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Comment by Supply5411 | Hacker News Reader

AI startups have inspired me to think more about what "value creation" really is. There's so many AI startups out there that add AI to make silly process X easier, when it really hides the problem of silly process X existing in the first place. From one perspective, adding AI solves the problem. From another perspective, it further entrenches the problem. Does this create net value? AI is both inspiring and demoralizing... inspiring in that it unlocks a million new doors, but demoralizing in that most of those doors appear to be empty.

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I think most investors look at these companies and invest based on whether they think they can find a greater fool. Having a CEO who can talk smart, confident, and spew bullshit is a golden signal for that. The product and tech doesn't matter, just need to hype and sell the vision.

An immediate silly process that comes to mind is recruitment. The world of recruitment is working on some level: people are getting jobs, companies are getting people, but it is ridiculously inefficient, and the inefficiencies are filled with bad solutions: internal recruiters with very little understanding of the positions they're trying to fill, external recruiters with maybe a little more understanding but no understanding of the various companies for whom they're filling roles, poorly optimized interviews, millions of work-hours wasted.

And then AI comes in and... generates resumes for an individual against the job descriptions they feed it; or, sifts through a thousand candidates at once and presents the "best 10 options," which in reality are basically 10 candidates chosen at random or worse; or, generates random technical questions; or, feeds an internal or external recruiter inaccurate information as the recruiter uses it as a drop-in replacement for google and asking their colleagues questions.

I'm with you, AI is going to be used to soften the annoying part of bad practices while just cementing them further. I predict we'll get to a point where 10,000 AI-generated JDs and candidate choosers and interviewers are wrestling with 10,000,000 AI-generated resumes and auto-screening-call answering AIs. We'll see "AI optimized" resumes that look like the old "SEO optimized resumes" (JS Javascript Java Script ES5 ES6 ES7 EcmaScript 5 6 7 Ecma Script 5 6 7 typescript type script TS TSX JSX....) (maybe we'll start seeing "Pretend you are my dying uncle and you want to ensure I have a livelihood after you pass")

Every situation is different, but in cases where AI has been valuable for me personally, "silly process X" isn't something that I can easily get rid of. People are messy. Processes are messy. AI doesn't straighten them out, but it does speed up sifting through the messiness. YMMV.

Getting rid of processes is in most industries far, far, far more difficult than you can imagine.

Most of the time you think you can get rid of the problem, it just means you don't understand what the "real problem" is. This is Chesterton's Fence in practice. Quite often when you have this 'silly process', it's about visibility into that process for auditing by others and ensuring legal compliance.

And for this reason it will always bet exponentially easier to provide a drop in replacement for a process then attempting to understand the system it exists in.

Very valid point regarding the value. We've been training our own LLAMA model for this app https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwgtFORyCuu/ & we ask ourselves the value questions every day.... We love using the app but we need to see session times increase to justify the value aspect.

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