I’ve been exploring the practical uses of AI for various workflows, having gone through the leading tools. In my previous write ups, I’ve been open on the realities of what worked well and what didn’t, at least in my experience. Internally, this felt like my version of a self directed learning experience to re-position myself for better opportunities in corporate career growth.
As a former software developer, the results were great at first, until I realised that the enjoyment of coding was lost. The enjoyment of solving a problem and feeling a sense of pride in my work just wasn’t the same. Don’t get me wrong, troubleshooting and bug finding can be great. So can rapid prototyping. But fulfilment drops. And thats the common theme I find with most developers I speak to as well.
As an aspiring writer, what looked like polished editorial feedback and edits at first, often became bland, monotonous, and very same same in language and tone. I’ve often found myself spending a lot of time having to trawl through revisions to verify that my original intent and tone was not removed. Often at the expense of more credits. In many cases, the results were woke and part of the problem – if everyone thinks the same, we lose nuance in human nature, cultural differences. Those things matter, and AI simply takes the woke path first.
In graphic design, rapid prototypes could be generated incredibly fast. But iteration of incremental changes often became a game of credit burn having to correct a ton of slop.
As for the corporate world. I’ve never been more confident to step aside. Having spoken to people in the industry, there really aren’t many people who know what they’re talking about. The ridiculousness of massive corporates placing arbitrary stats on KPIs just sounds foolish. Anyone can write dumb prompts to check off a quota, but thats just costly and a waste of fucking time to anyone with half a brain if you ask me.
There’s been this massive push lately for new corporate friendly tools that aide executive summarisation. That sounds great when you’re tooting your own horn in a market to pitch your own product. And its quite hilarious how many execs gobble that shit up as if its a holy grail. Truth be told, if you dilute garbage just enough, over time, the human element of sifting through shit becomes a lost skill muddled between SEO trash that these models are often trained from.
Perhaps a gap year away from the noise makes sense more than ever. In the corporate world, there’s a lot of overconfident leaders in high positions making bad decisions around things they barely understand themselves. Reminds a lot of an AI hallucination.
There used to be a time when leadership was about being in a position of service, ensuring that your teams are taken care off through challenging times, removing obstacles and fear. Motivating people through tough times instead of leading with fear and ambiguity to cover up their own lack of understanding. These days, the “smartest” people in the room are the most stressed and ending up in early graves, often due to culture and environments that breed anxiety.
Here’s the thing, if you’re at the point of retrenchments, perhaps the issue was always a leadership one if it ever got to the point. Perhaps its a political one as well, much like most forms of organised humans. Perhaps the truth that few speak about openly is that retrenchments are just cyclical tool thats meant to cull the population, and the latest buzzwords are just another trigger for leadership to hawk reasons around for why people need to be let go off.
But what do I know. Maybe teaming built around supporting others is fan fiction, and I’m the crazy one for believing thats what leadership was about.
Perhaps a bit of time off gave me the perspective to step back and look at corporate as the inefficient hot mess that it really is. Maybe I’m the one thats wrong, arrogant… Time will tell. For now, I’ve never felt more confident escaping the rat race and holding firm on my views of what leadership means and should be. All I know for now is I don’t want to be part of the problem, and I’d rather walk away from a life that expects me to compromise on my own values.
Perhaps this was always meant to be a complete reset.
Perhaps.