Workers Say AI Is Useless, While Oblivious Bosses Insist It's a Productivity Miracle
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/workers-ai-useless-bosses-miracleOpen linkView original on pawb.social584
Comments102https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/workers-ai-useless-bosses-miracleOpen linkView original on pawb.social
I'm a line worker in a factory, and I recently managed to give a presentation on "AI" to a group of office workers (it went well!). One of the people there is in regular contact with the C_Os but fortunately is pretty reasonable. His attitude is "We have this problem; what tools do we have to fix it", and so isn't impressed by " AI" yet. The C_Os, alas, insist it's the future. They keep hammering on at him to get everybody to integrate "AI" in their workflows, but they have no idea how to actually do that (let alone what the factory actually does), they just say "We have this tool, use it somehow".
The reasonable manager asked me how I would respond if a C_O said we would get left behind if we don't embrace " AI". I quipped that it's fine to be left behind when everybody else is running towards a cliff. I was pretty proud of that one.
Try giving them each an allen wrench and tell them to apply it to their daily lives to boost productivity.
That’s a banger line and I’m totally stealing it
Hey now, stealing is wrong.
I will give it to you as a gift.
I won't steal it, I'll scrape it for my model.
As usual, I fear for the reasonable manager's job.
Reasonable managers usually get plowed out of the way by unreasonable C levels who just see their reasonable concerns as obstructions.
Everyone bought so hard in on it that they need to (make you/us) use it. Otherwise it will be a financial disaster. It shit leaking down all the way.
(of course it has uses. But it's not AGI!)
In the early stages, it had potential to develop into something useful. Legislators had a chance to regulate it so it wouldn't become toxic and destructive of all things good, but they didn't do that because it would "hinder growth," again falling for the fallacy that growth is always good and desirable.
But to be honest, some of the earlier LLMs were much better than the ones now. They could have been forked, and developed into specialized models trained exclusively on technical documents relative to their field.
Instead, AI companies all wanted to have the biggest, most generalized models they could possibly develop, so they scraped as much data as they possibly could and trained their LLMs on enormous amounts of garbage, thinking "oh just a few billion more data points and it will become sentient" or something stupid like that. And now you have Artificial Idiocy that hallucinates nonstop.
Like, an LLM trained exclusively on peer-reviewed journals could make a decent research assistant or expedited search engine. It would help with things like literature reviews, collating data, and meta-analyses, saving time for researchers so they could dedicate more of their effort towards the specifically human activities of critical thinking, abstract analysis, and synthesizing novel ideas.
An ML model trained exclusively on technical diagrams could render more accurate simulations than one trained on a digital fuckton of slop.
That's what I suspect. All the corporate bosses pushing AI to keep the bubble inflated so that their investments don't get drowned in the crash.
I gotta work on my 401k stuff to find ways to divest from AI + tech too.
Did you censor CEO?
It's inclusive of the whole C suite. CEO, CFO, whatever else.
no, he's referring to the c suite: CEO, CTO, CFO etc
C*O is basically a slur these days anwyays
Also, many consultants
And many layers of middle management filtering PowerPoint slides.
I'm so sick of fixing AI slop code, especially because there's no love for people who fix the slop, only for the people who shipped the slop.
Hell I'm sick of fixing slop work from actual people
I am now semiconvinced that half of my co-workers are AI bots due to some of the dumb shit that they say
like literally AI hallucinations and reversals, coming from real people
When a human gives you bad code, you can pull them aside and coach them. With AI, that doesn't work.
the people who annoy me at work are the ones who don't learn, though
like how many times can you reforward the same chat messages explaining exactly what they're asking you, and the question is "where do I find ____" lol
They have to justify the cost of the consultants they paid to tell them to spend money on it.
The emperor's new clothes in the trillions.
Any boss ramming a tool down their workers throats without understanding it or validating it's usefulness is not a particularly good boss.
There’s bosses, and then there’s directors, and managers, and c-suites. Essentially, the people who don’t do any real fucking work are super impressed by it.
I don’t work with computers or coding, yet even in early childhood education/therapy some people are pushing for AI. Someone used it to make “busy scene” pictures for students to find specific things in. I hate using them. Prior to this, we used “busy scene” images that are easy to find online, full of quirky, funny details that the kids enjoy spotting.
But I can barely look at the slop images that were generated. So many of the characters have faces that look like wax figures left in the hot summer sun. The “toys” in the scene are nonsensical shapes somewhere between unusable building blocks and poorly-formed puzzle pieces. Looking at the previous, human-made pictures brought me joy, but this AI garbage is a mess that makes me sad. There’s no direction, no fun details to find, just a chaotic, repetitive scene. I bet the kids I work with could draw something more interesting than this.
I've never understood these use cases, pushing for generative AI in places where there's already an abundance of human-made resources. Often for free. Is it just laziness? A case of "Why take 2 minutes for a Google search when I could take 1 minute for a generative AI prompt?"
We just had an all hands where they were circlejerking about how incredible “AI” is. Then they started talking about OKRs around using that shit on a regular basis.
On the one hand, I’m more than a little peeved that none of the pointed and cogent concerns that I have raised on personal, professional, hobbyist, sustainability, environmental, public infrastructure, psychological, social, or cultural grounds - backed up with multiple articles and scientific studies that I have provided links to in previous all-hands meetings - have been met with anything more than hand-waving before being simply ignored outright.
On the other hand, I’m just going to make a fucking cron job pointed at a script that hits the LLM API they’re logging usage on, asking it to summarize the contents, intent, capabilities, advantages, and drawbacks of random GitHub repos over a certain SLOC count. There’s a part of me that feels bad for using such a wasteful service like in such a wasteful fashion. But there’s another part of me that is more than happy to waste their fucking money on LLM tokens if they’re gonna try to make me waste my time like that.
If you have to define OKRs to get people to use a tool, perhaps the tool is not a good investment.
Hey man you are preaching to the choir here lol
Textbook example of "When a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a good measure" (if it ever was)
sounds like starting a parallel business with out AI could possibly replace this company you work for...
Not really, actually. We have a shitload of wetlabs too for genomic assay and sequencing, which is honestly probably the most expensive line item on our OpEx by far.
is the company you work for publicly traded? asking for a friend
It's a productivity miracle for manager because they can bullshit their job faster and easier.
yup, they don't realize it will replace them, not their workers. and if you are that manager reading this, remember their goal is no middle class.
That means you.
Not your grunts that get paid dogshit and are little more the soulless husks these days.
You.
This, because all management does is communicate they think it's amazing..
Try and get it to do complicated or edge case things and it struggles, but management never ever touch complicated stuff! They offload it
Bosses aren't oblivious, AI isn't for the workers benefit. They need the workers to use the AI, so it can improve and begin to replace them.
That's part of how they're oblivious - mass adoption won't actually improve LLMs beyond a certain point, and we're long past it. The tech is fundamentally limited in what they can actually do, and instead of recognizing the limitations to work within them they're pretending we're gonna have AGI.
No but they dont need mass adoption, they need their workers to figure out a way the tool can replace their work. Plenty of people will work to replace themselves unfortunately. Whether it works out or not doesnt matter, those types of businesses will just try the next "tool" that replaces labor when it comes along too.
Whether it works or not matters to the investors. If it doesn't work they've sunk a lot of money, labor, and time into a boondoggle. They want to replace labor, but they want profit too. Businesses aren't just infinite money machines that can keep throwing shit at the wall until something sticks, eventually the investors pull out when they don't see the returns they expected.
That said, it's up to us to make sure the bosses don't ride this out on golden parachutes.
When the economy collapses we need to put them all in prison.
Sure that's all bad for AI in the long term, and maybe a few bosses in the short term, but the workers that are being targeted for replacement won't stop being targeted for replacement. People should be abandoning companies that are doing this, but most don't have the luxury to just quit their jobs. I think we focus far too much on the tools we use to replace people and not enough on the people who want to use tools to replace people. We could just stop supporting those people.
Okay, but that goes back to what I said before, the bosses are oblivious to how poor this technology actually is and are sleepwalking into a disaster. They're trying to replace their workers with something that can't replace them and this will have serious consequences, not just for the AI companies, but for the entire economy.
That's why we need to make sure they don't escape on their golden parachutes.
In the meantime, the workers could organize and demand the bosses stop trying to replace them.
Our new tech lead loves fucking AI, which let's him refactor our terraform (I was already doing that), write pipelines in gitlab, and lots of other shiny cool things (after many many many attempts, if his commit history is any indication).
Funnily, he won't touch our legacy code. Like, he just answers "that's outside my perimeter" when he's clearly the one who should be helping us handle that shit. Also it's for a mission critical part of our company. But no, outside his perimeter. Gee I wonder why.
I was asked to create a simple script... Great, I could have knocked that out in maybe 3 or 4 hours.
Boss insisted I use A.I. ... Fine whatever.
The code it spit out was OK, but didn't work... So I took it and started re coding and fixing the bugs.
It took over 3 hours to get that sloppy code to a working state.
Boss asked why it took so long, ai works in seconds. He didn't understand that I had to fix that crap code he forced me to use
Look, ai does pattern matching like a champ. But it can not create... It doesn't imagine...
Management never has a clue what their employees actually do day-to-day. We're just another black box to them, tracked on a spreadsheet by accounting. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out, you can't explain that.
I'm vaguely on the periphery of a project to create a sort of info-hub chat-bot. The project lead was really enthusiastic about getting me on board and helping me develop my skills in that direction.
Apparently there's a lot of people calling the wrong departments about stuff. Think along the stereotype of people calling the IT "Help Desk" for a broken light. The bot should help them find the right info, or at least the right department.
The issue, according to management, is that information is spread all over the place. Some departments use Confluence, others maintain pages on the intranet webserver. One has their own platform for FAQ and tickets, except it's not actually for tickets any more, which you'll only find out when they unhelpfully close your ticket with that remark. Wanna guess what confused users do? Right, call some other department.
The obvious solution would be getting each department to be more transparent and consistent about their information, responsibilities and ways to reach them, possibly even making them all provide their info on some shared knowledgebase with a useful search function. But that would require people to change their stuck habits.
So instead they develop a bot supposed to know all the knowledgebases and access them for users, answer simple queries, point them the right way for complex ones and potentially even help them raise tickets with the relevant departments. Surely, that will improve things?
The one time I tried it, I asked it a question that would have been my area of responsibility to see if people would actually find me or at least the general department. Yeah, nah, it pointed me at someone not just unrelated to that function or department, but also responsible for a different geographical area. IDK what they trained it on, but it probably didn't include any mentions of that topic, which is fair, given it's still in development.
But instead of saying "I have no information on that" or direct me to a general contact, it confidently told me to do the thing it's supposed to fix: bother the wrong person.
And the project lead wonders why I didn't inmediately jump at the offer to join his department.
My wife, who works at a college, was recently trying to locate some information from an old college newspaper that may not have been digitized yet and used their new work AI for help finding it. It directed her to the school’s archives, but provided made-up contact info for the office, and also recommended she contact herself.
It's really the middle management they don't understand, not the floor staff, the people who do all the checking and compliance which the top management now think can be replaced by AI
Honestly at this point AI is bad and human critical thinking is the worst I've ever seen in my life.
I know people that I expect would collapse inward without AI holding their hands, and here's the surprise of this statement. Can't wait to see it happen. I'm really holding on for the implosions and REALLY hope they happen when I'm nearby.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Data centers need to dissappear :)
There are incentives too. They have ram :)
All the more reason to gather a gigantic group of people and ransack them.
Re-defining "stripping the walls for copper" in the current year.
I have a simple anwer why managers think its smart and workers things its dumb. The managers see all kinds of documentaion from workers and to them the AI slop look the same. It looks the same due to the fact that the managers never take the time to comprehend what they are reading.
LLMs look smart if you have no idea what the fuck they're on about. And management is full of Peters.
Without a doubt. The skill set to be in management has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with selfish manipulation and no empathy. That way you can be cruel without missing a second of sleep.
I think it's more that AI is a soulless bullshit generator with no imagination and no deep understanding, and managers tend to notice that it can do most of the work they do. There's a lot of skill overlap with management there, so naturally they would be impressed with it.
Of course it is and its the point of my post.
I used some AI at work to do some stuff in polars, because I don't really know that library very well.
As a result I have a function that does what I asked for (I wrote tests), but I don't understand it and didn't really learn anything. Not a great trade.
Most of my conversations with my management is forced to be talking them out of the heinous baloney they're convinced of because "Gemini says.." No boss, Gemini made some shit up. Scroll past it or stop wasting my time.
And the only reason they can get away with not charging the training and computation costs is bunch of rich people essentially gambling a small portion of their generational wealth.
Dilbert manager energy
it's just great at pretending to do something, good enough to trick stupid execs
One of my college professors is mandating chat gpt
Why would they do that
Maybe because students are using it anyways, so it's better to teach how to use it responsibly, check for sources and not to trust blindly anything it outputs. But I am being optimistic.
They are pushing it at my work. I spent half a day trying to train Copilot to build me a report from one PDF and one way too formatted excel sheet, no go, the too-formatted excel stumped it, I had to clean it up first. I am booking payroll and the fucking system we use refuses to generate a report with the whole cost, there is one for gross to net and a separate one, not available in excel, and not in a format that can be put in a spreadsheet, for the employer cost. I need to split the total into departments & job cost codes. (ETA the payroll system also doesn't handle the job costing, even after I get total cost, more manual work)
I worked with the department who sends me this trash and glory be, there was a CSV for the gross to net one. Finally wrestled it into getting this right and asked it "what do I ask next time to get this result the first time" and it does now do a reliable job of this BUT:
All it's doing is making a report that the payroll system really and truly ought to be capable of producing. And I guess letting me honestly say, "sure boss, I use the copilot". It's not adding anything at all, just making up for a glaring defect in the reporting available from the payroll company. Give me access to that system and I could build the report, it doesn't need AI at all.
This is my problem with AI where I work. I can use it to get the result I want (eventually) although I have to do some editing.
But I can also use the python script that has been working fine for years, which gets me 99% of the way there in 15 seconds. It would be faster but the script is terribly unoptimized because I'm not a programmer.
they are stringing it along so they can get thier golden parachutes and bounce.
My workplace was holding the yearly meeting where they lay out a bunch of rules that get followed for a month, and then get forgotten about.
And one of the things in question was attendance. The boss smugly days "We have an AI tracker that can tell us if you've come in late"
I can't think of anything that could give me lrss faith in the accuracy of such a system.
All the sweet talk in the world ain't gonna save their jobs when their ai babies take over
It's undeniable that AI is great at problems with tight feedback loops, like software engineering.
Most jobs don't have the tight feedback loops that software engineering has
I, CandleTiger, do hereby deny that AI is great at software engineering.
it is totally deniable. Because it's simply not true. It's been studied.
One nit: they're good at writing code. Specifically, code that has already been written. Software Engineers and Computer Scientists still need to exist for technology to evolve.
This. Was setting up a new service and it scaffolded all the endpoints after the swagger and helped me setup tooling, tests, within a few hours. Also helped me research what has happened in the area since my last ms.
Now when adding the business logic I'll be doing most of it myself as it tends to be a bit creative about what I'm trying to achieve and tends to forget to check my models etc.
It's great at generic code, has issues on specifics.
I feel like if your code is so generic a generator can make it, you could achieve tge same results faster, more reliably, and more energy-efficiently with a shell script or two.
A specific tool should definitely beat a generic one. If I was doing these things all the time I would consider building something like that, scaffolding based on a swagger seems pretty easily achievable but since I do this every other year tops, and the setup will need to be updated with new techniques it's fast from a valuable time investment to write for me.
It is pretty bad at things that are "black boxes" that require documentation to analyze. For instance, I was trying to debug an SSL issue with DB2 (IBM database) and chatgpt and copilot gave conflicting answers. They frequently gave commands that didn't work, with great confidence of course. I had to keep feeding errors back to it. I even had to remind it that I was working in Linux and not Windows.
FWIW, ChatGPT and Copilot are two of the worst AIs out there for things like this. At many gigs I've had they're outright banned for use because of how garbage they are.
Which ones have you had recommended?
Claude Code, or Claude in general, notably Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5
Gemini also solid, though for coding found it lesser than Claude, but for heavy inference and reasoning it can be great and also supports a larger context window
Because they asked AI to tell them?
Always those fucking suits.
until you have a coworker that loves using AI and produces an ungodly amount of work product in barely any time and now you have to keep up
I don't keep up, I just stop interaction.
I had someone spit out an insane amount of requirements for a project at me. I ignored them and moved on with my day.
if someone brings me actionable tasks, I'll work the tasks. if they give me busywork slop, it goes right on the pile of bullshit and ignored.
my evals are reliant on deliverable goals and tasks, not sloppy bullshit.
that said, if they want me to work from a slopument I'll give them exactly what they slopped together and the best part is that I'll have a paper trail of slop to point the finger away from myself.
My good friend had a boss that loves AI, and so they used it to produce a strategic roadmap based off an email and a teams transcript.
AI has it's place.. GIGO
So does the apostrophe. That wasn't it.
Phone keyboard 🤷♂️
you're right. it has its place, as a footnote in history as being one of the leading causes of the downfall of society due to the rampant greed and fascist ideologies AI companies partake in.
AI claims that it can't grow with regulations. let me tell you, capitalism without regulations is just unfettered greed.
get out of that ivory tower before you hurt yourself.
AI can be useful in certain circumstances, its great at speeding up research for example (kinda proving its just a glorified search engine at this stage) but in my experience most business owners are way too dumb to know what is or is not useful to their employees work processes.
The machines constantly lie, research is one of its worst use cases.
Research in the sense of researching a problem you're having or getting an idea of how to start an implementation for something is a great use case and pretty much the only one I regularly use them for. Search engines usually fail to produce anything useful when describing the problem requires complec grammar.
Research in an academic sense yea they're horrible.
Yes I speak English, it's dog shit for your stated purpose. What word are you not understanding?
It really isn't but sure. If you're dumb enough to assume what it spits out is gospel it's dogshit for that purpose too, but that's a user issue. Not like random stackoverflow answers are always exactly what you need either lol
The irony of you calling it an ID-ten-T error, located between peripheral and chair, while you vehemently defend the use of AI tp study a subject. You're truly irredeemable.
You are again misunderstanding what they are saying. they clearly said it had use as a search engine, not research in any academic sense.
I am, again, not misunderstanding you, idk how you could possibly construe that. You're a filthy slopper. It's garbage for searching as it will inevitably misinform people with its hallucinations unlike an actual search engine.
easy to be fast if you don’t care about accuracy