I see a lot of discussion here about over-hyped AI, and then I see the huge AI bubble at my workplace, in news, in PR statements, etc.

Are there folks who work at companies – especially interested in those in tech – that have a reasonable handle on AI’s practical uses and its limitations?

Where I work, there’s:

  • a dashboard of AI usage by team and individual, which will definitely not affect performance review in any way
  • a mandate to use one AI tool last month, and this month a new one to abandon that tool and adopt a different one
  • quarterly goals where almost every one has some amount of “with AI” in it
  • letters from the CEO asking which teams are using AI to implement features from ticket descriptions, or (inspired by the news) use flocks of agents, asking for positives without mention of asking for negatives
  • a team creating a review pipeline for AI-generated output in our product, planning to review the quality of the output… using AI
  • teammates are writing code and designs and sending them for review without ensuring functionality or pruning irrelevant portions, despite a statement that everyone is responsible for reviewing AI output

Is all the resistance to overuse of AI grassroots and is the pressure for rampant adoption uniform among executives/investors? Or are some companies or verticals not drinking the koolaid?

  • Bayta@lemmy.world
    7·
    8 hours ago

    I run a small (5-employees) tech firm. We ignored AI for the first couple of years. Last year we started paying the basic Cursor subscription for our employees. We encouraged them to try it out a bit for a couple of weeks however they saw fit to evaluate if they found it useful for their workflows but we said we didn’t mind at all if they ended up deciding to adopt it long term or not. We also stressed we would continue reviewing code the same way so they would have to take responsibility for reviewing the AI’s output. I started as the only coder in the company and I review every PR so I am extremely familiar with all our codebase and I haven’t found it very useful personally but the people that joined more recently say it can be useful to point them towards parts of the code they are not familiar with yet. Right now each one uses it as a tool freely however they prefer and I don’t usually ask them about it, same way I don’t ask how often they use the “find and replace” function in VS Code.

    • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
      72·
      7 hours ago

      That could potentially backfire on you:

      https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Reasoning

      1. You could be including copyrighted code and not complying with its license.
      2. You don’t own the copyrights to AI generated code.
      3. The bugs and vulnerabilities AIs introduce are much harder to spot than in human authored code.
      4. Your team might not understand the code that they’re submitting.

      Etc.

      • chunes@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Good luck proving that any given snippet was written by AI. That sounds like a total mess.