cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64538524

So this is a bit of a weird one. I have a tech background, which gives me some more authority, but I’m working in a non-tech field at the moment. They’re taking this event pretty seriously, they’re flying me out from Beirut to one of their Gulf offices, so I would hope that they would make the trip worth it and not only listen for AI boosting.

I’m one of the few people on my team who doesn’t use these tools every day. The only benefit I’ve ever gotten was as an alternative thesaurus when the search engine results don’t give me exactly what I want, and as a supercharged content aware fill on my personal laptop when I’m dicking around editing images. I use a low memory local model from 2022. This is all I need or want. I also understand the tech on a much more fundamental level thanks to my background. Not to give out too much information, but we built simulated pseudo tensor cores on an FPGA in university. I’m not a machine learning engineer, but I understand what this thing is better than anyone else in that meeting will - and certainly anyone with AI in their job title.

I have to temper the fuck out of my tone and frustration to make sure I can get messaging across. I also need to be careful not to come off as panicking about AI “stealing” my job. I have a completely different career path than all those business people, so I don’t know if that’s something on their mind. I also, you know, work from another country. I’m the cheap offshore labor.

I’m obviously not going to word all of the below this way is my point. I have to pick my battles as well, because most of the people with serious authority haven’t had a real job in years and think their magic workplan generator and semi-reliable banana bread ratio calculator is the future of work, humanity, and consciousness.

Within my organization, I’ve seen people with years of knowledge and experience throw it out of the window because of the magic text box in their pocket. I’ve seen people with very passable English push their work through a slop extruder to “make the wording more natural” - when it makes it look more generic. I’ve also had experiences where someone in the chain of custody of my hard work did this to something I’ve made, making the information within it more generic, diluting my effort.

Company policy has banned external chatbots because Microslop Copilot is “more secure”. I used to use GPTZero as a detection tool, just to put in particularly egregious paragraphs and send a screenshot to whoever “wrote” it, to be like “Hey, this reads really bad and I expected actual tailored analysis here. Please write this yourself, if it’s not this long, it’s okay.” Slop makes our hard work look cheap! But GPTZero offers an LLM service, I think it offers a “de-roboticization” service, it has fucking GPT in the name, so it’s blocked now.

However, despite the ban, I’m still getting ChatGPT links sent to my Whatsapp from superiors asking me if I “checked this” or “if we’re covering all of this”, with the most generic ass information in there. The corpus of the web is largely Western and this shit just does not apply here. You know it doesn’t apply here. If we were having a face to face conversation and I suggested this stuff you’d be shocked, boss man. What the fuck.

I hear people in meetings and in the offices when I fly in openly talk about “ChatGPT being “better”” and using it on their phone. I’m not fighting for Copilot’s market share here, I want these people to use their brains!

So many little things as well. Feedback on my work comes back more vague now, like someone brute forcing a prompt instead of actually, you know, being a part of the process of doing work. People who need time to write English or are not confident with their English are not gradually improving their language skills. Some interns and juniors don’t learn anything, and are outright awful at looking up obscure information the old fashioned way.

Over the last few months, I’ve helped push some work friends off paying for ChatGPT, after relentlessly bombarding them with “You already know this”, “This sounds off, you worded it better to me over lunch”, “This contradicts our call with those guys, don’t you remember the argument you made?”, that kind of thing. I find it funny that the antidote to this shit is to be 1% more conscious about your work.

I can also probably score a lot of brownie points by overemphasizing my mini pc / raspi homelab situation and using it to do “AI”, kind of reassuring them that I am not insulting their digital false idol.

Thing is, with war tensions (usually it’s them asking about my safety, ha), this meeting has been pushed forward, but they seem adamant on having it.

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I would prefer not to enter job specifics for obvious reasons, but I do want to emphasize that the work we do can have direct positive impact on people’s lives and has done so already. Part of what keeps me sane in the corporate machine is the fact that I’ve somehow found myself in a position to nudge typically unfeeling processes into marginally improving the material conditions of normal people.

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Oh but you’re a dbzer0 user, that’s a pro-AI instance!

Yes and no. The admin is upfront about this being a facet of technology they are interested in, in the technical sense. I am as well. Their focus is on mass proliferation of this stuff with user control. I can’t say I share their views on this tech era to the tee, but this does not give me the heebie jeebies the way mainstream machine learning worship does. Also they seem to be horrified at the social phenomenon that is modern “AI”, so… It’s not that big of a deal. I don’t hate the tech when it’s in a whitepaper or running in a university server semantically indexing its digital library. I hate it when it kills the web and the brains of the people around me.

AI worship and AI financing is also a bit different in the Middle East, but this is not the place for me to complain about that. Let’s just say there’s layers. Let’s just say a lot of shit keeps me up at night.