Fuck AI

One in six US workers pretends to use 'cocaine' to please the bosses

Why does it seem like the people who understand the least about AI and LLMs are the ones pushing it the hardest? Fuck the management class and fuck AI enshittification too.

My boss tried to get everybody to use LLMbeciles for work. He was taken in by the fakery and set up a commercial OpenAI account.

I refused to use it. Ever. Like to the point that I never even collected my ID and password.

Others used it, but it was, as always, a time-waster where it looked like they were making gains at the start, only to get bogged down when important details entered the picture. So I quietly got my work done while others wrestled with AI. Then by the end of six weeks nobody was using it and my boss quietly shut down the account.

Is this the corporate more professional version of faking an orgasm?

I pretend to use it, but struggle. Like, I'll say it got me 80% of the way there but then I spend the rest of the day reviewing, fixing comments, adjusting unit tests...

...when secretly I was code complete in like 1-2 hours so I can just chill the rest of the day.

Management doesn't seem to question it because AI, and I'm pretty sure everyone else on my team is doing it too so we've sort of collectively created a low bar of expectations of output.

Lmfao

That's me. LLMs slow me the fuck down. I have a theory though, LLMs only work for people who are able to not think through everything. The socially unacceptable feeling is really: I'm not dumb enough to benefit from LLMs.

But the reality is idk what the fuck LLMs can actually do

at my job we suppose to know what we are doing, saying we use ai to solve problems would be more of a confession of incompetence than a brag

I've used ChatGPT a couple of times to give me some powershell direction. Every time, it was wrong on kind of simple things. Like, "invented a cmdlet from whole cloth" kind of wrong.

I got a work email yesterday that was basically an advertisement for Gemini. Apparently my work will be holding contests using it. There are no details yet, but I find it all absurd. The work I do is in-person and client-facing, I don't know what they plan to even use an LLM for in this scenario. Maybe for writing notes? Our notes contain private, confidential medical information. No way in hell am I feeding that into Gemini.

I'm not shy about taking an ethical stand point (I left a job last year because upper management created an unethical environment.) I'm prepared to conscientiously object the forced use of AI, if it comes down to it. Between my clients' right to privacy, Google's lack of concern for privacy, and the horrific environmental impact that builds AI in the first place, this entire venture is highly questionable. I have to wonder how much money changed hands for this to even come about.

I try to make it work for me--I really do. But it's just never worth the time & effort.

Recently, I asked our company-hosted instance of Copilot to draft up an application note for a new product we are releasing to help get my documentation juices flowing. This product is well documented on our internal sharepoint/teams/outlook/onedrive servers that Copilot scrapes, as well as some public facing press releases and marketing content, so I asked Copilot to draft up an app note for this product specifically by name.

Its first draft had tons and tons of info that was just straight-up wrong or super vague. So I refined the prompt asking it to cite sources for each paragraph. Lo and behold, there were 9 citations, and 8 of them were general technology references or competitor products.

Maybe it's a skill issue, but I can't get over the fact that this shit is not just so factually wrong, but so confidently wrong.

AI works really well for my domain (software engineering) especially for obscure one off languages, anywhere we're unfamiliar. Problem is I'm an overqualified senior and familiar with everything. I've sometimes fished for prompts that give a correct answer as required by my job lol, since I can verify it's correct. Turns out I'm also smart and fast at cheating the requirement.

Only 1 in 6?

This is an example of how appearance-based and feeling-based a lot of the activities of businesses are.

If you look at previous social orders its very obvious how much activity served a social function vs a real physical need related to survival. The pyramids, for instance. While there's a bunch of things you could say about their role in the ancient Egyptian religion, and the effect of the make-work on Egypt's economy/society, I don't think anyone could argue that a giant pile of stones could physically help anyone put food in their belies or keep them warm at night; and when you get right down to it it seems pretty clear to me that the root cause of the pyramids is the ego of the guy in charge.

And yet there are many people who will tell you that everything a modern business does is maximally efficient. I would argue that this is pretty clearly not the case. One of the most blatant examples is dress codes and air conditioning. Cooling a large office building is not a small expense, and yet many businesses opt to have their employees wear hot suits (even their non-public facing employees) and turn down the temperature lower than it otherwise would need to be. You could extend that idea to the design of the building itself: a glass box is not the easiest thing to heat and cool. You could even extend it to the existence of the office building in general: while larger buildings are easier to heat and cool per unit area than a bunch of small ones (because of the square cube law), and there are certainly benefits to agglomeration, many office buildings are enormously tall and therefore enormously expensive (as construction costs do not grow linearly with height). Additionally, a lot of these buildings are built on some of the most expensive land that exists, which balloons their cost even more. I'm not saying that I think high rises are completely useless, but I do wonder if they need to be as common as they are, especially now that the internet exists (but lots of other people have talked about that).

Its interesting to note though that because businesses are supposed to be efficient, and the more efficient they are the better they are (more powerful, cunning, brutal, manly, etc) businesses adopt an aesthetic of efficiency. The use of LLMs is one example of this (using a new technology has the aesthetic of efficiency even if it measurably makes productivity worse) but it extends to a lot of the things businesses do. Even a lot of their architecture and industrial design fetishizes efficiency without actually being efficient, IMO.

I'm one of them

One of us one of us one of us

I can fake ai pretty well with my shitty photo editing skills.

know enough about it to comfort the worried and placate the enthusiastic. Throw some buzzwords in there for them they love those