A Harvard Business Review study is answering the question ‘what will employees do if AI saves them time at work?’ The answer: more work.
Sadly its true. In my previous company, the CEO asked a web developer to start a project in another framework and when she said she needs at least 1-2 weeks studying the new framework, the CEO responded, “just use ChatGPT and try to do the project in 10 days”.
And at lower quality with more errors of higher severity. Yay.
I can’t access the paper but a lot of people are drawing wild conclusions from it and misrepresenting what’s there.
In short, what I could find was, they asked 40 employees from a tech startup about their AI use.
They did no comparison study or experiment.
If I had to guess the tech startup probably works in AI as well. Not exactly an unbiased study.
Also startups are notorious for 7-day work weeks because they’re…well…startups.
Ah classic “here’s a tool to make your job easier. But don’t think it will make you work less, it will just give us more money” (if ai even makes it easier)
I don’t know if this is true but I once read that people expected the cotton gin to improve slaves’ conditions because that part of the process was incredibly labor-intensive, so it would be saving them work. Instead it made cotton farming more profitable and boosted slave ownership. ☹️
I’ve literally never used it for work at all, c suits is starting to push it more but there’s no much use. Definitely not working harder
I honestly used AI for something other than summarizing a meeting yesterday. It failed so miserably that I’m really not apt to use it again. Maybe I was wrong to assume it could summarize a simple graph into a table for me.
A co-worker not long ago had AI (fucking copilot in this case) randomly trying to analyze a spreadsheet report with a list of users.
There wasn’t any specific need to do this right now, but, curious, he let it do its thing. The AI correctly identified it was a list of user accounts, and said it might be able to count them. Which would be ridiculously easy to do, since it’s just a correctly formatted spreadsheet with each row being one user.
So he says OK, count them for me. The AI apologizes, it can’t process the file because it’s too big to be passed fully as a parameter in a python script (OK, why and how are you doing that?) but says it might be able to process the list if it’s copy-pasted into a text file.
My co-worker is like, at that point, why fucking not? and does the thing. The AI still fails anyway and apologizes again.
We’re paying for that shit. Not specifically for copilot, but it was part of the package. Laughing at how it fails at simple tasks it set up for itself is slightly entertaining I guess, thanks Microsoft.
Oh yeah, same here except with a self-hosted LLM. I had a log file with thousands of warnings and errors coming from several components. Major refactor of a codebase in the cleanup phase. I wanted to have those sorted by severity, component, and exception (if present). Nothing fancy.
So, hoping I could get a quick solution, I passed it to the LLM. It returned an error. Turns out that a 14 megabyte text file exceeds the context size. That server with several datacenter GPUs sure looks like a great investment now.
So I just threw together a script that applied a few regexes. That worked, no surprise.
i used it for the first time a few weeks ago, cant trust the results as they dont verify the actual sources where they get numbers/cost from. it was about an ACA plan.
AI has a lot of pitfalls. It helps knowing how they work: tokens, context, training, harnesses and tools,… Because then nonsense like this makes a lot more sense; same for “count the R’s in strawberry” type things. (For the record, I later told it to use JavaScript to manipulate strings to accomplish this task and it did a much better job. Still needed touchups of course)
They work best when you know how to accomplish whatever it is you’re asking it to do, and can point it in a direction that leverages its strengths, and avoid weeknesses (often tied to perception and dexterity). Something like ASCII art is nearly a worst-case scenario, aside from maybe asking a general purpose LLM to do math.
You must have done things wrong. These cases actually work extremely well. Like it or not.
Yeah, after all, LLMs are known for their ability to do things correctly and not make up tons of random bullshit.
Burn it all down. Lock the CEOs in before you do.
They’re using AI inefficiently, then. I use it to get a lot done in very short bursts through the day, and spend longer bursts fucking off in between.
EDIT: imagine being so brainrotted that you think it’s bad to use AI to reclaim more of your day from your wage slavers.
I know you’ve got the most downvoted comment here, but I actually agree with you completely.
Using AI to replace genuine creative work is depressing.
In my experience, the latest AI tools (and agents) are more than capable of cutting corporate corners and generating the kind of bullshit busywork that defines so many “bullshit jobs.”
It feels like the perfect use case for AI given the system so many of us are stuck in. Be smart and use AI to get some of your time back at the expense of your employers.
Lemmy is full of militantly anti-AI folks who would rather die on a hill penniless, than use a flawed technology against oppressing influences, in their own favor. Despite the impending bubble pop, the tech isn’t going anywhere, may as well learn how to leverage and exploit it in the workplace.
How are you reclaiming more of your day? The wage slavers want you on the office 9 to 7 regardless of how much job you “save” in the meantime. Don’t you want the office to look living and used? Think of the shareholders’s investment on the office space!
I’ve fooled them into thinking I’m so studious and productive, that I’m only required to spend 4 hours in office, 4 days a week. A good chunk of that time is spent chatting with people I enjoy chatting with over coffee. I’m also naturally reclusive, so the requirement of getting out of the house has a positive impact on my life, regardless of the setting.
EDIT: I’m playing 4D chess over here while all your downvoters are 2D nut-tapping each other.
“but not me, I’m built different” 😅
This is the way
