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Top-level
 The thing that’s interesting about this is that this isn’t trying to measure productivity but instead feelings of productivity. In these kinds of studies, if they’re done soon after a new tool gets adopted, you find a noticeable positive sentiment: it feels productive because it’s new and you notice new things more Usually, once the tool has been integrated and you repeat the study a couple of years down the line (which would be now-ish), you’d get a reversion to the mean: no improvement 3/n 20 comments
It’s quite unusual for a study like this on a new office tool, roughly two years after that tool—ChatGPT—exploded into people’s workplaces, to return such a resoundingly negative sentiment But it fits with the studies on the actual functionality of said tool: the incredibly common and hard to fix errors, the biases, the general low quality of the output, and the often stated expectation from management that it’s a magic fix for the organisational catastrophe that is the mass layoff fad 5/5 @baldur Any employer that paid for Ai tools and pushes their employees for increased productivity, should be required to pay employees back pay for all the previous decades of productivity increases that didn't get them anything... Not even talking about all the other negative effects of AI boom...  @baldur When the AI proposal "helper" first came up on Upwork, I tried it and it wanted me to just give the client the entire answer to their recipe development issue in the first message. I've also noticed the available jobs were very AI-positive (edit 100 AI recipes for $10) for months, then suddenly switched to "only humans allowed" very recently. So it doesn't sound like it's working for either side.  @baldur At my workplace, the primary function of LLMs is to hang over all of our heads like the sword of Damocles. You don't even have to be in an area that's using it to be demoralized by the constant reminders that management really wants to replace you with a robot slave but just hasn't gotten around to your department yet. @Npars01 @gooba42 @baldur I have to wonder what happens if they actually succeed? It's all very well for the owner of a business if they can lay off 4/5th of their workers, but if everyone else is doing the same, who will buy their products? Currently employment is a foundation of society: If you don't earn your living you have no right to water, food or shelter. We could be looking at the very early days of a crisis that comes to define the next decades, alongside climate change. @Qybat @baldur @Npars01 And they *always* want us to measure IQ by net worth. It's not enough that they're the richest, they also want to be the most revered, most loved, smartest and most honored. They want *all* the money and they want *all* the social capital without having rightfully earned any of it.  @Npars01 @Qybat @gooba42 @baldur They just truly believe the entire world is theirs and we're just in their way.  It's gobsmacking that a hedge fund manager can simply order mass layoffs & wage decreases on a whim. Chris Hohn had a single bad year and that is how his fit of pique was manifested; putting thousands on unemployment in retaliation. @Qybat @Npars01 @gooba42 @baldur then we will invent more jobs... jobs are not a static thing where we will simply run out of them if we pretend for a second that ai based machines are literally doing all our work for us then we will essentially be in paradise, where food and shelter etc all costs nothing and we can spend all day having fun and relaxing just don't expect that to happen any time soon @ikt @Npars01 @gooba42 @baldur We don't have an economic model for paradise. There must be a limit to job creation. It already takes the efforts of the advertising industry to create artificial demands just to keep the current level of employment. We're already deep into the space of busy-work - pointless consumption to fuel pointless production. Whole industries built upon disposable goods and planned obsolescence to the point it's causing environmental damage. Just how far can we push this?  @baldur I feel like no one is happy in this but for different reasons: The employees know what's up by living in reality and so they understand what AI is (threat for wanting better) and that it doesn't work (as current) The companies (C Suite peeps) are mad because they can't get their slave system in place yet and they were promised 🙃 🤑  |
Gregory's Server
Both of these results are usually completely orthogonal to the actual effect on productivity. You’re just measuring people’s sentiment towards the tool.
The later study usually reverts to the mean because the employee, when asked, is comparing the tool to a competitor, not the before state. As in, at that point when asked about the productivity benefit of cloud-based Word, they’re comparing it to Google Docs, not to the idea of dropping the cloud-based editor entirely
4/n