[chamanbuga]

Nothing irks me more about the productivity space than the first use case on the blog post:

"Imagine you’re a financial analyst and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a presentation on Q3 performance by 8 AM tomorrow — we’ve all been there"

1. We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all. 2. This is toxic AF. We shouldn't normalize this behavior. Someone does this with me, I will politely tell them to F off instead of relying on Duet AI to have it done before dinner. 3. There's no way Duet AI can handle all the heavy lifting for such a major document without human intervention. Whereas the use case of getting a meeting summary does not need as much human intervention. It's interesting they start with this case.

There are a lot of promises here as well that require a lot more infra than just switching on Duet AI: "And because sometimes it’s hard for remote participants to see everyone in the conference room, or their colleagues appear far away and out of focus, we’re rolling out dynamic tiles and face detection that give attendees in a meeting room their own video tile with their name"

You need people to opt-in to facial reco. You need potentially multiple camera angles, or minimally high quality cameras that allow to to perform the crop and optical zoom into people's faces. You need in-room attendees to sign off on the digital zoom into their faces. People don't switch on their cameras at home because of this, yet in the room they will be ok? Not so sure about that.

All in all. Great feature availability. But it needs a balance of realism and how this will all come together.

[sbarre]

> We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all.

I'll speak anecdotally for myself here: I have seen - and experienced - this enough times in my almost 30 years, and I have heard from plenty of colleagues who have also seen or experienced this. These stories come from somewhere.

Times are changing, office toxicity is (relatively) on the decline but you don't have to go back too far - less than 10 years - where this kind of subordinate abuse was relatively common, and it still happens to this day.

I 100% agree with you that it shouldn't be normalized or made light of as part of a sales pitch like Duet AI is doing.

But to say this isn't common (we can argue the definition of "common" perhaps) is just inaccurate in my experience.

[panarky]

"Imagine you’re a Google PR writer and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a blog post about Duet AI for release to the public at 8 AM tomorrow ..."

[chamanbuga]

This comment wins.

[hbn]

> office toxicity is (relatively) on the decline

I think it's worse than ever, just on the extreme of toxic positivity where we all have to pretend we're a family and do constant culture training that doesn't actually help anyone but just enables the toxic people to do culture-fu to practice their toxicity under the guide of "holding people accountable" and "being upfront and honest"

[blensor]

I can understand that certain situations come up that require an all hands on deck emergency, but in such situations I would argue that the last thing you want is an AI generated failsafe presentation, but to get the necessary people on to fix this situation.

If it's part of the business to have people craft this regularly between 5pm and 8am then there is a systemic problem where AI will be a band aid at best.

[chamanbuga]

I see your point. I too have been asked to do something unexpected around end of day that ends up taking the night. Over the years, I have learned to say no. It was difficult to learn, but now people understand how to work with me. You're right, inaccurate to say this is not common, I just don't like how the usecase is promoting the worst stereotypes about managers. There's a lot of positive stuff. Ex. you want down time to spend with your family. There are a few calls you think you can skip on. You can ask Duet AI to attend on your behalf and give you summaries at the end of the day, etc...

AI is here to help us work smarter. Hopefully this creates time to work on more interesting & impactful problems thereby improving productivity. The worst case scenario is if people just end up working more on meaningless tasks.

Remember the "let me google it for you" meme? Not very different if all the manager has to do is ask Duet AI to pull together this report instead of asking you.

I'm digressing. This use case really triggers me.

[johndhi]

My pov on this is, I say no to people I don't want to work with and don't like, and I say yes to bosses I respect and who I want to work with more.

That way, I earn the trust of the people I like and fall off the radar of the people I don't.

[jeffbee]

> I have seen - and experienced - this

I have also experienced it, but when your colleague approaches you at 8AM to ask if you saw their email last night, it is easy enough to say "No, I just got here." Be the workplace you want.

[WhyNotHugo]

My thoughts exactly. The way this is presented is pretty grim and dark. It's like they're working to bring out the worst future possible. Including, like you said, normalising exploitation as if it's something to be proud of.

You'd think that this is April fools material, but apparently this is how they present their products nowadays. I wonder if this was written by a human.

[ebiester]

This is much less common outside IT. My worry is that this kind of enhancement will normalize unacceptable requests because "just have AI do it and you just need to go over it" will become an expectation.

[ChatGTP]

If the AI can do it your boss will just do it, then they will become burned out…

[RyEgswuCsn]

Well, I am afraid it will be either you doing it (with the help of AI), or your client/boss doing it using AI without you.