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A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

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  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb you had me at "Microsoft SlopGuard" :)

  • @larsmb @jzb
    I keep having this conversation with my husband. He is of the opinion that a”useful tool” should be used at its capability, not pushing it too far. For example, he is writing a thesis, he has all the information together and now he wants to use Ai to take his sources and find where in his document he has derived the information from. He likes to use the example of “a personal libraian”

    @larsmb @jzb
    I think if it’s a “closed system” where you feed it information and tell it to only use the information it has and say when it “comes up empty” it should be okay. And to speed up the process of citations that does seem useful. (He would also double check on the accuracy of it , like say if it says something is on page 34 it should be there otherwise it’s not valid)

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb Your 4am sleep deprived state was bang on 💥💯

  • @larsmb @jzb
    I think if it’s a “closed system” where you feed it information and tell it to only use the information it has and say when it “comes up empty” it should be okay. And to speed up the process of citations that does seem useful. (He would also double check on the accuracy of it , like say if it says something is on page 34 it should be there otherwise it’s not valid)

    @em_and_future_cats @jzb LLMs are notoriously bad at both using only the information they have, all the information they have, and telling whether they did.

    So yes, can be useful, but every answer needs to be validated against facts.

  • @larsmb @jzb
    I think if it’s a “closed system” where you feed it information and tell it to only use the information it has and say when it “comes up empty” it should be okay. And to speed up the process of citations that does seem useful. (He would also double check on the accuracy of it , like say if it says something is on page 34 it should be there otherwise it’s not valid)

    @larsmb @jzb
    I just worry that the younger generation will not understand how & when to use it & when to use their brains 🫩 . In the science realm, Ai can be useful for a lot of data heavy and number crunching stuff, but there must be a limit so that students can understand what & why these things happen. (And regulations so hallucinations are limited)
    The humanities are a no-go zone imo, the use of a closed system citation mechanism is probably the only exception for this.

  • @em_and_future_cats @jzb LLMs are notoriously bad at both using only the information they have, all the information they have, and telling whether they did.

    So yes, can be useful, but every answer needs to be validated against facts.

    @larsmb @em_and_future_cats Well, as designed, they are -- I'm not sure that's a built-in limitation of LLMs or not. To be fair, I am not an expert on the tech.

    As something of an aside...

    It would be really interesting if you could pair the natural language instruction input with predictable output.

    That is, for example -- if I could query, say, all the data in Wikipedia but get only accurate output. Or if you had something like Ansible with natural-language playbook creation.

    "Hey, Ansible -- I want a playbook that will install all of the packages I have currently installed and retain my dotfiles" (or something) and be guaranteed accurate output... that would be amazing.

    Except that I also worry about losing skills to do those things. I worry about the loss of incidental knowledge when researching if a computer can return *only* what you ask for and sacrifice accidental discovery.

    (I also still think search engines were something of a mistake and miss Internet directories. Yeah, I'm fun at parties....)

  • @em_and_future_cats @jzb LLMs are notoriously bad at both using only the information they have, all the information they have, and telling whether they did.

    So yes, can be useful, but every answer needs to be validated against facts.

    @larsmb @jzb 💯 this is what I keep stressing to my husband about! Validate the heck out of it if you are.. and then, is it *actually* saving you time in the end?

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb that’s a whole lot of text to say the problem is capitalism

  • @larsmb @em_and_future_cats Well, as designed, they are -- I'm not sure that's a built-in limitation of LLMs or not. To be fair, I am not an expert on the tech.

    As something of an aside...

    It would be really interesting if you could pair the natural language instruction input with predictable output.

    That is, for example -- if I could query, say, all the data in Wikipedia but get only accurate output. Or if you had something like Ansible with natural-language playbook creation.

    "Hey, Ansible -- I want a playbook that will install all of the packages I have currently installed and retain my dotfiles" (or something) and be guaranteed accurate output... that would be amazing.

    Except that I also worry about losing skills to do those things. I worry about the loss of incidental knowledge when researching if a computer can return *only* what you ask for and sacrifice accidental discovery.

    (I also still think search engines were something of a mistake and miss Internet directories. Yeah, I'm fun at parties....)

    @jzb @larsmb
    This too! Granted, if you’ve got to the phd level through education before llms you are probably okay with using it to “finish up” but I really worry about younger generations (even myself) when it comes to all of this

  • @larsmb @em_and_future_cats Well, as designed, they are -- I'm not sure that's a built-in limitation of LLMs or not. To be fair, I am not an expert on the tech.

    As something of an aside...

    It would be really interesting if you could pair the natural language instruction input with predictable output.

    That is, for example -- if I could query, say, all the data in Wikipedia but get only accurate output. Or if you had something like Ansible with natural-language playbook creation.

    "Hey, Ansible -- I want a playbook that will install all of the packages I have currently installed and retain my dotfiles" (or something) and be guaranteed accurate output... that would be amazing.

    Except that I also worry about losing skills to do those things. I worry about the loss of incidental knowledge when researching if a computer can return *only* what you ask for and sacrifice accidental discovery.

    (I also still think search engines were something of a mistake and miss Internet directories. Yeah, I'm fun at parties....)

    @jzb Is is an inherent limitation of how LLMs currently exist and are implemented.
    They do strive to minimize it through scale, but it's also a reason why they do get "creative" in their answers.
    Like with any stochastic algorithm, they perform best if you can (cheaply) validate the result. e.g., does a program pass the tests still?

    This is much harder for complex questions about the real world.

    @em_and_future_cats

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb
    Yeah, no. It's the same theme Marx recognized some 150 years ago:

    John Stuart Mill says in his “Principles of Political Economy":
    “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”
    That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value.

    [Capital, IV.15]

  • @larsmb @em_and_future_cats Well, as designed, they are -- I'm not sure that's a built-in limitation of LLMs or not. To be fair, I am not an expert on the tech.

    As something of an aside...

    It would be really interesting if you could pair the natural language instruction input with predictable output.

    That is, for example -- if I could query, say, all the data in Wikipedia but get only accurate output. Or if you had something like Ansible with natural-language playbook creation.

    "Hey, Ansible -- I want a playbook that will install all of the packages I have currently installed and retain my dotfiles" (or something) and be guaranteed accurate output... that would be amazing.

    Except that I also worry about losing skills to do those things. I worry about the loss of incidental knowledge when researching if a computer can return *only* what you ask for and sacrifice accidental discovery.

    (I also still think search engines were something of a mistake and miss Internet directories. Yeah, I'm fun at parties....)

    @jzb On the plus side, Ansible (because it's so freaking widespread and well documented, and it is mostly fairly easy to tell if the answer would do the thing one asked for) is a fairly successful area to apply GenAI to.
    Combine with ansible-lint, shellcheck etc in the precommit hook, and the results are actually rather impressive.

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb

    “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    This is already happening. So what’s the point? ;)

    Back to business: You are right. Every person who is "just doing the job" is endangered losing exactly this job, as AI will do it better and more efficiently. So the solution is to have a society of individuals who are smart enough to cope with it in an intelligent way. If not, the tech bros might win for a while, before all collapses.

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb “Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers” — heh, most of non-nerd people who works remotely that I know already using LLMs for this exact purpose without any marketing

  • @bexelbie From my POV the answer to "why not both?" is that you can't really separate them right now.

    Adoption of the commercial tools for whatever purpose does more to pave the way to the negative outcomes than any positive ones.

    I think the "overemployed" thing is more of a statistical anomaly than a real thing.

    Perhaps I'm just old and inflexible, though. Ideologically, I mean. I know I'm not very flexible physically these days...

    @jzb @bexelbie

    My answer to "why not both" is that workers adopting AI to undercut employers doesn't resolve the underlying problem which is bullshit jobs.

    I'd much rather work 20 productive hours in the week and create high quality work during that time instead of filing TPS reports for my corporate overlords.

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb maybe we should start that trend. If you can't destroy it = join it and ruin it from the inside. It's the way the parents on an episode is SouthPark got rid of this Pokémon trend that got into all the kids of the town. They joined in, making it uncool

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb yea. If any(!) LLM could do that in the least usage would be strictly limited and very expensive.
    LLMs only ever perform usable in fields you're not an expert in. (That's why your average top brass thinks it's useful)

    Right now they're trying and selling it as tool to cut out the employee. They claim, all the work's done and they don't have to pay a person...

  • A thought that popped into my head when I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

    Imagine that AI/LLM tools were being marketed to workers as a way to do the same work more quickly and work fewer hours without telling their employers.

    “Use ChatGPT to write your TPS reports, go home at lunchtime. Spend more time with your kids!” “Use Claude to write your code, turn 60-hour weeks into four-day weekends!” “Collect two paychecks by using AI! You can hold two jobs without the boss knowing the difference!”

    Imagine if AI/LLM tools were not shareholder catnip, but a grassroots movement of tooling that workers were sharing with each other to work less. Same quality of output, but instead of being pushed top-down, being adopted to empower people to work less and “cheat” employers.

    Imagine if unions were arguing for the right of workers to use LLMs as labor saving devices, instead of trying to protect members from their damage.

    CEOs would be screaming bloody murder. There’d be an overnight industry in AI-detection tools and immediate bans on AI in the workplace. Instead of Microsoft CoPilot 365, Satya would be out promoting Microsoft SlopGuard - add ons that detect LLM tools running on Windows and prevent AI scrapers from harvesting your company’s valuable content for training.

    The media would be running horror stories about the terrible trend of workers getting the same pay for working less, and the awful quality of LLM output. Maybe they’d still call them “hallucinations,” but it’d be in the terrified tone of 80s anti-drug PSAs.

    What I’m trying to say in my sleep-deprived state is that you shouldn’t ignore the intent and ill effects of these tools. If they were good for you, shareholders would hate them.

    You should understand that they’re anti-worker and anti-human. TPTB would be fighting them tooth and nail if their benefits were reversed. It doesn’t matter how good they get, or how interesting they are: the ultimate purpose of the industry behind them is to create less demand for labor and aggregate more wealth in fewer hands.

    Unless you happen to be in a very very small club of ultra-wealthy tech bros, they’re not for you, they’re against you.

    @jzb This would be happening if LLMs actually worked as advertised

  • @bexelbie From my POV the answer to "why not both?" is that you can't really separate them right now.

    Adoption of the commercial tools for whatever purpose does more to pave the way to the negative outcomes than any positive ones.

    I think the "overemployed" thing is more of a statistical anomaly than a real thing.

    Perhaps I'm just old and inflexible, though. Ideologically, I mean. I know I'm not very flexible physically these days...

    @jzb that’s fair. I think it’s impossible for any tool to not have both a worker freedom use and a worker subjugation use. It often depends on who gets there first and is correlated with privilege.


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