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Comment by Hard_Space | Hacker News Reader

I used to see AI generated images with lots of unintelligible writing or misspelled words in slides, but the speaker left them in anyway. “Good enough” is not customer obsession.

This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22, because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.

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I don't know if there is another industry that behaves this childishly. There might be. But good grief, how much more juvenile can ours possibly get? AI-generated images with obviously nonsensical text is something I never thought I'd see in professional meetings. But it is becoming more and more common.

we’re witnessing how advanced civilizations actually die

there’s no heroic clash with other civilizations, they simply rot away

Check the podcast “Fall of Civilizations”, this is very true. This advanced civilization is actually dying.

Long before GenAI, I saw people using meme generators a lot in corporate presentations. I found that equally jarring. Replacing that with GenAI stuff is probably an improvement. At least it's reducing legal risk. It seems more understandable to a global audience, too.

I still don't have an explanation why people are doing this. Is it part of leadership training? Or do presenters have their own theory that including this stuff makes the presentation more memorable and enjoyable?

People have a thing that they mimic the behavior of those above them in the hierarchy. CEO used a meme once because they thought it's funny, then everyone did this in order to mimic CEO.

Why was leetcode so popular? Because Google did it and they were the cool kids at the time.

And that started when we hired a couple people who were into competitive programming an started an event/contest

Being a grey beard, white board tests were popular because we didn't have an applicant pool experienced in software development. So we gave people logic and problem solving tests to see if they had the right type of thinking/temperament to train them up to be software devs. They didn't evolve into the trash they are now until later.

It remains to be seen whether GenAI only acts as an accelerant of organizational decline, by amplifying the laziness inherent in people.

It’s worse.

Remember the “Prussian general 2x2”? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/

AI enables the stupid and diligent. When I get long form emails from people I don’t know well, I assume that 80% of the time it’s AI bullshit. People are having AI respond with bullshit to other people’s bullshit.

I’m actually deliberately adding bad grammar to communications as a hook that you should read it. It hurts my soul.

During a recent semester final exam with fill in the blank questions, a student raised their hand to ask the teacher, "Do we get marked off for spelling?" The class was bewildered when the teacher answered, "Of course." Some students immediately turned in their exam assuming it would be impossible to pass.

At least everyone gets an RSU

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