• Lumidaub@feddit.orgEnglish
    14 minutes

    I hate the notion of “laying off people to generate returns” so fucking much.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    54 minutes

    If you lay off all the humans so AI can be cheap labour for corporations then there are only three alternatives.

    • provide humans with a universal basic income and living wage.
    • kill them all.
    • let them loose and let them wander (more addicitons, more theft, more homelessness, more violence).
  • Verdorrterpunkt@feddit.orgEnglish
    6 hours

    I think replacing my boss might be possible. The error and hallucination quota seems similar.

  • Iconoclast@feddit.ukEnglish
    5 hours

    I feel like a variation of this exact article gets posted here every single day for the past year or so, and every time the same comments show up underneath. Nobody ever opens one of these threads and discovers a surprising or novel point of view.

    I don’t understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don’t like. It’s so bizarre to me.

    • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 hours

      I don’t understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don’t like.

      If people left me alone about it then I wouldn’t talk about it…reality is closer to this.

      • Iconoclast@feddit.ukEnglish
        2 hours

        Where do they not leave you alone about it? 95% of AI related content I encounter online is people complaining about it on Lemmy.

        • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish
          22 minutes

          Work? It sounds like thousands of idiot ceos are buying into the fake hype over this shit and forcing it on their employees. Before firing them. And then there’s the AI slop articles and imagery that’s cropping up everywhere…

    • Photonic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 hours

      Well it’s not just that people don’t like it, there are a lot of people whose jobs are on the line because of it.

      So I guess it’s kind of hard for them not to keep talking about the thing that’s threatening their livelihood, which makes sense.

      And of course they want to see news that tells them it isn’t going to be so bad and that their expertise will still be in demand.

      • bluGill@fedia.io
        24 minutes

        I disagree - people’s jobs are not on the line because of AI. They are on the line because of the economy and AI is the excuse/fad of the year so AI is what is blamed. However I maintain it is the economy not AI at fault.

        • Photonic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          41 seconds

          Yes. But if it wasn’t for this particular fad their jobs would not have been on the line because there would be no alternative for their employers.

          And of course it is not AI that is doing this. AI, can’t feel, think or do anything. It is simply another tool. Just like production robots have replaced automotive factory personnel on a large scale. And you couldn’t blame the people who lost their job for hating the machines that replaced them. It may not be rational, but it is understandable.

          And of course if we are going to try to rationalise things, it is also not because of the economy. It is the people who benefit from replacing people with AI: the CEOs, employers and shareholders who care more about the companies’ profits than the human beings they employ. The people who have dehumanised their employees so much that in their minds, they are simply a tool to be used and discarded without any regard for the lives they are destroying. The reason why these people are the way they are and act the way they do has many factors that are way too complicated for any employee who is about to lose their job to an AI to understand.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8 hours

    While very different in some ways, some parallels between the AI-driven layoffs and the offshore outsourcing layoffs of the mid-2000s are striking.

    Ultimately both scenarios were/are driven by corporate greed. And it looks like the AI one is backfiring for many of the same reasons as the offshore one.

    They are replacing experienced staff who have strong critical thinking abilities and hands-on knowledge, and the replacements lack the institutional knowledge and the ability to look at the big picture, and they substitute speed for methodological discernment.

    Time is cyclical.

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
    8 hours

    Shocker. Just another excuse to fire higher paid workers, point at a line going up (until it doesn’t), say AI a lot, and then hire lower paid workers for the same (or worse now fighting AI in some cases) job.

  • Pope-King Joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12 hours

    Like, no shit the plagiarism machine that cannot create anything truly novel and can only regurgitate other people’s already existing work can’t replace professionals. I legitimately hope all of these companies go under.

    • Fishnoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12 hours

      Oh, and now you need a new fucking degree to learn how to ‘optimize your token usage with well crafted prompts the machine can understand’ otherwise you’ll burn through the energy Cleveland uses in a year, and end up costing the company millions.

      Dumbest fucking bubble so far other than tulips and beanie babies

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 hours

        No it’s dumber. Beanie babies at least left you with a little doll kids could enjoy.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        11 hours

        Oh, and now you need a new fucking degree to learn how to ‘optimize your token usage

        In some companies, ‘optimize your token usage’ means using as many tokens as possible.

        • dreamkeeper@literature.cafeEnglish
          29 minutes

          Yeah part of our performance evaluation at my company now is how much of our code is “made by AI”. I said sure buddy, added a code attribution to Claude so all of my code gets marked as AI generated even though I manually edit Claude’s subpar output all the time.

          As long as I initially generate the code with Claude I can manually change whatever I want and it still somehow marks it all as “AI-generated”. It’s a stupid ass metric for so many reasons, especially because of how dumb their metric-generating LLM bot is.

        • NekoKoneko@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9 hours

          Indeed.

          “AI is good” became “Good employees use AI” became “The more AI the better” became “The more tokens used the better the employee.”

          What’s incredible is that none of these are self-evidently true premises, but rich C-suite aliens managed to buy into the entire illogical chain.

          • pdxfed@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 hours

            but rich C-suite aliens managed to buy into the entire illogical chain.

            When many decision-makers are incentivized to only care about their next quarterly bonus or stock grant, just like the subprime crisis, people will absolutely set their company up to fail regardless of the consequences. Companies have trained people they are disposable so why would they act in the long term interest of the company? Economics, that is, incentives, are undefeated in making people do things. It may not be what someone intends, but being naive about economics is why adults are needed in designing reward systems (from government policy to company programs).

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10 hours

        Two things…

        1. Is…is Cleveland known for high energy usage? I don’t get the reference.

        2. Tulips had a bubble? I’m so confused.

    • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
      7 hours

      And that all the vibecoding they do instead will eventually turn their whole product into an unmanageable mess which cannot be salvaged.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.caEnglish
      11 hours

      Thing is, they CAN replace “professionals” — which is 80% of the population. They won’t replace the original thinkers, of which there are relatively few.

      And most original thinkers aren’t feeling threatened by AI, as they can figure out something new to do.

      I mean, I remember college. I remember how many people graduated without an original thought in their heads, focused only on getting the credentials to land their dream job. Those are the people generative AI is coming for.

      Has it made life more difficult? Yes. Is it a magic wand that will make companies rich without human investment? Absolutely not. At the end of the day, it’s just making the baseline of human knowledge accessible to the highest bidders, with a bit of randomness and sycophancy thrown in. Which is a step up from confident BS with a bit of randomness and sycophancy thrown in.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3 hours

    “Yeah, lets’t get rid of the knowledge of how our stuff actually works and replace it with a statistics fueled computer, woo, AI all the way!”

    This is what pisses me off the most, the willful disregard for knowledge and skills in organizations.

    If you don’t have the knowledge or skills, specific to your oranizations needs, then you can’t evaluate if the AI is doing a good job.

      • naught101@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6 hours

        I mean… That’s not really saying much will change in the majority of cases?

    • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
      7 hours

      The companies deserves to crash and burn when they finally figure out that the AI did in fact not do such a good job after all, and there will be noone around able to fix it.

  • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.socialEnglish
    7 hours

    I work in the food industry in a somewhat big company in Italy. In all the productive process, we have found exactly 1 (one) application for an AI. And I’m not talking about an LLM, but about the good ol’ machine learning: It’s a system that checks the labels of the product to see if they are good or not. It needed training but now it can check if the labels are fit for the market faster than a person. That’s it. That’s the single part of the whole process in which an AI has removed a person and just because it’s a job that a human couldn’t do it fast enough anyway.

    For the rest? The higher ups realized that there’s always the need of human intervention because even the simpler work requires of a decision making that a machine simply can’t do.

    We also have nopilot for the computers but only because it comes with the office package that the company pays. Nobody actually uses it other than to ask it stupid things.

  • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
    10 hours

    CEOs are getting their pockets filled so, yeah, I think its exactly the way companies think.