Appearing Productive in The Workplace — No One's Happy
What I have watched happen in my profession in the last two years, I am still struggling to describe. The first time I knew something was wrong, roughly a year and a quarter ago, I noticed a colleague replying to me using AI...
Some quotes that resonated with me:
This line reminded me of a couple of articles, linked below, that I read on AI use in astrophysics. Developing junior researchers is a big part of the point of their work, so they really are going to have to limit their AI use to make sure development happens. But worry that industry won't care; they've been hollowing out junior positions for years, because there's no value in training a senior who is just going to jump ship to a company that doesn't train juniors. That's an existing problem, but AI seems likely to make it worse.
We (my company) are trying to create agents that read a story and translate that into prompts, then execute said prompts, then review the output. The only piece missing is accepting the merge.
I'm not anti-AI, but a human needs to be involved at every step because a minor mistake made at the first step will amplify through the agentic pipeline.
A human should review every single thing that comes out of AI — especially if it is to be fed back into AI.