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.
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
Novel and entertaining the first time around. Rote and uninspired every time after.
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!
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…
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.
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.
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.
The people you work for don’t care, don’t pick up that slack for them, they still won’t care.
It is the company’s product.
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…
I hate AI with a passion.
For me AI represents a decline in cognitive ability.
In the past when I solved a problem, I actually learned something, and I felt great about that.
When using AI, I don’t get the same satisfaction of having learned something.
The way I see it, is that it’s a great tool for people that already know their shit and don’t want to bother writing the code for it. There are some other use cases which are nice, like updating documentation or helping with pull/merge requests.
But it sure isn’t worth all the downsides we currently know of, with the way it’s being implemented.
It is perfect for producing garbage that should never have been produced in the first place. Marketing wank. Nobody cares what it says, so long as it is aesthetically pleasing to the intended audience. It’s perfect for doing shit that never needed to be done in the first place. Perfect for busywork.
It is worse than useless for any technical purpose. Verifying its output requires more effort than manually producing that output.
Yep, used it on my year-end self assessment. Told it what I would have written and it bullshitted it up to the appropriate length. I reviewed it and fixed where it invented some accomplishments out of nowhere that would have been awkward if I ever got called on it. Knowing that my performance assessment would only be glanced at and never read.
Similarly, a design document owed to management for something they have no actual interest in. No one honors the design doc, no one expects it to be informative that actually uses the tech, but non-technical management feels ‘included’. Didn’t even need to be reviewed, because all the ones it concretely matters know not to bother with it.
Stuff I always hated and was pointless, but someone wanted to check some boxes.
Though just had someone clearly just feed my email into a prompt and told the AI to use my points to agree with me, and that was annoying to see someone using AI to try to be a sycophant to me. If you are going to be a suck-up, at least suck-up in your own words. I won’t do it to something someone will read in earnest.
Exactly the kind of horseshit I’m thinking of. The demand for mindless busywork is truly amazing.
I can only hope that the next big idea in business is a widespread push to “replace” AI production with “nothing”.
Sadly, at least for as long as I can tell, the horseshit is simply the language of the executives. They feel like they are being smart and insightful while saying nothing. So of course we are going to be stuck with it in any work that has room for bureaucracy to exist.
Meh, LLMs and GenAI as tools themselves and as technologies, are not that bad. There are definitely some legitimate and extremely useful use cases.
But it should never have been released to the general public, it will bring extreme harm to the world.
At my company we have an internal AI bot that uses Anthropic. We use it to investigate bugs by comparing code to expected behavior or finding things in data.
For example, I don’t write code. But when I need to find how data from a client is being mapped. I could either ask the engineer who’s busy with other work with my menial task, I could look though a bunch of code with bitbucket, or I could ask the bot which will give me the code and any ticket related to the code and pull requests.
When finding something in the raw data. I could take a bunch of files and text strings and pull them into excel and spend a bunch of time doing lookup, matches, and index equations in Excel. Something I did for years in the past. Or have the bot do that in 2 minutes. When I’m just trying to find and validate a few things.
the problem with ai isn’t the concept, wikipedia is great
the problem is it is not deterministic, often factually wrong and being used by the rich to steal workers pay
It’s peculiar as a thing that acts the same whether it’s right or wrong. That is a pretty big drawback when trying to use it for anything vaguely fact based. The fact that if you don’t know yourself, it sounds credible either way, is super tricky. Particularly when managers that are used to gauging credibility without knowing the material come along. They are complete suckers for AI output since they don’t have good ways to know better.
aka the bias confirmationer
Exactly my company is heavily pushing for full agentic development and while that does save time a bit, it comes at a cost, for one I’m no longer getting the deeper understanding of the codebase that I would if I did the work myself, and secondly the number of PRs that AI pushes out creates a review bottleneck because people can’t keep up, but management doesn’t care, they’d rather you push something out fast and if it breaks things it’s your job on the line not the AI subscription.
I use it to identify useful parts in scrap piles.
Blindly hating a tool is a you issue. Thousands of people needing to solve the same problem over and over is inefficient. Learn and practice for learning sake and then keep going researching new solutions in academia as in any other field. Or start applying proven solutions in industry as any other field does where experience which solution to apply makes the value proposition.
Thousands of people needing to solve the same problem over and over is inefficient
Sure, we have a name for that: Not-invented-Here (NIH) Syndrome. AI is not solving that Inefficiency.
Or start applying proven solution
Let me know when you find them, please.
When a tool is a hindrance to the solution, while also making people more stupid and consuming vast resources and contributing to climate change, then the hate is deserved.
A tool is only as good as the person using it. There is literally a saying about a hammer being the only tool and every problem looking like a nail.
The hammer salesman has infiltrated every corporate marketing team on the planet. It is a requirement to use the hammer at a shit load on companies.
Pretty much my problem. The salesman is telling the carpenter how to do their craft. And the boss goes along with it because its more profitable to say you’re using a hammer than it is to actually build and fix stuff.
It’d be deliberate corporate sabotage if I didn’t believe they were so stupid.
Valid criticism.
It’s pretty pervasive, and that campaign was way more successful than I ever thought it would be.
It’s gonna be a wait and see type deal, but imo not going great
Let’s hope so.
It is a tool for making billionaires more billions, that is about it. It can write sloppy code for you, and give you inaccurate and often directly erronous answers stolen from the people who actually provided those answers in the first place. It is not helping you in research, it is just making you forget how to actually research anything and making your brain lazier and lazier until your only source of information is its gaslighting.
It can’t do anything of the sort you are claiming it can do.
You’re right. Time to pull myself up by my
Bootstrap.jsand really apply my creative self to academia. I’m going straight to the nearest science building to innovate.Edit: they told me to go home
Is this comment ai? It stops making sense about halfway through.
“Everything I don’t like is AI”
Okay but this comment specifically. Did you read it? What is it saying?
Ignoring environmental issues, the issue at the moment is the tool is not production ready. If I design a tool to measure length of something but I can’t be confident the measurement will be right within a specific tolerance the tool is useless. If the tool is just guessing, well I can do that without the tool. Yeah it may be 85% accurate but I still have to employ someone to verify each one or risk selling bad product, because I can’t trust the tool.
People don’t “solve the same problem” over and over again, they learn what the solution is. You probably know a^2 + b^2 = c^2 or the Pythagoras theorem. You learned that. You didn’t “solve” it.
Now in addition you may have learned some uses of it. Things like measuring a shadow or knowing how long a road is going up a mountain. You also probably learned it won’t work to calculate how to shoot a basketball. Yes you know height of hoop and can measure the distance from you to hoop but the result is wrong because you throw on a parabolic curve not in straight line(not to mention gravity and air resistance etc). Ai doesn’t recognize those differences. If you tell it “given the height of a hoop and distance from the hoop, how can I tell how hard to throw a ball to get it into the hoop” it will give you an equation, probably calculate the distance with Pythagoras, then gathering average mass of standard basketball, and incorporating them into an equation for force required to push that mass to that distance.
From a software developer perspective another issue is context. I’ve seen alot of Ai slop where they calculate a value(say distance to monster in a game) each time it’s needed. Any software dev would calculate it once, store in variable, use it as many times you need, recalculate on next frame.
Again this is all ignoring the environmental, legal, societal, medical, mental effects. Just focusing on the fact the technology is several generations behind hoping to be production ready.
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?
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…
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.)
“closer to the opposite” is a funny way of saying “the opposite”
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.
AI has multiplied the workload and management is in psychosis
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.
