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In the latest update on AI slop, Ars Technica, a once reputable publication of over 25 years, has accidentally published a fake AI written article, complete with fake quotes. Unlike the fake story shared by Nate Silver earlier, which was published on a grifter's glorified blog, and somehow syndicated into Yahoo news, this story was actually published by a "real" media company under its own label. To be fair, the ars article bears few of the obvious hallmarks of AI writing, and it also gets a passing score by most AI detectors. I suspect the authors may have lazily asked AI to create a point by point skeleton for the article, then humanly written the words themselves that appeared on the page (excluding the hallucinated fake quotes of course). Fortunately, the article was taken down quickly, but the editors have so far refused to disclaim the use of AI, amd instead are hiding behind the misquotes as a reason to take the article down. It remains to be seen whether or not the use of AI slop was actually a rouge writer violating the policy, or someone using AI as directed by management but just skimping on the checking its answers part.
In other news, Malewarebytes has joined the ranks of Cloudflare and Lenovo as multi-billion dollar multinationational corporations that decided it's necessary to each publish a library of absolutely worthless AI slop, masquerading without disclosure as legitimate content. These zero effort AI takes are ... well ... zero effort, and provide zero added value to society by being published. I have no idea if Malewarebytes is a good company, but it's certainly a real company, with offices around the globe and enterprise contracts with many fortune 500 companies. These are all companies with sales and marketing teams in the dozens or hundreds of people, and likely multiple layers of approval to do anything new, yet they decided that zero effort AI slop takes are perfectly in line with their brand and reputation. There's clearly some kind of incentives (likely mostly SEO) for real companies to publish loads and loads of fake content on their websites, tangentially or not at all related to their actual business, which is extremely unfortunate because it's a waste of time for anyone who happens across this fake content, and even a waste of time for the slopmeister who has to click the button to generate 10 million words of fake content.
I wonder if they're under pressure from higher ups to make stuff using AI? Their bosses have probably been convinced through AI hysteria that extreme gains are possible using AI, and that if those gains aren't materializing for them, it's a problem with how they handle their prompts, rather than it being impossible owing to the deficiencies of the technology. Not wanting to be left behind, they mandate everyone use AI and increase their output in line with what the hypists say is possible, typically an efficiency boost of twenty to one hundred percent, and thus, pointy-haired bosses lacking technical expertise relevant to their companies products, unable to understand the deficiencies of AI output, tank market viability while boosting investor enthusiasm in the short term by playing into popular biases of the financialized scam economy.
The bosses get rich, as do the tech scammers and their affiliates, but the economy inches closer to its doom once the bubble goes pop.
I'm definitely feeling a lot of pressure from the higher ups to get on top of using LLMs. I support some extent of the push, the tools really are impressive and we're seeing real test cases of it providing a lot of benefit. But there is also a dynamic where the different manager fiefdoms are jockeying to show who's team is best utilizing it. I'm usually the shield that stand between our team and upper management bullshit and I recently had to walk my manager off a cliff of requiring each engineer to answer a short questionnaire every day about if they've used AI and for what the previous day after our standup.
Both can be true that there is a lot of value to be gained and that there is a bit of a mania going on where upper managers smell blood in the water. There's a lot of talk about merging teams and helping engineers transfer skills across teams, this is the kind of environment that makes careers as the manager who's team is able to demonstrate a superior implementation stands to gobble up other teams.
The actual labs could pop, but the people using the tech won't. The dotcom bubble didn't get get rid of email when it popped. This stuff is useful and there its use will linger.
That's something which drives me crazy about the whole thing. If LLMs really are that good of a tool, you don't need to mandate them. If someone can get a 10x speedup on his work, he's going to use the tool without management breathing down his neck to do it (indeed he'll probably use it even if management forbids it). All management needs to do is let nature take its course, and if some people are suddenly doing 10x the performance you have them coach the others on how to get that same speed-up. It's completely irrational to require people to use LLMs, rather than focusing on the results. It's nothing but FOMO really, and it's so aggravating to have to deal with.
this is just not really how corporate salary workers function. We had a guy we kept around for probably longer than we should have who refused to learn anything but sql. It's notoriously difficult to track actual productivity in software and because of that a lot of coasting, because when I say "yeah I spent all day yesterday working on the inspection schedule import process" There is probably only one guy on the team who could reasonably say if that was a task that should really take a whole day, and he's not my manager.
The whole concept of FOMO exists because there really are situations where you could be missing out. If you just assume that all the hype is right and there is a tremendous amount of uplift available if your team is using these new tools then wouldn't you want to push them into using them asap? There's always an available excuse in software not to learn new tools, deadlines are weekly and you have real work to do outside of messing with some new instruction set.
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