AI is enabling low talent men to succeed in the workplace in a way they couldn’t have done on their own.

[lacklustre]

Last week I was in a senior leaders meeting, a man who is knew to the company gave a presentation and hadn’t even bothered to disguise the telltale AI giveaways - the capitalised headings, the emdashes, the lot. The other men in the room praised him enthusiastically for his excellent work and he happily accepted their praise.

I work in a male dominated industry and I’m seeing this more and more and while I love AI and use it as a tool, I’m seeing so much stuff sent to me by male colleagues that’s clearly not their own work. I have a boss who’s decided he no longer needs the services of a consultant because he can be his own consultant with AI. He also runs most of my work through AI and then sends me ‘his’ improved version. Another male colleague even uses AI to write his WhatsApp messages. And they all constantly congratulate each other on their incredible work.

Is this a thing now? Of course I imagine lots of women use it in this way too. But in my large company, this is increasingly common and it’s like robots praising robots. Find it all quite disturbing especially when I know that two years ago, some of them were on work performance plans almost at the point of being managed out of the company.

Does it even matter? If I can’t beat them, should I just join them and start doing it myself?

I really enjoyed Technology is not Neutral by Stephanie Hare if anyone wants a read.

lol

You work in a male dominated industry surrounded by men and so of course you are going to see men using it.
It's a tool.
If you worked in a female dominated industry you'd see women using it more than men.

I hope you posted it to make the point that pointless, dull AI waffle usually adds nothing 😁

Hehe see what you did there meat proxy 😂
Did not make that up myself @harderthanIexpected it's a well worn term in tech!

If you're using the one-off free tools with no memory, then maybe.

But if you're into AI, your AI has memory, knows a lot about you and will start pulling that in.

If you've given it your CV, and it can see your name, it will infer

It absolutely does give different answers - it reflects the world it was trained on, and that world is misogynistic and patriarchal

I think a lot of mediocre men are impressed by the way AI presents things, even if the actual content is mediocre or worse. It’s just another form of male bullshitting.

AI-generated content is often twice as long as the source material you fed into it, which also seems to impress. Again, the equivalent is the pompous wordy jargon-filled way your not-very-bright bloke tries to big himself up to colleagues.

Oh, I see! Makes sense.

@CousinBette yeah I always have to tell it to be concise.

Fit in where? If they're too 'unintelligent' to work at all then I can't imagine them stealing OPs thunder or being praised for work that was created by an AI?

AI is not accurate

That is too simplistic... AI is very good in more quantitive work - less good in qualitative work.

So ask it 2 + 2 and you are very likely to get 4... go along that route and you can see that it is good at coding / assembling data / etc. where there are clear cut answers it can work well and is much faster than a human - I gave ChatGPT a complete website today - written originally for PHP 5.6 and said update it to php 8.5 compatible - within 2 minutes I had a zip file - uploaded it and job done - no issues... far faster than I could have managed!

however... ask it to explain patterns of poverty by race, class and geography in the UK and it will as with all things subjective, only be able to answer based on material it has seen and indexed, and that could be right, it could be wrong...

It has a place - but understanding how to use it is key... and generally those who are better at doing that will get better advantages from using it

I'm using it to flag up variations on construction projects and to measure some of them. It makes mistakes but it also catches things I would have missed, including my mistakes. It's not so good at reading the drawings but much better than I am with text notes, employers/contractors requirements/specifications etc.
Sometimes it's best to let it do the work first and then correct it. But presentations and emails are not that time!

Once again the problem is: too many mediocre men 😂

Sounds like he did a good job in the meeting if everyone else was impressed. Are you sure it isn't just bitter grapes, OP? Not saying that in a snarky way. It can defo be annoying when you put the effort in and a workmate finds a hack to do it in half the time while still getting equal praise.

I mean, it's a worse scenario IMO if we really are getting bested by all these mediocre men!

It has been proven to stop women getting jobs on application if there are any gaps for childcare and it prefers men because they earn more than female counterparts so it assumes they are "better".

That's before they even get in the door to pretend they earned even more to whoever asks face to face...

We call that scenario "sexism".

Jesus how thick/lazy do you have to be not at least to remove the AI giveaways?

Sometimes though it seems like one could call it "an excuse".

I don’t see how it’s sour grapes? Several of us were giving presentations and instead of using slides, he put his notes up on the screen complete with all the AI handprints - little emojis, emboldened text, capitalised headings etc. I’m surprised he didn’t actually include the prompt too. The other people in the room are less AI savvy so for whatever reason didn’t spot it, hence the huge amount of praise which was showered upon him.

One could, and I'm sure from time to time that is the case.

However, the evidence is that men and women are judged differently, with men assumed to be more competent than women. A man who provides a superficial overview is often seen as high level, leadership focussed, whereas a woman is often seen as not having a fundamental understanding and grasp of the details. This is exacerbated by both sexes feeling more comfortable challenging women than men, meaning both that women come across as less authorative and that we can't flow as smothly as men.

Here's just a few examples of studies showing the type of unconscious bias I am talking about:

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/july/men-more-likely-than-women-to-be-seen-as-brilliant-.html?challenge=d06e90d7-4d8f-4b88-9d8c-10b73beb60f1

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9940093/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2024/02/26/men-forget-about-female-researchers-says-study-on-gender-citation-gap/

https://www.inc.com/heather-wilde/a-harvard-study-shows-that-men-are-5-times-more-believable-than-women.html

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2017/07/07/men-interrupting-women

Sorry but if a man who has lower intelligence/ability than you uses ai to further his career then why are you not using it to enhance your superior ability?

I work in a female dominated field . I have always been technically better than my female colleagues as are most of the chaps I’ve worked with. They counter by being better at the governance and report writing aspects and have historically made sure that this is routinely identified through audit.

AI has allowed me to vastly improve my output and quality in my weakest area whilst it isn’t able to improve their technical ability much to their dismay I am currently killing it .

AI is very good in more quantitive work - less good in qualitative work.
So ask it 2 + 2 and you are very likely to get 4.

"Very likely".

I'd call that 'hopelessly incompetent' rather than 'very good'.

The worst offender for this in my team is female. But I notice she spews AI slop very obviously into emails and reports, whereas my male boss is very good at passing off AI feedback as his own insightful thoughts without getting caught.

Perhaps men are just more practised at confidently presenting other people’s ideas as their own!

What field is this?

Off to look for this Thanks