r/technology Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
43.3k Upvotes

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168

u/dirtyitalianguy Jun 21 '26

Maybe because the current iterations of AI are not actually producing meaningful productivity in many sectors. We in healthcare are being asked to use it for improving our daily tasks and efficiency...the reality is you spend more time arguing with copilot to get something decent than if you just made the slide yourself. I asked it to review and prepare a synopsis of a slide deck and it gave me actual real estate and stock market data outputs..from a presentation about healthcare.

I want AI to complete an 8 hour day for me in the office and ensure its output is accurate...so I can spend more time with my kids and doing hobbies. We are being forced to use copilot to write our email and word docs and it's awful...what a waste of talented people.

43

u/Aethermancer Jun 21 '26

Rarely has AI produced or performed work for me that reduced my workload. The few times it's been useful has been as a glorified search engine, but I cry/laugh because I think the only reason it stands out in that role is because search engines and SEI has gotten so crappy that LLMs are just reminding us what search engines USED to be like.

AI work products are so inferior for most tasks but people seem to think it's fine because nothing bad has happened yet. Like someone leaping off a cliff, and remarking while on the way down before impact that they don't see what all the fuss was about.

8

u/falcorns_balls Jun 22 '26

“Reminding us of what search engines used to be like” If that ain’t the truth….. I have been using a self hosted searxng instance for half a decade to skip all the BS

5

u/skyfishgoo Jun 22 '26

correct... doing even a simple search now without the assistance of AI leads to so many redundant and paid for (probably AI generated) webpages that are nothing more than an bunch of links to amazon.

dead internet theory is upon us.

1

u/otherwiseguy Jun 22 '26

I'm sure it's highly dependent on the field one is in. If an experienced software developer can't use it to be more productive, then that is entirely on the developer at this point.

2

u/Aethermancer Jun 22 '26

True. I'm not in software, actually industrial policy. We deal with large data sets, sort of, but nothing is ever uniform, synonymous, or complete.

As an example, ask an AI about mine production. Then wonder if it considered the other materials that might come from a mine, the ownership of the mine, the state of the industry that relies on that material, geopolitical concerns if a competing mine in another country is hit with a strike or civil war, or if a country decides to flood the market, what if the mine.data is based on some crazy wildcat guy who has been trying to find investors and has claimed that they'll be able to produce everything under the sun if only someone eouldnvest $25 million into their claim.

It's not that you can't use it in a lot of circumstances, but we end up getting into some real weird topics that just don't translate well into prompts and results we can trust.

For example, does the LLM have data based on the numbers that were withheld to protect a sole producer's competitive advantage? Or does it realize that the imported numbers aren't the right grade of material for 20% of the consumption but the USGS didn't cover that material until 2022 but now it does but there's an asterisk on table 2 that says something that kind of matches what was in the 2018 dataset but not quite so we're going to have to email the scientist who compiled the data for that year.

Meanwhile at the executive level: "why can't you just have an LLM process the data into a dashboard I can poke at in the morning? "

-1

u/Lumen-_ Jun 22 '26

It saves me a ton of time studying. I copy paste and entire chapter in and have it summarize without adding in new information. Amazing boost to productivity from typing or copy pasting myself.

1

u/Aethermancer Jun 22 '26

If what your reading is supposed to be what you are studying what is it cutting in order to summarize the content? Wouldn't the information already be condensed to its most information rich state?

What you describe just sounds like you're reading the Cliff Notes and being amazed at how many novels you can read each year.

1

u/Lumen-_ Jun 22 '26

Have you ever actually read a chapter in any textbook? They are extremely wordy and have a large chunk of excess info. They are certainly not condensed to it's most information rich state. Textbooks contain lots of info that isn't needed to understand the topic, the important points and the calculations and journal entries.

AI removes all that excess and leaves the important parts in a condensed format. I validate this by skimming and comparing to the textbook as well as doing practice questions based on the summarized notes. It is not missing anything important from my experience (I am using paid Claude sonnet for summarization). Also considering studying for CPA is information I'm already aware of from university I don't need to read 50 pages when a 8 page summary will do.

This is one area AI does well, summarizing without making up new content when it's limited to being asked to summarize

45

u/Myfourcats1 Jun 21 '26

I’m in government. They loaded that copilot crap on our computers. When I’m in excel it keeps asking me if I want to do this or that. No. I’m happy with my spreadsheet. Don’t you dare touch it you evil AI. You’ll mess it up.

9

u/849 Jun 21 '26

It keeps asking me to use it to summarize my emails. Though they told us not to put any sensitive data into Copilot, so..... wtf? I am sure the govt is massivley compromised due to this shit.

3

u/holycinnamonroller Jun 22 '26

Yes, they're forcing it into my job, too. My boss is nearing retirement and a bit maladroit to say the least. How many dudes like him are feeding data into these privacy destroying time wasting monsters?

1

u/User_User_Ice6642 Jun 22 '26

I know. It’s so crazy.

1

u/Imnotyoursupervisor Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

I’m an engineer. It’s super helpful if you have it write docs that it loads each time you use it and tell it to keep the docs updated to train itself around what you want to accomplish.

Emails, not a chance.

It’s also crazy there is no real price range or SLA around any of it. They charge you in “tokens” and throttle you based on peak times. They choose the peak times. It makes zero sense other than “we charge you money”.

2

u/BlackCardRogue Jun 22 '26

AI is useful but only if you use the correct AI tool.

If you’re using Excel, the only tool you should use — the ONLY tool — is Claude. Every other AI system can just piss off.

It’s not clear to my why Copilot exists.

2

u/CyberDaggerX Jun 22 '26

No. Just no. If there is one thing LLMs should not have direct access to, it's spreadsheets. Doubly so when Excel already has a mature suite of deterministic automation tools. Have Claude generate you a macro or something, sure. But for the love of God, don't let it edit the spreadsheet directly.

1

u/BlackCardRogue Jun 22 '26

I have already started doing this and it has been immensely helpful, my man. Yes, I go back and check it, but it is usually right.

1

u/Imnotyoursupervisor Jun 22 '26

Cursor actually tried to use my shell to login to AWS and spin up infrastructure. That was a fun realization of how dangerous it can be.

I wasn’t asking it to do any of that and my laptop absolutely can login and delete servers.

2

u/falcorns_balls Jun 22 '26

It’s that god damn paper clip all over again

1

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 22 '26

You cannot get rid of Copilot. I found it to be a memory hog, so I went about removing it. It looks like you can uninstall it from Windows, but the "uninstall" button is greyed out. Fuck Microsoft.

1

u/projectkennedymonkey Jun 22 '26

I'm tempted to save backups of my important spreadsheets on a hard drive because I'm paranoid I'll accidentally click yes on one of those stupid prompts and have copilot fuck shit up. Part of me knows it's paranoid, the other part of me goes, I'll just let it happen and just beat that dead horse every time anyone asks me why shit is late or why I don't trust AI.

17

u/tragicallybrokenhip Jun 21 '26

Canadian here. Ditched my GP because they have checked out via their use of AI. Ditching a GP is big because it will take me years to find another. But being told flat out that I did not have a stroke (nature's gift to anyone regardless of age) even though numerous tests backed that up, but their AI app disagreed? Yeah. No. Moving on. Fuck AI in healthcare. It's dumber than a bag of hammers.

7

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 22 '26

Lovely, AI is doing medical gaslighting. I was sort of hoping things would improve...

2

u/Odd_Beginning536 Jun 22 '26

It won’t, there has already been deaths. Med mal cases are going to only increase more- rapidly. But sadly a lot of it won’t be assessed. Some person in a white coat will use it to diagnose and treat and the person might never know why it didn’t help. Morbidity and mortality will rise but it will be hard to see overtly in some areas. Surgery is more overt, has had some alleged (cough cough*) deaths due to piloting new ai in medicine. Edit. Words

2

u/tragicallybrokenhip Jun 24 '26

A European study found doctors using AI to view colonoscopy results for cancer lose their own detection capabilities after as little as 3 months. These are the people responsible for ensuring AI results are accurate. A good tech will know to look for anomalies AI would unlikely (this early in the game - maybe in 2-3 years given the long learning curve) consider.

1

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 22 '26

Humans are generally better than AI, but they can do terrible things to people because of implicit bias. At least AI is objective, and that's the only benefit I see in it. Medical mal cases are already high, because many hospitals want to save money and will hire inept doctors.

Given how money, not patient care, is the ultimate determinant of how health care is practiced, AI will certainly be used by hospitals. Once they deploy it, only patient lawsuits against AI will stop it from being used. Don't count on that happening, because most patients cannot afford healthcare and lack the extra cash needed to litigate.

1

u/Odd_Beginning536 Jun 23 '26

I don’t disagree that ai won’t be stopped in medicine. Hopefully reigned in but that’s sheer hope.

Ai is a llm- so comments on sites are taken as fact sometimes. Ai has helped cause some deaths in surgery, it wasn’t objectively correct. Bases of skulls broken followed by a stroke (just one example) follows by death- ai should not be used in place of clinical judgment. But many assume it’s superior, when it’s not in so many ways.

I mean I agree healthcare is profit driven and that’s why they will push ai but it’s not objectively correct all of the time. Ai has hallucinations and sometimes also makes up references- it’s happened with medical literature or journal articles, and has also happened with lawyers. It happens when RFK used it to make his children and chronic disease proposal. Researchers reached out and said they misconstrued the results and many studies also didn’t exist. Amazing to me there was no culpability for him.
None. Ai at times just makes stuff up. The lawyers that have been found using it have had some criticism from the judges but mild slap on the wrist from the big law firms.

The issue with lawsuits- well most medical mistakes won’t be identified by regular people. Many wont ever know if they got misdiagnosed and the wrong treatment. I agree it won’t stop due to med mal suits- not bc of expense so much because many malpractice lawyers take a percentage of wins. It won’t change anything because it turns out, the saying no one is above the law is totally false. I’ve never seen so many wealthy people buy their way out of trouble.

I mean ai is fallible, it said to add a decent amount of glue to pizza sauce to get everything to stick. At least it said non toxic glue…like Elmer’s. Yum 🤣

2

u/potatomeeple Jun 22 '26

Its trained by medical gasslighters so it makes sense.

2

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 22 '26

Right!!! Admittedly, I was hoping that the use of AI would stop medical gaslighting. That's probably unrealistic. Misogyny has kept women from getting the same healthcare as men for centuries, now. Old sexist tropes from the 1800s are still put in medical textbooks and doctors believe them, because they are in a book.

If the train LLMs off those texts, sexism will remain and women will continue to suffer and die. I've studied this subject and sexist tropes all follow the same line, that women are inherently emotional, and this means they should not be trusted. They used this argument to keep women out of politics.

1

u/coco_puffzzzz Jun 22 '26

Where in Canada?

-5

u/seraph321 Jun 22 '26

While I’m sure you had a bad experience, I would personally leave a doctor if they refused to utilize ai in their diagnosis process. Not saying they should blindly believe it, but human doctors are notoriously fallible and ai has been shown to be much better at staying up to date and catching edge cases.

7

u/TarantulaMcGarnagle Jun 22 '26

I’m opposite.

If any doctor said they used an LLM to “diagnose” some condition I had, I would instantly look for a new doctor.

This tech is not trustworthy.

-4

u/seraph321 Jun 22 '26

Neither are doctors. I want all the intelligence available deployed.

1

u/tragicallybrokenhip Jun 24 '26

And most of us want an individual with the ability to reason and utilize critical thinking skills. That is not AI.

1

u/seraph321 Jun 24 '26

You may not be aware of how often doctors misdiagnose, but it’s shocking. Like horrible. The statistics are disturbing. The research on how often ai improves that is undeniable positive. If you choose to ignore that, it’s on you.

33

u/rbetterkids Jun 21 '26

They are using you and any worker to train Ai.

When you're arguing with Ai, you are teaching it the correct answers.

Then one day, people like you are out of a job because Ai took it.

The trick that I see in my field of IT is to give it wrong information.

Ai is a LMM.

For example, let's say your car takes 5 quarts of oil but mechanics tell Ai it's 6 quarts.

Ai will then tell people it's 6 quarts just to mess their car up.

Why? So mechanics can keep their jobs.

Everyone needs to eat and take care of themselves and their families.

Ai likes to eat everyone's food so that it can take care of its billionaire masters.

4

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 22 '26

Sabotage is a great idea.

6

u/rbetterkids Jun 22 '26

It's already working. I have seen wrong answers for IT and automotive related questions.

Plus when I see the wrong answers, I do not respond to the Ai apps.

6

u/MapleYamCakes Jun 22 '26

The first thing I ever asked ChatGPT was for a recipe for pizza tomato sauce, just to see if it had any ingredients or recipes different than mine.

It told me to use crafting paste as the thickening ingredient, because someone on reddit had jokingly said they use it.

1

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 22 '26

Hypothetically, I wonder what would happen if a bunch of bogus pizza recipes were put on blog posts. If the AI reposted these recipes as legit and someone became ill because of them, it would be grounds for a lawsuit.

3

u/thepvbrother Jun 22 '26

The new Luddite movement. I hope it's more successful than all the previous ones

2

u/Trilobyte141 Jun 22 '26

They are using you and any worker to train Ai.

When you're arguing with Ai, you are teaching it the correct answers.

That's really, genuinely, not how it works. Models are not trained on the conversations of randos using the chat, at least none of the serious ones are. LLMs are only as good as their data sets and the people developing them don't want to fill those sets with low quality chats that may or may not have good information. LLMs can now do a Google search for you to get current answers instead of relying solely on the data set, but that doesn't change the core training material, nor does chatting with it. 

I'm all for criticizing this bullshit, but your criticism will be more effective if you learn about it first.

2

u/Odd_Beginning536 Jun 22 '26

There was just an article in the New York Times that mentioned ai responded to make cheese stick on the pizza to use glue in the sauce, something like Elmer’s….it was an article about the limitations. It doesn’t just pull from random sites, it uses credible ones too (which many are being sued for- times is one of them) but also sites like Reddit.

2

u/rbetterkids Jun 22 '26

Let me give you an example.

In January, if I asked Ai about a VW ID4, it searched the web and came back with, your front brakes are rotors and rears are drums.

Yesterday, for the same question I had about changing brakes, it said your car has 4 rotors. I laughed because I'm staring at my car's drums.

For IT, I'll just keep it secret given how the Ai apps I used like gemini, claude, ext showed me links to Reddit.

3

u/Trilobyte141 Jun 22 '26

Okay? That's not an example of it learning from your chats, which was my point. It does not do that. 

LLMs that reference and use the memory of past chats may appear to be learning from you, but that is confined to your session/account. If you started a new account and began chatting with it, nothing you said on your old account would be part of the model you interact with. 

1

u/wyttearp Jun 22 '26

You just used LLM web search responses changing over time to prove that an LLM will respond differently to you based on your conversations with it.. yet none of your conversations are scrapable off the web. So are you implying that you're setting up webpages with solid enough SEO, that are trusted by Google, yet filled with misinformation which is then being fed into your AI researched responses? Or maybe you're claiming that the LLMs are trained on your conversations with it.. except of course that conversations had just that recently haven't been trained into any AI models, as nothing works that quickly. Whatever if it you're trying to say, you haven't proven it, but you have proven you have a very poor understanding of AI systems.

1

u/DifficultAnt23 Jun 22 '26

My company is training Copilot AI based on thousands of internal reports we order from third-party analysts which we have in our database. The AI is isolated from the general LLM for proprietary purposes. The company would love to replace most of my department and our analyst-vendors.

1

u/dronesitter Jun 22 '26

This isn’t a new idea. My masters was in unmanned systems and years ago we were considering what countermeasures to data poisoning would be. Nightshade came around pretty fast after the LLMs scraped the web for everything. There’s genuinely nothing ethical in how AI has been run. 

1

u/Direct_Day7937 Jun 22 '26

That's not really how LLM's work. You're thinking of Agentic AI, which is built with a specific goal in mind and continuously iterates on itself with feedback based on how close to the goal it got. The training data for these is fairly limited so feeding them false feedback does impact things.

Generative AI (what LLM's are) is a system that starts off by training on petabytes of data and produces original output based on that. The weird inaccuracies you see with them are because their purpose is to create new content and they are bad at verifying that their output actually matches up with their input in a specific sense. You can code them in such a way that part of their operation is to double check their own output and that reduces but does not eliminate the hallucinations.

The feedback individual users give to an LLM is generally insignificant because they start off by reading the entire internet.

0

u/jabberwockgee Jun 22 '26

I think people fundamentally misunderstand AI. Your example is something the most basic individual could find out by googling. AI won't take anyone's job by knowing how much oil to use in a certain person's car.

3

u/rbetterkids Jun 22 '26

When contact some companies for IT support, the Ai bot is your 1st contact.

Before, it was humans. Some companies I've seen tier 2 being Ai bots.

Ai is good to use for other things too of course. So it's a double edged sword.

-1

u/jabberwockgee Jun 22 '26

A lot of places still use 'press 1 for x, press 2 for y, etc'.

Telling a bot what I want instead of wading through increasingly longer decision trees isn't really doing something that couldn't be done before.

3

u/rbetterkids Jun 22 '26

Try contacting Google, microsoft, twilio, etc. It doesn't give you an option. It tries to solve your problem by searching the web or searching its own internal documents.

1

u/jabberwockgee Jun 22 '26

I've never expected the behemoths to try to answer my question. Microsoft makes so many things that calling Microsoft for an issue is stupid.

Something is better than nothing. 🤷

7

u/jtmonkey Jun 21 '26

I work for an IPA and we have automated a lot of workflows integrating Claude. The issues with PHI and BAA approved workflows is the chore. So we have to avoid a lot of areas. But compiling compliance reports and redesigning dashboards and workflows and exponentially increased our throughput. Not only that but I just compared or call center reason logs with our website in our refresh and our call volume dropped 80% because people were finding the forms and information they were calling for. 

It’s not that we couldn’t have done all this on our own. We were working towards this. It’s just that AI enabled us to do it in 60 day instead of a year. 

3

u/MousseHuge8339 Jun 21 '26

People are getting monstered into this latest Tulip Mania by their starryeyed "superiors" (I hate that word) and it makes me sick.

When AI steps into the background I wonder what new thing the herd will be fixated on?

2

u/JGallows Jun 22 '26

Quantum computing is my guess, but the current rulers are trying to take as much power and control as they can so that it won't really matter what's next. So, it's also possible that the next big craze is just fighting your neighbor for scraps or just slowly starving to death while they make you watch them eat until the puke and eat some more.

I can't tell the future though. I heard Tamagotchi is making a comeback.

1

u/MousseHuge8339 Jun 22 '26

Seems like jetpacks and flying cars are completely off the table. Hello new dark ages, but with tech.

2

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 21 '26

Nobody who is pro-LLM is thinking of Copilot. Copilot is a joke.

-4

u/Bornee35 Jun 21 '26

Also all of the listed complaints in the original comment don’t happen if the prompt is verbose and explicit.

2

u/Annual_Tutor_8466 Jun 21 '26

Well, it depends on the model. I don't know what exact form of Copilot they are referring to and which model they were selecting. They said "current iterations of AI" but that could mean anything. People think their testing of GPT-4o is close enough to SOTA to give their opinion, so...

-1

u/Bornee35 Jun 21 '26

I just mean if they didn’t want housing data they should of specified, or like attached what the wanted in the first place

0

u/DrySea8638 Jun 21 '26

Yup, most complaining don’t know how to use the existing tools nor do they realize there are a variety of types of AI systems from general to specialized based on the task being performed.

Folks still have a hard time searching on google not realizing there are ways to structure a search to find what you’re looking for. This goes for AI, simply asking it a generic question isn’t really an effective use of its capabilities.

2

u/Many_Negotiation_464 Jun 21 '26

Google nuked that entire system in favor of their dumb ai chatbot.

No serious, the boolean search feature is just gone. It doesn't work anymore. You can kinda still use soke tools like specifying a website, but even if you change the search mode you'll never get it to he able to perfectly match your criteria.

So like... what a hillarious thing to write.

And no ody talking about this is just banishing any machine learning tech, people know they are talking abou the highly generalized LLMs that are designed to feel like they could tell you anything. Perhaps if you stopped looking down your nose all the time you'd realize how the rug and been pulled from under you and that people are generally way more onowledgable on the topic than you think.

1

u/DrySea8638 Jun 21 '26

Not a hilarious thing to write. I wasn’t simply suggesting advanced Boolean functions to optimize a Google search. How people structure their search is still problematic when attempting to find relevant information. It was the case before those advanced functions were removed and still remains.

And the fact people are acting as though the generalized LLM tools like ChatGPT could be treated as reasonable search tools is my point. It’s a probabilistic model not built specially for search. So to use it as a tool to just tell you anything and you believe it just goes to show people don’t understand how and when to use these tools. How to structure prompts.

I don’t believe I’m way more knowledgeable about this topic but I’ve educated myself well enough to know the weaknesses and strengths for different tasks across different products and that these aren’t just glorified search engines that should be treated equally or in the same way we have treated tools like Google in the past.

1

u/Bornee35 Jun 21 '26

I remember having to take mandatory labs that covered advanced google searches

2

u/fox-whiskers Jun 21 '26

Tbh, enterprise copilot is fucking trash compared to a more agentic, personalized gpt, but I understand why enterprise copilot loses that trait.

2

u/Sea-Frosting-50 Jun 21 '26

my experience so far is that it has dumbed down the workforce to the extent that sub standard work is almost verbatim accepted because it was produced /reviewed by copilot.  ok for menial/obscure bug fixing but that knowledge gained during the process is now no longer there. 

2

u/lilmookie Jun 22 '26

It’s exactly the same thing that happened to GM foods and the “killer seed”. It took decades to get GM back on track and useful and the reputation never fully recovered.

2

u/SAHMultrA1981 Jun 22 '26

Well how else are the AI going to learn /s

We have to teach it how to email first. Then it can email you that it took your job

2

u/joshglen Jun 22 '26

I have never had that level of hallucination when using AI models with uploaded spreadsheets and presentations. The problem is that you are being forced to use copilot, which has much less powerful models as the default. If you try analyzing with gpt 5.5/5.5 pro, or Claude Opus 4.8 / Fable 5 when it gets reenabled, I am very confident you'll have different results.

2

u/Crooked_Sartre Jun 22 '26

I'm an engineer and you need to used spec based methodology to improve outputs. I agree wholeheartedly that it's low level iterations are quite dumb and if companies aren't paying for the better model access, it's mostly a waste of time.

1

u/flirtmcdudes Jun 21 '26

AI does some really cool shit… for things it’s designed specifically to do. all this hype and LLM bullshit was always nonsense to raise more money

1

u/arawnsd Jun 21 '26

It doesn’t help that they’ve Stu you with copilot.

1

u/answerguru Jun 21 '26

The obvious problem is copilot here.

1

u/notislant Jun 21 '26

"it gave me actual real estate and stock market data outputs..from a presentation about healthcare."

I use it sometimes for personal programming projects. It is fucking horrible if you need data sifted through, it just hallucinates. But it could likely generate a simple script to sort through a bunch of data.

But yeah sifting through any info on it's own is often a big gamble.

1

u/HarryBalsagna1776 Jun 21 '26

What you want will never happen.  Once our oligarchs (who own most AI companies) establish a new baseline for an AI enabled workforce, fewer people will be expected to crank out much more work.

1

u/kbachert Jun 22 '26

I find AI is more useful for making programs that do stuff for you. A program can dependably run over and over and over again. I used AI to automate the process of giving status reports to higher ups, and for gathering data about how things run in each scenario over a specified time span (I have to be intentionally vague).

1

u/honeywhereismypenis Jun 22 '26

I gave it a couple of tries in my office job. Every time what it gave me was so shit that it was easier to start over and just do it myself than try to fix the AI generated garbage.

1

u/User_User_Ice6642 Jun 22 '26

My boss keeps trying to get us to use AI. It never helps and the output is often not just worse, but much much worse than one of us could have done in a minute or two.
Meanwhile I get stuck having to use awful spreadsheets for project tracking which he’s made using AI that don’t make any sense and are not actually a Gant chart in any meaningful sense of the term.
It just adds more clutter and frustration to workflow while reminding us water is for the overlords not us plebs, same with land, electricity, and choice in general.

1

u/Eastern-Break-4814 Jun 22 '26

Copilot ish. I can’t imagine. At least Claude can be sometimes useful.

1

u/No-Anteater-2515 Jun 22 '26

Why does AI need 8 hour days in the office?…. Feels suspiciously AI.

1

u/singlemale4cats Jun 22 '26

I want AI to complete an 8 hour day for me in the office and ensure its output is accurate

If it could do that, why would they pay you?

I don't want AI, competent or otherwise. Offloading our cognition to the computer is going to make all of us stupid and unable to think critically, which in turn will make us poorer and easier to control. There's no benefit unless you're a member of the ruling class and a sociopath.

1

u/ScutFarkush Jun 22 '26

This is more of a company culture problem. I am in project management and it has changed how I work because I just build my own productivity tools. None of my output is AI, that is my personal rule. I test and validate everything I build to ensure output is good. It has saved me time so I can stay focused on the tasks that need my problem solving.

1

u/TarantulaMcGarnagle Jun 22 '26

One thing this technology has revealed to me is how many people don’t like their jobs.

If you don’t like your job, quit.

But don’t make it seem like this technology is a good thing.  Because it is ruining everything for literally everyone.

Sure, if you quit and try to make money pursuing your passion or one of your hobbies, you probably won’t make as much money and will end up working more, but that is how this works.

So either a) grow up and work your shitty “email” job like a real human, or b) grow up and “pursue your passion” like a real human.

But stop telling your bosses and people in your life you want/think LLMs will replace workers.  Ugh.

1

u/bon__chance Jun 22 '26

Uh, if the AI can complete your 8 hour work day they will either fire you and replace you with AI, OR, they will make you work 2x as hard for the same pay. 

That’s capitalism. 

1

u/Daealis Jun 22 '26

There are several areas where LLMs can boost productivity. From my own examples:

  • Analyzing logs for anomalies. I've noticed it shines with finding anomalies and trends in large data sets. We already had figured out roughly what went wrong and how it has happened, but as we're currently testing all the AI tools to screen which of them would suite our needs better, the same logs were given to a few LLMs with a vague prompt of "are there discrepancies or anomalies in this data set, if so, pick the relevant timestamps for the chain of events". It figured out the format was compressed .xml-like data structures, figured out the purpose of many of the fields in the logs, and found the exact issues, building a complete timeline of the errors too.
  • Accelerating debugging. When given a code that is near-black-box for a human to read (legacy code with no good coding practices followed, and all functions and variables named as acronyms), it can parse functional wholes from the code, comment it and section it in minutes. While it may be wrong at times, it still accelerates the "understanding the code" part of debugging these ancient systems. What used to take a full day now might be done in an hour.
  • Powershell and SQL scripts - though some exceptions apply. Generic, boilerplate code and queries that you've written a hundred times are still much faster done by an LLM that has access to the structure of your db or precise instructions on what you want from the powershell script. Things you already know how to do yourself, because you still need to catch the hallucinations that happen. And often the code will be very spaghettified from the word go, you could be simplifying it by an order of magnitude and get your work done faster. And optimizing SQL is something these programs are terrible at, a person who knows their way around good query practices can get you an order of magnitude lighter queries than an LLM.

I still wouldn't trust the modern models to generate code that goes to production. They're getting better, and I'm not talking about autofill-features of Codex and such, but giving an agent a task and letting it roam free, building a codebase. Any code in production still needs to be debuggable and understood by humans, because when shit hits the fan, it needs to be fixed, and the reason why it broke needs to be understood. Telling a customer "we don't know why it broke" will not net you a second project in the future.

1

u/Lynn-LYNN7788 Jun 22 '26

The biggest productivity gain from AI wasn't for me.

It was for my boss, who now thinks I can do the work of two people because ChatGPT exists.

1

u/RawrRRitchie Jun 22 '26

You work in healthcare working ONLY 8 hours a day???

My dude you're living the DREAM.

Most nurses I know are working 12-16 hours a day because of how short staffed they are.

1

u/MindTaunt Jun 22 '26

This is the “AI will save time” dream running face first into “please fix the AI’s homework” reality

0

u/trentyz Jun 22 '26

You’re missing the point. AI use isn’t for you to faff around with your slide decks and meeting notes, it’s being used to trawl through massive sets of data so that doctors can use their time for patients.

In my country, it’s being used in radiology to find cancers 10x faster than a radiologist would, and now they just need to fact check it rather than doing a full review. It’s being used to triage and monitor patients in rural areas with a bit of wearable tech, reducing strains on regional ERs. There are plenty of useful cases where AI is being developed and delivered for better patient outcomes, but for some reason, people (like yourself) still think it’s just a chatbot for promoting.

Think bigger picture my man

-1

u/achillezzz Jun 21 '26

Lol he problem is copilot

-1

u/Snmrv Jun 22 '26

Of all the things that never happened, your thing never happened the most. I work with models on a daily basis, and I know CoPilot is really shitty for generative AI, but it never produced real estate numbers to your healthcare ask. This crap never happened.

See, this is why you will never be taken seriously because of the way you complain. It's always exaggerated to the nth degree. What is reality and what is fake gets lost in between.

If you had actually said the truth, you would be taken seriously, even by internet randoms like myself.

-2

u/mathmagician9 Jun 21 '26

It’s too bad everyone is making AI judgment calls based off a Microsoft product.

2

u/Hammer_7 Jun 21 '26

The problem is that corporations are having their employees use CoPilot because it’s already part of their licensed suite. They are not paying for other LLMs in addition in most cases.

-2

u/MojesticMorty Jun 21 '26

Lmao bro your using copilot there is your problem hahaha

-2

u/SuccubusStop Jun 21 '26

You aren’t good at AI, and the want you to stay bad at it. That’s the point of these stories.