with no upside, unless it truly pays for itself in business impact, and if they too are stuck in some justifying of their added cost loop to make their decision seem a good one no matter what, or if they are being more careful?

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

#97

Post by meindnoch »

ramoz wrote: post #56

My CEO sent an ai generated blog today. I've never felt more frustrated reading something in my life. "x happened, here's what it means", "groundbreaking", "game-changer", "significant", "forefront of a technological shift"

Why are you reading your CEO's blog?

This question applies whether it's written by an AI or not.

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

#98

Post by lazide »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #17
donatj wrote: 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 nephew has no programming knowledge. He wants to build a website that will turn him into a bazillionaire. He asks AI how to solve problem X. AI provides direction, but he doesn't quite know how to ask the right questions. Still, the AI manages to give him a 70% solution. He will go to his grave before he learns enough programming to do the remaining 30% himself, or, understand the first 70%. Delegating to AI isn'…

More precisely, each ‘AI’ is just a statistical grouping of a large subset of other (generally randomly) selected humans.

You don’t even get the same ‘human’ with the same AI, as you can see with various prompting.

It’s like doing a lossy compression of an image, and then wondering why the color of a specific pixel isn’t quite right!

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

#99

Post by justonceokay »

ryandrake wrote: post #93
justonceokay wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about making the productivity metrics go up, even if at the expense of real productivity or common sense. The man who it was named after ironically (unironically?) faked his own metrics

It doesn't seem to even be about making metrics go up. It's about telling a narrative-reinforcing story: That AI is great. It's worth it. Leadership is right to be obsessed with it. I would have thought that in a fight between "fooling ourselves with a story" and "metrics go up" that the metrics would win, but it seems to not be the case.

what you said is what I was thinking. Thanks for phrasing it so eloquently

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

#100

Post by didibus »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #11

The problem with most corporate work that these managerial idiots want replaced with AI is that is all so utterly useless. Reports written that no one will ever read, presentations made for the sake of the busy-ness of "making a deck", notes and minutes of meetings that should never have taken place in the first place. Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-wr…

So many times you write a document for someone to review and question that it could be written better. Yet the reader will now just ask for bullet points from the AI. I was hoping people would go, right, let's just start writing bullet points from the get go and not bother with a full document.

Once you allow AI to replace the process, you kind of reveal that the process never mattered to you, if you want faster pace at the expense of other things, you don't need to pay for AI, just drop the unnecessary process.

I feel AI is now just a weird excuse, like you're pretending you have not lowered the quality and stopped writing proper documents, professional emails, full test suites, properly reviewed each other's code, no, you still do all this, just not you personally, it's "automated".

It's like cutting corners but being able to pretend like the corner isn't cut, because AI still fully takes the corner :p

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