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[–] 30 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

Microsoft (and maybe all the AI companies) made at least few mistakes in the marketing of this technology. AI isn't a replacement for human accountability. It still requires oversight and expertise. It is great for a first draft. It is terrible for a complete work product. Agents (with the right loops to verify accuracy) are reasonably complex - and most companies don't have the people development infrastructure to train their teams with the right skills to build them. Honestly, AI is shining a light on how terribly businesses have been run over the last 30 years, and how lazy business leaders are.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 5 hours ago*

    It still requires oversight and expertise

    Perhaps some people who don't mind the ethics of gen AI work very hard to produce good work. But I believe that when you give people an easy, low-effort path, a great many of them will take it (regardless of the quality of the results). Training notwithstanding, a vast number of people cannot resist the lure of doing as little as possible.

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  • [–] 36 points 9 hours ago

    It is terrible for a first draft if you're aiming for something that reads like a human being's actual thoughts. Don't let an LLM think for you and create the first draft of "your" thoughts. At most, if you absolutely must, use it as a spell checker. But write your words yourself.

    No one wants to know what ChatGPT thinks. We might want to know what you think... But only if it's actually you doing the thinking.

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  • [–] 25 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    It is great for a first draft

    Only if the aim is towards mediocrity.

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  • [–] -4 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    Do you aim for excellence in your first drafts? You may want to consider better effort allocation.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    As my violin teacher used to say, “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”

    If you’re not aiming for excellence every time you do something you’re practicing imperfection.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    Sure man, but the vast majority of us do not work in the making beautiful sounds with violing business.

    If some middle manager boss says to some minion to make a quick draft of a keynote of some random info that tangentially may make sense in one of his meetings, and the minion then goes on working on it on full attention for a day to make the beautifullest keynote of the word he did not do a draft and the boss is pissed because other shit did not get done. Having an llm quarter ass a keynote based on a prompt and two refinements is precisely the effort required for that job, any more than that is wasting time.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    If the quick draft doesn't justify the time and energy, the keynote certainly doesn't. If the keynote is a waste of time, then the meeting is pointless. The best place for the LLM is to replace the jackass who called the pointless meeting in the first place.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    If you are using a generator that combines everything (both bad and good) on the net, you will end right on the middle. If everyone that's lazy uses the same method, your work becomes the definition of mediocre.

    Nothing wrong with mediocre, I mean the corporate world is full of mediocrity and that's what is expected in assignments.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago (1 child)

    That assumes that there is no effective way to filter good from bad. But there is - both automated heuristics and manual training does this.

    LLMs absolutely produce mediocre output in some ways, but it's not an inherent limitation caused by them "averaging" the internet. If that were the case there'd be a lot more typos, emojis and internet lingo by default. The fact that LLMs have these instantly recognisable stock ways of writing and stock phrases is a simple way of seeing that they don't simply produce "average" output in that very naive sense.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    Do you even know what the word heuristic means? A heuristic is something that is just good enough. Not great, not perfect, just good enough to get the job done.

    Heuristic algorithms were always going to result in LLMs that were only just good enough.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    Heuristics are by definition imperfect, but they are not, generally, "just good enough". In fact, heuristics may not be good enough for a given purpose.

    Am I right that you're not actually disagreeing with my comment?

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  • [–] 5 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    First draft of what? The AI* doesn't know what you're trying to make, so to use it, you first need to write a prompt to convey to it what you're trying to convey. If what you're trying to make takes the form of prose, there's your first draft already; there's nothing the AI can add other than padding and replacing your voice with a psychopath's. But to begin with, if you have the skill to turn a first draft into a final product, it's almost always going to be faster to just use that skill to create the first draft yourself instead of trying to convey to an AI what it's supposed to be like. If it isn't, it's something that's so easy to describe that there's either no value in making it or those few words are already the perfect way to convey it.

    Also, this just completely undermines the whole thing:

    It still requires oversight and expertise.

    The sole virtue AI arguably has, is its accessibility; anyone who can read and write a supported natural language, can make use of it. But the moment it starts requiring expertise, that accessibility becomes worthless. To anyone who is even somewhat serious about what they're trying to do, that natural language interface just offers far too little control for their purposes.

    *) For the purposes of this comment, "AI" refers to the kinds of natural language-driven generative AI heavily marketed by companies like Microsoft, not the general concept of artificial intelligence or even the underlying technology of those products.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 hours ago

    This is an incredibly stupid take, can’t believe people upvoted this shit, lol

    Have you not used AI agents anytime in the past 6 months?

    They can pull in information that you don’t write down, it can create Powerpoint slides, it can create mermaid diagrams from your description.

    Those are not things you just do manually because you can? At that point why not code in Notepad instead of relying on the stupid machine assisted IDEs?

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