6 ms·

Ultimately this isn't "AI's fault". As the article points out, clueless executives who don't understand the capabilities and limitations of specific LLMs push t

by glimshe 14d ago

Ultimately this isn't "AI's fault". As the article points out, clueless executives who don't understand the capabilities and limitations of specific LLMs push the technology on workers so they can say they are "using AI to improve efficiency".

deleted 14d ago
[deleted]
Grombobulous 14d ago
Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities? As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsoft Teams doesn’t suck just like Sam Altman promised that AI is so powerful and so capable of exceeding the capabilities of humans that it’s dangerous. Maybe at some point some of the B2B customers of AI products will be suing their vendors for the kind of grossly exaggerated marketing we are seeing right now. I think that SaaS companies would never get away with it. I don’t know that the executives at my company suddenly lost their mind and decided that hundreds of dollars of AI spend per employee is suddenly justified even though approving a simple $##/month/employee SaaS tool was previously a rigorous slog. The only reason the executives at my company suddenly changed their mind on frugality is becausey they were sold a lie by a huge industry. We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.
- hilariously 14d ago
  You should. It's their fault for picking a bad vendor. It's their fault for not finding someone with taste to solve the problem. Fundamentally its their business, pretending you can blame someone else for your ultimate accountability is stupid. Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.
  - kakacik 14d ago
    Thats a fraud and host of other charges with that poison, and I see no difference with overhyped llms. You are not correct.
    - hilariously 14d ago
      Fool me once, shame on you, fool me ten billion times its still Microsoft's fault you bought the wrong thing.
      - cindyllm 14d ago
        [dead]
  - seethishat 14d ago
    They didn't pick the bad vendor, the herd did. They all go to the same conferences, attend the same vendor lunches and buy the same garbage. And today, most of the IT managers are not technical at all. They have art degrees and have never been technology practitioners. Literally anyone off the street can be a "decision maker" in technology today. Just buy what everyone else is buying and collect a huge paycheck while working remote. People who understand tech and sort of know what they are doing, are not included. That has been my experience.
    - simonuv 14d ago
      [dead]
    - WarmWash 14d ago
      My previous landlord was the IT manager of [big bank everyone would recognize] at their headquarters. When he asked me to email him scans of a bunch of personal documents, I asked him for his PGP key. ..."What's that?"
      - philipallstar 14d ago
- Aerolfos 14d ago
  > We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud. Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global... It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it
  - andrei_says_ 14d ago
    Wow, what a post.
- le-mark 14d ago
  > We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud. This is what they depend on actually. Scape goats for their failures. This quarter takes a hit then number go up.
- marcosdumay 14d ago
  Your executives are completely unable to evaluate the products they decide to buy? If so, yes, they are to blame, either for not being able to evaluate the stuff they buy or for deciding on questions they are not qualified for. Either one is incompetence. You can also blame them to continue renting the thing (because it's not brought) after it's shown to be defective. And if they decide to do irreversible transformation to your business before verifying that the thing even works, than yes, that's bare incapacity of running a company.
sdcfgy 14d ago
Don't underestimate the ability of workers to completely misunderstand the capabilities and drive it from the bottom up too. Half my colleagues are besotted with the technology and unaware that it is shaping their decision making, not the other way around.
dgellow 14d ago
Given how the AI industry lies about capabilities and is pushing the rollout with all their weight, the blame doesn’t go fully on their customers
pj_mukh 14d ago
But isn’t this also just bad implementations of AI? “It got a stupid simple answer wrong”, seems like a gpt-4o on a buggy RAG implementation from 2 years ago problem. Hard to fathom a modern model would get any of this basic stuff wrong. I know accountants using it for (a lot more complex but similar problem) tax law parsing and it going through flawlessly. There seems to be some bidirectional media gaslighting happening here where the doomers and glazers are talking past each other a bit.
antasvara 14d ago
I don't know, it feels like "reading a claims summary and classifying the type of claim" should be the bread and butter LLM use case? Not that executives are blameless for pushing AI everywhere, but we should also be able to "blame" AI for doing poorly at a task it's supposed to be good at.
- fluoridation 14d ago
  [flagged]
- dpoloncsak 14d ago
  A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. You can't 'blame' the AI, as it can't be held accountable.
  - voncheese 14d ago
    The interesting thing about AI v. other disruptive technologies (like the internet, steam engine, etc), is that AI has been personified both by the manufacturers of it (Anthropic being the most blatant by using a human name for its product) and users. That makes it way more likely that people blame AI (doesn't make it right by any means, but does mean that the actual blame gets diffused even more).
    - spwa4 13d ago
      How is that a problem? That makes it far worse for companies, after all. If an employee of a company makes a mistake then the consequences are: 1) employee was willingly sabotaging the company: employee gets jail time plus fine, employer is on the hook financially 2) employee was involved either in accident or just made a stupid decision: employer is on the hook financially So if that's the case, then employers are financially responsible for everything the AI they use says. That's the rule for employees. Note: this is different from, say if a company uses a car and it just starts by itself and drives into the next door warehouse setting it on fire (ie. some sort of designed-in decision/issue) : in that case the maker of the car is responsible, both financially and criminally, even if an employee or even the boss/owner/everyone at the company were involved. Of course, guaranteed that governments will change this the first time a court makes this obvious connection. Why do I think that? Well, for example, the UK government changed the rule when it turned out the post-office's written software (written by contractors, under post office and thus government responsibility and accountability) decided to cause incredible damage by blaming innocent people for stealing. Then, a special law was voted that in that specific case it didn't apply, and the government department, nor any of it's employees, were responsible. Just like, for example, Pennsylvania changed the rules for unwittingly-but-directly aiding criminal activity when it turned out half the Pennsylvania government was complicit in the kids-for-cash scandal (because in that case, normally, you wouldn't be criminally liable, but you WOULD be liable for any financial damage you do)

by glimshe 14d ago

deleted 14d ago

[deleted]

Grombobulous 14d ago

Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities? As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsoft Teams doesn’t suck just like Sam Altman promised that AI is so powerful and so capable of exceeding the capabilities of humans that it’s dangerous. Maybe at some point some of the B2B customers of AI products will be suing their vendors for the kind of grossly exaggerated marketing we are seeing right now. I think that SaaS companies would never get away with it. I don’t know that the executives at my company suddenly lost their mind and decided that hundreds of dollars of AI spend per employee is suddenly justified even though approving a simple $##/month/employee SaaS tool was previously a rigorous slog. The only reason the executives at my company suddenly changed their mind on frugality is becausey they were sold a lie by a huge industry. We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.

hilariously 14d ago
You should. It's their fault for picking a bad vendor. It's their fault for not finding someone with taste to solve the problem. Fundamentally its their business, pretending you can blame someone else for your ultimate accountability is stupid. Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.
- kakacik 14d ago
  Thats a fraud and host of other charges with that poison, and I see no difference with overhyped llms. You are not correct.
  - hilariously 14d ago
    Fool me once, shame on you, fool me ten billion times its still Microsoft's fault you bought the wrong thing.
    - cindyllm 14d ago
      [dead]
- seethishat 14d ago
  They didn't pick the bad vendor, the herd did. They all go to the same conferences, attend the same vendor lunches and buy the same garbage. And today, most of the IT managers are not technical at all. They have art degrees and have never been technology practitioners. Literally anyone off the street can be a "decision maker" in technology today. Just buy what everyone else is buying and collect a huge paycheck while working remote. People who understand tech and sort of know what they are doing, are not included. That has been my experience.
  - simonuv 14d ago
    [dead]
  - WarmWash 14d ago
    My previous landlord was the IT manager of [big bank everyone would recognize] at their headquarters. When he asked me to email him scans of a bunch of personal documents, I asked him for his PGP key. ..."What's that?"
    - philipallstar 14d ago
Aerolfos 14d ago
> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud. Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global... It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it
- andrei_says_ 14d ago
  Wow, what a post.
le-mark 14d ago
> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud. This is what they depend on actually. Scape goats for their failures. This quarter takes a hit then number go up.
marcosdumay 14d ago
Your executives are completely unable to evaluate the products they decide to buy? If so, yes, they are to blame, either for not being able to evaluate the stuff they buy or for deciding on questions they are not qualified for. Either one is incompetence. You can also blame them to continue renting the thing (because it's not brought) after it's shown to be defective. And if they decide to do irreversible transformation to your business before verifying that the thing even works, than yes, that's bare incapacity of running a company.

sdcfgy 14d ago

Don't underestimate the ability of workers to completely misunderstand the capabilities and drive it from the bottom up too. Half my colleagues are besotted with the technology and unaware that it is shaping their decision making, not the other way around.

dgellow 14d ago

Given how the AI industry lies about capabilities and is pushing the rollout with all their weight, the blame doesn’t go fully on their customers

pj_mukh 14d ago

But isn’t this also just bad implementations of AI? “It got a stupid simple answer wrong”, seems like a gpt-4o on a buggy RAG implementation from 2 years ago problem. Hard to fathom a modern model would get any of this basic stuff wrong. I know accountants using it for (a lot more complex but similar problem) tax law parsing and it going through flawlessly. There seems to be some bidirectional media gaslighting happening here where the doomers and glazers are talking past each other a bit.

antasvara 14d ago

I don't know, it feels like "reading a claims summary and classifying the type of claim" should be the bread and butter LLM use case? Not that executives are blameless for pushing AI everywhere, but we should also be able to "blame" AI for doing poorly at a task it's supposed to be good at.

fluoridation 14d ago
[flagged]
dpoloncsak 14d ago
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. You can't 'blame' the AI, as it can't be held accountable.
- voncheese 14d ago
  The interesting thing about AI v. other disruptive technologies (like the internet, steam engine, etc), is that AI has been personified both by the manufacturers of it (Anthropic being the most blatant by using a human name for its product) and users. That makes it way more likely that people blame AI (doesn't make it right by any means, but does mean that the actual blame gets diffused even more).
  - spwa4 13d ago
    How is that a problem? That makes it far worse for companies, after all. If an employee of a company makes a mistake then the consequences are: 1) employee was willingly sabotaging the company: employee gets jail time plus fine, employer is on the hook financially 2) employee was involved either in accident or just made a stupid decision: employer is on the hook financially So if that's the case, then employers are financially responsible for everything the AI they use says. That's the rule for employees. Note: this is different from, say if a company uses a car and it just starts by itself and drives into the next door warehouse setting it on fire (ie. some sort of designed-in decision/issue) : in that case the maker of the car is responsible, both financially and criminally, even if an employee or even the boss/owner/everyone at the company were involved. Of course, guaranteed that governments will change this the first time a court makes this obvious connection. Why do I think that? Well, for example, the UK government changed the rule when it turned out the post-office's written software (written by contractors, under post office and thus government responsibility and accountability) decided to cause incredible damage by blaming innocent people for stealing. Then, a special law was voted that in that specific case it didn't apply, and the government department, nor any of it's employees, were responsible. Just like, for example, Pennsylvania changed the rules for unwittingly-but-directly aiding criminal activity when it turned out half the Pennsylvania government was complicit in the kids-for-cash scandal (because in that case, normally, you wouldn't be criminally liable, but you WOULD be liable for any financial damage you do)