Post by @paul
Well, I finally had an "AI in the workplace" meeting...
As an external contractor, I'm privileged that my opinion matters to them, and I _think_ I've managed to convince them that having an LLM pretend to be human to say nice things to the staff members and customers is a bad idea.
I was also able to demonstrate the privacy/reputation/security issues with some things they have already done, i.e. creating "apps" (static HTML and js webpages) and uploading them to varying services (vercel, nelify, etc.) Is a baaaaad idea.
And after extracting the "what problem is it you're trying to solve" question, another couple of people and myself were able to say "why haven't you asked for that before? It would just be a simple report!"
They may still have "AI" in their future in some form, but I think I've managed to cease the idiocy for now.
"It's only going to get better" was said though, to which I responded "it fundamentally cannot"... And then described the economical, environmental and general exponential growth problem/power requirement of having hundreds of billions of tokens in a model to actually get better.
Did I do well?
@paul I think in the end the AI people want to believe, and I think you did as well as you could :) It's just really hard to turn someone around who wants to believe something and is invested in it, but with enough gentle nudges in the right direction I think they may get there.
@sotolf@polymaths.social
But magic box can do magic!
I left the meeting hopefully having convinced them that even if the magic box can do amateur magic sometimes, they'll need somebody who actually understands the input and the result to confirm it. That will never go away.
@paul The only thing that has worked on my manager is when I am getting grumpy at them for having to go to work after hours fixing shit it broke, even though then too the caveated it with "maybe 'we' prompted it wrong" when what it should have done was just porting some quite simple ETL code from one system to another, it made changes that introduced hidden errors that are really annoying to figure out and fix.