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AI Users Are Working Up to 90 Minutes Longer Every Day, Study Finds (gizmodo.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 127 points 1 week ago (24 children)

I can anecdotally attest to this. My company has built their product in such a way that it is unusable without AI. There are some things it legitimately expedites, but there are more things that used to take me 10 minutes that now take an hour and a half. And then I have to go validate the output anyway.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

    Yup.

    My work uses MS Teams and Sharepoint, and MS is dumbing down both products as much as is feasible in order to force people to use CoPilot more. It's moronic, and I hate discovering changes to the UI that appear to be bugs and then finding out it was deliberate. (Like buttons and scroll bars that are invisible until you hover a cursor over them. Stupid.)

    But LLM's were only ever useful if the validation of their output didn't outweigh the supposed time saved, and that is rarely the case.

    Stupid business practices. Can't wait for a popping of the bubble.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago

    if the validation of their output didn’t outweigh the supposed time saved

    This is the key. LLMs are (somewhat, there are style and maintenance issues)) useful where things are easy to prove correct, like mathematics (there are theorem validity provers) or programming (does it compile, pass tests).

    Most of the rest of the world is not like that and tasks require judgement, so people need to validate that the LLM didn't 'hallucinate' (bullshit anthropomorphic word for 'get it wrong') again.

    In subtle domains finding if an error exists can take longer than doing it yourself, with a worse failure rate, especially as skills atrophy. Same thing happened on production lines with the introduction of robots.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Teams implementation of copilot was done poorly. I'll use it sometimes by clicking copilot in the upper right corner. Its 50/50 after I use copilot in teams that a window will cover up the left side where all my chats are and it won't go away. I have to actually right click and quit teams to get the chats with people back up.

    Clearly there was minimal testing by Microsoft before they rolled out copilot in teams.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Clearly there was minimal testing by Microsoft before they rolled out copilot in teams.

    Oh yeah. They rolled out an update a month or two ago that turned notifications for project tasks I had that I had flagged for higher importance, inexplicably. Absolutely infuriating stuff happening with their vibe coders.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 week ago (15 children)

    I'm probably ignorant, as i left the conventional workforce before AI took off.. But how does that exactly make you work longer? If the AI isn't finished by the time the shift is over, then it's tomorrows problem, no?

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  • [–] 54 points 1 week ago (13 children)

    Most people in jobs like this aren't paid hourly, they are salaried and expected to get the job done. Usually the problem isnt necessarily the runtime of an AI, but the inefficiency of a workflow that brought AI into its center.

    It's like walking a child through how to cook a meal. Maybe it's technically less "work" since they are doing the chopping, measuring, stirring, etc, but it takes longer since you have to take time to be explicit about all your instructions, and correcting mistakes, etc. The difference is a child will eventually learn how to do it themselves, while in practice, and AI probably won't since it likely relies on inputs that can't just be piped in (cause if they could, you'd do the job with regular programming).

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago (11 children)

    Most people in jobs like this aren’t paid hourly, they are salaried and expected to get the job done. Usually the problem isnt necessarily the runtime of an AI, but the inefficiency of a workflow that brought AI into its center.

    Sure, but if the tools provided/mandated by the employer are inadequate to do the job more efficiently. That should be the employers problem, not the employee's.

    You can't as management both claim the need for AI out of efficiency, and blame it at the same time for you not getting your job done in time because of it. But then again, how often do you come across competent leadership these days. The lemon can always be squeezed a bit more I guess.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    should

    sorry, we live in capitalism, hbu?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    Why would management even consider that they're contradicting themselves every 5 minutes? They're the ones that sign the paychecks, they can be absurd if they want to be. It's not like there's every going to be personal consequences anyway, and if the company burns to the ground, they've already got their golden parachute worked out.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    They don't have to, just as much as you don't have to compensate for their shortcomings. Of course that's easier said then done if you work somewhere with little to no workers protection and fear losing your job. But that still doesn't make it right.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Of course that’s easier said then done if you work somewhere with little to no workers protection and fear losing your job.

    That part. No one said it was right. It's simply what many of us have to put up with to survive. Building solidarity and unions in the current environment is difficult. Labour power has been set back almost to square one in a lot of places, and if you'll remember, building it up in the first place, cost a lot of lives and a lot of blood. It's really hard to be a martyr for the cause, when you know no one is going to step in to support the people who count on you, which is why organizing NGO support networks is so essential. They know that community is what gives us leverage, and that's why they do everything in their power to make community building seem futile.

    We have no churches, because they've all been compromised. We have precious few non-corpo social clubs and sports orgs. Unions have been beaten into a bloody mess. We have a handful of charities and volunteer orgs, most of which are dependent on corporate grants donations for survival. I'm not saying it's hopeless, but we need to be clear where we are to figure out a path forward. We need to build communities of truth and trust beyond their reach if we're going to push back. Just saying "no" sounds great in principle... but we have to all say "no" together otherwise you're just lighting yourself on fire, and the machine will not even notice you're gone.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (1 child)

    I know unions and workers rights are basically none existent across the pond. And I can only hope that changes for you guys. But I sure hope if I would get fired for doing as I'm told by management, that I can go to the union and/or judge to get compensation for being unjustly fired.

    This shouldn't really be a discussion imho, but alas here we are.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    We're less far gone in Canada, but it's still bad. We're hanging on by our finger tips to worker's rights, the US is largely in free-fall. That said, they're doing their damnedest to run the same playbook in Europe and Britain, as I'm sure you're all too aware. Hang on to your community. Don't take it for granted. Work at it. Grow it. Build a wall (metaphorically) around it because they are going to try to break you the way they broke us. Don't let them divide you over petty things. Race, ethnicity, sexuality. They weaponize the wedges to divide and conquer. Repetition creates reality. Ritual is a defence against propaganda, don't be afraid to use it. They will mock you for using emotion, while weaponizing rage and hate. Stand together.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    you speak in logical thought, but in my experience the boss does not care about that. you are expected to do the job in the time allotted and any failure is your responsibility even (and especially) if they pulled you off of that to deal with "more important" priorities in the middle of your work. you will be dinged for failing to complete it by deadline.

    this was eventually used to justify laying me off at my last job even though i usually pulled it off.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Also, anecdotally, if it's anything like my workplace then management is trying to nickel and dime the process so much that they refuse to invest in the people building the tools. They think because they build AI tools that they don't need actual humans on the team and can just "10x" everything so they're forced to try to make vast one-size-fits-all tools that are a mile wide and an inch deep

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Not to mention all the tools you use on a daily basis that have also adopted AI development causing them to behave erratically. I have been wrestling with the coderabbitai for the last two hours to get a PR finished.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    My company recently shifted to a new time clock system, which uses AI for basic search functions. Search is also intended to be the primary way users navigate the site. The salesperson’s marketing was “oh it’s so easy, you just describe what you want to do, and the AI takes you there!”

    I need to approve my time card each week. The page is literally titled “Time Approval”. But searching for “Time Approval” usually doesn’t yield any results. Sometimes I’ll get lucky if I search for something like “I need to approve my time card for last week” but even that isn’t foolproof. Like it literally can’t find the page I need every week, even when I search for the exact title of the page. And who the fuck wants to type out an entire sentence just for a basic site directory search?

    The way to get to the approval page through the UI (by clicking through, without using the AI-powered search function) is like four obscure menus deep. This is something that every employee is expected to do every week, and they buried it like they were planning on making a treasure map. They intentionally made the UI unintuitive, so users would feel compelled to use the AI search. But then the AI search doesn’t fucking work, so I end up having to navigate the unintuitive menus anyways. I ended up just bookmarking the approval page directly in my browser, so I can log in and then use the bookmark to jump straight to that page.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    this is the kind of shit that gives me small comfort

    they want to make me use a shitty stupid terrible slow system? ok, fine. but I'm gonna take my sweet time with it. oh, something else isn't getting done? damn, probably should've thought of that before you implemented a system that you were warned was going to slow down 99% of the company employees and cost tons of quantifiable time

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    I can too - but at the same time, a lot of the extra time I’m putting in is using the clankers to more quickly address tech debt issues that we have been punting on for literal years (do not get me started on the priorities of my manager and our PM)

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