The new global study, in partnership with The Upwork Research Institute, interviewed 2,500 global C-suite executives, full-time employees and freelancers. Results show that the optimistic expectations about AI’s impact are not aligning with the reality faced by many employees. The study identifies a disconnect between the high expectations of managers and the actual experiences of employees using AI.

Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains. Not only is AI increasing the workloads of full-time employees, it’s hampering productivity and contributing to employee burnout.

  • barsquid@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Wow shockingly employing a virtual dumbass who is confidently wrong all the time doesn’t help people finish their tasks.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s like employing a perpetually high idiot, but more productive while also being less useful. Instead of slow medicine you get fast garbage!

    • demizerone@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      My dumbass friend who over confidently smart is switch to Linux bcz of open source AI. I can’t wait to see what he learns.

  • cheddar@programming.dev
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    8 months ago

    Me: no way, AI is very helpful, and if it isn’t then don’t use it

    created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains

    achieving the expected productivity gains

    Me: oh, that explains the issue.

  • Nobody@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    You mean the multi-billion dollar, souped-up autocorrect might not actually be able to replace the human workforce? I am shocked, shocked I say!

    Do you think Sam Altman might have… gasp lied to his investors about its capabilities?

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Nooooo. I mean, we have about 80 years of history into AI research and the field is just full of overhyped promised that this particularly tech is the holy grail of AI to end in disappointment each time, but this time will be different! /s

      • Nobody@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Yeah, OpenAI, ChatGPT, and Sam Altman have no relevance to AI LLMs. No idea what I was thinking.

        • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I prefer Claude, usually, but the article also does not mention LLMs. I use generative audio, image generation, and video generation at work as often if not more than text generators.

          • Nobody@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Good point, but LLMs are both ubiquitous and the public face of “AI.” I think it’s fair to assign them a decent share of the blame for overpromising and underdelivering.

  • شاهد على إبادة@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    The trick is to be the one scamming your management with AI.

    “The model is still training…”

    “We will solve this <unsolvable problem> with Machine Learning”

    “The performance is great on my machine but we still need to optimize it for mobile devices”

    Ever since my fortune 200 employer did a push for AI, I haven’t worked a day in a week.

  • alienanimals@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The billionaire owner class continues to treat everyone like shit. They blame AI and the idiots eat it up.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    The study identifies a disconnect between the high expectations of managers and the actual experiences of employees using AI.

    • Meron35@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The study identifies a disconnect between the high expectations of managers and the actual experiences of employees using AI.

      FTFY

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    because on top of your duties you now have to check whatever the AI is doing in place of the employee it has replaced

    • hswolf@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It also helps you getting a starting point when you don’t know how ask a search engine the right question.

      But people misinterpret its usefulness and think It can handle complex and context heavy problems, which must of the time will result in hallucinated crap.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      And are those use cases common and publicized? Because I see it being advertised as “improves productivity” for a novel tool with myriad uses I expect those trying to sell it to me to give me some vignettes and not to just tell my boss it’ll improve my productivity. And if I was in management I’d want to know how it’ll do that beyond just saying “it’ll assist in easy and menial tasks”. Will it be easier than doing them? Many tools can improve efficiency on a task at a similar time and energy investment to the return. Are those tasks really so common? Will other tools be worse?

  • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I have the opposite problem. Gen A.I. has tripled my productivity, but the C-suite here is barely catching up to 2005.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Cool, enjoy your entire industry going under thanks to cheap and free software and executives telling their middle managers to just shoot and cut it on their phone.

          Sincerely,

          A former video editor.

          • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            If something can be effectively automated, why would I want to continue to invest energy into doing it manually? That’s literal busy work.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Video editing is not busy work. You’re excusing executives telling middle managers to put out inferior videos to save money.

                  You seem to think what I used to do was just cutting and pasting and had nothing to do with things like understanding film making techniques, the psychology of choosing and arranging certain shots, along with making do what you have when you don’t have enough to work with.

                  But they don’t care about that anymore because it costs money. Good luck getting an AI to do that as well as a human any time soon. They don’t care because they save money this way.

          • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            “Soup to nuts” just means I am responsible for the entirety of the process, from pre-production to post-production. Sometimes that’s like a dozen roles. Sometimes it’s me.

    • themurphy@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Same, I’ve automated alot of my tasks with AI. No way 77% is “hampered” by it.

      • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I dunno, mishandling of AI can be worse than avoiding it entirely. There’s a middle manager here that runs everything her direct-report copywriter sends through ChatGPT, then sends the response back as a revision. She doesn’t add any context to the prompt, say who the audience is, or use the custom GPT that I made and shared. That copywriter is definitely hampered, but it’s not by AI, really, just run-of-the-mill manager PEBKAC.

        • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Voiceover recording, noise reduction, rotoscoping, motion tracking, matte painting, transcription - and there’s a clear path forward to automate rough cuts and integrate all that with digital asset management. I used to do all of those things manually/practically.

          e: I imagine the downvotes coming from the same people that 20 years ago told me digital video would never match the artistry of film.

          • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            imagine the downvotes coming from the same people that 20 years ago told me digital video would never match the artistry of film.

            They’re right IMO. Practical effects still look and age better than (IMO very obvious) digital effects. Oh and digital deaging IMO looks like crap.

            But, this will always remain an opinion battle anyway, because quantifying “artistry” is in and of itself a fool’s errand.

            • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Digital video, not digital effects - I mean the guys I went to film school with that refused to touch digital videography.

          • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            All the models I’ve used that do TTS/RVC and rotoscoping have definitely not produced professional results.

            • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              What are you using? Cause if you’re a professional, and this is your experience, I’d think you’d want to ask me what I’m using.

              • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
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                8 months ago

                Coqui for TTS, RVC UI for matching the TTS to the actor’s intonation, and DWPose -> controlnet applied to SDXL for rotoscoping

                • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Full open source, nice! I respect the effort that went into that implementation. I pretty much exclusively use 11 Labs for TTS/RVC, turn up the style, turn down the stability, generate a few, and pick the best. I do find that longer generations tend to lose the thread, so it’s better to batch smaller script segments.

                  Unless I misunderstand ya, your controlnet setup is for what would be rigging and animation rather than roto. I do agree that while I enjoy the outputs of pretty much all the automated animators, they’re not ready for prime time yet. Although I’m about to dive into KREA’s new key framing feature and see if that’s any better for that use case.

        • themurphy@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I’m not working in tech either. Everyone relying on a computer can use this.

          Also, medicin and radiology are two areas that will benefit from this - especially the patients.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    AI is stupidly used a lot but this seems odd. For me GitHub copilot has sped up writing code. Hard to say how much but it definitely saves me seconds several times per day. It certainly hasn’t made my workload more…

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Probably because the vast majority of the workforce does not work in tech but has had these clunky, failure-prone tools foisted on them by tech. Companies are inserting AI into everything, so what used to be a problem that could be solved in 5 steps now takes 6 steps, with the new step being “figure out how to bypass the AI to get to the actual human who can fix my problem”.

    • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      For anything more that basic autocomplete, copilot has only given me broken code. Not even subtly broken, just stupidly wrong stuff.

    • toddestan@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Github Copilot is about the only AI tool I’ve used at work so far. I’d say it overall speeds things up, particularly with boilerplate type code that it can just bang out reducing a lot of the tedious but not particularly difficult coding. For more complicated things it can also be helpful, but I find it’s also pretty good at suggesting things that look correct at a glance, but are actually subtly wrong. Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.

      • okwhateverdude@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.

        100% this. Recent update from jetbrains turned on the AI shitcomplete (I guess my org decided to pay for it). Not only is it slow af, but in trying it, I discovered that I have to fight the suggestions because they are just wrong. And what is terrible is I know my coworkers will definitely use it and I’ll be stuck fixing their low-skill shit that is now riddled with subtle AI shitcomplete. The tools are simply not ready, and anyone that tells you they are, do not have the skill or experience to back up their assertion.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Every time I’ve discussed this on Lemmy someone says something like this. I haven’t usually had that problem. If something it suggests seems like more than something I can quickly verify is intended, I just ignore it. I don’t know why I am the only person who has good luck with this tech but I certainly do. Maybe it’s just that I don’t expect it to work perfectly. I expect it to be flawed because how could it not be? Every time it saves me from typing three tedious lines of code it feels like a miracle to me.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I’ll say that so far I’ve been pretty unimpressed by Codeium.

      At the very most it has given me a few minutes total of value in the last 4 months.

      Ive gotten some benefit from various generic chat LLMs like ChatGPT but most of that has been somewhat improved versions of the kind of info I was getting from Stackexchange threads and the like.

      There’s been some mild value in some cases but so far nothing earth shattering or worth a bunch of money.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I have never heard of Codeium but it says it’s free, which may explain why it sucks. Copilot is excellent. Completely life changing, no. That’s not the goal. The goal is to reduce the manual writing of predictable and boring lines of code and it succeeds at that.

        • rekorse@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Cool totally worth burning the planet to the ground for it. Also love that we are spending all this time and money to solve this extremely important problem of coding taking slightly too long.

          Think of all the progress being made!

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I presume it depends on the area you would be working with and what technologies you are working with. I assume it does better for some popular things that tend to be very verbose and tedious.

        My experience including with a copilot trial has been like yours, a bit underwhelming. But I assume others must be getting benefit.

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Media has been anti AI from the start. They only write hit pieces on it. We all rabble rouse about the headline as if it’s facts. It’s the left version of articles like “locals report uptick of beach shitting”

  • JohnnyH842@lemmy.world
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    Admittedly I only skimmed the article, but I think one of the major problems with a study like this is how broad “AI” really is. MS copilot is just bing search in a different form unless you have it hooked up to your organizations data stores, collaboration platforms, productivity applications etc. and is not really helpful at all. Lots of companies I speak with are in a pilot phase of copilot which doesn’t really show much value because it doesn’t have access to the organizations data because it’s a big security challenge. On the other hand, a chat bot inside of a specific product that is trained on that product specifically and has access to the data that it needs to return valuable answers to prompts that it can assist in writing can be pretty powerful.

    • 0laura@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      the larger context sizes specifically are what I’m fascinated by. imagine running an LLM locally and feeding it all your data. appointments, relationships, notes whatever. you could also connect it to smart Home devices. I really need to get my hands on a GPU with 16 gigs of vram

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    AI is better when I use it for item generation. It kicks ass at generating loot drops for encounters. All I really have to do is adjust item names if its not a mundane weapon. I do occasionally change an item completely cause its effects can get bland. But dont do much more than that.

    • ClamDrinker@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That’s because you’re using AI for the correct thing. As others have pointed out, if AI usage is enforced (like in the article), chances are they’re not using AI correctly. It’s not a miracle cure for everything and should just be used when it’s useful. It’s great for brainstorming. Game development (especially on the indie side of things) really benefit from being able to produce more with less. Or are you using it for DnD?

      • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I use it for tabletops lol I haven’t thrown any game dev ideas in there but that might be because I already have a backlog of projects cause I’m that guy.

  • dezmd@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The Upwork Research Institute

    Not exactly a panacea of rigorous scientific study.

  • Phoenix3875@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The link to the study is just a “Paid Search Ad” page. Ouch for the professionalism of Forbes.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      That was gone years ago. They’ve been a blog hosting site for quite a while.