alt Hacker News> “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.”
Everyone I talk to (including outside of tech) is going through this phase at their companies. It’s not working.
Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what? If the police are making a document that sources from another report that another officer used AI to produce from their notes which were also run through AI and on and on, an inconsistency that leaks in at a previous step will check out when someone reviews the output against the inputs.
We’re all also discovering that many people’s idea of reviewing the output is to skim it and verify that it looks convincing enough. Checking facts is hard and takes time. These people are using AI because they want to work less, not to give themselves extra work.
Replies
One can ask, what is a practical difference between “Check everything that it produces” and “Do all the work yourself”?
It’s not typing that’s the bottleneck, at least not often, so this is essentially assuming that you can do all the needed work without actually doing it, which is obviously wishful thinking.
This is a great way of capturing the core problem. Fact-checking a document is a difficult skill! Expecting people who've never had to do that before to just start doing it - when these AI tools are supposed to save them time and make life easier - is not reasonable.
Here's a massive document, without any real context as to what thinking went into the points it's making, tell me if it looks ok. Oh, and there's 10 more where that came from.
We're outsourcing the thinking to the recipient.
Yes, it's way easier to create the report now, but it's not being honed down to the crux of the points it needs to make. And the reviewers are expected to what? Up their ability to mentally consume and reason about reports.
I mean, barrier number 1: did you read it yourself before asking someone else seems too high for some..
> We’re all also discovering that many people’s idea of reviewing the output is to skim it and verify that it looks convincing enough.
I mean over time I've come to believe that most people are just _bad at reading_ - if you ask these people to compare two documents they'll say that they are the same if the wording or surface "feel" is at all similar, even if in the precision of the statement they say the opposite.
See also: People being generally bad at listening and hearing what they want to instead of anything quantitatively derivable from what the other person said.
None of this is written as an excuse for AI.
its just duplicating the work at that point, because you have to check everything anyways
> Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what?
A colleague of mine circulated "minutes" from a meeting last week, there were only three of us in the meeting (one external service provider, my colleague + me).
There were several items on the "minutes" which I didn't recall being discussed, so I asked him if he'd had AI help, he said AI was filling in the gaps based on its knowledge of other discussions he'd had with it.
Glorious.