AI Adoption at Major Companies

Quick rant on how ridiculous AI has made my job.

The way my major tech company is "adapting to" AI is perhaps the worst of all worlds, and is a major blackpill for me in terms of AI actually increasing productivity gains.

I'll preface this rant by saying I actually like AI, use it a lot for personal projects, but the way corporate incentives interact with it is beyond terrible.

Not only are we spending tons of money on multiple systems at once, I am being forced to use the WORST ONE because of internal political plays. (i.e., my boss's boss burned a lot of political capital on this tool and is forcing us to use it.)

So now I am stuck using an incredibly bad AI generation tool, which makes extremely basic mistakes constantly and has zero iterative prompting whatsoever. So every content creation is one shot, with wildly varying (but almost always bad) results.

On top of this, they handicap the tool to fit with "brand guidelines" by filling in a bunch of extremely vague marketing guidelines some consultants came up with in order to keep the content "on brand." What this does in actuality is put a ton of crap in the prompt on the backend that I can't change, and handicaps the heck out of the model so it repeats the same stock phrases over and over.

What ends up happening is I now have to create literally 5x more content, and end up having to generate stuff using this AI tool, then edit it by hand, taking WAY LONGER than if I had just done it myself. Despite explaining this to my boss, I'm still being asked to create way more content because "AI increases productivity."

The worst part is that I end up just writing a lot of the copy myself, but when it does well I don't even get to take credit for it because it's nominally the AI writing the copy.

If I were able to use the better AI tool for writing, at least some of this mess would be bearable. But as it stands right now I am pulling my hair out every day trying to work with my companies "AI initiative." I have to imagine folks across the market are dealing with similar problems.