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.

This tells one very important thing: The only job that could be replaced by AI is the executive's. Shocking

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.

They have to justify the cost of the consultants they paid to tell them to spend money on it.

Any boss ramming a tool down their workers throats without understanding it or validating it's usefulness is not a particularly good boss.

It's a productivity miracle for manager because they can bullshit their job faster and easier.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

they are stringing it along so they can get thier golden parachutes and bounce.