My son has gone back to college in his late 20s, and he is shocked at how many PROFESSORS are using AI for their lessons, and reading their presentations to the class for the first time.
He’s got one prof who told them on the first day that she didn’t want to teach this course because she didn’t know anything about it, but the original prof left, so they forced her to teach it. She’s learning the subject from AI at the same time the students are. She was reading the AI lesson, and got to a fundamental point that my son knew about, but she didn’t, so instead of explaining it, she just said to skip it. My son was appalled. It would be like studying math, and having the teacher skip division because she didn’t know what it was.
This is a major college in a major city, and it’s common.
Imagine taking up a five-figure debt for this kinda shit lol
I saw that happen in universities since 20 years ago already. AI just made that much simpler
I’m a university instructor and I definitely use AI to help learn material. But I write all the student-facing material by hand. And I use LLMs to check my work for errors, directing it to never offer a rewrite.
My friend (acquaintance maybe) who is a language teacher told me he used a “Resume Generator” to make his resume for him earlier this week.
A resume is the easiest shit ever, it’s one page, and you know all of the information that should be on it. This “language teacher” had to use an LLM to make his, because he’s a dumb lazy bitch.
I feel bad for any kids who end up with such a worthless instructor… I honestly hope he doesn’t find work, the kids deserve better.
If you put no effort into making something, why does it have value and why should people put effort into consuming it?
In theory, LLMs can help people do better quality work faster, but the productivity boost is modest when quality work is the goal. However, what seems to be happening to a great extent is that people are putting in a lot less effort and employers are now paying for salaries and AI tokens while getting worse quality work and slower progress in return.
And yeah, anyone who actually is trying to do a good job will get pissed at their co-workers half-assing it and pumping out low-effort AI slop while pawning work off on them. I think the only sustainable path forward with AI is instead of token usage being a badge of honor, there’s a culture of shame around AI where people put in a lot of effort to make sure nobody can tell they used AI out of fear of ridicule.
there’s a culture of shame around AI where people put in a lot of effort to make sure nobody can tell they used AI out of fear of ridicule.
Earlier this year there was a whiteboard in one section of my office where some people had a tokenmaxxing leaderboard. Now it suddenly disappeared.
Or they could just actually not use it?
Using it and then obfuscating it’s use is just creating more unnecessary work to end up with a lower quality finished product.
It’s not really that difficult to just not use it, I’ve gone literally my entire life without it and nothing has been “too difficult”.
Thousands of generations have passed before me without using it.
There is no element of inevitability to this. You can just not use it.
My own experience is that many, many “bosses” out there are not worth their hugely grotesque bonuses.
Most “bosses” in my previous company were selected by elimination. Competent people were promoted and moved to other parts of the organization and whoever was most senior got to be the next boss. Then when they failed at the job the next most senior person replaced them.
The Peter Principle: People rise to their level of incompetence.
Let’s say you’re a great salesman, the best in the company, so they make you a Sales Manager. Unfortunately, that’s not your strength, and you do a mediocre job, so you don’t get promoted beyond that position, where you stay for years, being mediocre.
Eventually, all the middle manager positions, and maybe even the upper management positions get filled with people who were great in past jobs, but only mediocre in this one, and the entire company settles into mediocre business management.
That’s the Peter Principle.
Thank you for explaining, today I learned
Failing upwards. Everyone rises to their optimal point of incompetence.
And I am sure this will have consequences for these bosses and will land them in unemployment and poverty, right? Surely?
And here I always thought the CEO was supposed to stay at home and just have a slop agent ingest the tsunami of slop and spit out piles of slop in response. I never expected the CEO to read the slop personally.
use AI for everything
get fucked
who could have foreseen this
AI is changing … how we judge the people we work with.
Yeah no shit, I judge my coworkers who rely on chatbots. What a revelation
Beyond that, I judge people who rely on chatbots, or put trust in them.
I look down on them. They literally cannot think for themselves, it’s fucking pathetic.
Management: Use AI everywhere! Also management: Why does everything sound like a chatbot? The real failure is executives confusing mandatory adoption with actual productivity, then blaming workers when the resulting mountain of nonsense lands in their inbox.
our management didn’t force it on us, we requested it
maybe this is the difference
When employees ask for AI, they’re solving problems they actually understand. When management pushes it from above without training or clear goals, they’re often just chasing a productivity headline.
Depends on the coworkers. Some does, some gets in over their head.
I would agree with this nuance. As a software developer who is now heavily using LLMs for my job, I’ve wondered about how different people see LLMs and come to a similar conclusion.
I like them because it’s a low-level tool I reach for whereas many people forced to use “AI” are using crappy solutions hacked into their existing tools, à la Microsoft Copilot.
AI/LLMs can be a very useful tool, but when it’s just slapped onto existing products you use, it’s often limited or only supports very contrived use cases.
I’d hate AI too, if my only/main exposure to it was Microsoft copilot, or even Gemini in Google Drive/Docs.
That’s because they do not know how to use AI correctly, it is always the case. Remember when people didn’t know how to search in google. It looks to me the same thing. They pretend to ChatGPT do this work for me and the management thinks ohh amazing job John Doe!!! Here is a raise!!! 🙄
The correct way to use AI is to not use it, and instead use your brain.
There might still be time to change course before the cognitive atrophy sets in.
And that’s exactly where management fails! You can’t demand AI adoption, provide no training, no guidance, no quality standards, and then blame employees for poor results. If workers don’t know how to use AI effectively, that’s a leadership failure. Management wanted instant productivity without investing in skills.
Yeah exactly I agree. Weird my comment has a down vote 😬
Take a step back and your reply basically says:
All of you here that hate AI and have a negative sentiment towards it are wrong.
There is nothing wrong with AI.
You’re simply using it wrong, it’s a skill issue.
If people didn’t have this skill issue, like they did with Google when it first came out, then people would not have a problem with AI.
Your comment implies the issue with AI is people misunderstanding it, while ignoring all the other massive downsides, both environmentally and socially.
Google situation is not the same as AI. Google replaced your library index, nobody liked trawling through index cards at a library. AI is looking to replace technical expertise. People like having tecnhical expertise, and they like using it, it feels nice and makes you money.
Your comment above is being downvoted because this:
That’s because they do not know how to use AI correctly,
seems to imply that there is a correct way to use AI.
In the context of the current generation of labor theft algorithms and surveillance tools, the only correct way to interact with them is as a conscientious objector - which is to say, abject refusal on moral grounds.
Failure to abstain from the use of LLMs and their ilk indicates either:
- Ignorance of the damage being done by these algorithms, their training, and the corporations that develop and operate them (have you somehow been living under a rock?)
-or-
- Complete moral and good sense judgment failure of the individual.
“AI” is continually improving prediction models. There are excellent use cases for prediction models, like weather forecasting, or planning distribution of emergency resources ahead of impending disaster.
But expecting a desk jockey to expect any prediction model to accurately create anew thing based on a human description of what that thing should be like would require the prediction model to possess its own creativity. That’s just not a thing.
and llms are suited for none of those examples you gave.
I can only assume that you didn’t fully read my comment, because it is specifically not talking about such prediction models. It is specifically talking about LLMs and the related corporations around which all of the current VC hype nonsense is centered.
The early part of your comment said
seems to imply that there is a correct way to use AI.
LLMs are universally hugbots, telling you what they think you want to hear. That’s always going to be a bad way to get accurate solutions. I think we agree on that.
There are prediction models that aren’t LLMs which can be useful. Your comment was unclear on whether you considered LLMs to be the entirety of “AI” or not.
I suppose I’ll never understand why comments are upvoted or downvoted. Sometimes I get the impression that it’s more down to chance or mistakes.
Can’t have a differentiated opinion about $bad_thing on here!
I see differing opinions get upvoted here with regularity, just not the bad opinions.
That’s two different words that should be differentiated, mind you.
That’s just your opinion man
