The key to 'liking' AI is to turn corporation-brained and stop caring about any sense of quality, customer satisfaction, or even your own satisfaction.

Minimum. Viable. Product.

That's why they love AI. It promises to make it so that you can always BS something out the door in 10 minutes, collect the check, and move on before it breaks. When you have no conception of pride in your product, the money you get paid to sell cheap trash is just as spendable as what you get selling artisanal creations, and if you can BS out something in half the time, you can do it to twice as many customers. Double revenue. And by the time the lawsuits come in, you're supposed to be already working somewhere else. That's the company's problem, not yours, right?

sigh

Just don't.

Don't change your morals just cause of peer pressure, especially not corporate pressure

AI is pretty bad most things you do that are actually valuable so your critique definitely holds. It's bad for the environment and creates tech consolation and all round is creating around as many problems as it claims to solve.

AI as in neural networks are really good in most ways such as playing chess and detecting melonomas but I'm going to give some tips for spocifically LLMs.

Treat it as a dumb intern. You ask it to find research papers but you have to read them yourself to actually assess them. You can use it to draft an email but you still have to proofread it. You can use it to write code but expect bugs and unhandled edge cases.

I'm a software developer and I use an LLM to create code generators, internal tooling, a thing that takes a json and outputs SQL insert statements or to look up docs. The AI has not increased my productivity per se but the tooling I created with it has.

Another use case is to ask for critique, you paste some code block in and ask it to review performance for example and it can spot the "use a hash map there" cases pretty easily.

That's my 2 cents on the topic.

My company does annual reviews. You have to write your own review, then they will read it over and then sit down to talk to you about it.

Last year, I just had ChatGPT write it for me based on all of my past conversations with it. Turned it in. The first question they asked me was, 'Did you use AI to write this?' Without hesitation, I said absolutely. They loved it so much, they had me show everyone else how to do it and made them redo theirs. I couldn't frikin believe it. Everyone is still pissed they have to use ChatGPT this year, but the bosses love that corporate hogwash so much.

They're about to receive a stack of AI-generated drivel so bad that I bet they have everyone go back to handwriting them.

Do we work at the same place? Lol

I totally get you, despite some pedantic disagreement about what "spam" means. I'm in the same boat a bit.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I've kinda leaned into it in the sense that "if they're gonna make us use it, then I want to be in a position to steer the direction". While I discourage its use and preach to people about it's evils, I also try to improve the AI tools and processes that we're using. That probably makes me part of the problem, but it relieves a bit of the pressure of how shit it is day to day.

I'm actually kinda bearish on AI.
Or rather I think that either it's a bubble that will pop, or before too long it's gonna cause a global depression. Maybe a bit of paranoia and doomerism.

Ask ChatGPT "How do I unionize my workplace to protect my job against AI obsessed management?"

I'm literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter

Feel you 100%.
I dunno why but my entire career everyone always talks like doing IT is simply a stepping stone to becoming a manager, so stupid. Like god forbid you're not the lEaDeRsHiP type.
And now with the rise of "Agentic IDEs" it's even fucking worse, I don't want to be managing people let alone herding a pack of ~~blind cats~~ autonomous agents.

Unfortunately the only solution is to stop caring, Yes, really.
I know it hurts producing sub-par garbage when you know you're capable of much more, but unfortunately there's no other way.
If upper management doesn't care about delivering quality products to their consumers anymore, you shouldn't either. You'll stress and burn yourself out meanwhile those responsible won't lose a blink of sleep over it.
Do exactly what they want. Slop it all. Fuck it. Save your energy for what really matters.

That or start looking for another job, but you might struggle to find one that isn't doing the same shit.

Stop carrying about the quality of your output and just copy and paste the slop back and forth. its what they want.

Try to distance yourself from the quality of your work.

Produce AI slop like your overlords fetishise, then have a mouse jiggler wiggle the cursor and an AI answer your Teams messages.

You're the sane one.

AI is a tool, just like a hammer. You could use a rock, but that doesn't give you the leverage that a hammer does.

AI is also a machine, it can get you to your destination faster, like a car or train.

Evil people have used hammers, cars, and trains to do evil and horrible things. These things can also be used for useless stupid things, like advertising.

But they can also be used for good, like an ambulance or to transport food. They also make us more efficient and can be used to save resources and effort. It depends on who uses it and how they use it.

You can't control how other people may misuse these things, but you can control how much you know, how you use it, and what you use it for.

Many people think they're 20% more productive with AI, but they're actually 20% less productive.

https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/ai-hampers-productivity-software-developers-productivity-study/

I remind my boss that giving AI full access to our codebase and access to environmemts, including prod, is the exact plot of the Silicon Valley episode where Gilfoyle gave Son of Anton access. His AI deleted the codebose after being asked to clean the bugs....deleting the entire codebase was the most efficient way of doing that.

I am also encouraged to use AI at work and also hate it. I agree with your points. I just had to learn to live with it. I've realized that I'm not going to make it go away. All I can do is recognize its limited strengths and significant weaknesses and only use it for limited tasks where it shines. I still avoid using it as much as possible. I also think "improved productivity" is a myth but fortunately that's not a metric I have to worry about.

My rules for myself, in case they help:

• Use it as a tool only for appropriate tasks.
• Learn its strengths and use it for those things and nothing else. You have to keep thinking and exploring and researching for yourself. Don't let it "think" for you. It's easy to let it make you a lazy thinker.
• Quality check everything it gives you. It will often get things flat wrong and you will have to spend time correcting it.
• Take lots of deep breaths.

[Edit: punctuation]

It definitely sounds like you've already decided to find AI useless regardless of what it can do, but on the chance that I can maybe change your mind a little bit...

I'm a huge AI skeptic myself, at least compared to my coworkers. Almost everything it spits out has been incorrect for me, except in very narrow use cases.

First, I find it useful to find links to actual documentation for tools/libraries/languages I am completely unfamiliar with. The examples and text it generates are usually poor, but it can do a decent job of finding webpages.

Second, I've found it good at guided code reviews. It is no substitute for a real human review, but adding an AI pass before you open a pull request can knock off some of the low hanging fruit.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do and kind of AI? Maybe it's the autism but I find LLMs are bit limited and useless but other use cases aren't quite as bad Training image recognition into AI is a legitimately great use of it and extremely helpful. Already being used for such cases. Just installed a vision system on a few of my manufacturing lines. A bottling operation detects cap presence, as well as cross threads or un-torqued caps based on how the neck vs cap bottom angle and distance looks as it passes the camera. Checking 10,000 bottles a day as they scroll past would be a mind numbing task for a human. Other line is making fresnel lenses. Operators make the lenses, and are personally checking each lens for defects and power. Using a known background and training the AI to what distortion good lenses should create when presented is showing good progress at screening just as well as my operators. In this case it's doing what the human eye can't; determine magnification and defraction visually.

AI tooling producing some things fast

This isn't necessarily a good thing. Yeah, maybe AI wrote a new microservice and generated 100s of new files and 1000s of lines of new code... but... there's a big assumption there that you actually needed 100s of new files and 1000s of lines of new code. What it tends to generate is tech debt. That's also ignoring the benefits of your workforce upskilling by learning more about the system, where things are, how they're pieced together, why they're like that, etc.

AI just adds tech debt in a blackbox. It's gonna lower velocity in the long term.

I do know that I am the minority on Lemmy. I believe, there is a space for AI in our life. Of course it is not the way big corporations is trying to shove down in our throats.
The ethical and moral problems of AI is not part of your question.

If you decide to work for your company that forces you to use AI, then you either use AI or get a new job.
That's how capitalism works.

You don't have to like it. You just have to accept the "must use AI" as part of the things they are paying you for.
There is no metric aside of: they are Paying you to do this way.
If you don't want to do that way - the ball is in your court.

Edit: Browsing Lemmy I just saw this post. Maybe it will help you:
https://lemmy.ml/post/40233766

Make a list of the tasks you hate doing or are repetitive, time consuming and not normally automateable. Then see if any of them are a good fit for an AI workflow.