Posted by jjfoooo4 1 day ago
That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.
Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.
I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.
I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.
Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.
With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.
It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to the next.
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> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.
For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit first.
This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.
And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.
I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my time in those projects building hard guardrails.
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> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates
I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.
So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.
Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really internalise the choices made.
When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role is just being a sub-agent.
Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.
One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.
If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.
The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.
This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.
So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?
If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.
First: why? How does that help you?
Second: Is that actually true? Do you ever watch videos that a friend recommends to you? Even if the amount of time and effort your friend put into producing that video is zero? Do you ever read anything that a friend recommends? Even if they didn't write it?
How much time and effort, in your estimation, did jjfoooo4 put into producing this article on tombedor.dev?
Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.
We have seen this before when big data started to be a thing, tons and tons of reports being auto-produced weekly (or even daily), but even if they contain relevant information they are low-value because no one can take action on so much information.
That's true. The document is low-value.
Asking people to put in personal effort isn't going to change that. If they comply, the document they produce will still be worthless, and you still won't want it.
You're diagnosing a problem unrelated to the problem you actually face.
Your post sounds logical at the first glance, but has nothing to do with the reality. The topic title is totally on point! If the user would put human effort in it, I wouldn't get those crappy emails.
So this post is talking about at work but I think the principle goes well beyond that. Think of all the AI chatbots you have to deal with to get through to customer service at a company. Or get through ATS systems in hiring. If it isn't already the case, this will probably replace or supplement TAs marking assignments.
The problem is that AI makes these interactions too cheap for the party that already has disproportionate power. The cost for them to add another layer, another hurdle, another set of questions, etc is essentially zero. Yet everyone who wants to get through that system has to pay in a human cost.
I just thought of another good example. In the pandemic auditions in Hollywood went virtual for obvious reasons. But this never went away. Now, you might say it's convenient to not have to spend hours driving to Burbank for a 5 minute audition but anecdotally the taped audition seems to be much more work. It requires a lot of prep and more tech for good sound and audio. There are people who help people tape auditions, which has really just added another layer. Plus, instead of only locals, anyone anywhere can submit an audition so where you might've had 30 people previously, now you have 150.
And what happens to those profesionally-produced auditions? They get submitted and the casting director might pick 5 randomly to even look at. If there isn't already, there will also be an AI system that filters those auditions.
At least previously you got 5 minutes of actual time from a casting director, the actual director, etc. So it's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.
Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'll end up happening is AI agents will rise to help people on the other side of that. You can think of using AI to cheat on school assignments as an example of that.
So what will we end up with? AI agents inundating AI systems, which just adds a whole bunch of inefficiency.