5 ms·

Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!

ModernMech 6mo ago
AI doesn't have to be conscious or sentient to take over, all that needs to happen is for politicians, law enforcement, journalists, educators etc. to uncritically parrot everything it outputs. The military is already using AI to make targeting decisions. If they just go with whatever the AI says to strike, then AI is already fighting our wars.
- trollbridge 6mo ago
  As a bonus, mistakes can be blamed on AI.
  - krige 6mo ago
    For many that's not a bonus, that's the goal. Consequence-free life ahoy.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      Fun and games until the AI decides extincting us is worth it.
      - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        Unfortunately you can really tell which people haven't seriously considered that possibility or seriously don't care if it happens
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  The scary thing is that AI decision making has been infiltrating society for decades as an unseen entity.
jerrygarcia 6mo ago
I often wonder if the popularity of LLMs among company executives is that they are the perfect yes men. They rarely disagree with any idea or proposal, providing a salve for the insecurities of their users.
- davebren 6mo ago
  I was listening to one of Altman's more recent interviews and it sounded like he himself has LLM induced psychosis.
  - r_lee 6mo ago
    I remember him tweeting about how he can "feel the AGI" when speaking to GPT
    - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      Yeah, it's hard to say if he's doing marketing because that's his job or if he's really swallowed the whole pill
      - shimman 6mo ago
        Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company? Do they not teach critical thinking anymore in schools, did it go away with phonics too? Why would you ever ignore the MASSIVE conflict of interest here, it's just really foolish but it's endemic not just in tech journalism or journalism in general where people just take the words of others and not apply any critical analysis to them. It's all access journalism now, waste of time.
        bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        > Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company The question isn't about what action he's taking, it's about what motivates him under the surface. Obviously what he is doing is marketing. What I'm curious about is whether he truly believes his own marketing or if he is just doing it because its his job
MattGaiser 6mo ago
And I would bet he judges your work with AI, assigns you work generated by AI, and perhaps evaluates whether you yourself use enough AI.
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  That's exactly what he does...wtf are you spying on me?? Lol but seriously, I don't know how to handle his AI delegation
eru 6mo ago
Well, has it been an improvement?
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  No that's why I'm complaining
tcp_handshaker 6mo ago
Have you tried to prompt inject your team leader? It works wonderfully with mine.
SecretDreams 6mo ago
I would be looking for another job. I'm fine with using LLMs as coding tools. But I find it deeply offensive when someone is very explicitly using them to communicate with me. Communication is such a deeply human experience. It lets people feel each other out, and learn things beyond just the words being said. To have that filtered out by an LLM is just disgraceful.
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  Yes exactly and I am actively applying for jobs. But I feel like the next job will also have this nonsense behaviour
- sumeno 6mo ago
  Good luck finding a company that doesn't have these people if LLMs are used
  - misterflibble 6mo ago
    Yes true! It's everywhere now!
- lamasery 6mo ago
  I think you're gonna struggle to find companies that aren't infested with this kind of thing. Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get). LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote. LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC. Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.
beached_whale 6mo ago
This is one of my fears with this, losing ones voice. Everyone's expression distilled to the mean. This has ramifications in things like recognizing if a person is who they say they are too. At least currently, it is punished/shunned to sound like an LLM, but it's well within reason to see that shift to individuality being penalized.
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  I think corporations will start penalizing first, they're already doing that to some extent at my work because they want their in-house agents to only review our PRs.
nusl 6mo ago
https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/ https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/
- thatjoeoverthr 6mo ago
  I've been calling them "meat condoms". In the workplace, it's one or two warnings before completely ejecting them. On social media, instant block.
  - nusl 6mo ago
    Seems to be becoming more common, even for folks that are otherwise quite pleasant to deal with. Perhaps social and workplace pressures causes people to opt for it, much like LinkedIn is a cesspool of bullshit
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  That's terrific lol thanks for the link BTW!
- Izkata 6mo ago
  > > The experience is strange; you aren't able to grasp any common human aspects because there are none. You can't reason with the human, because the human isn't doing the reasoning. You can't appeal to it, because the LLM behind it is in direct support of its own and the proxy's opinions and whims. I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.
avaer 6mo ago
Just because thoughts are translated doesn't mean they are consumed in the process. However I don't doubt many "team leaders" can and should be replaced with LLMs.
nidnogg 6mo ago
Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell
- aceazzameen 6mo ago
  You have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.
  - nidnogg 6mo ago
    You're absolutely right here and things have improved significantly at work after dropping this habit even if slightly.
    - duskdozer 6mo ago
      >You're absolutely right :|
      - misterflibble 6mo ago
        Lol that triggered me too!
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  "running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it? Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine, just another type of validation before you share something, but if you actually let the LLM rewrite what you say, then I feel like that's beyond "running it through an LLM", it's basically letting the LLM write your text for you instead of just checking/validating.
  - misterflibble 6mo ago
ge96 6mo ago
Man that's so annoying I have a similar problem our devops person I ask question to literally gives me AI responses Also annoying to me working with a "partner" non-technical they just send me an LLM dump of how to do something I was trying to explain it to them in an analogy like showing up to a mechanic and telling them what to do based on what ChatGPT said
oddsockmachine 6mo ago
I'm dealing with the same nonsense. I get LLM-generated reviews of my work, documents, and plans which are not grounded in reality or nuance. Regularly have to explain why the AI is wrong. I was told I should run my docs through the LLM to make them read better. But they're not even being read by humans at this point.

AI doesn't have to be conscious or sentient to take over, all that needs to happen is for politicians, law enforcement, journalists, educators etc. to uncritically parrot everything it outputs. The military is already using AI to make targeting decisions. If they just go with whatever the AI says to strike, then AI is already fighting our wars.

trollbridge 6mo ago
As a bonus, mistakes can be blamed on AI.
- krige 6mo ago
  For many that's not a bonus, that's the goal. Consequence-free life ahoy.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    Fun and games until the AI decides extincting us is worth it.
    - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      Unfortunately you can really tell which people haven't seriously considered that possibility or seriously don't care if it happens
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
misterflibble 6mo ago
The scary thing is that AI decision making has been infiltrating society for decades as an unseen entity.

jerrygarcia 6mo ago

I often wonder if the popularity of LLMs among company executives is that they are the perfect yes men. They rarely disagree with any idea or proposal, providing a salve for the insecurities of their users.

davebren 6mo ago
I was listening to one of Altman's more recent interviews and it sounded like he himself has LLM induced psychosis.
- r_lee 6mo ago
  I remember him tweeting about how he can "feel the AGI" when speaking to GPT
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    Yeah, it's hard to say if he's doing marketing because that's his job or if he's really swallowed the whole pill
    - shimman 6mo ago
      Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company? Do they not teach critical thinking anymore in schools, did it go away with phonics too? Why would you ever ignore the MASSIVE conflict of interest here, it's just really foolish but it's endemic not just in tech journalism or journalism in general where people just take the words of others and not apply any critical analysis to them. It's all access journalism now, waste of time.
      - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
        > Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company The question isn't about what action he's taking, it's about what motivates him under the surface. Obviously what he is doing is marketing. What I'm curious about is whether he truly believes his own marketing or if he is just doing it because its his job

MattGaiser 6mo ago

And I would bet he judges your work with AI, assigns you work generated by AI, and perhaps evaluates whether you yourself use enough AI.

misterflibble 6mo ago
That's exactly what he does...wtf are you spying on me?? Lol but seriously, I don't know how to handle his AI delegation

eru 6mo ago

Well, has it been an improvement?

misterflibble 6mo ago
No that's why I'm complaining

tcp_handshaker 6mo ago

Have you tried to prompt inject your team leader? It works wonderfully with mine.

SecretDreams 6mo ago

I would be looking for another job. I'm fine with using LLMs as coding tools. But I find it deeply offensive when someone is very explicitly using them to communicate with me. Communication is such a deeply human experience. It lets people feel each other out, and learn things beyond just the words being said. To have that filtered out by an LLM is just disgraceful.

misterflibble 6mo ago
Yes exactly and I am actively applying for jobs. But I feel like the next job will also have this nonsense behaviour
sumeno 6mo ago
Good luck finding a company that doesn't have these people if LLMs are used
- misterflibble 6mo ago
  Yes true! It's everywhere now!
lamasery 6mo ago
I think you're gonna struggle to find companies that aren't infested with this kind of thing. Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get). LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote. LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC. Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.

beached_whale 6mo ago

This is one of my fears with this, losing ones voice. Everyone's expression distilled to the mean. This has ramifications in things like recognizing if a person is who they say they are too. At least currently, it is punished/shunned to sound like an LLM, but it's well within reason to see that shift to individuality being penalized.

misterflibble 6mo ago
I think corporations will start penalizing first, they're already doing that to some extent at my work because they want their in-house agents to only review our PRs.

nusl 6mo ago

https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/ https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/

thatjoeoverthr 6mo ago
I've been calling them "meat condoms". In the workplace, it's one or two warnings before completely ejecting them. On social media, instant block.
- nusl 6mo ago
  Seems to be becoming more common, even for folks that are otherwise quite pleasant to deal with. Perhaps social and workplace pressures causes people to opt for it, much like LinkedIn is a cesspool of bullshit
misterflibble 6mo ago
That's terrific lol thanks for the link BTW!
Izkata 6mo ago
> > The experience is strange; you aren't able to grasp any common human aspects because there are none. You can't reason with the human, because the human isn't doing the reasoning. You can't appeal to it, because the LLM behind it is in direct support of its own and the proxy's opinions and whims. I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.

avaer 6mo ago

Just because thoughts are translated doesn't mean they are consumed in the process. However I don't doubt many "team leaders" can and should be replaced with LLMs.

nidnogg 6mo ago

Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell

aceazzameen 6mo ago
You have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.
- nidnogg 6mo ago
  You're absolutely right here and things have improved significantly at work after dropping this habit even if slightly.
  - duskdozer 6mo ago
    >You're absolutely right :|
    - misterflibble 6mo ago
      Lol that triggered me too!
embedding-shape 6mo ago
"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it? Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine, just another type of validation before you share something, but if you actually let the LLM rewrite what you say, then I feel like that's beyond "running it through an LLM", it's basically letting the LLM write your text for you instead of just checking/validating.
- misterflibble 6mo ago

ge96 6mo ago

Man that's so annoying I have a similar problem our devops person I ask question to literally gives me AI responses Also annoying to me working with a "partner" non-technical they just send me an LLM dump of how to do something I was trying to explain it to them in an analogy like showing up to a mechanic and telling them what to do based on what ChatGPT said

oddsockmachine 6mo ago

I'm dealing with the same nonsense. I get LLM-generated reviews of my work, documents, and plans which are not grounded in reality or nuance. Regularly have to explain why the AI is wrong. I was told I should run my docs through the LLM to make them read better. But they're not even being read by humans at this point.