Comment on AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley researchers found the opposite.
errer@lemmy.world 15 hours agoRight now everything the study finds seems to be a positive for both workers and bosses…workers are motivated and more cognitively engaged, bosses are getting more work out of them.
The second part is purely speculation on how this might lead to unwanted side effects in the future, but the study offers no evidence at all for those effects yet.
justgohomealready@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
How is it a positive for you to be required to deliver 10x the work in the same timeframe as before, while earning the same salary, and while having your job change without warning or negotiation? AI makes it possible to do much more work in a shorter amount of time, but that doesn’t translate into more free time - it’s just that it becomes expected that you should deliver much more work.
Let me give you an example: imagine you work for a magazine. Before, you worked on a team of 5 designers, who each had a week to come up with two or three sections of the magazine. Now, most of the team is gone, you are creating the whole magazine by yourself using AI, your job changed from writing copy and using photoshop to create art to “prompt engineering”. The company expanded its business and now they publish 10 magazines (mostly AI slop) instead of one, because they can.
This is great for those who sell tokens and maybe for your boss, no one else. Workers end up being expected to increase their output multiple times; the fun parts of the job are taken over by AI and you’re left doing basically QA all day; the market is runover by AI slop; your boss now has to compete not only with very specialized people, but also with kids using AI.
I can tell you from personal experience working in the consulting world that many people who have been heavy AI users for the last year are now ending up with burnout. I can personally see everything the article mentions going on in my real world bubble.
errer@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
All of what you’re saying might be true, but the study doesn’t show that. That’s my point.