chat

It shows up in my field of work sometimes, to my great annoyance. I have an increasing number of customers who now give me some variation of "i asked chatgbb how to fix this ABC plumbing issue and it says all you have to do is XYZ".

Then I have to justify my explanation as to why the fucking AI isnt right, why their incorrect hunch now improperly reinforced by a computer program is also wrong. I had a guy tell me recently that Claude is smarter than I am, so my decades of experience and knowledge is now moot and I am 'just a parts changer now'. Also love to come behind someone who looked up how to change a shower cartridge on chatgpp, bought the wrong cartridge, broke additional parts of the shower trim trying to follow the wrong removal procedure and is now pissed that I cant get their shower trim back together correctly and how my license must have been acquired via a Cracker Jack box.

Last Friday, my final call of the week was to go to someone's house to swap out a Moen Posi-temp cartridge. Customer has the parts, you just need to swap them Microfiche.

Go over. Customer has water off, trim is off. Cartridge is broken into multiple pieces, some stuck in the valve body, some on the shower floor. In the process of removing the cartridge in attempt to save themselves some money, the customer stripped the screw hole on the handle. They cracked the plastic adapter that holds the now broken handle to the shower cartridge. They tried to remove the cartridge with the wrong tool, bent the brass shaft on the cartridge. Brass shaft gouged the valve body internally where a o-ring sits so now water will leak by the o-ring and now the shower will never shut off fully. Ive been here before. Just change the whole valve. Customer wants to be a tight ass, wants me to try and salvage it and then change it if salvaging doesnt work.

It's Friday at 545pm. Plumbing supply houses are now closed. I can get them to open but they charge an after-hours open up the doors fee of 250, non negotiable and due before they will even unlock the door.

Because the guy couldn't just leave it alone, his $200 dollar shower cartridge swap turned into $1,800 dollars worth of emergency service work. And then he complained after the fact, about how he was getting hosed for the cost and he wasnt sure whether or not I was at least partially responsible for the predicament because chatgpp told him it was super duper simple.

Fuck AI.

Yeah similar experience with programming. The colleagues that weren’t really any good at the job are no faster than they were before but they have found new and interesting ways to piss me off. My favourite being ai generated helm charts that don’t work that they haven’t even tested in dev and want me to approve for a prod release.

Downside is people think im the blocker but i can guarantee if i approve their crap and it breaks prod ill be blamed anyway.

My favourite is a guy whos job it is to liase with other teams and i ask him to get me on the line with x and he will bring me into a call asking what i want, i explain, he sends me the copilot summary and asks “shall i send that to x?” My guy? If you wanted me to write the summary just ask? Also why the fuck are you even here?

Ive checked out completely. I didnt think my job could get worse and it did. Maybe itll get even worse or ill get hit in the next round of layoffs. Oh our offshore colleagues ai generate word documents and attach them to tickets and move it to done without ever having done the work its fascinating.

I'm also in IT and I noticed that "AI" totally destroyed a lot of people's ability to just google for answers. They ask ChatGPT for things and when it doesn't work, they immediately get frustrated and come to me for help. "AI" has similar effect to short-form content - it worsens your attention span and makes you expect immediate answers

ive also seen coworkers turn to chat bots in attempt to troubleshoot and its like they turn their brains off assuming the chat bot is gonna figure it out for them. like, its a tool that can be helpful pointing you in the right direction at times, but damn you gotta be the one behind the wheel.

I have experienced a programmer with decades of experience spend hours trying to get ChatGPT to fix an issue he was having with an external library. I solved the problem in five minutes by reading the God damn documentation.

I was also once given the thankless task of consulting for the CEO of a manufacturing company who had convinced himself that the magic wizard in the computer could turbocharge his business. He wanted to cast an AI spell that would summon hitherto unknown leads for his B2B sales and he insisted that it should be done in Microsoft's cursed Copilot Studio web interface which is really an application for building annoying chat bots to avoid doing customer service. I was charged with fixing the clusterfuck he had set up, seemingly using prompts generated by other LLM's

It was so extremely frustrating to work with, nothing was documented, and instead of being able to program your logic with coding like a civilised person you had to set it up with some bullshit drag and drop web interface. Testing anything took ages because you had to wait for the AI to hallucinate information on completely irrelevant topics before you could see if stuff worked. But you couldn't really see if stuff worked because LLMs are non-deterministic and the prompt that provided something resembling something close to useful in one run would output utter shite in the next. He wasted too much of my time and his own money trying to cast this spell until he gave up and ended the partnership. He would have gotten more value for money by hiring an intern to do Google searches and taking notes for a couple of days.

An exchange I had about driver support:

[Me] it says here in the documentation for both product A and product B that as of driver version D this product is no longer supported, which is corroborated by the products own documentation

[My bosses boss] chatgpt says it will work.

This back and forth went on a little bit, until I just gave up. Not only was he telling me that a fucking llm was more correct than the official documentation, but also he wasnt asking the llm the right question, literally just was asking it about product support. I dont care that the product "will probably work" its not supported anymore so using it will create a lot of tech debt for us. But no. Chatgpt is correct, chatgpt knows all.

Turns out, the product won't work for other reasons, so thank God I'm not gonna be responsible for the literally unsupported product so when thing inevitably break I have to find a way to fix it.

I never encounter LLMs at work but I'll be honest if i could just stop working and offload everything to the computer and still get paid i would do it. The output doesn't matter to me at all.

I am at work to collect a paycheque and nothing more

Working in a different environment, but there is AI/LLM on the job for other roles. The other day I was overruled by a more senior person. I provided a correct information/plan (which I am very qualified for) but they decided to check my work on some sort of chat bot and made a new plan with errors (and literally about 20 mdashes...). 5 years ago that person would have been able to review my work mentally or just by consulting documentation and reference materials we all have accces to and are supposed to follow. Or maybe just trust me to do my job that I am good at. But now its easy to run it by a machine so why not? I'm very salty about this. It looks like they took some time to disguise the LLM content into their usual style which itself probably took longer that doing it from scratch.

The senior people with more responsibility are loving AILLM in their work, and there are frequent unimportant but obvious errors I catch. Suggests they aren't always really looking at it before submitting. So who knows what big mistakes are getting through. I think there is some consciousness about this, and even that the labor saving is exagerated. But its going to set the pace faster for everyone. So we will all be forced to out our names on dubious quality work and forget it was ever another way. Consequences will be primarily on other people initially, for us moral quandaries, guilt, get deisceplined eventually for driving it wrong.

Real...

Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.

Hours except it's your fucking brain.

I read an article posted right here on hexbear about how massive corporations are buying up a lot of AI licenses for things like Copilot ChatGPT and Claude

It talked about how this created a cult following of true believers and how tech CEOs are afraid to speak up because it will get them fired

​Basically every big company nowadays expects their workers to use AI. Not doing it or using it and just being bad at it are valid reasons for a layoff now

​The smaller startups not using AI are the ones building strong foundations for the foreseeable future and you should look for one of those. But the authors advice was just to play along and "use it" (but not really) until eventually the entire industry comes crashing down

Don't worry. I would tell people to read the documentation, but my company has a few tools owned by Google and they are all written with AI now. Just straight up lies and references to API endpoints or menu items that don't exist. World sucks man.