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points by CharlieDigital 1 day ago | 0 comments

    > The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked, and the Valley is not equipped to detect that. It has no experience with being disliked by normal people.

An anecdote from a recent occurrence. We show up for a team offsite. Several leaders presented decks. Of course, AI generated decks. Some of the animation was broken. Many of the read throughs felt like they were the first time folks saw the decks.

Cannot state how off-putting this was as someone participating in this team activity. The talks I appreciated the most were the ones where people didn't have slides at all and talked off the cuff.

[–] fidotron 1 day ago

AI existing has done a lot to expose how many people have always had zero respect for their audience.

The confusion is this doesn't diminish the utility of AI as a tool by people that do care one bit. It only affects the people whose work is indistinguishable from low effort AI nonsense, while the others will get ever more conspicuously "authentic".

[–] ThePhysicist 1 day ago

Well it is a good indicator of what stuff people do not like to spend time on. Turns out it's making decks, reports and all that. I use AI for building games and a virtual LAN party OS and everything is super polished and looks great (to me), because I spend a ton of time on it and obsess over details, AI is a big accelerator in that venture for me and gives me superpowers.

But yeah sometimes when I just need to deliver some asset to a customer I use AI to create it and lightly edit it, the result is ok but it's not great.

I share the disdain for AI built presentations, especially Claude has a signature look that is so tiring. I remember this phase when Office 2016 (?) came out and featured this "smart" diagram editor that let you create these cringe arrows, flowcharts etc. with bullet points, some people really got hooked on that and used it everywhere, the result was as cringeworthy as the AI presentations are. Eventually people lost interest and things got back to normal. AI might be different though.

That said I also generate presentation decks for my products with Claude using an HTML based workflow with proper print CSS using Weasyprint, where I use my own corporate identity and design practices from the web, the result looks really professional and pleasing (to me), customers also like it a lot. It doesn't really look like AI either as it's just good HTML and CSS with a print stylesheet. So there are ways of using it to make things better, but it also brings out the lazy side of people that don't care so much.

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

I totally get using AI to make the decks; it's drudgery.

But now that one no longer needs to actually perform the mechanical deck building, how about spending that gained efficiency on ensuring quality of the output? Play it back at least once. Use that time savings to prep to deliver a killer talk.

[–] 10111001 1 day ago

> But now that one no longer needs to actually perform the mechanical deck building, how about spending that gained efficiency on ensuring quality of the output? Play it back at least once. Use that time savings to prep to deliver a killer talk.

Or few truly have the discipline to do that, but they got a lot of it "for free," because of the effort they had to put into making the slide deck.

I'm more and more of the opinion that friction isn't bad, and mindlessly reducing it has actually been bad for us. What we should have are "friction engineers," that carefully design things we need to do to be difficult in precise ways that force us to do other things we benefit from but don't have the discipline to consistently choose.

[–] steveBK123 1 day ago

I think AI is creating some of the same problems in non-coding tasks that it has created in coding.

That is - you can do more & have faster iteration loops, but you can basically burn all the gains on stupid stuff no one needs.

If your org likes to scramble, and/or your management has ADHD.. then LLM slop cannons pointed at things like dashboards, status reports and decks is extremely exciting. People are throwing together materials about content they don't understand for people who aren't going to read it. But the motion feels incredible.

[–] ryandrake 1 day ago

It's a tough tightrope to walk.

As someone whose job heavily involves giving presentations and writing documents / spreadsheets, I am under tremendous pressure now to simply "output more stuff." AI has increased the amount of "stuff" co-workers are spewing out, and that's apparently what's being measured. I don't know if any of this "stuff" is being read, but my management seems only interested in volume of bits. So, slop it is.

Occasionally, I'm sure this stuff is getting read by a real human, and I apologize in advance if it's you. But incentives are unfortunately totally aligned towards producing mountains of slop.

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

    > ...my management seems only interested in volume of bits

It's as bad as teams that are measuring by LoC or PR volume.

Whenever I hear this come up, my first question is "how are you matching that to revenue?" and you can see gears churning...

[–] strbean 1 day ago

> This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked

I think the early automobile had a huge share of haters as well?

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

I can understand both the automobile and electricity because those were legit dangerous and worthy of some caution.

[–] daemonologist 1 day ago

Still are (cars at least, kill twice as many people annually as malaria).

[–] blooalien 1 day ago

> ... because those were legit dangerous and worthy of some caution.

As is the case with many humans when equipped with "AI".

[–] Analemma_ 1 day ago

How many people do you think there currently are in safety-critical industries who are just vibe coding everything and not reviewing the code, or giving it to agents to review with instructions to just route around whatever quality gates there are? I bet it's a lot more than zero.

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

A lot less than you probably think.

My line of work: I deal with enterprise SaaS companies and I can see first hand that engineers are very slow moving with AI, very cautious, and still believe they need to review small PRs.

[–] Analemma_ 1 day ago

I guess we'll just have to see. Personally my bet is on the first incident to cause more than 100 fatalities which can be solidly traced back to vibe coding to happen in the next 12-18 months (possibly it already has, depending on whether you count the school bombing in Iran).

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

I don't think it's fair at all to blame AI for that; a human made the final call to drop those bombs.

[–] soperj 1 day ago

And then there's Microsoft

[–] akmarinov 1 day ago

Electricity too

[–] teeray 19 hours ago

The modern automobile has a lot of haters too

[–] laserDinosaur 1 day ago

Similar to that I was looking at VPS options recently and Ionos seemed to have some good word of mouth - I go to their site and its COVERED in AI this AI that, AI logos on every single product line they have. Tacky trend chasing is not what I want from a stable long term boring VPS.

Is seeing that much AI crap being thrown at their product lineup actually appealing to anyone?

[–] 1potato 1 day ago

I recently cancelled my service with IONOS. I was just on a basic shared plan, but I found the performance unacceptable. They don’t use cPanel, if that’s important to you. Their upsell attempts are full of dark patterns. When you cancel your account, unless you are very forceful, they want you to CALL them to confirm or they’ll attempt to keep billing you.

Just one person’s experience, but it wasn’t a positive one.

[–] saghm 1 day ago

I heard from a former coworker that someone who predated both of us at the company (i.e. had been there over a decade) got fired after asking for clarification about a very obvious contradiction between two (presumably AI written) slides from a new executive at an all-hands meeting.

[–] steveBK123 1 day ago

Q&A at all hands meetings is a trap to fire people who don't drink enough kool-aid.

Do not, under any circumstances ever ask a question other than "gee golly sir, you sure are smart, how do I grow up to be like you".

[–] saghm 18 hours ago

I certainly would never have the guts to do something like that, but on the other hand, I think people like that are very valuable for anyone who actually cares about real feedback. Evidently in this case (and probably in most cases) that doesn't include the executives, but as someone who doesn't have a lot of confidence in his ability to notice changing headwinds in a large company until there are very visible effects, his sacrifice probably would have been a much-needed wakeup call for me if I were still there.

[–] hijinks 1 day ago

a few days ago i sat through a all hands presentation that they made claude an artifact for it so it was some voice LLM reading.

It read the slide notes for the at the end of each "slide". He was asked to give the presentation himself and couldn't do it.

[–] gim89 15 hours ago

We aren't fed up with AI, we're fed up with them.

[–] AnimalMuppet 1 day ago

"Read throughs".

Oh, mercy. Do not read your slide deck to me. I can read it faster than you can read it out loud. While I'm doing that, say something that isn't on the slide.

[–] bee_rider 1 day ago

I don’t get the idea of saying one thing while the audience reads something else. It seems like a sure recipe for confusion.

I usually put almost no prose-type text on my presentations. Figures, captions for figures, equations, variable definitions, small code snippets, those are ok.

The only time I’d put prose on there is if it is a “main idea,” then I’ll do the thing where I read it word-for-word from the slide. But that’s got to be used sparingly enough that it sticks out as a weird moment that the audience is supposed to remember.

[–] blooalien 1 day ago

> I don’t get the idea of saying one thing while the audience reads something else. It seems like a sure recipe for confusion.

If one does this, it should be because the slide is a list of short bullet-point talking-points, and the speaker is going through them one by one explaining them in more detail.

> I usually put almost no prose-type text on my presentations. Figures, captions for figures, equations, variable definitions, small code snippets, those are ok.

This is honestly the type of stuff I always found most helpful in a slide-deck presentation. Information that enhances what the speaker is saying.

[–] JKCalhoun 1 day ago

Yeah, I have allow tolerance for bad slide decks (which existed way before LLMs).

Thankfully, I got some good pointers and coaching from having worked at Apple and having done a number of WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) talks.

[–] spwa4 1 day ago

You see this constantly, but as usual this is management refusing to put in the least amount of effort. AI might enable some of this, whereas they (ab)used team members before, but otherwise, what does it have to do with AI? In fact I doubt most managers can figure out how to make a presentation with AI, and it will still take time so they won't do it even if they figure it out.

Before, at a certain FANG you definitely know, you had management making presentations they very obviously had never seen before, made by people who weren't at product meetings and so were extremely shallow about any project and had basic facts wrong ... and of course management can't answer questions about the slides.

I 100% get the complaint. But what does it have to do with AI?

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

AI lowers the bar significantly. Just as with kids and essays; it's not the plagiarism or cheating on an essay is new, it's that AI makes it trivially easy to engage in low-value behavior and thus higher incidence.

In this team? Pre-AI, maybe 10% of the slides would be questionable. Post-AI? 90% of the slides were just "meh", broken animations (they never previewed it), and "uh, let me read that slide".

[–] dofm 1 day ago

> You see this constantly, but as usual this is management refusing to put in the least amount of effort.

We're all managers now. So everyone can be that lazy.