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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
- mallowdram 1y ago"transfers the effort from creator to receiver." 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of communication/language, transfers the status back to the recipient, it teaches receivers that units contents are no longer valid in general and demands a tapeworm format to replace what is being trained on.
- backprop1989 1y agoWhat’s a tapeworm format?
- lazystar 1y agomaybe chatgpt can help us understand it better
- mallowdram 1y agochat can't grasp what it hasn't been trained to automate.
- nradov 1y agoI don't think you actually grasp what you're writing either, or at least you can't explain it in any coherent way, so LLMs are no worse on that score.
- mallowdram 1y agoThere are vast, unexplored sums of knowledge that LLMs can't automate, mimic or regurgitate. This is obvious simply from meme-culture. Try asking Chat GPT to derive meaning from Kirk's shooters casing engravings. Listen to the explanations unravel. Once you attach the nearly limitless loads of meaning available to event-perception (use cognitive mapping in neuroscience where behavior has no meaning, it simply has tasks and task demands vary wildly so that semantic loads are factors rather than simple numbers), LLMs appear to be like puppets of folk psychology using tokens predictably in embedded space. These tokens have nothing to do with the reality of knowledge or events. Of course engineers can't grasp this, you've been severely limited to using folk psychology infected cog sci as a base of where your code is developed from, when in reality, it's almost totally illusory. CS has no future game in probability, it's now a bureaucracy. The millions or billions of parameters have zero access to problems like these that sit beyond cog sci, I'll let Kelso zing it https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oK0E4siLUv9MFCYuOoG0Jir_65Tx5Kik/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oK0E4siLUv9MFCYuOoG0Jir_65T...
- nradov 1y agoNo one — human or LLM — actually knows the meanings of the phrases that Tyler James Robinson wrote on his cartridge casings. There's lots of speculation but he isn't talking, and even if he was we wouldn't know whether he was telling the truth. If you want us to take you seriously then you'll have to come up with a valid example instead of posting a bunch of pseudo-intellectual drivel.
- mallowdram 1y agoYou're proving me correct. The pseudoscience is CS, it has no game in events. The interdisciplinary search for semantics derived from events isn't pseudo-intellectual drivel, it's the central quest of key sciences and subfields that range into neuroscience. Of course we can concatenate meanings from his behavior and clues, but these meanings are not accessible in AI or narratives. You're essentially throwing in the towel as proof legacy explanations have died in automation in AI. Face it CS, your approach is bureaucratic, for enforcing the dead status-quo of knowledge, not for the leading edges.
- bitlax 1y ago> No one — human or LLM — actually knows the meanings of the phrases that Tyler James Robinson wrote on his cartridge casings. But of course we do! The right-wing groyper theory crashed on the rocks so we're left with a deranged leftist who killed in the name of his leftism.
- mallowdram 1y agoNo, memes subvert politics in general. They're references of nihilistic chaos that dissolves left and right.
- bitlax 1y ago"Your Honor, have you ever heard of Marcel Duchamp?"
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- mallowdram 1y agoWhatever the training can't assimilate, yet can be transmitted by users as analytic statements.
- oblio 1y agoI'm not sure I understand this. Maybe an example would help, please?
- mallowdram 1y agoUse your imagination. Any event that cannot be defined by low dimensional meaning (which there are myriad). The problem with the distinctions between event perception (what causes a car crash) and what AI assimilates is the arbitrary bottleneck of words, causal statements, images, deep reductions which are possible illusions of semantics like beliefs, motivations, desires. Humans can take in a remarkable array of stimuli in order to perform tasks that are not cause and effect through optic flow. AI is stuck behind a veil of predicted tokens. In essence, AI cannot automate mimicry of understanding even when the magic act demonstrates. Events are already tapeworms, but our skillset is so stuck behind the veil of folk psychology and f science, we are merely pretending we understand these events. So a tapeworm format is probably somewhat like a non-causal contradictory event that may have infinite semantic readings. Think edges of paradox: Kubrick, Escher, Cezanne, Giorgione, Song Dynasty landscapes, Heraclitus, find the Koanic paradoxes of the East and keep conjoining them. Think beyond words, as thoughts are wordless, the tapeworms are out there, math doesn't and can't see them. This is what's so jarring about meme-culture, which are tapeworms to AI as they are tapeworms to narrative containment culture, what might be viewed as academia/intelligensia/CS engineering/plain English media, the tapeworms are here, CS I think assumes the causal/semantic linkages are simple, meaning is low-bandwidth, but the reality is semantic is both limitless (any event) and illusory (meme-culture ie several memes in sequence). AI has no path in either case.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- httpsoverdns 1y agoAre you able to read this article without paying, or do you only get this one paragraph summary?
- c-linkage 1y agoCheck for no-script or ad-blockers. I could read in Chrome but not Firefox.
- donatj 1y agoMy 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.
- jjgreen 1y agoShip it!
- matheusmoreira 1y ago> He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged. "Explain to me in detail exactly how and why this works, or I'm not merging." This should suffice as a response to any code the developer did not actively think about before submitting, AI generated or not.
- mholm 1y ago"You're absolutely right— This code works by [...]"
- padjo 1y agoIf it ever stops leading with a cheery affirmation we’re doomed.
- latexr 1y agoI think you might’ve missed this part from the post: > AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to quit).
- dsterry 1y agoImplement a no workslop policy. Reputation will take care of the rest. Basically an educational task.
- drivingmenuts 1y agoAnd just think of all the money spent on ChatGPT subscriptions. You’re not gonna see that back anytime soon.
- theideaofcoffee 1y agoThe 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.
- Terr_ 1y ago> Summaries written by AI of longer-form work that are then shoved into AI to make sense of the AI-written summary. Also the problem where someone has bullet-points, they fluff them up in an LLM, send the prose, and then the receiver tries to use an LLM to summarize it back down to bullet-points. I may be over-optimistic in predicting that eventually everyone involved will rage-flip the metaphorical table, and start demanding/sending the short version all the time, since there's no longer anything to be gained by prettying it up.
- mavamaarten 1y agoSo true. We used to appoint someone in the group to take notes. These notes were always correct, to the point, short and easy to read. Now our manager(s) are heavily experimenting with recording all meetings and desperately trying to produce useful reports using all sorts of AI tools. The output is always lengthy and makes the manager super happy. Look, amazing reports! But on closer inspection they're consistently incomplete one way or another, sometimes confidently incorrect and full of happy corpo mumbo jumbo. More slop to wade through, when looking for factual information later on. Our manager is so happy to report that he's using AI for everything. Even in cases where I think completeness and correctness is important. I honestly think it's scary how quickly that desire for correctness is gone and replaced with "haha this is cool tech". Us devs are much more reluctant. We don't want to fall behind, but in the end when it comes to correctness and accountability, we're the ones responsible. So I won't brainlessly dump my work into an LLM and take its word for granted.
- AlexandrB 1y agoIt'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.
- Bukhmanizer 1y agoI don’t think AI slop is inherently mandatory, but I worry that the narrative around AI will devalue engineering work enough that it becomes impossible to avoid.
- drivingmenuts 1y agoAs someone who has spent the last 30 years honing my craft (programming), all I can say is this: ha ha!
- BoorishBears 1y agoI've spent 16 years and I won't exactly be cheering if we hit a wall with AI. I love programming, but I also love building things. When I imagine what having an army of mid-level engineers that genuinely only need high level instruction to reliably complete tasks, and don't require raising hundreds of millions while become beholden to some 3rd party, would let me build... I get very excited.
- pixl97 1y agoProgramming is almost never an objective in itself, it's a stepping stone to some other task. It's nice it pays a good living, but I have a feeling that's going away eventually.
- kazinator 1y agoThat light bulb lying in a pool of epoxy resin is cool as hell though. A lot of poetic talent must have gone into the prompt.
- Animats 1y agoThe 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?
- keyshapegeo99 1y agoI had to disable UBO and my VPN's ad blocker. Then the whole piece showed up
- rickydroll 1y agoWorkslop production is how we determine who should get a ticket for Ark B.
- varjag 1y agoIf 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%.
- handfuloflight 1y ago[flagged]
- varjag 1y agoSee mostly on the subject but just slightly veering off context texts like this is why it's irritating. Arguing something not entirely relevant yet short of complete strawman and debating the tangents that were never brought up while never adding anything of substance.
- handfuloflight 1y ago[flagged]
- varjag 1y agoGrasping nuance and implications of human replies is also something LLMs struggle with.
- handfuloflight 1y agoYou're claiming there's a detectable "mental signature" but dodging the fact that this claim is inherently testable. Either the signature is recognizable enough to put you in that "offended 22%," or it isn't. You can't invoke pattern recognition to justify your irritation, then hide behind "nuance" when the logical implication—that you should be able to spot it blind—gets pointed out. Turns out humans are just as evasive as LLMs when pressed to back up what they actually said.
- ryandrake 1y agoMy 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.
- meindnoch 1y agoJust give them an AI generated response.
- thatfrenchguy 1y agoIt’s kind of a good way to make your business collapse though, because figuring out the kinds of problems where LLMs are useful and where they’ll destroy your productivity is extremely important
- cjbgkagh 1y agoJust make shit up, or even better have the AI make shit up for you
- Macha 1y agoThe problem is, the shit that's made up will be used to justify the decision as a success and ensure the methodology continues.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoIf they’re mandating use like this I doubt it’s their only dysfunction. At least this one has a built in scapegoat.
- kingstnap 1y agoMake it long enough that it's not worth any human's time reading it. Like full-on balls to the walls slop. Pass it between different LLMs to add additional conclusions and subheadings. In fact, do it in parallel where one chatbot is adding another few pages here, and simultaneously and independently, another is adding different pages somewhere else and concatenate the results together. Once you get about 25 pages of dense slop, just conclude that AI made writing this report 1000x more efficient.
- paultopia 1y agoIs 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.
- joe_the_user 1y agoFair point, The thing about companies asking for slop is that a middle manager maintaining usual stream of vacuous text is a proxy for that person paying attention to a given set of problems and alerting others. AI becomes a problem because someone can maintain a vacuous text stream without that attention. So it's likely to become an arms-race.
- shash 1y ago> So it's likely to become an arms-race. And this is my real fear with the current crop of AI. That rather than improving the system to require less junk, we just use AI to generate junk and AI to parse AI-generated junk that another AI summarises ad infinitum… Like, instead of building a framework that reduces boilerplate code, we use an LLM to generate that boilerplate instead (in a more complex and confusing manner than using a traditional template would). Or, when dealing with legal or quasi-legal matters (like certifications), 1. Generate AI slop to fill a template 2. Use AI to parse that template and say whether it’s done 3. Use another to write a response. Lots of paperwork happening near instantly, mostly just burning energy and not adding to either the body of knowledge or getting to a solution.
- paultopia 1y agoI think this may already be happening in job applications---companies using AI to parse them, applicants surely by now using AI to spew them out at increasing volume...
- romaniv 1y agoWe 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 Thanks for the career advice.
- vkou 1y agoA pilot has ultimate authority of how a plane is flown, because it's their ass in the fire if the plane can't land. If you're a low-level office drone, you are not a pilot.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jennyholzer 1y agoEmbody a slave mindset
- red_rech 1y agoOr we’ll import people who will.
- lkey 1y agoRidiculous, I have it on good authority that embracing the 'hacker ethos' by becoming a 'coding ninja' with a 'wizard' mindset will propel you to next-level synergisms within transformative paradigms like AI and blockchain.
- karakot 1y agoTo leverage that hacker ethos for maximum synergy, you'll need to empower a holistic and agile mindset. This allows you to pivot toward a disruptive paradigm and monetize your scalable core competencies across the entire ecosystem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nphardon 1y agoThe 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.
- arwhatever 1y agoThe AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?
- bluefirebrand 1y agoExecs more or less always assume that workers are some combination of stupid and lazy After all if they weren't stupid and lazy they would be important execs, not unimportant workers
- nphardon 1y agoThat adds to the dissonance for sure.
- 2THFairy 1y agoAI criticism and pushback. When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]" Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation". The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees. This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.
- Galxeagle 1y agoI've come to appreciate that using AI tools are a skill on it's own. Anything beyond auto code completion takes quite a bit of conscious effort to experiment with and then learn how to delegate to in a workflow. They often end up being valuable, but it did take some work to get out of my productivity 'local maximum' that maybe not everyone would naturally take on.
- ramoz 1y agoMy 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"
- everdrive 1y agoI hope you learned an important lesson about reading the next email from the CEO.
- duxup 1y agoAt one company I worked at the executives sent out constant emails to everyone. It was part of the culture. After some layoffs HR leadership sent out a THREE PART email about how they were working on a very important project and how it took many many hours and meetings and so on. The project was renaming the HR department ... After that I sent all executive emails to a folder and did not read them, my mood improved drastically by not reading those emails.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- meindnoch 1y agoWhy are you reading your CEO's blog? This question applies whether it's written by an AI or not.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoYou misread. It's not the CEO's blog.
- ManlyBread 1y agoI 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.
- zmmmmm 1y agoI'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.
- tonymet 1y agoold flow : send RCA to customer in a timely manner 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.
- tonymet 1y agoThe 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.
- polloslocos 1y agoThe monetary analogy of nominal vs real productivity is so good — I’m stealing it for some undetermined use in the future.
- tonymet 1y agoI appreciate that . I do spend a lot of time trying to be illustrative
- diegof79 1y agoWow, this article resonates with me. 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.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThis is similar to how the internet destroys productivity with YouTube. Humans are masters of compensating productivity gains with time retrieval. Now that ai makes my programming 10x more efficient, I will work 5x less destroying “half of my” productivity.
- queenkjuul 1y agoMy 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 looking for a new job.
- suzzer99 1y agoMy manager is obsessed with AI agents. Thankfully he's leaving, so I don't have to look for a new job.
- luPowB6aAcRZcFr 1y agoI'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.
- hevangel 1y agoI 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
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]