Management spent two years demanding everyone use AI, then discovered everyone was using AI. Now they’re shocked the office is a conveyor belt of hallucinated PowerPoints reviewed by other bots. The real productivity breakthrough will be executives learning that buying subscriptions isn’t a business strategy.

I just wish my company would start hiring again. I have been using the AI out of necessity, because we are short-staffed in certain areas. I've asked several times, directly, how much my AI use is costing and nobody is in a position to know. It's certainly helped in some areas but I want to build a case that hiring a college grad or two can help more....

Ernst and Young say 36% of companies using AI have experienced catastrophic incidents.

Hopefully some of them go bankrupt. That would be a stellar way to get rid of some bad management.

People at my company are broadly phoning it in with AI. Everyone on my team was complaining the other day that people keep posting in our team Slack channel with Claude and we are the only humans in the conversation.

God damn what a world

The idea of AI is not the problem. It's the execution. Both in it's used wrong and that the people wont benefit.

If we could all leave work 2 hours earlier because of enhanced production, we would all fight for this shit.

But that's not gonna happen.

Hahaha. No. Management is not losing jobs over this. Not in the quantities needed.

The idea of AI is not the problem.

For many of us, the idea is also the problem. Stealing the collected works of humanity in order to build a machine meant for delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience is deeply antisocial, and an attack on our dignity as people

Recently in my team people are posting AI output for review, and others feed it into a chat bot and paste the result.

So which trade are you thinking of changing to?

Careful they might just hire two AI using interns to replace you. Maybe bad mouth how much the AI is making mistakes and get them to make you stop using it and then ask for help when production slows.

Which is why it was supposed to be an open technology with no profits as its a culmination of humanity. Nobody should own it or make a profit from its creation.

Being short staffed is the whole point. They believe (where they are right or wrong) AI will replace large number employees. For example in my company where that are pushing vibe coding, my boss said that now they believe that the large projects need less people.

If you use AI and still have to work overtime you are your own problem. As long as you deliver why would they change anything? Don't deliver. It is not worth sacrificing your health for someone's else's profits. You have only one life.

I see people who embraced vibe coding still working overtime and over weekends, more than before.

So which trade are you thinking of changing to?

I’m sure there will be a lot of demand for AI slop cleaner-uppers in the near future.

If only literally everyone warned them this would happen…

Even if that happened it would still be a terrible technology. The damage to the environment isn’t worth it.

It's the execution. Both in it's used wrong and that the people wont benefit.

If anyone important does get fired they'll just get re-hired by another company who needs some doofus to fill a position in upper management.

This really is just like every other management trend. They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work.
AI can really help with a lot of mundane tasks that everyone dreads doing. And it can really help at finding information in an ocean of docs and pages. But... you have to invest in training people jow to use it, building the internal tools to make it effective, and in getting the garbage out of your existing docs.
It can also be used for coding of course, but the ecosystem needed to do that well requires even more investment in basics.
The fact that tech writers who know how to work with and document for AI aren't being hired by the bundle tells you how wrong soo many companies are about their approach.
Bonus points, if used well, AI doesn't have to be obscenely expensive. At least until they start charging what it actually costs.

get rid of some bad management.

Good luck. Like cockroaches, they'd probably survive a nuclear holocaust.

delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience

This would be a problem even if the technology were completely free and open. LLMs poison peoples minds and make them boring, helpless and stupid.

If Facebook were a nonprofit, it would still be terrible for people.

No I know it's a mostly futile hope.

Is it because they turn bad once they become management? Or were they like that from the beginning?
Personally I think it's both, but mostly the latter.

Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking

What a loop...

January: We're going AI native, please use AI as much as possible.

March: Everyone needs to attend workshops on how to maximize AI productivity.

July: Some models are only available for special (properly justified) cases. Speak to your manager. Turns out that some people did everything (even commits) with top cost models.

August: Ok, we're setting some limits on token usage, due to some people spending 1000% over the average.

September: we are creating additional frameworks and limits to AI use.

It took a bit of time for the actual AI cost/benefit to reach the top management and put some hard numbers in contrast with the hype machine, but it's happening.

We are ruled by idiots. It's probably been that way for the majority of history.

Most places I've worked, management has been a negative force.

But [company] selling [thing] told me it's good, it's not like they would lie about that!

Both. People who are promoted to management because they are good individual contributors are often lacking in management skills (they turn from something they are good at to something they are bad at), and people who crave and hard pursue management positions rarely have management skills (always bad).

That sounds extremely plausible. 👍

I feel like we're co-workers, with how perfectly that timeline matched the day-job's progression.

We're at "did you take the seminar on looping that uses tokens like a firehouse so you can use less tokens? Why are you using too little (/not enough) tokens, and why is it not magically 10x-ing all of your (fucking ansible) config?" Or some shit.

Yes. Refactoring for clue will be a huge growth market; and so many people will be just unable to fill those roles now with the mental degradation.

Why would anyone use a fortune on AI? A Claude subscription costing $200 will give a single person more tokens than they can probably use in a week. That's almost nothing if you compare it to a programmer's salary and the amount of leverage it can give them.

Then again, yeah, some people are just extremely dumb.

Frankly, I think we all have a bad manager inside of us, and the problem is that being put in a manager position exposes you to humanity-draining incentives that feed the bad manager parts of you, until it defines you. Higher compensation and promotions for focusing on costs and not quality, and short-term gains rather than long-term stability.

If you're unusually self-aware and smart, and put effort into grounding yourself, you may counteract it, but most people probably just float through life and let those incentives define them and their choices.

My company is at the July stage. Who knew giving people unrestricted access to Claude enterpise with no training would blow through budgets in days

Yes, in the future being created for us, 95% of jobs will be janitors mopping up AI slop.

$200 a month is if you let them train on/sell your data. Companies pay API costs, which are much higher than that.

The one issue is if you actually push it hard, you get a cease and desist from the provider like my coworker

They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work.

That sounds like when a company I used to work for first found out about Agile....

Everyone who was paying attention even a little bit has known this would be the trajectory from the beginning. And we haven't even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.

I swear the shitty AI posters being seen everywhere overnight had an unseen effect too. What were the thinking?

What a shocking turn of events! If only something like this could have been foreseen and prevented!

"And why did you leave your last job?"

"The company went bankrupt due to severe mismanagement."

"How did you get your management position at that company?"

"My dad was rich."

"You're hired."

I think they get promoted to management because they're bad.

They're not going to promote the guy who knows what he's doing, because they need him to keep working in his current role. The guy who slacks off, bosses people around, and gets chummy with the boss though? Perfect candidate for promotion.

After talking to some people who actually have been forced to work with AI on projects in teams Its been horrifying to find how little time they are given to build out proper safe guards, rules and test the process.

Management seems to be expecting these stupid robots to work the first time every time

Even in small projects for every 8 hours of work there's a good hour or two of adjusting memory, standing rules, hooks, and countless other things.

It's endless upkeep. Every shift in work flow tends to create knock on effects.

Management of the bot it self becomes a massive work load if you want them to be even remotely reliable.

I'm not surprised their use in a corporate environment is backfiring massively.

Just in time for the big tech AI companies' bills to come due to their investors. Excellent... taps fingertips together

To be fair that's been a common industry for much of human history.

The professional fixer of the stupidity of the rich. Is a age old profession and well respected.

Just this times it's, the slop machine is working what are we paying you for. The slop machine is broke what are we paying you for!

This article is literally the AI slop version of the original Guardian article.

Management is good at accumulating and maintaining power. Competence in actually getting stuff done doesn't really help with that.

Do we work at the same company??

And we haven't even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.

Why do you think that?

IMHO, API prices are likely to drop over time as we scale up and efficiencies are found, combined with general pricing pressure from the competition... SOTA models will continue to have SOTA prices, of course, but reasonable priced distilled and open weights models are already common.

A consequence of API prices dropping is that "heavily discounted" consumer plans will also adjust and won't be so generous relative to API prices.

you are part of the problem