our workplace LLM mass delusion
I can't help but wonder whether we will look back on this AI hype in the workplace with confusion and embarrassment. If we indeed progress into a future where the bubble will burst, models will further close up, become too expensive for the average user, enshittified, or really specialized for specific fields and most promises end up not fulfilled, how will employers everywhere play this off? How will employees recover from witnessing this cultish environment suddenly dropping off as if nothing happened?
My employer, for example, struggles with funding. Open positions are not to be filled and will just fall away; employee bonuses for great work have been cancelled 2 years ago due to the tense financial situation; necessities fell away with a message to just "find a way to deal with it". Several departments are completely overworked with no help in sight, and are just asked to cut corners. Important licenses and databases are just dropped to save money.
This is the backdrop to our AI adoption in the workplace. Still, somehow, there is enough money to hire consultants that advise to go all in on AI for a possible future where money can be saved, and enough money to pay external companies for LLM workshops and seminars for employees for years, and enough money to pay for licenses of both ChatGPT and Copilot.
That means: The employee bonuses that should go to all the hardworking employees, and the money to further support our work, is going to grifters, security risks, bad workshops that are not teaching anything remotely usable for our work, and technofascists.
Not only that!
We have recurring house-wide meetings where groups are asked to show off their LLM projects. They register them, try them out for a couple months, and then come back presenting their results. I have attended all of these meetings so far, and there was not a single one that actually worked out. All projects ended with the conclusion that this isn't workable, that this isn't saving time, or that it over-complicates things. Hundreds of people, different teams, people enthusiastic about AI, all kinds of projects, and there wasn't a single success.
All kinds of workshops, "prompt-engineering", custom GPTs and skills, pre-prepared documents and templates could not make something truly effective and reproducible in our field of work (not anything coding related!). It was a messy gamble every time. It took a significant amount of time to fine-tune everything, to repeat the task, to verify the output, and correct mistakes before continuing with the rest of the workflow. Not considering this or that document, hallucinations, inability to fill in documents correctly or edit them were the biggest complaints. Even on an Enterprise license, the restrictions were too great.
But wait, there's more!
We also have house-wide meetings where employees show off how ChatGPT can be used regardless of specific projects; just general use cases for the workday. Let me tell you what great things were shown off.
For one, it was shown that you can ask the bot how it feels today. That wasn't presented as a joke, or being sarcastic; no, it was shown very seriously, I guess under the guise of how cool and futuristic and human it is. I'm getting really upset here at the point of writing this, because I have to fight hard to get the funding for the database my team needs for my work and have to justify it every year, and I know that in any other contexts, or just 5 years ago, they would have laughed in your face if you suggested to get a subscription in the thousands to enable employees to have a pointless conversation with a bot. Hello, we have shit to do over here, departments are drowning in work, and you wanna have software that talks to you? That would have been the response, and it is the correct response still!! People like that need to be treated like the fools they are, and we need to challenge them more!
Next up was the great use case of downloading the cafeteria menu (which is a 1 page nicely designed Excel sheet, like a timetable, showing the different options for each day) from the intranet, giving it to ChatGPT, and asking it what's for lunch on Wednesday. I wish I was joking. I WISH! The bot spat out a longer answer than reading the entire sheet would be. Downloading and uploading and writing the prompt took longer than just reading the sheet. You can see what's for lunch on Wednesday with one glance already. No bot needed!
The other general use case presented to us (by our head of IT, no less) was that if we are not sure whether something is a spam mail, phishing attempt, a mail with a suspicious attachment, whatever... we should save it to our Desktop, upload it to ChatGPT and ask it. Good god. I am still in disbelief. I'm sorry, but I don't want the less technically inclined employees among us to save anything shady onto their work laptop. Come on now. What is happening? Have we lost our minds?
Intentional or not, AI is seemingly great at amplifying the Dunning-Kruger-Effect in people, making everything they attempt with it seem smarter and justified to them, packaging every fart in a nice bow that makes it seem deep initially. People can pretend they’re now doing something really important and groundbreaking while using the tool for completely mundane and worthless tasks that are better handled differently. Defenders of the tech can feel like they’re part of something big and revolutionary and fantasize about the day they will be proven right and all the critics will shut up or apologize (like my conspiracy theorist dad, who still clings to the same prophecies after over a decade, hoping to be ahead of the curve and right for once in his disappointing life).
It’s sad, because it feels like a completely out-of-control delusion; you see smart and capable people with lots of responsibility at work suddenly turn into a shill for these AI companies without any rhyme or reason. A highly qualified person, suddenly reduced to the same presence as a door-to-door salesman lying about how well the cleaning product really works, making up use cases that are neither useful nor working right. How is a person like you suddenly reduced to praising the option to ask a bot to summarize a damn 1 page lunch table and present it as a good use case in a company-wide meeting? What have you done to arrive at this point?
It’s pure hype, eerily much so, and these people cannot possibly admit that. We have no specific problems it can solve in this workplace, at least 90% of the employees do not have work that would profit off of what Copilot etc can do; yet we attempt it anyway, each attempt worse than the prior one, inventing possible uses and creating problems where there are none, just to be able to burn tokens and justify a subscription, to cosplay the people in Sci-Fi media and have something to show upper management ("At least we tried"). We fall behind on our daily work to train an LLM, beg and plead with it and dance for it like court jesters, and poke around in the shit it spits out. If you ask around at my workplace, any use is good because it is a use and we are exploring and playing. It completely minimizes the time waste, the money sink, the effect of each use, and the powerful institutions behind these tools.
And I just wonder: How did this befall us so quickly? There is never money for anything, but this unreliable tech with a huge upfront cost got through immediately? New tech usually passes the public sector by, but this one got all the attention? It takes years or even a decade to implement any sort of change or new ideas into this beast, yet we had the infrastructure and organizational bandwidth to deal with AI up within a blink of an eye?
It is creepy to realize how capable a place really is, and how easily things can be implemented - if the leadership just wants to. It's a complete mask-off moment, underlining that it is never impossible or slow-going by default; it is intentional, by design, and could be improved any time. This is a completely trust-shattering moment for any employee.
This is why I asked at the start of this post how we are supposed to move forward from this at some point. How are we all collectively supposed to forget and move past experiencing a point when the respectable elders in an institution have completely and totally embarrassed themselves in the name of "progress"? When all the gates and wallets have been opened for this utter disappointment, showing that the obstacles for implementing anything thought to be inherent and unavoidable in the organization are just a fluke, a lie, an arbitrary thing? How it all created a culture of feeling repeatedly gaslit over months about this whole assessment, as if you must be the one that is insane?
I cannot forget this at all. This is my second Covid.
As a final note: If none of that is happening in your workplace or life in general - genuinely good for you. Should be like that everywhere, hope that happens to me too eventually. I applaud you for the skilled and competent people in your life that choose AI use wisely, make the most of it, and offer good solutions. Happy for you if you work in an industry where its use makes sense and produces good output. But unfortunately, places and situations like the above exist, so let people commiserate about the insanity in them without attempting to deny what we’re experiencing.
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