alt Hacker NewsWe could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
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High trust environments are inherently more efficient and cheaper so the destruction of trust will act like a tax on all activity. But that'll probably make the GDP go up so it will be read as an economic improvement, just like wrestling with health insurance companies.
Even when they are honest about it there's a cost. I keep receiving status emails where the first line says "Generated with AI, be sure to check for accuracy". Apparently, it's more efficient to send an email with unverified information to twenty people and tell them to each individually check it than it is for the sender to just make sure it's accurate before they send it out. Maybe they're just asking their agent to do the check for them though.
"Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs"
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
> I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.