This makes sense. I can’t speak for a news site like Salon, but I can tell you that AI is killing search; it’s killing views, and scrapers run up the traffic bill for most sites. My saving grace is being small enough that I don’t attract that many bots, and I take some action to block some of the worst, but for a large site like Salon, that’s a nightmarish amount of effort to make money in a dwindling advertising market.
As someone who has heard people talk about spending 30-45 minutes with AI crafting an email response, I think this might apply outside law firms. I think using AI may be paralyzing us. There’s always another tweak, a different way to say something, another item we hadn’t thought of and need to discuss with our agent.
We’ve turned basic communication into committee work and, in the process, turned a tool designed to save us time into one that makes everything take longer.
This is the reality few people in management seem to understand. There is absolutely a point of diminishing returns when it comes to hours worked. And that point is usually not where you think it is. It’s not at 16-hour days; it’s probably less than eight hours. You probably get the highest-quality output from your team for a few hours each day, and even that depends on how many meetings and interruptions their brains have to deal with.
It’s not a layoff, but it’s the next best thing: telling over 25% of your workforce their jobs are so unimportant you’ll pay them to leave.
The tech job market is toast. There’s no other way to put it.
This is dumb on so many levels. Having a meeting assistant in such a personal meeting was probably rude and dangerous from the start. Forgetting it was there while you talked about replacing the former employee was even stupider. Maybe the icing on the cake for me is another question. If she was terminated, why did the email with the transcript still get to her? Why was her email account still accessible?
This might be a really good example of AI use making your systemic failures even more obvious, and faster.
I get it. Every day, there’s someone in Big AI telling us that AI is going to either replace you or kill you. Every other day, the tool you use to do your job changes. On the off days, announcements about new products that will revolutionize everything and make employers need fewer employees mix with…