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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

> No one HAS to use AI.

Well… That's no longer true, is it?

My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.

And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person.

AI is already unavoidable.

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> My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.

My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.

Nothing says "this product is useful" quite like forcing people to use it and punishing people who don't. If it was that good, there'd be organic demand to use it. People would be begging to use it, going around their boss's back to use it.

The fact that companies have to force you to use it with quotas and threats is damning.

Yeah. Well. There are company that require TPS reports, too.

It's mostly a sign leadership has lost reasoning capability if it's mandatory.

But no, reporting isn't necessarily the problem. There are plenty of places that use reporting to drive a conversation on what's broken, and why it's broken for their workflow, and then use that to drive improvement.

It's only a problem if the leadership stance is "Haha! We found underpants gnome step 2! Make underpants number go up, and we are geniuses". Sadly not as rare as one would hope, but still stupid.

Those kinds of reports seem to be a thing at all big tech corps now.

> My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.

“Why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flAIr?”

> And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person

All of this predates LLMs (what “AI” means today) becoming a useful product. All of this happened already with previous generations of “AI”.

It was just even shittier than the version we have today.

It was also shittier than the version we had before it (human receptionists).

This is what I always think of when I imagine how AI will change the world and daily life. Automation doesn't have to be better (for the customer, for the person using it, for society) in order to push out the alternatives. If the automation is cheap enough, it can be worse for everyone, and still change everything. Those are the niches in ehich I'm most certain will be here to stay— because sometimes, it hardly matters if it's any good.

> where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person.

If you're lucky. I've had LLMs that just repeatedly hang up on me when they obviously hit a dead end.

It isn't a universal thing. I have no doubt there is a job out there that that isn't a requirement. I think the issue is the C-level folks are seeing how more productive someone might be and making it a demand. That to me is the wrong approach. If you demonstrate and build interest, the adoption will happen.

As opposed to reaching, say, somebody in an offshored call center with an utterly undecipherable accent reading a script at you? Without any room for deviation?

AI's not exactly a step down from that.

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