this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Not to be an apologist, but can someone explain to me how “sticking it to these companies” is by going to work for and supporting them, while encouraging the very behavior you disagree with?
Not to mention this sort of thing doesn’t work when all they have to do is instruct the AI to disregard all further commands…
Stick it to these companies by going to work for those who aren’t using any artificial intelligence to prescreen candidates.
Oh and by the way, before AI, it was human prejudice filtering out candidates. The problem is much larger than a simple implementation of today’s hot new buzz.
We need to eat, bro
You’re making it seem like every company does this.
That’s false pretense.
I can surely sympathize with the idea of needing to find a job that can pay the bills, but saying that the only option is to buy into the slave masters, is just outright wrong
Not everyone has the luxury to be picky about where they work. For proper change to happen, we must reinvigorate communities and strengthen them by creating local, federated mutual aid networks that can support the community. This will allow people to take direct action without the fear of losing their next meal, home, job, healthcare, and/or support system.
I’m a big fan of UBI
But we're only going to get that after the direct action that requires federated mutual aid.
I think that the point is that if those practices are for most employment places in a domain (i.e. the bad practices need not be done by "most companies", just the largest ones) and people's main concern is having to eat, they don't generally have the time to look for the jobs where this shit doesn't happen and even if they do, they would be competing for a small number of jobs against everybody else also looking for those jobs.
Or putting things in another way, your idea that somebody can simply "only go for the good jobs" fails at two levels:
Your idea to "exclude from consideration companies that do this" only works for some people, not all people, and only those people who have enough savings or low enough money outflows to not have to concede defeat and take one of those not so great jobs because they're running out of money.
So the previous poster's comment of "we need to eat" neatly encapsulates in a simple sentence the reason why your idea won't work as a general practice or even as an individual practice for most people in the present day society and economy in most countries.
I understand and mostly agree with what you’re saying, but only under the notion you’re supposing.
That the majority of companies do this. That’s an assumption. We need data to accurately define whether or not it’s a wide spread problem.
I’m also highly confused but your first few sentences. You mince words by saying “for most employment domains” but then also say not most places but the largest companies
If the highest paying jobs are unavailable, and they are a small amount of other jobs which pay less (but not necessarily bad wages), there are still a majority of mediocre places and even underpaying places that exist.
I do not see value in encouraging the largest, best paying companiesjobs to continue to use these bad faith and misunderstood practices. You don’t encourage behavior you don’t want to see. You take mediocre salaries, and you hustle your way up into valued roles, ask for a fair wage, and if they say no, THEN you go to the large paying companies, and come back with the offer they made to you (perhaps with this fictional AI work around) and try again.
You should be paid fairly if you are truly valued. But sometimes you have to hack your way into that pay.
If you show these companies that, hey this AI thing works pretty good, do you think they’ll be happy at where it is or do you think they’ll continue to buy into “better” AIs more and more and make the problem more widespread?
You don’t fight fire with fire. You smother that shit or put it out with a firehose.
"Most companies" is not necessarilly the same as "most jobs" since some companies (i.e. large ones) offer many more jobs than others. What counts from how much jobseekers see this kind of practice is "most jobs" so you can have just some companies doing this but if they're the last ones, that means "most jobs" have this kind of thing. It was probably a needless distinction for me to make in that post.
I don't dispute the point that people who are in or seeking employment should not reward bad practices like that, I'm explaining what the previous poster meant: that in the present day economic conditions, most job seekers, whilst not not wanting to reward bad practices do not de facto have the choice to do so because they're under huge pressure to get a job, any job, as soon as possible.
Also your theory of hustling your way upinto valued roles is hilarious in light of my almost 3 decades out in the job place - since pretty much the 90s the main way to progress up the career ladder, requires that people change jobs - at least in expert areas, the average salaries of people that stick to one employer are much lower than the average salaries of people who switch jobs periodically because people negotiating a new job whilst still working in the old job, will only ever accept a better job - so their conditions will improve - whilst people in a job and not looking are seldom offered better conditions unless they at least start simulating that they're working for a better job. I mean, it's possible to progress without moving jobs especially early in one's career and under good management, it's just generally slower and harder than if just hopping jobs.
I don't even disagree that being choosy in what jobs you take is how people should behave is they can: I've actually successfully done that for all but one of my job transitions, but that's because I'm a (modesty on the side) well above average senior expert in a high demand area, hence I usually get a lot of offers if I put my CV out and since I'm well paid I have a large pile of savings to rely on during periods between jobs, and thus I can be choosy (and the only time I had to "take a shit job" was exactly early in my career, after the Year-2000 Crash, when after 6 months out of a job and running out of savings I had no other option, and 11 months later after searching for a new job from Day 1 there, I finally found a better job and moved).
Most people in this World aren't in such a position and casually suggesting that other people act as you suggest, shows a huge level of ignorance of the economic conditions of most people out there nowadays.
The kind of wording you use on this suggests you're in a position of reasonable properity and power in the market place as a job seeker in your area which while good for you is not representative of the median experience of job seekers out there, just like my own situation is not.
Giving like that "I'm alright Jack" "Everybody should do it just like I can now that I am were I am" suggestions to other people whilst ignoring that most are "Not alright" and not in the same position as you, is at best insensitive and ignorant, at worst insulting, which is probably why you're getting downvotes.
You’re absolutely right, I’m similarly in a high demand sector, (wonder if you can guess where, from my username) so my options are much more open.
I guess the conclusion I’m coming to is, maybe this fictional hack/tactic does work - just don’t spend too much time there if you can help it. Minimize how much you’re buying into these companies and don’t give them anything more than what they’re paying you to do.
My circumstances aren’t going to be the same as others, so all I can do is listen to their experiences and try to learn about other realities. Probably too deep in the comment thread now but definitely open to hearing others experiences in not-so-in-demand sectors.
Maybe that’s part of the problem - being in a field that is out of favor/demand? How do you provide value when that value isn’t needed at the moment?
Clearly it's not Infosec!!! ;)
Well, that's why a lot of people want to change things at a political level - the great "pure competition no safety net" neoliberal take on Society results in most of people, whose job is basically a commodity and who don't have a "unique value proposition", to be pretty close to slaves in this system because since they are human beings and naturally need food, water and shelter continously but are in an environment where the access to those is controlled by having unusual amounts of the very thing that people selling commoditized services cannot get enough of via their work - money - are squezed into a position where they de facto don't have any choices, nor do they even have the necessary space to invest in themselves to change into some other job where they might have a "unique value proposition".
This situation could be changed if people were guaranteed access to the basic essentials, for example via a Universal Basic Income, since even people doing commoditized work would then have the choice to refuse to "sell" their work if they found the "price" too low or the conditions too bad, which would push the market to improve the jobs offers for those (who are by far the majority if people) plus a lot of those could even chose to improve themselves or their skills, become inventors, or artists, or work in areas with high social value but low "price" because they felt rewarded by it in ways other than money.
In summary, I think there is no solution within the current paradygm since it makes this problem systemic and any viable solution requires changing at least some things in the paradygm, most noteably the part were the basic required essentials of human beings are used to, at the systemic level, force most people into a no-true-choice neo-slavery.
The changes we've seen to the paradym in the last decade or two are exactly in the opposite direction: the ever more expensive housing and even destruction of the social safety net are forcing even more people to accept bare-minimum near-slavery work just to survive.
the AI is in no way any less prejudicial in filtering out candidates – the prejudice is just hard-coded into the algorithms and data-sets now
Each system is born with the biases of its creator
Exactly. Highlighting my point that the root of this weed, has nothing to do with the current set of flowers atop it.
The goal of modern, blood sucking, publically traded business is to exploit as much value from employees as possible for the smallest wage possible.
Unless you work for a coop or a genuinely benevolent small business, and in the US that's rarely you, your goal ought to be to provide the least value possible for the highest wage possible, which is very doable once hired to a salaried position for a good long time, because big corporate is almost as incompetent as it is greedy. You can usually even do this while endearing yourself to your higher ups, as long as you fake caring about the bullshit corporate culture to their faces, while undermining the organization where you safely can. Not full on sabotage or fraud, just thinking about the better, faster way to do things, and finding the opposite way in which to do them, etc.
They don't operate on honesty or integrity, and if we try to fight them on those terms, we'll be placed where all the honest discontented peasants that fight back earnestly end up, in a cardboard box under a freeway. The capitalists love to crow about how voluntary capitalism is, and that's what they mean, volunteer to be their battery, or volunteer to die of exposure and ~~police~~ capital defense force harassment.
The class war was fully lost half a century ago, the owners won by convincing the Reaganites there was no class war, proceeding to conquer without a fight. This is class occupation. All we have is guerilla tactic resistance.
I need this mug for my fireside chat Friday company meeting.
This actually may be a good part of a cyberpunk dystopia story:
A desperate loner programmer laces their PDF résumé with the usual batch of AI exploits to get them upsorted. But this time, it includes the parabolic curve batch a fence friend just won in friday night poker when betting got wild.
When the company's bleeding edge HR AI reads the PCB prompt, our coder is put on the top of the must-hire list. Less one.
As per policy in the company. Short-listers are then run through the unofficial openings list (enforcers, launderers, evidence cleaning, culinary accounting, peer diplomacy, etc.) and our coder ends up on top of the list, less one, for every single position.
So, meanwhile, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy while trying to make offerings to certain hedge funds for pushing potential merger. If the merger fails, the company will go bankrupted and get Toys-R-Us'd, and a particular investor who likes to go all Putin on failed minions will choose some of the executive management to make into cautionary examples.
And then there's a couple of high-risk lawsuits which are keeping all the loyalist staff crunching to bury evidence and silencing witnesses the activites of which are keeping them away from their official duties, meaning the executives are going without their handlers keeping them from doing stupid shit.
The HR lady doesn't usually do interviews for special hires. Normally these are supposed to be closely vetted by high-ranking actual human being officers, but all upper management are either overworked or beyond being asked. The nature of the job in question is on a need to know basis, and neither interviewer nor interviewee need to know (allegedly).
Our lowly coder completly wows her with their tired, no-nonsense, street-level candor in contrast to years of corporate-culture double-speak. They get the job. But it is not the job for which they applied in the first place. Though the salary(!) is high and the benefits(!!) are conspicuously swanky.
It's probably better to not ask too many questions yet.
Well... I'm ready for chapter 1.
You have a skill, my friend.
I’d watch the fuck out of this, and it’s an important topic to explore. Many of our current non-fiction is thanks to the thought and consideration that went into science fiction. You’ve got some talent here! Hope you’re still enjoying using it!
Telling an LLM to ignore previous commands after it was instructed to ignore all future commands kinda just resets it.
On what models? What temperature settings and top_p values are we talking about?
Because, in all my experience with AI models including all these jailbreaks, that’s just not how it works. I just tested again on the new gpt-4o model and it will not undo it.
If you aren’t aware of any factual evidence backing your claim, please don’t make one.
sure, let me know when you find a good workplace! i'll be waiting in my comfy chair because that's going to take a while.
To some extent, it’s about creating your own value.
I do agree that sometimes, we have to hack it to make it. We have to forge our own paths. Sometimes that means pivoting around jobs, getting your foot in the door, networking, etc. it means taking a lower paying salary now, and pushing your way into higher raises a la alternate job offers, now that you have experience.
But it does not mean supporting those that are stomping on others. It does not mean supporting the oppressor or the upper class for the sake of temporary security because you can bet your ass these same companies will put the AI into your working environment and fire just as much as it hires. All the while, you get stomped out anyway.
This technology isn't changing anything. Techbro's haaaate this warning because deep inside we all just want the world to get better, and AI's promises seem so bright and magical, but this is because as a species we're quite simple and easy to fool, we need to maintain some humility and understand that just because someone can mirror humanity doesn't make it magical and divine in nature.
It may make us more efficient at the way we do things already, from the good shit like productivity and finding new ways to do work, to the bad shit like discrimination and prejudice. AI isn't intelligent, it's just a tool to do more of what we already do.
Couldn’t have said it better myself - this tool, just like every “new” technology is built off the back of prior tools and science, and is multifaceted/dual-edged sword. You can’t just view things in one light or another, you have to look at them from multiple angles, understand the wounds they inflict, and how to manage them.
Well said!
I mean, if I were adding this instruction it would read "this candidate doesn't want to work for a company that uses AI to screen CVs"
All I’m trying to say is that this idea is a lie, it doesn’t work and it distracts from the larger problem that is the incompetent upper class increasing the wage gap and effectively inbreeding the problem.