Fuck AI

My broseph in Christ, what did you think a LLM was?

I fucking love this. It's amazing.

To everyone I've talked to about AI, I've suggested a test. Take a subject that they know they are an expert at. Then ask AI questions that they already know the answers to. See what percentage AI gets right, if any. Often they find that plausible sounding answers are produced however, if you know the subject, you know that it isn't quite fact that is produced. A recovery from an injury might be listed as 3 weeks when it is average 6-8 or similar. Someone who did not already know the correct information, could be damaged by the "guessed" response of AI. AI can have uses but it needs to be heavily scrutinized before passing on anything it generates. If you are good at something, that usually means you have to waste time in order to use AI.

Our AI that monitors customer interactions sometimes makes up shit that didn't happen during the call. Any agent smart enough could probably fool it into giving the wrong summary with the right key words. I only caught on when I started reading the logs carefully, but I don't know if management cares so long as the business client is happy.

Burn, baby! Burn

My workplace, the senior management, is going all in on Copilot. So much so that at the end of last year to told us to use Copilot for year end reviews! Even provided a prompt to use, told us to link it to Outlook (not sure why, since our email retention isn't very long)... but whatever.

I tried it, out of curiosity because I had no faith. It started printing out stats for things that never happened. It provided a 35% increase here, a 20% decress there, blah blah blah. It didn't actually highlight anything I do or did. And I'm banking that a human will partially read my review, not just use AI.

If someone read it, I'm good. If AI reads it, I do wonder if I screwed myself. Since senior mgmt is just offloading to AI...

I must say i love this very much. Only this may put idiots leading companies that use this crap to ditch it.

I see this happening more and more as corporate USA throws itself blindly into AI dependency. Basic facts and information will become corrupted, maybe hopelessly so, as it infuses itself into our systems.

It doesn't matter. Management wants this and will not stop until they run against a wall at full speed. 🤷

Lol.

The output from tools infected with LLMs can intrinsically only ever be imprecise, and should never be trusted.

Copilot, is that you...

I work in a regulated sector and our higher ups are pushing AI so much. And there response to AI hallucinations is to just put a banner on all internal AI tools to cross verify and have some quarterly stupid "trainings" but almost everyone I know never checks and verifies the output. And I know of atleast 2 instances where because AI hallucinated some numbers we sent out extra money to a third party.

As an unemployed data analyst / econometrician:

lol, rofl, perhaps even... lmao.

Nah though, its really fine, my quality of life is enormously superior barely surviving off of SSDI and not having to explain data analytics to thumb sucking morons (VPs, 90% of other team leads), and either fix or cover all their mistakes.

Yeah, sure, just have the AI do it, go nuts.

I am enjoying my unexpected early retirement.

Before anything else: whether the specific story in the linked post is literally true doesn’t actually matter. The following observation about AI holds either way. If this example were wrong, ten others just like it would still make the same point.

What keeps jumping out at me in these AI threads is how consistently the conversation skips over the real constraint.

We keep hearing that AI will “increase productivity” or “accelerate thinking.” But in most large organizations, thinking is not the scarce resource. Permission to think is. Demand for thought is. The bottleneck was never how fast someone could draft an email or summarize a document. It was whether anyone actually wanted a careful answer in the first place.

A lot of companies mistook faster output for more value. They ran a pilot, saw emails go out quicker, reports get longer, slide decks look more polished, and assumed that meant something important had been solved. But scaling speed only helps if the organization needs more thinking. Most don’t. They already operate at the minimum level of reflection they’re willing to tolerate.

So what AI mostly does in practice is amplify performative cognition. It makes things look smarter without requiring anyone to be smarter. You get confident prose, plausible explanations, and lots of words where a short “yes,” “no,” or “we don’t know yet” would have been more honest and cheaper.

That’s why so many deployments feel disappointing once the novelty wears off. The technology didn’t fail. The assumption did. If an institution doesn’t value judgment, uncertainty, or dissent, no amount of machine assistance will conjure those qualities into existence. You can’t automate curiosity into a system that actively suppresses it.

Which leaves us with a technology in search of a problem that isn’t already constrained elsewhere. It’s very good at accelerating surfaces. It’s much less effective at deepening decisions, because depth was never in demand.

If you’re interested, I write more about this here: https://tover153.substack.com/

Not selling anything. Just thinking out loud, slowly, while that’s still allowed.

I raised this as a concern at the corporate role I work in when an AI tool that was being distributed and encouraged for usage showed two hallucinated data points that were cited in a large group setting. I happened to know my area well, the data was not just marginally wrong but way off, and I was able to quickly check the figures. I corrected it in the room after verifying on my laptop and the reaction in the room was sort of a harmless whoops. The rest of the presentation continued without a seeming acknowledgement that the rest of the figures should be checked.

When I approached the head of the team that constructed the tool after the meeting and shared the inaccuracies and my concerns, he told me that he'd rather have more data fluency through the ease of the tool and that inaccuracies were acceptable because of the convenience and widespread usage.

I suspect stories like this are happening across my industry. Meanwhile, the company put out a press release about our AI efforts (literally using Gemini's Gem tool and custom ChatGPTs seeded with Google Drive) as something investors should be very excited about.

How much do you want to bet they also rolled out bonsuses based on this bogus data? The one saving grace is they started using the new LLM tooling mid-Q4 so any quarterlies would at least be partially based on real data

This would suggest the leadership positions aren't required for the function of the business.

I've said it time and time again: AIs aren't trained to produce correct answers, but seemingly correct answers. That's an important distinction and exactly what makes AIs so dangerous to use. You will typically ask the AI about something you yourself are not an expert on, so you can't easily verify the answer. But it seems plausible so you assume it to be correct.

I hope they sue whoever sold it to them. it's not artificial intelligence, it's a machine learning chat bot. they may as well be running their company with a magic eight ball.