Perspective from someone forced to use AI at work:
I am a software developer and I am “invited” to use AI to ship as fast as possible. I hate it with all of my heart, and you know why? Because before I could think of myself and use the time to create something, whereas now I have to spend the same amount of time to talk to a machine and I can’t do anything while it works. If it doesn’t understand I have to explain again. It’s frustrating
I’ve started to think of it as the person sitting in the driver seat of a self-driving car. You aren’t actually driving, but you have to be paying attention at all times just in case you need to intercede.
.
Now when you develop using AI, you can’t (or at least aren’t supposed to) multitask, you just have to sit there, doing nothing but literally staring at the screen trying to read the “thinking” as it scrolls past, endlessly…for hours on end.Novel and entertaining the first time around. Rote and uninspired every time after.
I swear to god, as much as I used to be pro ai from like 2019 to 2023, AI has made my coworkers so fucking stupid. So many of them are like useless without AI now and I keep getting sideways looks when I say I don’t use AI for my job.
I get it to some extent as I work IT, but come on! You can’t even make a fucking email without CoPilot telling you what to say!? Use AI as in Actual Intelligence! It’s found in that place between your ears, god damn it.
You mean putting water on plants? Like from the toilet?
I used to work for a small digital strategy consultancy. All the senior consultants up were expert in pretty much everything digital marketing and did their own data manipulation and analysis. SEO, technical SEO, link building, paid search, paid ads, Facebork ads, Youtube ads, social listening, search research… you name it. New consultants sat with experts, learned from people who genuinely knew their shit. We were expensive compared to, eg. Accenture’s off-shore teams, but our results were far stronger, and offered genuinely actionable insights (relevant to our clients’ business strategies and goals), compared to Accenture’s off-shore teams.
Then we got bought up. Quite apart from the devastation that wreaked upon our ops staff as we were ‘integrated’ into the larger company, we were instructed to start using AI for all data analysis. For efficiency. So, our junior consultants no longer did any of their own data aggregation, cleaning, manipulation, or analysis. They didn’t understand the data. They just spewed out whatever the AI told them the data said. Which, admittedly, was quicker. But there was no insight beyond the fucking obvious.
And, one by one, all the experienced people left the company.
Including me.
What had been a company of experts became a small department of AI users who didn’t understand what they were doing, or why, or what it meant.
We were told this in a recent dept meeting:
We are not talking about replacing you or me by AI, no no no. We are talking about acceleration. To accelerate and change our ways of working and this is mandatory — yes or yes. The colleague — it doesn’t mean just this dept — that doesn’t use AI for their daily work next year, won’t be in this company. And we will check it. This is the message: won’t be in this company. And i’m not talking because it’s me who orders this. No, it’s the strategy of the company.
I’m sooo motivated to be working there…
Sounds like it’s time to make whatever AI the company has subscribed to, waste a whole lot of tickets on random shit.
I’d just ask the AI if this (whatever project I’m working on) looks correct. Then take whatever feedback it gives, whether correct or not, apply it, save it, and ship it. Sounds like what they want, yes? Give it to them. Hahahah.
I thought about malicious compliance but I don’t want the end-users to get a shitty product.
It is the company’s product.
The people you work for don’t care, don’t pick up that slack for them, they still won’t care.
Makes you wonder how much they’re getting for selling your data to train AI. Makes you wonder why you can’t say training AI wasn’t on my job description and if you’re going to be adding AI Training into my caseload you should be paying me more. They’re getting a kickback, you’re getting more work and same pay and what are the AI Companies getting? More stable ways of removing you from the company.
Repos moved from local infra to an “enterprise” github account a while back.
Management is sometimes ‘true believer’, and only after the bill comes do they decide that maybe their employees shouldn’t burn as many tokens as possible anymore.
They all picture it like AI is a great things and their employees are just not tech savvy enough to appreciate it, so all they have to do is make everyone have a taste and obviously everyone will both love it and become amazingly effective. Turns out that people generally do have a decent impression, for better or for worse, and forced micro management of it doesn’t boost morale nor productivity.
How do they quantify who is using it or not?
They generally have a hook into the accounts the employees use to access the provider. So you can burn tokens and look ‘productive’ and have it have nothing to do with your work.
A lot of the early adopters have already figured out that measuring employee usage just ends with big AI bills and essentially zero assurance that the AI provider was used productively. Those folks discontinued things like leaderboards and review based on tokens consumed.
Token usage, maybe? Just set up an agent with computer use to go talk to another agent. Problem solved.
You use your worker account to access The AI.
Every fucking month I go from thinking my job is okay to fucking hating it because the CEO and other executives at my company give me orders from AI, or new orders to use AI in some fantastically stupid and needles way.
FUCK AI.
And the data centers, meanwhile, are destroying the goddamn planet and making everything worse for innocent people who live near them.
FUCK. AI.
If I ignore the datacenter buildout implications and the copyright implications, access to AI facilities might be somewhat useful sometimes. But having it crammed down my throat with management second guessing my assessments of what it does makes it just insufferable.
Also, other people’s AI slop is a huge workload burden too. Even if I am measured and don’t use it much, that doesn’t spare me from the flood of crap from my colleagues…
If it generated wealth that workers could share in, then they might like it. But it’s not generating wealth for anyone.
It’s probably burning more wealth than it creates anyway
Check out the Better Offline podcast. You’ll like it.
Oh come on. Like a dozen old white dudes who have no morals are making a TON of money off of it
This is likely why the Chinese appear to be more positive to AI. They’re not forced to use AI for ridiculous tasks and they’re not as worried that AI will displace them.
sounds delusional as fuck
Since China’s economy isnt “not in a depression” due to six companies buying shovels for AI slop from each other, there isn’t the same rabid propaganda encouraging management to compel the use of it.
Plus China’s formally a communist country, meaning they have a welfare system that is less distorted by any desire to torment the poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_in_China
(I’m sure it’s less awesome than it could be, but being better than the US on this issue is so low a bar that counties almost have to intentionally choose not to clear it.)
As someone who has always been interested in technology and it’s development, I find AI fascinating.
As someone who has a brain and can see all of the negative impacts this technology is having and will have on the world, I find AI deeply saddening and scary.
Can we go back to the 90s?
In a world where people controled their own work and lived in community with each other, AI could have been one of the greatest technological advances of the last fifty years. In the current system where everyone is subordinated to a tiny class of economic dictators who own every technology and piece of infrastructure, AI mostly just serves to advance the interests of its owners.
53% disapproval is rookie numbers! We can do better, fellow people!
Who doesn’t love having a dumbass client tell you, the industry professional of 10-20 years and a senior member of their department, that they figured out the problem you’ve been working on for over a year, and the answer is <barely fucking related to the task at hand>?
No joke, had TWO clients within a week send me slop telling me that ThEy TaLkEd WiTh ChAtGeMaUdE and basically tell me that to solve a issue with a specific vendor app that I really need to check the firewall for blocks for some operating system functions that aren’t even in use.
Like fuck dude, read your own goddamned slop and use your Alleged Intelligence to see if it even sounds remotely applicable…
The socially awkward CEOs of these companies went out giggle farting about how AI was going to replace everyone. Everyone starting thinking about how that would mean nobody could eat because they see what’s happening in politics. Everyone decided to nope out of that.
If they had let their PR dept handle things everyone would be oblivious and happy right now.
Good thing they could not keep their mouths shut.
What is very problematic is not AI in its isolation. But the way how it is (and becoming more) embedded in the society with current socio-economic system. AI probably could very well coexist if our socio-economic system would be more adorned with it. Eg. having tax on AI tokens, Universal Income, or something else that just works.
I wonder to what degree the Glass Door reviews are mentioning AI in the context of regular duties vs AI in the hiring process.
Indeed. Whilst I very much hope that people are turning against using LLMs, that’s not what this chart shows. As you allude to, it’s just the sentiment of reviews mentioning AI, of which a large number are probably complaining about the results, rather than expressing opposition to the use of LLMs.
Unless this results in a workers strike none of this blathering matters. It’s all just loud complaining.
Organize and do something about it!
Already unionized.
It’s funny how the chart correlates to stupid assholes saying stupid things. How’d that happen?
It’s not coincidental that the word “Saboteur” refers to someone throwing shoes into industrial machinery in an effort to cause it to jam or break.
Not spanners?
No, then they’d be called cléoteurs.
