[flkiwi]

One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.

[ploum]

"One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate."

I cannot imagine what it means. To me it reads like "I know someone who can run very fast but has no legs."

[vogu66]

Capable doesn't mean capable of office work though, I could see someone with a language disorder doing electronics and have trouble with words, not numbers. Or someone who has trouble with written words specifically doing most of their learning with classes and videos.

[flkiwi]

Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.

[toofy]

> like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.

this is such an incredible way to phrase what it all looks like to the rest of us. and i suspect the people doing it, just like those with obvious cosmetic surgery, have no idea how weird and off it looks.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I have a similar coworker, but he's not great at prompting, so 10% of the time the AI version of himself makes confident assertions that he did not intend and are clearly not true. Genuinely no idea what I'm supposed to do about it.

[flkiwi]

Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.

[dawnerd]

Sam, and when you ask them a deeper question about it on a call they usually have no idea. It’s making people very lazy.

[wolvoleo]

Yeah I hate it when people do that and I always call them out on it.

Unfortunately our company is trying to be "AI First" so they'll just point to that and continue their bullshit.

Our company literally promotes AI slop over personally made content even if it's mediocre crap. All they care about is rising usage numbers of things like copilot in office.