> Every use of AI for these robs the employee culture of a genuine trust building moment.
Spot on.
The erosion of communication and relationships between people in the workplace (or even outside it) that AI contributes to is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Society today has already suffered greatly in these areas thanks to social media, and AI just makes it worse.
People (in general) are really struggling to understand when/how to use AI to be more productive and happier (and imo there is a way to do it, by offloading the grunt work to AI). With the constant rush and jamming of AI down everyone's throats though, its hard to be able to take that step back and think "is this use of AI making me happier/more productive".
Yes. The role of good management here cannot be understated. Good management (all the way up) is the difference between saying "be more productive, here's an AI subscription" and people understanding what types of usage are actually wanted and useful.
As it is now, with just the vague handwaving many managers are doing, people are hearing "You should reach for AI immediately anytime you get an input that you technically can paste into the AI" - so we can't be mad at them if they're just doing what they think they're being told to do.
Where are you guys working where people are doing this? I work in a company where leadership is also ramming AI down everyone's throats, but I don't recall ever getting copy/pastes from LLM as responses to E-mails or chats. My biggest problem is people not reading/answering their E-mails and chats at all, or finally getting back to me long after the due date of whatever I'm asking about. Which is a different workplace comms problem altogether.
Design docs on the other hand have been fully taken over by the slop machine. They all kind of look the same now, and give off that familiar "I didn't write it so you might as well not read it" vibe.
I was working in an env where I started to suspect that people I was chatting with were using LLMs. These were people that didn't want to talk to me either way, so there was not much lost here. I suspected that, because the technical expertise they were showcasing when responding to messages would evaporate when talkin f2f
Norms surrounding the use of LLMs are in the process of being established, it's a new frontier. Many people rely on these signals over common sense. The feedback loop will lead to corrections in time, for now people are sussing out where the boundaries of appropriate-use are. Corp/gov policy is still lagging as well.
I really am not a big fan of this... Hand-waving, I guess? Around this problem. Saying "well the norms are still being established" feels kind of like a "well don't really get mad at the people doing it, they're still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable use" kind of thing to me. People should already know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. The fact that they don't is very, very telling and says a lot about the people doing it IMO.
Maybe. It doesn't help that a lot of corporations are pushing their employees into dark patterns around LLMs. That in turn informs their own personal use of LLMs outside the workplace