AI is functionally equivalent to disinformation as it automates the dark matter of communication/language, transfers the status back to the recipient, it teaches receivers that units contents are no longer valid in general and demands a tapeworm format to replace what is being trained on.
My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready.
Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working without actually working.
He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged.
More and more I think Brandolini's law applies directly to AI-generated code
> The amount of [mental] energy needed to refute ~bullshit~ [AI slop] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
The problem with most corporate work that these managerial idiots want replaced with AI is that is all so utterly useless. Reports written that no one will ever read, presentations made for the sake of the busy-ness of "making a deck", notes and minutes of meetings that should never have taken place in the first place. Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary.
I like the quote in the middle of the article: "creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependant [sic] upon outside forces". I believe that orgs that fall back on the AI lie, who insist on schlepping slop from one side to the other, will be devoured by orgs that see through the noise.
It's like code. The most bug-free code are those lines that are never written. The most productive workplace is the one that never bothers with that BS in the first place. But, promotions and titles and egos are on the line so...
AI in its current form, like the swirling vortex of corporate bilge that people are forced to swim through day after day after day to, can't die fast enough.
It'll be very funny if any AI productivity gains are balanced by productivity loss due to slop - all the while using massive amounts of electricity to achieve nothing.
The article as I see it is just one paragraph that end "So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?" Is there more if you're a subscriber to Harvard Business Review?
If you were around for the heyday of Markov chain email and Usenet spam this whole thing is familiar. Sure AI slop generation is not directly comparable to Markov process and generated texts are infinitely smoother yet it has similar mental signature. I believe this similarity puts me squarely in the offended 22%.
My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore those cases and only mention the times it worked.
It's kind of a mirror image of the global AI marketing hype-factory: Always pump/promote the ways it works well, and ignore/downplay when it works poorly.
Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept to work with a cross-functional peer, etc. It does not pass the smell test that you could find absolutely nothing for most corporate jobs. I'd hazard a guess that this attitude, which borders on outright refusal to engage in a good-faith manner, is what they're trying to combat or make unacceptable.
Fascinating example of corporate double-speak here!
> My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too.
Now they're on record as pro-AI while the zeitgeist is all about it, but simultaneously also having plausible deniability if the whole AI thing crumbles to ashes: "we only said to use it if it helped productivity!"
> My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better.
Bloody hell. That feels like getting into borderline religious territory.
I wonder how much this has to do with the LinkedIn world where everyone is making "I made us 100% more efficient last week with AI!" type stuff.
I'm not normally on LinkedIn but recently was and with the AI stuff the "look at me" spam around AI seems like an order of magnitude more absurd than usual.
Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your employees to produce PowerPoints about the TPS reports, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you get meaningless LLM argle-bargle in return.
We call these workers “pilots,” as opposed to “passengers.” Pilots use gen AI 75% more often at work than passengers, and 95% more often outside of work.
Identify a real issue with the technology, then shift the blame to a made-up group of people who (supposedly) aren't trying hard enough to embrace the technology.
Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism
This isn't wrong though. There's obviously two types of people using AI: one is "explain to me how X works", and the other is "do X for me". Same pattern with every technology.
The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.
My CEO sent an ai generated blog today. I've never felt more frustrated reading something in my life. "x happened, here's what it means", "groundbreaking", "game-changer", "significant", "forefront of a technological shift"
I refuse to read anything that seems to be obviously AI generated. If they can't be bothered to write down what they think then I don't have any reason to bother with reading what they've posted either.
I've never yet accepted an AI written answer when responding to my emails all though I try it routinely. Mostly it just doesn't capture my style. But even when it does, there's some kind of essential spark missing.
I think a lot about the concept that the AI output is still 99% regression to a mean of some kind. In that sense, the part it can generate for you is all the boring stuff - what doesn't add value. And to be sure, if you're writing an email etc, a huge amount of that is boring filler, most of the time. But the part it specifically cannot do is the only part that matters - the original, creative part.
The filler was never important anyway. Physically typing text was never the barrier. It's finding time and space to have the creative thought necessary to put into the communication that is the challenge. And the AI really doesn't help at all with that.
The AI revolution 2022-2030 is a speed run of the IT revolution of 1970-2000. In other words, how to 1000x management overhead while reducing real productivity, meanwhile skyrocketing nominal productivity.
Today, I discussed with a product manager who insists on attaching AI generated prototypes to PRDs without any design sessions for exploration or refinement (I’m a UX designer). These prototypes contain many design issues that I must review and address each time.
Worse still, they look polished and creates the illusion that the work is nearly complete. So instead of moving faster, we end up with more back and forth about the AI miss interpretations.
My manager has Claude leave a two-page worthless comment on every single PR we submit, uses copilot to write 20-line "summaries" of 5-line changesets, and once sent my coworker and I a Claude-generated document that was so unclear in its purpose that we both replied "what even is this" after which the manager just ghosted the slack thread and pretended it never even happened.
I'm dealing with this now. It is the bane of my existence.
Paragraphs of content spread out over pages and pages of nothing. Laziness at enterprise scale.
Deep research reports are even worse. They will cite AI-generated content in their work, which makes verifying their sources an O(n^2) task since I, now, have to find the sources _those_ sources cited to find the truth.
This generation of AI is the worst thing to happen to humanity since social media.
I won't trust any AI productivity research if the test subjects do not have access to unlimited tokens/GPUs. I see how much productivity gain first hand when you can burn $20 of tokens to save you 30 minutes of human work or the miracle that will happen when you are burning several hundred dollars of tokens a day.
Even the OpenAI or Claude $200 plan doesn't give you enough tokens to make you truly productive. The true ROI measurement should be the token cost over your hourly wage times the time you had saved if you have to do it by hand
38 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadAI is functionally equivalent to disinformation as it automates the dark matter of communication/language, transfers the status back to the recipient, it teaches receivers that units contents are no longer valid in general and demands a tapeworm format to replace what is being trained on.
Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working without actually working.
He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged.
More and more I think Brandolini's law applies directly to AI-generated code
> The amount of [mental] energy needed to refute ~bullshit~ [AI slop] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
I like the quote in the middle of the article: "creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependant [sic] upon outside forces". I believe that orgs that fall back on the AI lie, who insist on schlepping slop from one side to the other, will be devoured by orgs that see through the noise.
It's like code. The most bug-free code are those lines that are never written. The most productive workplace is the one that never bothers with that BS in the first place. But, promotions and titles and egos are on the line so...
AI in its current form, like the swirling vortex of corporate bilge that people are forced to swim through day after day after day to, can't die fast enough.
It's kind of a mirror image of the global AI marketing hype-factory: Always pump/promote the ways it works well, and ignore/downplay when it works poorly.
That is where the AI come into full use.
> My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too.
Now they're on record as pro-AI while the zeitgeist is all about it, but simultaneously also having plausible deniability if the whole AI thing crumbles to ashes: "we only said to use it if it helped productivity!"
Do you see? They cannot be wrong.
Bloody hell. That feels like getting into borderline religious territory.
I'm not normally on LinkedIn but recently was and with the AI stuff the "look at me" spam around AI seems like an order of magnitude more absurd than usual.
Identify a real issue with the technology, then shift the blame to a made-up group of people who (supposedly) aren't trying hard enough to embrace the technology.
Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism
Thanks for the career advice.
I think a lot about the concept that the AI output is still 99% regression to a mean of some kind. In that sense, the part it can generate for you is all the boring stuff - what doesn't add value. And to be sure, if you're writing an email etc, a huge amount of that is boring filler, most of the time. But the part it specifically cannot do is the only part that matters - the original, creative part.
The filler was never important anyway. Physically typing text was never the barrier. It's finding time and space to have the creative thought necessary to put into the communication that is the challenge. And the AI really doesn't help at all with that.
New flow: please run RCA through chatgpt and forward to your manager who will run it through chat GPT and send to the customer.
RCA is now 10x longer, only 10% accurate, and took 3x longer to get to the customer.
Today, I discussed with a product manager who insists on attaching AI generated prototypes to PRDs without any design sessions for exploration or refinement (I’m a UX designer). These prototypes contain many design issues that I must review and address each time.
Worse still, they look polished and creates the illusion that the work is nearly complete. So instead of moving faster, we end up with more back and forth about the AI miss interpretations.
Now that ai makes my programming 10x more efficient, I will work 5x less destroying “half of my” productivity.
I'm looking for a new job.
Paragraphs of content spread out over pages and pages of nothing. Laziness at enterprise scale.
Deep research reports are even worse. They will cite AI-generated content in their work, which makes verifying their sources an O(n^2) task since I, now, have to find the sources _those_ sources cited to find the truth.
This generation of AI is the worst thing to happen to humanity since social media.
Even the OpenAI or Claude $200 plan doesn't give you enough tokens to make you truly productive. The true ROI measurement should be the token cost over your hourly wage times the time you had saved if you have to do it by hand