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.
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.
I taught at a small college in the early 2000s. It was the type of place you got an associates degree. I was hired to teach there a few weeks after I graduated from college. I had four days to prep for teaching a full courseload. Day classes and night classes. I had never taught a day in my life prior. I was a presenter at a museum previously. I had the fun job of staying one day ahead of my students. I would spend every free moment in the textbooks writing outlines for every chapter I could. Each class I would try to stay on topic and would sweat any time a question would come up, hoping I could answer. I never worked harder in my actual college career than I did when i had to teach. I did eventually get ahead and turned up to be a pretty good teacher. I was liked and respected by my students and peers.
I’m just saying getting thrown into the deep end is nothing new. Instead of writing outlines, you can generate them. However, I would agree that all that time I spent working is what enabled me to be a good teacher. I understood the work required at the pace it was expected. I’m not against AI, but I don’t think it belongs everywhere. It is a tool, not a panacea.
Imagine taking up a five-figure debt for this kinda shit lol
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.
I saw that happen in universities since 20 years ago already. AI just made that much simpler
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.
That’s an awfully harsh assessment. People are being encouraged to do this sort of thing and as a language teacher why not get a first draft done for you?
The real test of whether it is pitiful it is if that person took what was given and ran with it rather than review and modify it.
If society is demanding people know how to use AI, it would be stupid of a teacher not to do so themselves, because they have to teach how to use it.
Once again, the key is how one uses AI, not if one uses AI.
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.
I use ai at work to handle low-value, high-effort bullshit.
I have to plan out a quarter ahead for my team of about 20 people. The expectation was to sit with them during multiple planning meetings, haggle out plans based on estimates and vibes for what we might be able to get done.
I hated that so I loaded all of our work data (agile) into an agent I created. I had it create plans based on historical data. I tuned those plans based on what I needed to. It would take me about two hours to do the entire quarterly planning. I sent it to the teams for modifications, fed those back through for final tuning. Then the agent would create and schedule all of the work, dates, assignments, set up all the admin stuff to make it go.
Took planning from probably about 60 labor hours per quarter to maybe 10.
Because my boss was a twat, he would not log into the system to view the plans, he could only read PowerPoint. I had the ai make his dumb ass slides from the content.
So you can use these things effectively. You can also make endless work slop. Keep in mind, work slop is not new. Ever hear of a “walking deck”? It is as fucking stupid as it sounds. You make a presentation about what you and your team does for nobody in particular. It is usually self promotional marketing wank that nobody ever looks at. Been a thing for ages. Now I can just use my work data to generate one if I wanted (I don’t want one).
This levels the playing field for all the busybodies who don’t really work, but do make a lot of slop. I hope they drown in it.
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.
So I should stop doing a good job and I can fail up?
Man, I feel like a chump.
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.
And I am sure this will have consequences for these bosses and will land them in unemployment and poverty, right? Surely?
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.
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
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.
