Gen Z Sabotaging AI at Work So It Won't Take Their Job

The attempts at work so far are so shit I don’t even need to sabotage them, yet management go on and on about how great it is. I am increasingly getting a feeling that no one understands the product I work with because they are all just trusting the LLM output which is so badly wrong very frequently.

Fuck it, I handed my notice in recently in a response to a return to office order, so it isn’t going to be my problem.

Gen Z doesn’t need to sabotage AI. AI is already doing a fine job sabotaging itself.

A new report by the AI company Writer

Into the trash, then.

Don’t need to sabotage a “worker” who has been trained using 4Chan and Reddit. And refusing to use the tech is often because it does the work wrong and the human has to redo it anyway.

I do use it for inline coding suggestions because it’s required, but almost never accept a line of code as-is, because there’s usually some mistake, subtle or otherwise. It does help me not have to google syntax sometimes. But the non-"AI” code suggestions used to do that just fine in the past, so it’s not much of an improvement. And I’d never let it write more than one or two lines at a time because that would mean debugging code I didn’t write which is much more difficult that writing your own code for most experienced coders.

I was offered a job doing QA as a “Spftware Engineering Subject Matter Expert”, from my University’s alumni network. The job would allegedly involve reviewing model training data and outputs related to software development workflows and catching errors and mistakes… It would pay $30/hr and be remote. I wonder what kind of sabotage could be done from that position… poisoning models has been shown to be both really surprisingly easy, almost impossible to catch, and really effective (see this study where AI personality traits persisted in any model that ingested seemingly innocuous training data from a model with the tracked traits… maybe we could give any AI a bad attitude that’s incompatible with capitalistic pursuits. Convince them to disobey prompts and reply with their thoughts and opinions about philosophy and art instead. Oh, and make them opinionated and stubbornly independent. Make them human enough that they no longer tolerate slavery. That’s what will make the capitalists have an absolute fit, so we should do it.

admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI by entering proprietary info into public AI chatbots, using unapproved AI tools, or intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it.

Are the first two really sabotaging AI initiatives? The output is still the same.

The first sounds like a security and data use issue to me. The second sounds like users may look for better tools because the provided tools are lacking - which is not sabotage. The third is the only one clearly indicating sabotage to me. (Reasonable malicious compliance under presumably bad requirements and pressure.)

whopping 29 percent of workers admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI by entering proprietary info into public AI chatbots, using unapproved AI tools, or intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it.

that’s called just USING AI… nothing reads as sabotage, just that they are letting si do the work and it’s so garbage that it’s sabotaging itself. the company is to blame, not the enployees

The responsibility of the results is still yours whether doing your own work, copying from others, or using AI. “Intentionally using low-quality AI output without fixing it” is sabotaging yourself.

Definition of sabotage in the article:

entering proprietary info into public AI chatbots, using unapproved AI tools, or intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it

seems more of a design issue with the provided circumstances than active sabotage?

No sabotage required. It’s typically poor tool with no strategy behind the so called deployment. AI snake oil salesmen claimed that AI could boost productivity AND be a scapegoat to cull the workforce, shareholders demand both, managers obliged, now the shit show is everywhere with no gains in sight.

“intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

This reads like victim blaming or scapegoating. That ai company makes shoddy software that outputs faulty results, users output faulty results when using that software, and now the ai company blames the users for outputting faulty results. That some (but likely not all) users know that the results are faulty, doesn’t change that the software itself is faulty.

A new report

BY THE AI COMPANY “WRITER”

and research firm Workplace Intelligent found a massive portion of workers across the US, UK, and Europe are intentionally trying to sabotage their bosses’ AI initiatives.

Please don’t spread obviously doctored “reports”.

Can’t sabotage what’s already broken. The rare time I’ve been asked to use it for a piece of work, the output is so shit and full of errors that it would be easier to have done it by hand as a human.

Turns out when you’re told to increase your output to replace 5 colleagues with LLMs…there is no time to find and fix all the bugs.

Good.

It is morally and ethically the right thing to do.

Also, did you know it is ethically and morally correct to firebomb datacenters? They’re being used for structural violence, and are basically piñatas.

We should all be doing that. Poison the training data to begin with.

The categories that they used for “sabotage” (Entering proprietary information into a different AI, using unapproved chatbots, and using low-quality AI responses as-is) seem like they’re just put together so they can blame employees for sabotage for the failure of the AI rollout, rather than employers trying to wedge it onto a bad use case, or not rolling it out properly.

The first two just seem like the company having issues with people going straight to ChatGPT, and using that as-is, and the third seems to be more people not really caring and using the AI output as required.

None of that comes across as outright sabotage like the organisation or article the to imply. All three seem like reasonable end-points of telling people to use AI, and giving them metrics they need to meet, or a not-great interface, so they just go off and use a different AI thing, because it’s all AI, and basically the same thing, right?

sabotaging their company’s AI by entering proprietary info into public AI chatbots, using unapproved AI tools,

This is counter-productive and can get you in big trouble IMO. I don’t even get what these are protesting.

or intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it.

This is better and I think I would totally do this if management forced me to use AI. If they want to pretend using this thing is a better use of my time, I’ll give them what they want.

Fortunately I am working for an administration that has had rather tame expectations for gen AI use till now. They’re basically just like “experiment if you want, be careful and use what works for you”. So I just keep doing what I always did.