Comment by lollobomb
5 hours ago
Fuck, yes. This.
I work in an "AI-first" startup. Being "The Expert", my work has become 90% reviewing the tons of crap that confident BD people now produce, pretending to understand stuff that has never been their domain, proudly showing off their 20-pages hallucinated docs in the general chat as the achievement of their life.
"Heads up folks, I wrote this doc! @OP can you review for accuracy and tone pls?"
And don't hit me with the smartass "just say no", it's not an option. I tried that initially. I have a pretty senior position in the org, I complained to the CTO which I report to, and with the BD managers as well, that I do not have bandwidth to review AI-produced crap. After a couple of weeks, CEO and leadership in an org call spelling out loud that "we should collaborate and embrace AI in all our workflows, or we will be left behind". They even issued requirements to write a weekly report about "how AI improved my productivity at work this week". Luckily I am senior enough to afford ignoring these asks, but I feel bad to all my younger colleagues, which are basically forced to train their replacements. I am not even sure at this point whether this is all part of the nefarious corporate MBA "we can get finally rid of employees" wet dream, whether it's just virtue-signalling to investors, or if CEO and friends genuinely believe their own words. I have the feeling leadership (not only in my org) has gone in AI-autopilot mode and just disappeared to the sunny tropical beaches they always wanted to belong to.
I would happily find another workplace at this point, but you know how the market is right now, and anyway, I have the feeling that this shit is happening pretty much anywhere money is.
Everyone feels smart now, and it's a curse.
God, how I hate this. It's making my life miserable.
Well you can hack the people. Send them on wild goose chases, make them simplify their documents, start quizzing them on the contents of their documents, make them do presentations, the list goes on. Getting hazed for doing shitty work sucks and people will catch on.
Heh, I could do it for my subordinates (and I don't need to, I made pretty clear with them that I have zero tolerance for this shit and they seem to comply), but for other teams it's not so easy, the environment is pretty brutal in terms of politics, if I start sabotaging the "SUCCESS" of some dumb BD, the manager will comply with me and the CTO.
This quote from the original blog post resonates with me:
> The room had been arranged in such a way that saying so was not a contribution; his managers were too invested in the appearance of momentum to want the appearance disturbed.
Yes, I know, I should learn to be more subtle. I just don't have the energy for this stuff. I am tired.