When your boss insists you to start using AI for your job, do you cave to their demands, or resist using the tech?
The reality is that if you’re in a position where you have to ask, you may be doomed either way.
We suggest you learn from the experience of Kevin Cantera, a man from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who “willingly embraced AI for work” after he and his colleagues were encouraged to use ChatGPT, according to a new entry in the Washington Post’s work advice column.
His reward for going along with those demands, after being a faithful servant for 17 years at the edutech company? Getting replaced by a large language model, along with a couple dozen of his coworkers.
That’s, of course, after his boss reassured him that he wouldn’t be replaced with AI.
Deepening the bitter irony, Cantera — a researcher and historian — had actually grown pretty fond of the AI help, telling WaPo that it “was an incredible tool for me as a writer.” He’d become somewhat of an AI whisperer, claiming he gained a mastery over putting in prompts that helped the AI generate accurate, non-hallucinated info, which he always made sure to review, edit, and rewrite, per WaPo.
“I considered the LLM as a collaborator,” Cantera added. “My productivity was off the charts.”
The LLM was a collaborator alright — a collaborator with his boss.
Cantera is certainly not alone. Bosses the world over are firing their grunts and gleefully replacing them with unproven AI agents. Or they’re culling their workforces down to a skeleton crew, and forcing whoever survived the layoffs to pick up the slack with the help of AI tools. Many of them have openly gloated about it.
But often, quickly trying to replace human know-how with constantly hallucinating tech blows up in the faces of the bosses who embraced it, sending them scrambling to rehire humans.
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