As others have said, companies put chatbots in place in a race to the bottom to solve the “huge” problem of paying people (usually not very well in entry-level roles at least) to help their customers navigate their broken products. My industry is no stranger to extreme cost reduction: support teams are almost always seen as a cost center and like outsourcing before it, companies are always looking for an alternative to just paying domestic people fairly to do the very real work of, um, keeping your customers loyal and paying. But it’s disheartening to see how much worse things are getting with the forced introduction of chat bots that barely function in lieu of just paying people. Lol I feel like such a dweeb talking about this here, but I’ll finish with one salient example: my company was beyond willing to spend in excess of 100k a year on a chatbot that not only doesn’t work, but also pisses our customets off supremely (our product is for older people, who mostly want phone support). But I had to fight tooth and nail to increase my team’s hourly rate for the first time in company history (an increase that amounted to less than 50k annually for a team of 10). Soooooo, yeah, fuck this shit.
Mar 1, 2024
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Apologies if this is strongly worded, but I'm pretty passionate about this. In addition to the functions public-facing AI tools have, we have to consider what the goal of AI is for corporations. This is an old cliché, but it's a useful one: follow the money. When we see some of the biggest tech companies in the world going all-in on this stuff, alarm bells should be going off. We're seeing a complete buy in by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and even Meta suddenly pivoted to AI and seems to be quietly abandoning their beloved Metaverse. For decades, the goal of all these companies has always been infinite growth, taking a bigger share of the market, and making a bigger profit. When these are the main motivators, the workforce that carries out the labor supporting an industry is what inevitably suffers. People are told to do more with less, and cuts are made where C-suite executives see fit at the detriment of everyone down the hierarchy. Where AI is unique to other tangible products is that it is an efficiency beast in so many different ways. I have personally seen it affect my job as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Microsoft's latest IT solutions are designed to automate as much as possible in favor of having actual people carry out typically client-facing tasks. Copy writers/editors inevitably won't be hired if people could instead type a prompt into ChatGPT to spit out a product description. Already, there are so many publications and Substacks that use AI image generators to create attention-grabbing header and link images - before this, an artist could have been paid to create something that might afford them food for the week. All this is to say that we will see a widening discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy and the working class, and the socio-economic structure we're in actively encourages consolidation of power. There are other moral implications with it that I could go on about, but they're kind of subjective. In relation to art, dedicating oneself to a craft often lends itself to fostering a community for support in one's journey, and if we collectively lean on AI more instead of other people, we risk isolating ourselves further in an environment that is already designed to do that. In my opinion, we shouldn't try to co-exist with something that is made to make our physical and emotional work obsolete.
Mar 24, 2024
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Asked a spicy question at the end of a long presentation about all the AI tooling we’re supposed to use, essentially around how we can reconcile pushing towards this technology while maintaining our B Corp status. Did not receive a satisfactory answer to that and they’ll probs realize I’m the only person not signed up for the org ChatGPT account, a tool I have never used for environmental reasons. Anywho, had to tell my lil internet friends about this as I suffer through several more days of presentations extolling the value of replacing every single work stream with AI processes that decimate the earth.
Apr 30, 2025
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I’m being fully FORCED to use AI on Google Office and it’s SO annoying. I don’t appreciate that after any Google Meets (which SUCKS by the way) that Gemini wants to send me a recap of the meeting. I DON’T WANT GEMINI ANYWHERE NEAR ME! Also, this AI Fiverr GO I keep getting force-fed in my YouTube Ads, that uses individual creators AI to generate content that looks like the content they’d create is absolutely insane and horribly dystopian.
What happened to art? What happened to appreciating the human spirit, and learning from our mistakes? Idk, but I’m tired.
AI could have been a really genius way for expanding our understanding of important issues, but instead it’s used just for people to honestly be lazy, and also creepy.
Weird Note: People falling in love with AI is honestly really tragic. But, as someone who has a grandmother who has repeatedly fallen for scammers due to loneliness, I would rather have her fall in love with AI versus someone who’s trying to get (and has successfully gotten) her bank account information to slowly take money from her and string her along via horribly photoshopped photos and copy & pasted poems found off of google with her name added to seem unique. Just strange to say I’d rather have my grandma fall in love with a robot vs a scammer 😂😂.
May 30, 2025
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We know what’s for dinner this week
Feb 1, 2025
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I probably have to pop that cherry today for work and I’m deeply sad since I’ve gotten this far with never once using it, which is the way things should be.
May 9, 2025