Posted by mooreds 16 hours ago
(And I try to be judicious about what counts as "of substance" so they can't accuse me of flooding them with messages)
[0] myself included https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAESbQHrOzAViiJizn8otPF3AAeE...
My question recently has been how to broach this subject with colleagues who really enjoy producing prose with AI. There is not yet a better cultural shorthand for this sort of thing than "slop" which is a harsh-sounding word and itself sort of a thought-terminating cliché. "I don't want to read what you didn't write" is maybe closer — but it needs a pithier and somewhat more encouraging encapsulation, like "I want to hear it from you".
Has anyone had good experiences setting up professional boundaries or team norms around AI-written docs?
For the team I lead, my guideline is AI generated is fine but it needs to be human-edited and/or summarized. You want me to read what you're offering? Put some effort into it and meet me halfway. I don't want AI generated gibberish with made-up terms. You'd better also understand what you are presenting as your work. It's been fairly well-received though we're still working on it.
I have some co-workers on other teams who use AI to generate responses to literally everything. Ask a simple question? Get pages of AI generated nonsense in response. They are proving a tougher nut to crack.
You may find that brings a better and more human focused discussion. Who is the audience and what is best for them? Don't frame it about your preferences but about the real persons that your colleagues seek to talk to.
Everyone else, including me, not so much. I envy his talent and ability to so successfully use the new tools. It's just something to think and talk about regularly. Maybe one day we will all be able to use the tools as well as that guy.
Thats said, i don't know any professional way for this but currenlty trying to communicate with peers in order to work without a problem.
As much as you want to say "actually do your job, jackass." Being goal oriented has had the best results for me.
At a broad level, the issue isn’t generated content, it is the ratio of verification capacity to generation capacity (V/G). Your pain is because generation capacity has increased significantly, while verification is laborious and capacity has not (and can not) catch up.
Unlike spam which is from external sources and can be ignored, messages from other employees have to be responded to. I guarantee this is creating bottlenecks all across the firm, outside of the individuals who are feeling productive.
For fixes, theres theoretical approaches that might work?
If you need leadership to help you, then this issue has to become something that is on their radar, which means that something needs to go wrong or costs need to be registered.
The shortest conversation for that is to make people aware that generation has improved individual productivity, while moving the costs of that production to the rest of the firm.
If leadership is not at the stage to listen, then you need to move the costs you are incurring to the people who are sending them to you. Maybe set time aside to sit down with whoever sent a PR and then read what they sent together, to understand it.
It also makes a difference if tokens are being subsidized or not. If the firm doesn’t care how many tokens are being used, then you are naturally going to have over production.
My own solution for this (for now at least) is to add a preamble section “AI;DR” to PR descriptions, filling what a TL;DR section would have done in the past. I’ve socialized to my peers that no part of such a section will be written by AI, and it should contain exactly this missing high-level content described by the author.
At this point I can't tell if it's a pun or the anti AI article is AI written as well. This sucks.
“Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.”
Also we have reached the point where LLMs are pubkishing more contents than humans so we have probably reached a point where humans will inconciously start copying and using LLMs style too.
1) negative parallelism: "It's not bold. It's backwards."
2) em-dash addiction: "The problem -- and this is the part nobody talks about -- is systemic."
again, i'm not saying the author wrote this sentence using AI. i was just tickled by how stereotypically AI it sounded. for better or for worse, those characteristics are just going to set off the AI detector in people's heads now, as evidenced by the fact that there are like 10 separate comments on this post that picked up on the exact same thing.
So there it is: cruel people who don’t even read their own prompts while happily believing others read their text load and pat the genius on the shoulder for being such a great guy in writing, while in essence it turned the RTFM movement on its head: UUOAI - “Use your own AI.”
People cannot communicate better by using the digital equivalent of logorrhea.