I have a boss who tells us weekly that everything we do should start with AI. Researching? Ask ChatGPT first. Writing an email or a document? Get ChatGPT to do it.
They send me documents they “put together” that are clearly ChatGPT generated, with no shame. They tell us that if we aren’t doing these things, our careers will be dead. And their boss is bought in to AI just as much, and so on.
I feel like I am living in a nightmare.
They just hopped onto the bandwagon pushing for copilot and SharePoint. Just in time as some states are switching to open source.
I’m a consultant so I’m doing a lot of different things day to day. We use it to track meetings with the copilot facilitator and meeting recaps and next steps. It is pretty helpful in that regard and often matches the tasks I write for myself during the meeting.
I also have to support a wide arrange of different systems and I can’t be an expert in all of them so it is helpful for generating short scripts and workflows if it is powershell one day, bash the next, exchange management etc. I do know powershell and bash scripting decently well and the scripts often need to be fixed but it is good at generating templates and starter scripts I flesh out as the need arises. At this point I’ve collected many of the useful ones I need in my repos and reuse them pretty often.
Lastly one of the companies I consult for uses machine learning to design medical implants and design and test novel materials and designs. That is pretty cool and I don’t think they could do some of the stuff they’re doing without machine learning. While still AI, it isn’t really GPT style generative AI though, not sure if that is what you’re asking.
I’m in an environment with various level of sensitive data, including very sensitive data. Think GDPR type stuff you really don’t want to accidentally leak.
One day when we started up our company laptops Copilot just was installed and auto launched on startup. Nobody warned us. No indication about how to use it or not use it. That lasted about 3 months. Eventually they limited some ways of using it, gave a little bit of guidance on not putting the most sensitive data in there. Then they enabled Copilot in most apps that we use to actually process the sensitive data. It’s in everything. We are actively encouraged to learn more about it and use it.
I overheard a colleague recently trying to let it create a whole PowerPoint presentation. From what I heard the results were less than ideal.
The scary thing is that I’m in a notoriously risk averse industry. Yet they do this. It’s… a choice.
The order is:
Use whatever tool is not malicious and doesnt attack customer data.Most use (IMO) way too much AI. The first result (the google AI answer) is trusted and done.
No research done beyond that.I purposefully blocked the AI answer in uBlock. I don’t want any of that.
Besides that I use it on occassion to look for a word or reword my search query if I don’t find or know what I am looking for.
Very useful for the “What was the name of X again? It does Y and Z” queries.
Also for Powershell scripting because it can give me examples on using it.But every asnwer is double and tripple checked for accuracy.
Seen too much news about made up answers.At home I usually only use it for bash scripting because I can’t be bothered to learn that.
Our company is forcing us to do everything with AI, hell they developed a “tool” to generate simple apps using AI our customers can use for their enterprise applications and we are forced to generate 2 a week minimum to “experiment” with the constant new features being added by the dev teams behind it (but we’re basically training it).
The director uses AI spy bots to tell him who read and who didn’t read his emails.
Can’t even commit code to our corporate github unless copilot gives it the thumbs up and its constantly nitpicking things like how we wrote our comments and asking to replace pronouns or to write them a different way, which I always reply with “no” because the code is what matters here.
We are told to be positive about AI and to push the use of AI into every facet of our work lives, but I just feel my career as a developer ending because of AI. We’re a bespoke software company and our customers are starting to ask if they should use AI to built their software instead of paying us, which I then have to spend hours explaining them why it would be a disaster due to the shear complexity of what they want to build.
Most if not all executives I talk to are idiots who don’t understand web development, shit some don’t even understand the basics of technology but think they can design an app.
After being a senior dev and writing code for 15 years I’m starting to look at other careers to switch to… Maybe becoming an AI evangelist? I hear companies are desperately looking for them… Lol, what a fucking disaster this shit is becoming.
That work environment sounds like hell. Literally. If I woke up one day and had to work like this, I would think I never woke up at all and Lucifer finally started torturing me.
AI is ruining my ability to think and sucks the fun out of writing code. I am so happy our boss doesn’t force us to use it.
I work for a small advertising agency as a web developer. I’d say is mixed. The writing team is pissed about AI, because of the SEO-optimized slop garbage that is ruining enjoyable articles on the internet. The video team enjoys it, because it’s really easy to generate good (enough) looking VFX with it. I use it rarely. Mostly for mundane tasks and boilerplate code. I enjoy using my actual brain to solve coding problems.
Customers don’t have a fucking clue, of course. If we told them that they need AI for some stupid reason, they would probably believe us.
The boss is letting us decide and not forcing anything upon us. If we believe our work is done better with it, we can go for it, but we don’t have to. Good boss.
How does one AI for SFX?
VFX, not SFX. In our company, the team shoots real-life videos and then puts effects on top. The most recent project I saw was a movie for a manufacturer of paper colors. The artists made a big tower in one of their factories explode into a wave of paint, it looked pretty (but it was only a few seconds long).
Wrote the wrong abbr. :p
Sounds cool!
I am very, very concerned at how widely it is used by my superiors.
We have an AI committee. When ChatGPT went down, I overheard people freaking out about it. When our paid subscription had a glitch, IT sent out emails very quickly to let them know they were working to resolve it ASAP.
It’s a bit upsetting because may of them are using it to basically automate their job (write reports & emails). I do a lot of work to ensure that our data is accurate from manual data entry by a lot of people… and they just toss it into an LLM to convert it into an email… and they make like 30k more than me.
The head of my agency is a gullible rube who is terrified of being “left behind”, and the head of my department is a grown-up with a family and a career who spends his days off sending AI videos and memes into the work chat.
I’ve been called into meetings and told I have to be positive about AI. I’ve been told to stop coding and generate (very important) things with AI.
It’s disheartening. My career is over, because I have no interest in generating mountains of no-intention code rather than putting in the effort to build reliable, good, useful things for our clients. AI dorks can’t fathom human effort and hard work being important.
I’m working to pay off my debts, and then I’m done. I strongly want to get a job that allows me to be offline.
It almost sounds like were both in the same company
it doesn’t exist. but i work for a company that does real work. it doesn’t bullshit.
what does your company do?
I use Excel at work, not in a traditional accounting sense, but my company uses it as an interface with one of our systems I frequently work with.
Rather than tediously search the main Excel sheets that get fed into that system for all of the data fields I have to fill in, I made separate Excel tools that consolidate all of that data, then use macros to put the data into the correct fields on the main sheets for me.
Occasionally I’ll have to add new functionality to that sheet, so I’ll ask AI to write the macro code that does what I need it to do.
Saves me from having to learn obscure VBA programming to perform a function that I do during .0001% of my work time, but that’s about the extent of it. For now.
Of course most of what I do is white collar computer work, so I’m expecting that my current job likely has a two-year-or-less countdown on it before they decide to use AI to replace me.
thankfully i’m cusodial so they’re just relieved i know how to use the timeclock lol (not kidding) lol
Uff. That sounds like a nightmare. I’m glad my job doesn’t force us to us AI. It’s encouraged, but also my managers say “Use whatever makes you the most productive.” AI makes me slower because I’m experienced and already know what I want and how I want it. So instead of fighting with the AI or fact checking it, I can just do shit right the first time.
For tasks that I don’t have experience in, a web search is just as fast. Search, click first link. OR. Sure, I’ll click and read a few pages, but that’s not wasted time. That’s called learning.
I have a friend who works at a company where they have AI usage quotas that affect their performance review. I would fucking quit that job immediately. Not all jobs are this crazy.
AI tends to generate tech debt. I have some coworkers that generate nasty, tech debt, AI slop merge requests for review. My policy is: if you’re not gonna take the time to use your brain and write something, then I’m not gonna waste my time reviewing your slop. In those cases, I use AI to “review” the code and decide to approve or not. IDGAF.
You have the same attitude that I do. I know what I’m doing and design something in less time than it would take fighting with text prompts. We are encouraged to use AI to “generate ideas,” but that is the part of the job that I most enjoy. If I can’t come up with my own inspiration, what am I even doing? It’s a nightmare.
So far it’s a glorified search engine, which it is mildly competent at. It just speeds up collecting the information I would anyways and then I can get to sorting useful from useless faster.
That said, I’ve seen emails from people that were written with AI and it instantly makes me less likely to take it seriously. Just tell me what the end goal is and we can discuss how to best get there instead is regurgitating some slop that wouldn’t get is there in the first place!
Dumbass senior contract person and program managers are all for using copilot and I’ve caught several people using chatgpt as a search engine or at least that’s what they tell me they think it is.
I feel like giving AI our information on a regular basis is just training AI to do our jobs.
I’m a teacher and we’re constantly encouraged to use Copilot for creating questions, feedback, writing samples, etc.
You can use AI to grade papers. That sure as shit shouldn’t happen.
I sat next to a teacher the other day who did just that. Every single paper was graded by an AI. It actually shocked me.
What happens when the student asks why a specific mark was given, or how they can improve on the next one?
Education system isn’t really about education anymore. It’s moving people along that can barely read and write to fulfill meaningless jobs to make the rich richer.
This is an archive.org link to a 1967 essay
I had to use a link shortener because the n word is scrubbed and can’t be posted in my comment or link.










