Comment by Terr_
19 hours ago
> AI completely broke some of the signals management used as proxies for team competence.
This is very similar to how LLMs were already breaking signals in writing. It was (is?) an enormously important proxy (however imperfect) for a bunch of things like: "put effort into this" or "is smart" or "is interested and engaged" or "has an emotion" or "has carefully considered the idea."
Heck, even basic awareness of an issue/detail gets forged, mentioned in the text but never in the mind of the sender.
In a way, LLMs have made it much more difficult to be believed. On the one hand, my inner paranoiac feels vindicated -- preparing for the worst case, over a lifetime, feels more prescient than it should. On the other hand, making decisions, specifically about how much faith to put into another unfamiliar human, becomes even less tractable.
The work can no longer speak for the human. A nightmare for the introvert.
The work, even before LLMs, struggled to speak for the introvert (and even the extrovert) -- a unique enough work usually results in puzzlement, a questioning of motives, and sometimes even overt ridicule.
Even for writing, it was a struggle. How many times did pieces of writing get ignored (or rapidly skimmed) because they were "TLDR"?
When I was very young (a teen), I wondered (after seeing the films The Matrix and Fight Club) to what degree other people were a dream-like hallucination (basically, those films made the concept of p-zombies accessible to a kid). That childish daydream, is now a reality. My inner paranoiac squeals with delight. Ah, the perversity. Even skill at deception itself can be faked, now. Even the beautiful can treated as if it were hideous.
I wonder if anyone ever made an episode of Star Trek, where one crew-member pranks another (possibly inebriated) crew-member, by having them wake up in a perfect holodeck reconstruction of their ship and crew. How long before they would notice? Weeks could go by, before a red alert dissolves the illusion.
It's after 3am, and I am not inebriated, but fuck I need to sleep. Sometimes I hope I drift into a coma, so that I can deal with things that are, on the one hand hallucinations, but on the other hand _not_ deceptions. There is a universe out there, where _their_ Matrix (film), is Vanilla Sky (amusingly, its inspiration was the film Abre los Ojos, released one year before The Matrix -- maybe in this universe, the Spanish Armada reached England).
Good night, you doomed, sad people.