Replace "AI" with "intern" and the same is true. But somehow that's ok?

This individual may get it, but it's worth mentioning that LinkedIn has embraced AI and incorporated it into its platform.

AI sometimes gets it wrong. The more it’s reused and seen as correct, the more likely it will rewrite history and “be” correct.

AI is already making people dumber and dumber while still being touted by tech bros and "ceos" as the "future" of work. All "social" media owned by big techs should be massively boycotted and the dependence of them should be shunned.

That’s what my AI program surmised too.

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.

I guess in hindsight that book "Bullshit jobs" was more spot on than much of corporate America would like to admit

Ok but how much resource did this zero-work-value operation consumed? I'm sure we're going into negative efficiency with these systems.

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.

I work in Oncology and AI it has fantastic niche applications in our field. 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.

“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

But also, they are narrow, specific, well-documented and and well-tested.

A lot of these niche applications are being starved of oxygen in the current environment. Starved for funding or tarred by association. The best thing for the field would be a market correction that wipes out most of the bad actors.

Absolutely.

The whole current strategy is to create "general purpose" tools, using the giant blob of data that is the internet. That's created a strange reversal where organizations are forcing staff to try to adapt the tools to their domain.

I can speak to healthcare because that's where I work. Overwhelmingly the industry is very interested in these technologies. There's still people who should know better trying to shove big tech chatbots into clinical workflows. But that's generally frowned upon.

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.

📌

To be fair to Bill and Sandra though, they dodged a pretty massive amount of some pretty boring sounding work. So there's that

True! And probably no one will ever notice so it’s fine. And in other news: “something something government should be run like a business” 😂

Exactly this. I don’t care how badly you run your business, as long as it’s nowhere near the critical functions of society.

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.

Cautionary tale for sure

And that's how you purple monkey dishwasher a Ship of Theseus.

I see this already where I work. Fucking idiots.

It took a LONG time for LinkedIn to get it

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 may well be that 90%, even 99% of LLM AI is crap 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

*you are out of a particular kind of job

good place 'jason figured it out?'.jpg

At Icarus Capital Management, the value can only go up

Brilliant

What are we even doing here?

Well a tool is a tool. 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.

This is a good point. However, if we're taking the planet into consideration, it's a very bad tool.

I guess this is up for debate. It has lots of defects, but it also brings great new opoortunities to the table. For example it is already having a great impact in material dev, protein folding, medicine dev, etc. I think we need to learn to manage or reduce the defects while getting the benefits.

Agreed. I'm currently dead against it when it's being used for frivolous applications.

AI I this current form is complete bullshit & a waste of time, creating a generation of stupid idiots

Does this tell us anything interesting about the value 'work' in the first place?

You know if I used an AI to read this beforehand it would have caught how terribly I wrote it

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...

And they're not. Making money, that is. They are raising a lot in investment, no value is being returned. Just bullshit.

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.

Even on paid plans, OpenAI loses money for every prompt that ChatGPT processes.

the Ai 'industry' is haemorrhaging money, i just hope it doesn't totally destroy my modest pension when it finally implodes

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

When do we quit finance rich IT people's toying around? Its as though they don't recognize the wonder of humanity. Without it we are nothing.

This is how we get the scenario in Cube.

Yes, but the CEO and executive leadership doesn’t know and doesn’t care.

Mark Butcher really knows his stuff. A fellow worth following.

You did use the proper cover for that report though, right?

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.

And Sandra, Bill & Jane still collected their paycheck 😂

This is my constant fear and why some perceive me as “slow” to adopt AI. I’m not slow, I’m just thinking through long-term business impact. #ai

Take out the AI at each stage and as far as I can tell, there's still no business value created unless the report inspires action.

Correct.

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. That's kinda the issue with all this really.

No one wants to work these days.

I certainly don't

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

If Sandra wanted a report just for Bill, she should e-mail it.

What is the opposite of a "Linkedinlunatic?"

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!

Ha ha. Ai is the biggest con since the south sea island bubble.

This isn't business this is "busy-ness"

A former boss once warned me to always be wary of ppl that are in meetings a lot because he said they just wanted to appear bisy at all times while not actually doing work.

Substitute "educational" for "business" and you have the same result.

That post also explains why a lot of LinkedIn doesn’t get it. bsky.app/profile/ejac...

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" Just pick one!

Who is Al? Is this Al as in Albert or Al as in Alfred?

Garbage in, garbage out.

Sandra entered the report Data for the AI to build on. It was prompted

Nobody ever asked who AI generates business value for. The only correct answer is AI companies.

Nope. It adds excess energy use so our prices go up and pollution. It is only more money for billionaires

My boss ran an ai analysis of a potential acquisition target. 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.

And they effectively saved a jpeg over and over, the tech telephone game. This is all working out great /s

Now we’re just wasting time at work faster.

Some of the responses are illuminating. 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?

Important point as I've heard this time and time again.

As I said the a "writer" extolling the virtues of AI, "If you didn't bother to write it, why would I be bothered to pay for it and read it?"

I say something very similar to colleagues when I’m training them to write.

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.

Depends on what they bring to the table. 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.

@joshuajfriedman.com I'll leave this one in your capable hands

SIGH

I know, right?

As a professional writer, there’s just one measure I’m interested in. 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.

Creative decisions are where experiences come in. I can see writers using AI to help fill in the technical gaps.

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.

that's what editors, peer reviewers, and the fucking spell checker were for instead of burning energy and boiling lakes to cool down server farms running four million daily ChatGPT prompts to "make this writing good" fuckksake

👏🏻

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.

Not _everyone_ gets it on LinkedIn. It's why I spend most of my time here instead.

AI created the CV. AI screened the CV. AI created interview questions. AI prepared interview answers. When everybody is is super, no one will be.

This might be more of an observation about the report and its contents than AI.

Ever used Ai? If you did you’d know it’s utter crapola

I have, and I've also read a lot of reports that were no better. If anything, they were worse.

Yes. It’s the con man’s dream. They are going around companies telling them to buy programmes What a lot of nonsense.

And in the meantime, they are all LITERALLY killing their braincells and potentially setting themselves up for dementia in their 40s-50s. 🫠

Unfortunately for every one of those there are a thousand that absolutely do not get it at all

This is how people tell you the report was bullshit to begin with

Its a weird time when even linkedin says something is crap.

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

The only business value is how much the electric bill's gonna cost.

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.

I mean the traditional way to discredit our economic system is slightly different www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comm... but I enjoy this version

Thank you - most amusing. 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 hardcore US libertarians love it, it's probably a garbage metric.

RFK commented that GDP measures ‘everything except that which makes life worthwhile’. If you tell them this don't mention that this was in the 1960s and that this was THE RFK

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

The ‘the system is broken’ to ‘oh fuck I’m not a selfish monster’ pipeline 👍🏻

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

Sure, though I think I’d still argue that a core tenet of libertarianism is that the individual has the freedom to do as they will, and if others also benefit that’s cool but not the objective. In the end a fundamentally self-interested philosophy. I commend you for your empathy

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.

Are these Cake lyrics?

"He's doing no business...he's usin' AI..." Damnit now I have an earworm.

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.

Many are saying this

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

And it’s wildly inaccurate … except maybe point 1. If it added: Sarah conducted research. Sarah used Ai to summarize research into a report.

Also +50 kg CO2 emitted into the atmosphere

Nailed it

The word “understood” is doing such a heavy lift.

Makes you think if the report ever needed to be written in the first. Maybe AI unveils the futility of the work people do.

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 😂

I don't understand why people would do something so half arsed. If a job is worth doing, do it right.

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. Both the busy work and the tech are bad.

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.

The last bit ‘But but but AI adds business value’ 😂😂🤣🤣

📌

uh oh bad sign

Isn't this basically explaining bullshit jobs?

Sounds like an MBA.

AI adds enormous stress on our environment while enstupidifying most endeavors. I would respect AI if it were used by a few thousand scientists. When I can't breathe outside, I do not need to see your drawings dance.

Back in my day, homework cheating didn't exist because we only had dial-up, and most plagiarism was easily detected with a google search, back in my day, when google search actually worked, back in my day, when we scooted ourselves on scooters.

Yep, we call it efficient inefficiency: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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.

📌

Bullshit jobs

Heads up: The HAL 9000 and SkyNet bugs that drove these fictitious AIs to kill humans have been shown to exist in current AIs. In controlled tests, AIs were willing to let a human die rather than abort the mission. Asimov's 3 rules must be MANDATORY code. [==*==] www.newsweek.com/ai-kill-huma...

The only "bug" here is human innaction because it is not even a bug. It is just an auto-correct text with our entire collective lifetimes of writing about robot apocalipses being regurgitated through it - the bug is whoever keeps obeying the Magic Conch.

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?

Sounds like a "manager" admitting they don't know how to manage. Damn, maybe we did get some value out of GenAI.

And nobody from point a-b seems to have checked any of the outputs to make sure they are right

Bill libelz!

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.

👀

@noethematt.bsky.social on my way to see you speak about this, and other AI things at this very moment

Yeah, the machines are now just like us

Ironically enough, they're creating an ever growing demand for people who can do without machines.

Where is this demand? Serious question because I'm in the job market.

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.

I think this is correct.

It will interesting to see what will happen when the AI created report and subsequent documents are referenced in a legal case...

Well if no-one read the report then that's a human failing. Nothing to do with AI 🤷‍♂️ EBKAC.

AI is perfect for replacing management. 🤷‍♂️

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

This is very much my experience with it!

Yeah; AI neatly divides work into two types: The work that is pointless and the work that will kill people if left to AI.

Or legal ones. Can not stress this often enough... if the advice an employee dispenses has legal or regulatory implications, this is all going to go very pear shaped very fast.

The idea seems to be an industry wide bet that if enough companies break the law at the same time no single one of them will get prosecuted

Using the Area 51 invasion memes from a few years ago as a serious business plan

Ai cannot generate an original thought. It is pointless

Neither can Hollywood.

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

Somehow I dont think banks will be in a rush to calculate your account balance using AI so there probably is a limit to how stupid this can get

This is exactly why I cannot use AI for any part of my job: what I do has to work. 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 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.

Since eyes are on this I'll expand: 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)

So yeah, I definitely feel the original posts. I fucking hate generative AI, always will.

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.

I believe this was also one of the arguments in Utopia for Realists: rather a lot of the kind of work that gets done doesn’t actually need to be.

I haven’t read it, but I’m very familiar with the concepts.

I regret that I have but one Like to give for this post. If what we build doesn't work, it reflects badly on us. Not "AI." It costs us reputation (read: money), maybe even lives.

Yeah, having all of the accountability is just wonderful, isn’t it.

Yes! Because then the folks who suck don't make millions