Right. The phenomenon of bullshit jobs. If nobody cares what is written, why not automate it away? Meh.
Gotta burn up the token quota somehow, or the boss will be mad again.
>We need AI to get rid of the middle man
>Makes AI the new middle man
I love American business culture
that is at least reducing the number of middle men
Needs a third panel with a tech bro telling investors that’s why his company is worth a trillion dollars.
Meat proxies we have become
My team leader now wants weekly reports that he gives to his boss who I’m guessing gives them to AI to digest. It feels like we’re all just putting on a sock puppet show and pretending it’s real.
Was it ever real? I think AI is just exposing how nonsense it all has been for the past 40 to 70 years. This whole corporate culture mindset was built by people who used work to avoid their family and golfed or drank their way through lunch.
More than 5% of the people alive today got to work jobs in a time before weekly status reports, organizational key results, year end reviews and stacked ranking. There are even worse things from before those so going back isn’t the answer. We need to build a new work culture and we should not feel that what we have today is just how it is.
And making their money off of the underpayed employees running the stores and factories on the bottom of the stack who actually create most of the value
It’s even funnier now though because I’ve started including a summary section…“this week I saved the company and outperformed everyone else”…I should get a promotion soon 😭😭😭😭
I feel like I’m too autistic for this shit. I’m an engineer and just send out the bullet points. Why are we wasting everyone’s time with this overly verbose garbage? What happened to celebrating brevity? Just give us the 24 hr work week and give up this farce.
I used to be like that but learnt that the literal meaning isn’t enough for some people, and an emotional impact needs to be created through prose. In general I still prefer brevity if it is very common phrases/jargon.
There is an idea among the neurotypicals that longer is better, in part because the academic environment rewards length. More words is more better.
Not all academic environments reward length; psychology is quite the opposite where brevity and being concise are lauded. In my entire undergraduate psychology degree my longest maximum word-count for an assignment was 1500 words. Most were around 1000 words and a few were 700-800 words. Many people struggled with getting all the info they wanted into that space but I really thrived.
It isn’t a judgement of the science so much as of the education apparatus around the students. If you don’t have people able to grade papers on content, a lot grade papers on weight.
Yup. “This meeting could have been an email” is evergreen.
I would like to do this, but many people want the fluff and sparkles.
I have received compliments from coworkers about my AI slop, and I told them, “You know that I just feed a list of bullet points into an AI, right?”
They were happy anyway. It will probably take some time before everyone gets over the ‘wonders’ of AI. Until that day, I give them what they want.
Yup. People don’t like to admit that a huge percentage of corporate “work” is performative
Same but I’m playing the stupid ass game. Would prefer to do my work and use notepad to give you a list of things I did. Now it’s a formatted report with a summary that said I did all the things.
Yeah i do this. Whenever i try to write in paragraphs the recipient ends up not responding to half of it. It’s like they reach the first question and stop reading.
This AI expansion and summarization reminds me of when translation online was new and you’d translate something then translate it back and get a totally different thing.
You gotta send separate emails with only one point/question in each email. Leave them nothing else to respond to.
I changed to bullet points to try and avoid this, didn’t much help the situation. people read the first point to the third level deep and didn’t go past, instead of skimming all the top level bullet points and then going deeper as appropriate into each one
ex:
- I hear X is a problem
– is it because of Y or Z?
— if Y, our options are A and B
— if Z, our option is C
there’d be four items like that, people wouldn’t read past the first. I gave up and now just leave items as perpetually open pending a decision from the people who didn’t answer, or I make a decision and then get all pissy with everyone when they come back and ask “well what about ___” like MF I WOULD HAVE ADDRESSED THAT IN THE EMAIL BUT Y’ALL MFS NEVER RESPOND TO THEM SO DON’T FUCKING ASK ME QUESTIONS NOW
Online translators seem to have gotten a lot better! Your comment, translated to Mandarin and back:
是的，我也会这样做。每次我尝试分段落写东西，收件人最后都会有一半内容没有回应。感觉他们读到第一个问题就停止阅读了。
这种 AI 扩写和总结让我想起了早期网络翻译刚出现的时候：你把一段话翻译成另一种语言，再翻译回原来的语言，结果得到的内容却完全变了。
Yes, I do this too. Whenever I try to write something in paragraphs, the recipient inevitably ends up not responding to half of what I wrote. It feels like they get to the first question and just stop reading.
This AI expansion and summarization reminds me of the early days of online translation, when you could translate something into another language and then translate it back, only to end up with something completely different.
deleted by creator
This also applies to job applications and resumes.
The joke is that the ten bullet points at the end are completely different from the ten bullet points that started it all.
It’s a game of Chinese-room whispers.
That sounds racist… right?
Time to think of a new name? Like we dont call Brazilian nuts by their “other” name anymore.
Edit: oh, I cant compare those?
Well how about a different term that has fallen out of use: “sitting Indian style”. Yea we dont call it that anymore, even if it was common childhood name. We grow up, we recognize that unnecessary racial assignment is a racist.
So, no, I dont think the defense of “thats just we called it as kids” is a valid reason to keep saying it today. Youre just perpetuating “thats just how people talked”, “its from a different time” normalization and casual racism.
The original thought experiment was about Chinese, so it’s more of a reference than deliberate racism. It’s a famous philosophical debate about whether A.I. can be conscious, or if it just simulates understanding.
Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.
Searle goes on to say, “The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.”
That’s really a flawed analogy, though. In this analogy, the man isn’t passing the Chinese Turing Test – the program is passing the Turing Test. The man is just the hardware that the program is running on.
It’s not a question of whether the man (the hardware) has any understanding. What you want to know is if the program has any understanding. Honestly, it seems like deliberately muddying the issue by proposing this hypothetical ‘intelligent hardware’ and using it to distract from the actual question about the software’s intelligence.
If I’m running a supposedly ‘intelligent’ AI on my 3090, you can’t refute that by pointing out that the 3090 is not intelligent on its own, without software.
In this situation, neither the hardware (man) nor software (program / instructions) has any understanding. The man is blindly following instructions, while the program is simply… instructions. Searle was trying to highlight that neither understanding nor consciousness arises automatically just by having a fancy and convincing output generator.
Another nice, more recent quote:
I demonstrated years ago with the so-called Chinese Room Argument that the implementation of the computer program is not by itself sufficient for consciousness or intentionality. Computation is defined purely formally or syntactically, whereas minds have actual mental or semantic contents, and we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else. To put this point slightly more technically, the notion “same implemented program” defines an equivalence class that is specified independently of any specific physical realization. But such a specification necessarily leaves out the biologically specific powers of the brain to cause cognitive processes. A system, me, for example, would not acquire an understanding of Chinese just by going through the steps of a computer program that simulated the behavior of a Chinese speaker.
It’s not my analogy, I take no credit for it. If you follow the link to Stanford Philosophy, there’s plenty of discourse; including pretty much every counterargument possible. It’s an interesting read.
Wow, thank you for this! Never knew about this one. Why the heck did anyone downvote your helpful comment?
I remove my own upvote from my comments lol
That’s not what Chinese whispers is, though.
It’s what I grew up calling telephone.
Telephone is where you start with a short phrase and whisper it into the next person’s ear. Then that continues for everyone, and what the last person says out loud has nothing to do with the original statement.
Your defense is “thats just what they called it back then” as though were forced to keep calling it the same thing today. Pass, lazy justification for casual racism.
Like, shocker, people 40-50 years ago we pretty loose with racist caricatures…
This reminds me of my ex’s mom describing some as Mexican, then asking “Is that racist?” Well, now it is, Karen (her actual name).
Any mention of an ethnicity other than white isn’t racist. You’re racist for thinking it is.
It’s not racist lol. In case you need a refresher on the definition of racism:
discrimination, prejudice, or violence against people because of their race
There’s no prejudice or discrimination at all. It doesn’t even have anything to do with the culture or language. It could really be any language that the person in the room doesn’t understand, like Klingon, Latin, or whatever. Save your energy for actually racist phrases like “Chinesium” etc
Okay buddy. Weird hill to die on.
It’s also called the telephone game but that doesn’t work with the Chinese room pun.
That’s not really a fair comparison, because “Chinese” is not a slur; it’s the preferred adjective (just like “Brazilian”).
I do think it’s a bit racist though, because it specifically exoticizes/others Chinese people/things.
I once knew a Mexican girl who went by “China” (“Chinese” in Spanish) because she was born with blonde hair, which makes no sense except that “Chinese” is used as a synonym for “weird”.
it’s also the common name of the language, which is probably what the experiment was actually referencing
I’ve always seen it referred as ‘Chinese Whispers’.
Before that it was called ‘Russian Gossip’.
ive only ever seen it called a game of telephone idk where the racial part came from
It was telephone for me growing up in 90s Western Canada.
Broken telephone is what it sounds like you guys are talking about.
90s, eastern Canada
Different names in different places. I grew up calling it Chinese Whispers.
Ugh, my gram does. We pick them out of the holiday but mix now
Do Chinese whiskers have braces?
Do Siamese sisters get whiskers in stasis?
I hope researchers somewhere are quantifying exactly how different they are.
Wow we finally discovered lossy text compression and all it takes is 6000 gallons of water.
But… this is the opposite of compression.
Unless used for images:
This is definitely The Onion, correct?
True, it’s lossy expansion and then lossy compression.
You’re absolutely correct, very insightful! Would you like me to turn this into a fascist crackdown on citizenry on top of guzzling critical resources?
No, i don’t think so, can you help me crack and reverse engineer this commercial proprietary software from 1998 instead?
That wouldn’t be against your TOS right?Yes and please bomb a school in Iran.
the trick is exploding it first! then there’s plenty to compress!
The thing is, can’t compress water.
I hate this so much. I have to read project applications and final reports for a living and in the past years this has become a very tedious endeavor. I recognize this shit after two paragraphs and it’s so annoying!
Everyone boosting AI use acts like it’s this little secret that only they know about.
I use AI everyday for software development. It’s soul sucking and saps any satisfaction from completing anything but you can’t put the genie back in the lamp so here we are.
I have had multiple discussions with non technical people who are on both sides of this image. They sit there talking about how it makes it easier to do the various parts of their job without irony. I just blink back thinking “you are describing a meat proxy”. If you are just copy pasting emails from one UI to another why do they need you?
The anti AI people like to pretend that it’s ineffective but there are a large number of people in the middle of the org chart whose job is basically summarizing PowerPoints from below and then pass up. AI can definitely do that and even if it’s inefficient it’s fast and doesn’t need benefits and healthcare.
Those people are going to get fucked.
there are a large number of people in the middle of the org chart whose job is basically summarizing PowerPoints from below and then pass up.
Middle management?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_management
Middle management is the intermediate management level of a hierarchical organization that is subordinate to the executive management and responsible for “team leading” line managers and/or “specialist” line managers. Middle management is indirectly (through line management) responsible for junior staff performance and productivity.[1]
Strategic functions involve analyzing a subordinate group in terms of productivity and financial effectiveness, creating a strategy of improving the current situation and reporting to the executive management in the form of attending a boardroom meeting or a discussion.
Yep. I think about it like having a time machine that could go back and change the future, or a printer that outputs perfect money dollars. Would be super useful, but only if somehow you alone, no one else, had the same technology. If everyone has it, it’s just chaos and everything sucks.
which is what these people want for all technology.
There are job “cheats” that are efficient - ways to save time that don’t affect work product.
And then there are “cheats” that just push the work to someone else, because some people will gladly save five minutes for themselves even if it creates an hour of work for someone else.
So yes, the latter people are the ones driving workplace AI adoption, as their “little productivity secret.”
If you couldn’t be bothered to write it why should I be bothered to read it.
![I mean ... what are we doing here? [instachaaz]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9c19bb81-be5a-4782-89da-82b4737b9147.jpeg){kind=link}