The employees secretly using AI at work
The employees secretly using AI at work
Some employers are either tacitly or outright banning access to generative AI tools like ChatGPT. But employees who love them are finding ways to discreetly backchannel.
Berlin-based business consultant Matt and his colleague were among the first at their workplace to discover ChatGPT, mere weeks after its release. He says the chatbot transformed their workdays overnight. "It was like discovering a video game cheat," says Matt. "I asked a really technical question from my PhD thesis, and it provided an answer that no one would be able to find without consulting people with very specific expertise. I knew it would be a game changer."
Day-to-day tasks in his fast-paced environment – such as researching scientific topics, gathering sources and producing thorough presentations to clients – suddenly became a breeze. The only catch: Matt and his colleague had to keep their use of ChatGPT a closely guarded secret. They accessed the tool covertly, mostly on working-from-home days.
"We had a significant competitive advantage against our colleagues – our output was so much faster and they couldn't comprehend how. Our manager was very impressed and spoke about our performance with senior management," he says.
Whether the technology is explicitly banned, highly frowned upon or giving some workers a covert leg up, some employees are searching for ways to keep using generative AI tools discreetly. The technology is increasingly becoming an employee backchannel: in a February 2023 study by professional social network Fishbowl, 68% of 5,067 respondents who used AI at work said they don't disclose usage to their bosses.
Even in instances without workplace bans, employees may still want to keep their use of AI hidden, or at least guarded, from peers. "We don't have norms established around AI yet – it can initially look like you're conceding you're not actually that good at your job if the machine is doing many of your tasks," says Johnson. "It's natural that people would want to conceal that."
As a result, forums are popping up for workers to swap strategies for keeping a low profile. In communities like Reddit, many people seek methods of secretly circumventing workplace bans, either through high-tech solutions (integrating ChatGPT into a native app disguised as a workplace tool) or rudimentary ones to obscure usage (adding a privacy screen, or discreetly accessing the technology on their personal phone at their desk).
The article: “I asked a really technical question from my PhD thesis, and it provided an answer that no one would be able to find without consulting people with very specific expertise."
Me waiting for the part where the AI hallucinated and he got an F on his thesis:
I mean, it might have worked out, but you have to be very careful when asking LLMs for factual information. I've tried it at my work and it gave me info that contradicted that from experts.
54What kind of PhD thesis? I'm kind of shocked they would say that. I'm in a scientific field, and it falls flat on its face whenever I start to get relatively subspecialized. Not that I haven't found some uses for it.
26I believe this is a person who already has a PhD they defended successfully (presumably by doing all the work themselves, if they've only just discovered ChatGPT). So we're talking about an advanced person who used their thesis subject matter to check ChatGPT's abilities, not to produce their thesis.
Which is exactly the type of user that can benefit the most from ChatGPT because they can verify its output... but YMMV wildly if you're a beginner in whatever field you're querying.
12
I was very surprised by this part as well. ChatGPT isn't great when it comes niche subject matter. I feel like this must be an exaggeration, or perhaps he didn't really validate the results.
Or maybe he just got lucky.
13It will also contradict itself and make the same mistakes even if you point them out.
Can be useful as a starting point, but you basically need to fact check everything it says.
8
Obviously no one used AI for the title.
31Lol fr, this is what ChatGPT 4 outputted for me
"Employees Covertly Embrace AI Tools Like ChatGPT Despite Rising Corporate Concerns"
Seems much better IMO lolol
32So the guy didn’t learn from the article that AI does a better job lol
0
I think I understand why this is a double-edged sword. Most consulting companies basically invoice hours. Even a lot of software development is charged by the hour. So now empoyees use AI, come up with awesome work much faster, and all that looks like a big advantage - until you get to the end of the month and find out that you now have a lot less billable hours logged.
The bright side is that you can now deliver more projects - so you now have to do much more work to invoice the same as before, and all the competition is now also delivering awesome work. It's a race to the bottom, more stress and less money for everyone involved.
30And then all those clients come back complaining, because the factual info the AI confidently provided turns out to be made up, ending up in a huge loss of money.
10That's merely a logistics problem.
The far greater issues is the fact that the AI is an external system with no guarantees of confidentiality or quality. You're giving this system private business and technical information and getting who-knows-what in return.
Your company and your employees are still the ones on the hook for the final product so everything AI gives you still needs to be verified and vetted by people who know what they're doing (if you're not a complete cowboy farm).
Assuming it turns out ok you've not saved as much time and resources as you think, and you've still given away private information.
If you don't think someone out there is going through all the private emails and proprietary code submitted to AI you're being very naive.
9This. I don’t want to be a project manager for 40 projects while AI does the actual work.
1
in a February 2023 study by professional social network Fishbowl, 68% of 5,067 respondents who used AI at work said they don't disclose usage to their bosses.
An undemocratic workplace is like a game of poker, right from the interview. I'd pretend I do my job, you'd pretend you pay a fair wage.
One can imagine if such a tool with a dramatic productivity boost has been discovered, there is a reason to vote or choose: if each and all of employees want to double the income or halve the work time.
But when parties compete with each other, there is one only will to fool your boss and probably even coworkers, as it guarantees you can play this card. Flash it too soon and you are either empty-handed or outright disadvantaged by your discovery.
It's good to read news about new unions and cooperatives. They smoother down this outright hostile environment. Shame they weren't here before this AI wave,
20Much of my job should have been computerized a while back, and we now have numerous tools to automate various tasks. However, my comprehension of the results enables me to distinguish between reliable data and errors, which my boss is unable to do due to their limited understanding of the output.
Having a good boss that understands that is key. Not everyone is so lucky on that front.
13I'm using it all the time for all kinds of shit. So is everyone else (that's why the businesses behind them are able to make money).
9I'm pretty sure email work has been transformed into an extremely inefficient format for sharing bullet pointed documents.
- Give the AI a bullet pointed list and get it to generate an email from that list.
- Send the email
- Recipient gets the AI to summarise the email into a bullet pointed list.
10I do that with SOPs, part of my job if to create them for a new system we're using. I essentially just create bullet points, say hey, can you make the following into an SOP? And paste my bullets. It spits out a pretty clean looking SOP that I just need to go in and edit a bit. It's really useful.
2
I use it to help me figure out how to get spreadsheets to do things I need them to. For that, it's essentially the same as using a search engine, but you can be pretty specific in a way that you can't with Google unless you get lucky and happen to want to do exactly what someone else has already done.
It isn't perfect by any means, but it helps me to figure out the tools and commands I can use that I wasn't previously aware of.
2I use AI mostly to provide search engine style results, because search engine results are utter garbage at this point.
2
can't use AI to hold 2 pieces of metal together while I weld it. AI is irrelevant to me, and my job is safe
5Haven't welding robots been a thing for ages? In a few years that bot can do your job, and figure out how to do it more efficiently while it's doing it.
6Somebody said that to me a few years ago, and honestly, I think we're still a looooong way away from robots being able to weld up repair jobs.
Sure, they can be used for making mass produced, new items, but a huge amount of welding work is bespoke pieces, or repair jobs. And honestly, building a robot to do that work will be far, far, far more hassle to most employers than simply paying someone to get in there and get it welded. There are just too many variables to take into account for the machinery to be cost effective - right now.
Of course, a few years down the line, and the robots might have become cheaper to deploy, but they'll have to be damn cheap for people like my boss who refuses to even buy a few old Android tablets so we can digitise much of the shop floor documentation.
4For large-scale industrial production, yes. It is likely the original commenter is doing custom or fairly small-scale welding, which needs either a much more expensive welding robot, or lots of extra work reconfiguring a still very expensive one. For such applications it is both cheaper and faster to do by hand and likely will be for a long time, though how small scale the practical limit for having a robot will likely decrease over time.
3