[foxfired]

We had a mandatory ChatGPT training course at work. You had to sign up in limited space classes. This is a large company, needless to say it was chaos to get a significant number of people to participate.

I got a spot. We were shown how to copy and paste data from excel and other data sources into the chat interface. We had sample data to work with, there was always someone in class who would say "mine didn't work." The developers in the room asked about codex, the instructor said she wasn't a developer.

We did get a certificate though. There was nothing they could teach that you couldn't learn by using the free version in your own time. Whatever they are doing with the Maltese government is just to increase the monthly active user count.

[rukshn]

I’m now responsible for improving AI literacy in the organization I work.

But the people in charge just want the employees to just answer some questions so they can handover Claude or Chat GPT licenses so they can show people are using AI to improve productivity.

There are people who don’t know when to use AI and when not to use Ai and think they can just Claude their way through everything. I wanted to change that but when the whole idea is to just increase AI use I guess they don’t care about how AI is used.

[ffsm8]

I was on a quarter demo the other day and the project lead for ai innovation was talking about the things he's preparing for the company.

I will not address the things he pitched (as coming soon), as I'm a developer and (hopefully) not the target audience, but I was quiet surprised when they made a questioneer asking how many people use ai and how frequently. (The target demographic was middle management, product owners etc)

75% of people answering said they're using it daily and considered it an essential tool they need to work

Considering it was anonymous I was expecting lower numbers, honestly.

[overfeed]

> Considering it was anonymous

In the recent past, my department received an email from on high with a list of people who were yet to complete the "anonymous" survey.

I always assume my work-survey answers are traceable back to me, whether it's via self-doxxing with my answers, tracing links of the rootkit-level MDM software that can record my screen, but they pinky-promise to only use for remote assistance, in case I open a ticket with IT.

[andy99]

Talked to someone at a large company who had admin access to survey results (require to do some analytics). The survey was “anonymous” but results were geo-located, and had some information about the team they came from, which in many cases was enough to clearly identify people. There is a difference between “doesn’t have a persons name on it” anonymous and actually anonymized in a way hardened against figuring out who is who. I don’t think anyone really does the latter.

[jpc0]

You do know it is possible for the answers to be anonymous but who submitted to be tracked?

[iinnPP]

Depends on how it's done.

Trusting that process to be done well is probably not the greatest plan.

[HumblyTossed]

I have taken some really badly (on purpose?) written questionnaires in the past. Asking about team size, role, etc.

That’s not anonymous at that point. That’s an agenda.

[overfeed]

I've seen questions asking for my org, team size, role, and when I joined, and thought it would have saved me time had they asked for my employee number instead.

[close04]

Most external survey providers claimed anonymity but in their T&Cs stated in a very roundabout way that they could provide some information to customers for quality purposes or something. Read “we’ll deanonymize some users if the paying customer wants it”. Internal survey tools are subject to internal management pressure.

Even when you use a tool like Microsoft Forms, where MS really can’t be bothered to deanonimize users unless 3 letter agencies get involved, it’s still possible to do timestamp matching between the proxy/VPN logs and the submission time.

Asume real anonymity only if the URL is the same for everyone and you can fill the survey from any computer on the internet.

But the explanation for why people overhype AI usage is probably simpler. They want to keep their license because it’s a nice perk. They’ll use it to get the gist of a long email thread without bothering the read the details, to get some meeting minutes without validating if that was actually what was said, to generate some crappy modern equivalent of wordart graphics for their presentations, and feel like the time saved to generate what most time is slop was worth it.

When I worked on this (outside of coding) it was a pain to find a use case that really benefited. These were all niche uses that fit an LLM like a glove. These rest was slop, I could see the usage reports, and the BS self reporting surveys. Everyone inflated the numbers and usage to justify keeping their license.

[DrewADesign]

You do know it’s possible for insecure leaders to lie about things like that, and that there’s no possible way to definitively tell beforehand?

[Survey8430]

This guy is wrong.

[hennell]

It's perfectly possible. Two tables, one stores answer responses only, the other just marks off who has responded. No link between them and you have anonymous data but can tell who hasn't responded.

Of course if you record created/updated timestamps on both, insert both records in the same order, accidently record the user code in the response data, take backups in between responses, have identifying questions or just don't have that many people responding it's easy/not hard to reverse engineer.

But it's quite possible to do right, I did it quite effectively almost by mistake years ago. Sent a customer survey out with generated codes as identifiers recorded with answers. Before sending reminder emails a script grabbed the codes, marked the customer as responded and wiped the code (so I could just get future responses where code was not null to mark next people off). Although I had timestamps the script meant customers were updated in blocks, there really wasn't any data to link them.

I know because the Boss was not happy he couldn't find out which customer had said what, and I had to point out all the communication (with customers and me) called it an anonymous survey, so why would I have saved them?

So it is possible, just not easy even if you intend it, and it's often not intentional...

I don't trust anonymous surveys either now...

[HumblyTossed]

The pressure to use AI is worse than the pressure kids get to use drugs. It’s insane.

The job market right now sucks so everyone is really just trying to not be the next cut.

[kakacik]

Never expect anonymous voting/quizz/whatever to be fully anonymous in big corporations, if its something about touchy topics and/or can affect employment/performance of given person results will be skewed. If metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric and all that.

It all rest on the shoulders of responsible manager(s) on how moral they are. Many are not.

[ravenical]

If it's 75% exactly, that's consistent with them asking four people

[ffsm8]

It wasn't, and it was visibly updating while people were submitting their answers. I just rounded it as I don't remember the exact number at the time they closed the submission.

Could still be faked ofc, but I don't think they did.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> 75% of people answering said they're using it daily and considered it an essential tool they need to work

> (The target demographic was middle management, product owners etc)

This leaves a fairly wide set of options for what "essential" entails.

Do 75% of middle management and product owners actually need AI for their job? Seems unlikely.

Do 75% of middle management and product owners use AI to slop up emails, meeting "summaries", and reports? That's quite possible. Would they declare it to be an "essential tool"? One imagines they are not too fond of actually doing meaningful work.

It's quite easy to get high percentages like this when the AI is involved in make-work and the costs are low if not zero. The moment inference costs go up, most of this usage will evaporate.

[Tesl]

Most of the answers to your post are reasons this 75% must be fake / lies or whatever.

But maybe the simplest answer is that most people do use the tools daily now and consider them essential...?

As much as HN would hate to think that

[smeggysmeg]

The leaders who mandate AI have no understanding on how to actually use it for productivity. They use it like a Magic 8-Ball to confirm whatever ignorance they have and believe the hype that it can do anything.

[SoftTalker]

They have always done this. These are the same managers who ask subordinates for reports that support their predetermined agendas, or higher level execs who hire consultants for the same purpose.

[throwaway894345]

I agree with you, but also it’s not entirely unreasonable to just use AI (or any other tool) and let them figure out over time what are and aren’t good uses. This approach requires an ability to see past the next quarterly earnings report, which is a rare quality for a business, but it can be healthy. The long term result is likely to be a culture that is more AI literate than they would be if they had top down instruction. The optimal path is probably a bit of both, but if I had to pick a ditch it would be “trust my employees”.

The thing I have a real issue with, and which seems more common, is the belief that they can cut raises because AI will make them more productive. In that case, the best employees (read: those most capable of leveraging AI effectively) will leave to find better paying work and the remainder will be too busy with the additional workload to have time to figure out how to use AI to make themselves more efficient.

[liveoneggs]

Just have IT roll out OpenClaw to everyone, connect it up to their emails, chats, password managers, etc and then click "go".

Why not?

[RobotToaster]

Definitely start with the executives, you can't leave them out of such a useful tool. :)

[somewhatgoated]

Not that there would be any ill effects from this, executives sit mostly in meetings, they don’t really do anything much besides that; maybe occasionally write a short email. They also don’t have access to critical systems.

It’s much more of an issue with devs

[xyst]

So my electricity bills are rising just so corporate idiots can increase an internal metric.

Fuck all of this.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Almost every bad thing happening in the world is so corporate idiots can increase some internal metric.

[vultour]

I’ve never gone through a paid training course that wasn’t a complete waste of time. It’s at the point where people at work know there isn’t even a point in offering these to me. “But why don’t you take the Terraform training?” Because I’m not going to waste my time with a 3-day course where it takes the first day to install and configure Terraform. I can install it on my computer in 5 minutes. I think people usually see these as a paid vacation, but I find them so insufferably boring I’d rather just work.

[bookofjoe]

Yes! Forty years ago (c. 1985) members of our department of anesthesiology (University of Virginia Medical Center) were offered an optional two full day course on how to do our own MedLine searches so as not to have to put in a request to the biomedical librarian for same.

I jumped at the chance to not have to be in the OR from 7am-5pm doing the same old same old but instead relax and learn something useful.

Bad choice.

The instructor and material were deadeningly boring; I couldn't even begin to enter into the computer the right search request format and terms and as I sat there I was reminded of my days in elementary school watching the big round clock on the wall tick away the minutes until the final dismissal bell.

Because our chairman was in the class and had encouraged all of us tenure-track faculty to take the course, I couldn't bail after the first day but had to return for the second day.

Subsequently I continued using the biomedical librarian to request my searches (it took just a couple minutes to fill out the form) with excellent results.

[MattDamonSpace]

Half of people are below average, these classes raise the floor they don’t expand the ceiling

[sethops1]

Fun fact, studies show human performance follows a power distribution, not a normal curve, implying _most people are below average_.

https://www.npr.org/2012/05/03/151860154/put-away-the-bell-c...

[therealdrag0]

Eh, if you are measuring social output and success (eg Emmy nominations), then no duh; there’s a lot of network effects and winner take all games. Also surely there’s some principle about when one end is capped (0) but the other end is not, this happens.

[jpfromlondon]

They certainly add hay to the haystack

[KronisLV]

Then they sound good, same as basic computer literacy classes!

[rwmj]

They lower the ceiling since now the other half have to deal with the AI slop.

[realty_geek]

My saddest interaction recently was with a friend with a 1st class degree in computing and several years experience in software engineering in many prestigious companies.

I asked if he had tried out Claude code or anything similar. His answer: My company has scheduled a training course in that so I'll wait

:(

[wartywhoa23]

So sad indeed, a man is left out in the cold waiting for his turn to receive a stochastic-brain-implant-as-a-service.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

It's hard to detect sarcasm these days but in case you're being serious, not everybody will share your feelings.

[3daH17]

He is serious. He has an AI company with a vibe coded website.

All positive comments here come from the financially invested or the near-retirement people who need cognitive assistance and are willing to sell out future generations.

[rrr_oh_man]

> in many prestigious companies

That's the hint. Most companies >50 employees suck.

[surajrmal]

Bold claim. I have the opposite experience. On this site I imagine most folks will agree with you, but there are a lot of folks who choose to work at larger companies over small ones.

[calgoo]

I have worked for enterprise companies all my life, they are all a horrible mess of people trying to play 4d chess to get a promotion and look good. They do offer better life / work balance, so if you are not a workaholic like the startup / SF crowd, then its actually a decent job. Just remember to enjoy the life outside the office, with people that are not from the office and you will be fine.

[wise_young_man]

It’s sad to you that they have a life outside of work?

[shimman]

It's the VC mind rot, the only thing that matters in life is working apparently. A sad existence indeed but you need a cohort to exploit if you're gonna make the next unicorn for cashing out.

[westmeal]

I don't get what's sad about that

[zer0tonin]

This site really has become a parody of itself.

[altmanaltman]

The fact they have to resort to these tactics does not bide well for the company that wants to create AGI or go bust.

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

Oh I don't know, it seems like a good step forward towards regulatory capture. First partner, then certify, then require the certification. A limited regional beta, like launching your app in New Zealand first.

[materialpoint]

A company could get more profits from formally teaching employees the function of the Fn key on their laptops. It is staggering how most people, even among developers, don't know what it's for, and consequently, nearly everybody suffers from not being able to turn volume up or down, or accidentally disconnect from meetings by having turned on airplane mode.

[epolanski]

Similar things happen in different non-tech companies I know.

But nobody uses LLMs that aren't Gemini or Copilot enterprise, as they are already on Google cloud or Microsoft offering already.

And there's high pressure on workers to find use cases where AI can boost productivity, with bonuses dangling on who finds real case scenarios.

I don't know about the results of these experiments, but I know unhappiness is widespread.

[jpc0]

My favorite right now.

"Make the AI do xyz"

That clearly needs a custom harness to integrate with ORG tooling.

"No we won't pay for token usage, make it work with the subscription were already paying for"...

Guess you don't want AI then...

[layer8]

You are not providing any argument for why the course developed by the University of Malta should match your experience.

[bartread]

> We were shown how to copy and paste data from excel and other data sources into the chat interface.

Grnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnguuurnnngh.

I remember the copy and paste drudgery from the early days of ChatGPT. It was a miserable and joyless experience. Nowadays (and for a long time) you can simply attach the file.

[Tenoke]

> We did get a certificate though.

As someone who never bothered to get any certificates (beyond a University degree) even when I'd do online courses (of which the most course-like must've been fast.ai), are these ever actually useful in any manner?

[jellyfishbeaver]

There are so many stupid "courses" and SaaS tools doing this I imagine that the value of the many of these certificates is close to 0.

Many of them you can simply take the exam over and over until you pass, and then stick a shiny stupid badge on your LinkedIn profile.

[stingraycharles]

They are useful for getting a job, that’s about it.

In our case, we get our entire team AWS solution architect certs as well just so we can always tell our customers that our whole team is certified (we do a lot of “forward deployed” stuff for enterprise customers).

[benhurmarcel]

In his case of a large company, I’d expect that completing the useless training is necessary to get access to the tool. That’s how it worked in mine.

[encrux]

For everyone in the EU: Copying and pasting sensitive data (like customer data) into AI tools is a violation of the GDPR, and potentially the AI act, which will be enforced soon.

These violations come with hefty fines.

[rvnx]

I would be cautious to advocate these laws that strongly in the context of AI tools:

Companies and employees always make their decisions based on a risk/reward basis.

Sometimes a commercial contract (like Microsoft Copilot) is enough to cover your ass and to meet the needs of the regulator.

Even if the operator is exactly the same.

Laws are constraints to navigate, but if you are successful enough (ahem, rich) then they don’t apply to you.

At the moment what the EU wants is to make sure that in the long-term they can access your private information.

Realistically if you are in the EU you have more risks telling your darkest secrets to a EU-hosted model that the government will arrest you, than to a Chinese-model (who doesn’t collaborate).

EU Chat Control, is here to protect kids and protect you from terrorists; you don’t want to claim you support pedophiles right ?

So following these rules is always a matter of choice.

Respect and you will be stuck with your shitty Mistral and no privacy, not respect and you have your shiny Claude that you have to think what to input inside.

[jstummbillig]

What is it with this new one line paragraph style?

EDIT: Needless to say I loath it and I don't know why.

[rvnx]

I agree with you I could have made it more compact by making 1 point = 1 paragraph, sometimes it’s a bit difficult to cleanly articulate my ideas, and I try not to clean them up with GPT first in order to keep the original tone.

For the not liking it part, I guess that if someone writes a long text, there are more chances to find at least a point of disagreement than a very short sentence

[Tenoke]

It depends heavily on what type of data though. As far as I understand if you have no PII or anything close to it you are mostly safe - especially if it's customer data but aggregated.

[realityking]

You’re brushing too broad a stroke GDPR only affects personal information. There’s plenty of sensitive business information that is not covered by GDPR - for example per business customer revenue data - that is legal to put into an AI tool but your employer may not want you to.

[layer8]

> business customer revenue data

Usually this would require the respective customer to agree to sharing that data with a third party.

[oliwarner]

But the normalisation of copying and pasting internal data into external tools is a recipe for complete disaster.

I'd be surprised if there weren't already phishing attacks that work by pretending to be a LLM.

[michaelbuckbee]

This sounds an awful lot like the early how to get on to the internet highway classes that existed. I don't think the classes had a lot of worth in the strict educational sense of like "here's how you do X Y & Z" but... We're I think much more effective at saying, you know, "X Y & Z are now possible."

It does take time and a little skill to know the edges of the AI tools. What's reasonable? What's not? What's likely to hallucinate? You could get something in the rough bounds of trust.

I can see a class helping with that.

[olalonde]

You got a certificate though.

[pembrook]

You do understand if every person in Malta were to use chatgpt regularly it wouldn’t even show up as a blip on their MAU chart

Cue up the next cynical bad take.

[darkwater]

But if you can prove any kind of success with Malta then you can go to the next 10 "slightly bigger" nations out there and tell them "See? It worked very well with Malta". And then move to a bigger layer, and a bigger layer...

[rvnx]

In practice since this is valid for a year it is essentially a free-trial they are giving away and they hope that it may generate additional revenue at some point after that

[ergocoder]

> There was nothing they could teach that you couldn't learn by using the free version in your own time.

That's true for almost everything in life.

> Whatever they are doing with the Maltese government is just to increase the monthly active user count.

That's one of their main goals. Another main goal is to also make money. There are a few other main goals.

What do you mean by "just to increase"? Did they try to hide their goal? Was it a secret agenda nobody knows about?

These are some strange tautological comments.