At this point, I don’t think it’s even worth trying to talk down business leaders who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. They need to make their own mistakes.

BUT

I do think there’s a competitive advantage here for companies willing to seize it. Which great candidates are getting overlooked by biased hiring? If you can identify them, hire them, and retain them — if! — then I suspect that payoff quickly outstrips the cost savings of having an AI automate your garbage hiring practices.

/end

@inthehands

This is how competitive systems learn: the language of death. In this case corporate death.

Politics careens from one failure to the next. Movement death, often learning something, but it only lasts a while.

Biological evolution: same thing. Species death.

Medicine too, though we work very hard to deny it. Death.

Technology is wrong more often than right. Progress still happens because the failed bubbles guide us violently.

@inthehands The white bruhs that code will always see a resume that says Director as more powerful than a resume that says Assistant despite the director really being a buzz word that has nothing to do with a job and assistant meaning assistant manager of a retail chain that requires more people skills and work ethic than "director". AI is always going to weigh their own white male bias more highly than #womenofcolor in #hiring.

@inthehands Hiring managers are so unskilled that in studies, choosing random resumes resulted in a more competent and happy workforce. Hiring managers generally hire people they like or remind them of themselves which always results in a bullied workforce because managers aren't exactly the best workers or nicest people. #hiringmanager. They lack the self awareness to know when they should hire the coal covered in dust vs the shiny diamond.

@inthehands I think there is one exception--for a lot of people in creative fields who may have some kind of borderline ADHD condition, getting past the blank page or the digital equivalent is a real struggle. And if there's something that can push them past that step from nothing to something, they'll find it useful.

There's a powerful temptation to just use version zero, though, especially if you're not the creator but the person paying the creator.

@inthehands The victims will learn the hard way. The people doing it will learn the easy way: making huge amounts of money and then skipping town before the poisoned soil kills all the crops, ready to do it again to a fresh set of victims.

@inthehands in a discussion I saw someone noted that a "removing AI from workflow" consulting company would soon be viable.

@inthehands

One of these is not like the others. Here’s how I think about it: many processes can be thought of as generating a large number of leads and then screening them to find the good ones. In classic AI this a generate-and-test algorithm. It’s vital that your testing works or you will get bad answers.

Using AI for the “generate” phase is not nearly as bad as using it for screening phase, provided that your tests are good. And we do know how to test our code, don’t we?

@inthehands The same applies in translation - both AI and human. It's easy to produce something almost, but not entirely like a piece of natural language, but the flow won't be quite right, the word choice clunky, the rhythm subtly off. (I was tempted to use only two examples in that last sentence as a demonstration!)