Also kinda implies that those middle-management, read-and-write reports jobs are, in and of themselves, pointless. I mean, if two chatbots spewing gibberish at each other can do the job indistinguishably from the humans, it kinda seems like those jobs don't need to exist.
Reading can be a pleasure. Then you don't want to cede it to AI. But if reading/writing is stupid duty forced by circumstances it's wise to save your time - to have more time for pleasure reading.
“AI” is a very fluid term—today it means generative models, a couple years back it meant NLP and neural nets, for a few years before that it meant things like regression and logistic models built with supervised training. Everything BUT GenAI has very powerful and well-proven applications
I worked at an institution I'm Brazil that used image model to identify trees by his leaves in an aerial photo of the forest. Other team used a similar solution to diagnose diseases on trees just with a picture of the tree trunk. But these solutions don't bring billions in investiment.
Up until that info is used to hurt them. Work being boring is not the universal same as being unneeded. Part of the issue with AI is how easily it can be manipulated to the benefit of the ignorant billionaire forcing it's use especially when no one else is in the know on the actual data / reports.
Which makes me wonder why they're even working at all. They'd be dodging even more boring sounding work by being unemployed. Which might be the case now actually.
Low level jobs are being taken by machines and kiosks and ai is taking over mod level jobs. I really love the situation billionaires who hoard money put us in
It does add business value.
Just not to your business. Your business is just spending money on the AI tools so that the business providing those tools can make money...
To your replies saying “buuut ai is haemorrhaging money” — yes absolutely, but the aim of course is exactly what you said: to fool enough businesses so they don’t.
AI is a projection of many things in the working class of Americans but right now it feels to be a mix of unprecedented levels of burn out and existential disillusionment by what we’re even doing anymore and why we’re even doing it in this country
Now imagine that the report is something critical: how are the repairs at the nuclear plant going; here's the latest laparoscopic surgery update; we're making these modifications to the braking module.
Even more simply: There's value in work that doesn't have an innate value in it ala tech security, but like with AI cutting jobs, tech security get cut up until something catastrophic happens then they get hired again.
Considering how little working at a job gets you these days? No surprise. Especially since very very few can earn a living doing something that interests them
Nothing scares me than AI potentially meaning most in the future will not be able to write a sentence on their own. It could very well kill off our creativity and more importantly our curiosity for good! The two things that make us human in the first place!
LinkedIn literally cannot decide whether AI is good or not, you'll see stuff like this then scroll down once and immediatly see "More people should use AI to craft the perfect CV" then the next post is "Recruiters hate that they are swamped with AI CVs"
Assuming that superficially, these articles give the illusion that some work has been done. Did they even consider that anyone can spew out the same articles with AI, therefore whatever value they could have brought through their own perspective and experience as a person is now gone.
If the "writer" can't understand the semantics of what they're trying to say, how will they understand whether the LLM is saying anything truthful about it? Not that it matters if they aren't even going to proofread it.
Seriously, if you have to, just hire somebody with an arts degree or something.
"I'm not paid to know where to put a comma so I'm just going to trust that the Racism Accelerator will adequately communicate what it absolutely does not understand instead."
Seriously what the shit. Technical gaps my ass.
In my mind both are very intertwined.
Style isn’t just a means, something that merely gets in the way of achieving your objective. It is an important part of the creation.
That’s what I believe it's better to try and accept not being perfect, if it means being personal.
Now using AI to fill the 'technical gaps' for something that you want to say and it feels like it's THE ONLY way, I get it. But it has to be said that every bit in the text that doesn't come from the person (be it adequate writing) is as much taken away from the overall interest of the writing.
clearly Sandra, Bill, and Jane are redundant, fire them. let Sandra's AI talk directly to Jane's. better yet, fire everybody and let AI run the whole company. ez pz. /s
If the result was “We figured out any process AI can entirely take over is probably 100% unnecessary” that would be a benefit. However, learning from stupidity is not a common trait.
The thing that gets me about the obsession with GDP as a yardstick for prosperity is that it's always used to discredit a country compared to the US. I'm Canadian, we get this crap all the time from people with agendas.
Even if you worship the Almighty Dollar, $65,700 per capita PPP is still great.
An embarrassing fact about me is that as a teen and young 20 something I identified as libertarian because I wanted equal rights and thought neoliberal economics made sense and then I learned more about economics and became a communist
More that even if you are acting entirely in your own self interest we objectively live in a society that does not benefit anyone. I would argue that people like Peter Thiel who are clearly psychotic from their own lack of boundaries are in some ways the biggest victims of the system
AI use is worthy of its fair share of criticism, but I'm not sure that outlining an obviously stupid and reckless overuse of AI proves that it can have no business value.
Business value comes from the tail ideas that employees generate. LLMs do nothing but give you statistical averages. You can't make money with average. Increasing the average output while decreasing those tail events means your company will die.
So success isn't about increasing the average output, it's about increasing the kurtosis. This is best achieved by hiring employees with diverse backgrounds and life experiences.
Moral of the story Bill, Sandra,and Jane don't really want to do work given an easier option. Hope they used the reclaimed time to go to a nice beach and relax
For reference the legal profession never recovered from the death of low level entry jobs. The goal of AI is to replace as many jobs as humanly possible with robots that only an ignorant person THINKS is as good as a person
Important reports will be written, reviewed and acted on by dumb robots.
But if Bill actually did the presentation, he would have had some understanding about the report. Unless he’s incompetent 😂 and jane should have also asked some questions during the presentation. So 80% chance that the outcome is the same even if they actually read the report. Or not 😂
But the job isn't worth doing. That's the part a lot of people are missing here. Bill and Sandra and whoever else in this hypothetical are working pointlessly to accomplish nothing. If AI can do the whole job it probably doesn't need doing.
I haven't watched the Office, but a few years ago I kept seeing a clip of a character having a mental health crisis realising his job is just adding paperwork and slowing everybody else down for no reason, and the company would run smoother if he just didn't do anything.
Except that @linkedin.com does NOT get it because they constantly harass people to use their AI job search, and more than half the crap jobs listed are for training AI so that the human workforce becomes obsolete.
Every other suggested post is fucking AI related. And if you post something there's a 'punch it up with AI' button on it and of course the classic push a button to send a generic reply to a post... Absurd.
I’ve now seen HR software that gives AI features to basically let it perform the entire evaluation cycle:
- goals are created by AI
- evaluated by AI
- manager can let their feedback be created by AI
At that point, what was the goal of going through this whole charade?
Facts, facts...this is so overrated.
More seriously my sincere hope is that somewhere in some civilized societies, some people with working brains are still training engineers, scientists, researchers, decision makers to analyze factuality of contents and keep things we truely rely on functional.
Sandra, Bill and Jane all get laid off and their salaries are redirected to the AI service provider, cutting out the middleman of labor and increasing efficiency.
Mostly hypothetical, but I've seen some company owners change their mind after seeing the effects. We'll have to wait and see for any serious scientific reports to be written about it.
If everyone at the company is just pretending to do their jobs, AI lets a computer pretend to do the jobs instead. What AI really is is a signal that work didn't need to be done in the first place. At least until someone uses AI for something with customer or employee safety implications
In some cases though we’re really talking about a decline in work quality and I’ve seen it at my own job. The good news is that adoption of AI tools is now considered more important than actual revenue so we can keep the charade going for another year or two
I had to sit and watch as a manager for where I work used chaptGPT in a meeting to "create" a text reply because they didn't feel like manually creating their response.
I have to hear about all these leads, managers and co-workers are using AI to "help" them do their jobs or just in general life.
If neither of you has read David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs, I highly recommend it. You'll learn a lot that you already know intuitively- and a lot more besides.
Comments
All "social" media owned by big techs should be massively boycotted and the dependence of them should be shunned.
But Big Tech isn't interested in small niches.
Google stepped in recently with a Precision Oncology chatbot, it's a 2 page system prompt in Gemini.
It's nuts. They're setting their reputation on fire for nothing.
The best thing for the field would be a market correction that wipes out most of the bad actors.
And in other news: “something something government should be run like a business” 😂
but I work with Engineers and PhDs who have to get shit done on time and under budget
and they all use a tool called AI, which like all tools has uses and non uses
my guess, in a year or two, you are not using AI, you are out of a job
Drills do not add business value if you try do drill holes into the air either.
Use the tool for something useful, and there will be added value.
Stop blaming the tool, this is a users and business and issue.
Just not to your business. Your business is just spending money on the AI tools so that the business providing those tools can make money...
Cut out the middle men
I mean they might fail if you are working with highly nested JSON objects but many are literally designed to call and read tool output in JSON...
That's kinda the issue with all this really.
https://bsky.app/profile/ejacobslaw.com/post/3kabr7mrepz2a
Just pick one!
I did an analysis of the same target.
That AI analysis was really slick-sounding but missed a major area of concern: a significant drop in volume in their major line of business.
This is all working out great /s
Clearly serious people saying things like “AI helped me write more articles in the last month than I have in my career to date…”
No reflection on whether they were any good, mind you. Maybe their audience used AI to read them?
I would say that writing, from my perspective, essentially has two broad categories of features. Technical and creative.
Technical like proper grammar, not having a run-on sentence, not reusing the same word over and over again, etc.
Did the piece make its readers think, feel and do what I intended?
Measuring your writing simply by the delivery of articles alone is a fool’s errand.
I can see writers using AI to help fill in the technical gaps.
Seriously, if you have to, just hire somebody with an arts degree or something.
Seriously what the shit. Technical gaps my ass.
Style isn’t just a means, something that merely gets in the way of achieving your objective. It is an important part of the creation.
That’s what I believe it's better to try and accept not being perfect, if it means being personal.
AI screened the CV.
AI created interview questions.
AI prepared interview answers.
When everybody is is super,
no one will be.
Sadly the biggest joke is that GDP is, and has long been, a pile of shit as a device to compare the performance of economies.
If you tell them this don't mention that this was in the 1960s and that this was THE RFK
Even if you worship the Almighty Dollar, $65,700 per capita PPP is still great.
If it added:
Sarah conducted research.
Sarah used Ai to summarize research into a report.
Maybe AI unveils the futility of the work people do.
Important reports will be written, reviewed and acted on by dumb robots.
Sure, criticize beaurocracy, on some level. Do that.
But it's not true 100% of the time that we can always take shortcuts. Sometimes we need to READ THE DAMN DATA.
If a job is worth doing, do it right.
Both the busy work and the tech are bad.
When I can't breathe outside, I do not need to see your drawings dance.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296324006325
- goals are created by AI
- evaluated by AI
- manager can let their feedback be created by AI
At that point, what was the goal of going through this whole charade?
Damn, maybe we did get some value out of GenAI.
More seriously my sincere hope is that somewhere in some civilized societies, some people with working brains are still training engineers, scientists, researchers, decision makers to analyze factuality of contents and keep things we truely rely on functional.
People who gleefully embrace AI are just signaling that what they do is superfluous enough that a fancy autocorrect could do it.
This is why so many middle managers and executives love it.
I have to hear about all these leads, managers and co-workers are using AI to "help" them do their jobs or just in general life.
My workplace also implemented an AI Chatbot for the purpose of answering general customer questions to reduce our call volume.
It did, then they started wondering why we weren't getting more products from members (this is a different issue I have)
If what we build doesn't work, it reflects badly on us. Not "AI." It costs us reputation (read: money), maybe even lives.