one CEO of a tech recruiting company suddenly found herself being inundated with Slack messages from employees that they’d clearly generated using AI, leading her to implement a new policy that strictly forbids the practice for internal communications.
One anonymous CEO got so fed up, they threatened to “fire the next person” who blasted them with unedited ChatGPT slop
“You weren’t supposed to send me all of this slop! You were just supposed to sell it to paying customers!”
My own experience is that many, many “bosses” out there are not worth their hugely grotesque bonuses.
David Graeber might have something to contribute to this subject.
I started a new role at a multi national corporation a couple months ago. My “onboarding” to try to get caught up on a new project involved shifting through thousands of pages and slides of AI generated content that had been created on this project… Which ironically is about creating systems to try to make AI return more relevant results. The company have paid me a small fortune in the hours I spent reading material that held no value but to make someone somewhere look like they were being productive at some point in time.
I’ve been dealing with this at my job too, I’ve been trying to review technical documents “written” by another developer who is 100% using AI to generate the technical docs. I find the docs totally unreadable. I don’t have much in the way of review comments except “can you re-write this part in a more human-readable way”? * 1000. Then the re-writes happen but again it’s clear the prompt was just “AI, re-write this in a more human-readable way” and it’s still just as unreadable just in a different format.
.
But then again, I’m always unsure, are we at the point where we aren’t expected to be able to read these docs, and are they just meant to be ingested by a different AI agent to then use them to do something else ?
Don’t make me tap the sign
use AI for everything
get fucked
who could have foreseen this
If you put no effort into making something, why does it have value and why should people put effort into consuming it?
To be pedantic, value is in the eye of the beholder. Cost is how much goes into something, Price is how much someone wants to pay, Value… that is much more subjective.
Oil costs $50 a barrel to pump, priced at $100 on the market but when it comes to value could be seen as providing $20,000 of human labor.
Not trying to defend AI junk, like seriously people, just do the work yourself. But value is such a hard thing to quantify.
I think there’s a presumption from the industrial boom. A ton of textiles is useful whether it is gathered, cleaned, spun, woven, dyed and printed by hand or by machine. And that might extend to practical complex products like printed parts or buildings constructed by robots.
One problem, is the whole point of art is human expression. LLMs might be okay for design, except there’s art in design. AI is cultural appropriation extended to all human expression.
Another problem is a lot of the practical content made is flawed. Imagine if machine-woven textiles were holey and had structural weaknesses that tore open easily, so we made fabric by machine anyway and had seamstresses sew patches over the holes.
(Not all industrial age machines were perfect, and sometimes we had issues, which would be corrected by better machines, but in this case, human interaction is allegedly part of the magic, with recorded human work being used to train future AI models. But we’re being forced to worship the dark gods an awful lot for the meager blessings being returned.)
The third problem is machine thinking is unexpectedly resource intensive. We once imagined smart (conscious) agentic AI running on our PC or our smartphone. Now it takes immense data centers that gobble up more power and water than we have, during a water crisis. And the industry is so desperate about it they’re polluting the air like it were, well, the industrial age. While we’re in a pollution-driven climate crisis and mostly to make slop and faulty vibe code.
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.
“But but but! Who’s gonna burn all that oil & gas if AI data centres don’t? Won’t somebody PLEASE think of fossil fuel promoters!”
The Babies are still drilling, remember? We have to make sure they make billions and trillions of dollars…
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.
LOL
It’s like asking a rando to write a Rust program. Just not going to happen at the level necessary to be good. There are people getting very, very good results with Claude.
