Pluralistic: AI’s productivity theater (25 Jul 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

But bosses’ resemblance to toddlers doesn’t end with their credulity. A toddler’s path to getting that eye-height candy-bar goes through their exhausted parents. Your boss’s path to realizing the productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through you.

A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

The headline findings tell the whole story:

  • 96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;
  • 85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;
  • 49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;
  • 77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.
  • onoira [they/them]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    before i left my last job, we were being required to use github copilot.

    this is after i gave them numbers showing that after one month of trialling it:

    • tasks took me the same amount of time on average to complete, but
    • code reviews took twice as long, as:
      • the code was shit.
      • i didn’t understand my ‘own’ code.
      • the code wasn’t idiomatic to our design patterns, and had to be rewritten.

    i already had half a year of experience of successfully wrangling copilot for extrapolating/translating large/repetitive administrative shell/ansible scripts. but for heavy coding tasks — rather than modelling the problem and developing a solution — i was spending the same amount of time effectively letting a JS bootcamp intern (mis)interpret my specifications line-by-line and then i would proofread their mistakes. in a way, this took more time because it left me very little time for self-review before i was under pressure to move on to the next thing.

    the bosses got the same results from the other two people who trialled it, and decided not only to buy into copilot, but to implement chatgpt to automatically write copy and translate it for customers. that went about as well as you might expect.

    i am so fucking done with tech.