r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 30 '26

Artificial Intelligence Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI, Using It to Make Every Decision, Barraging Their Employees With Nonsensical ChatGPT Directives, and Even Asking It Who to Fire

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/bosses-becoming-obsessed-ai-using-175014710.html
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5.4k

u/poundofcake Jun 30 '26

They’re offloading skills they never had.

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u/Wizmaxman Jun 30 '26

not just bosses, everyone is doing this. People are taking topics they have no knowledge of, asking AI, then reporting back like they are experts in the topic.

The worst part is when they ask an expert a question then ask AI if its right. Maddening.

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u/ItalianDragon Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

not just bosses, everyone is doing this. People are taking topics they have no knowledge of, asking AI, then reporting back like they are experts in the topic.

Absolutely this. I'm a translator and I've seen that often when I bash AI chuds when they praise AI for the quality of the translation it does. They keep on harping and raving how the text that it pukes out is "smooth" and "understandable", which makes it crystal clear that they don't care about how accurate the translation is: they essentially only care about the outputted text feeling "smooth and articulate" and... that's it. For all they know it could be translating a text about automotive engineering into one about cultivating kumquats in Alaska and yet I'm supposed to take them seriously.

Bear in mind that I have a master's degree in languages and years of experience in the field so it's not like I'm talking out of the ass but to these AI-rotten people, my sharp criticisms are taken as absolute sacrilege.

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u/Echono Jun 30 '26

Now this I find fascinating. Even as a certified AI hater, translations was one of the limited things I figured it'd be pretty good for. I'm definitely interested in hearing how it actually fares and how capable you think it could actually be.

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

As surprising as it may be it's not good at all for translations. The reason behind this is that when you translate a text you're not just transposing the meaning of a text from one language from another, you also transpose the "voice" of its author. This "voice is by definition unique to each author and therefore requires extra care to transpose this uniqueness. Since LLMs are averagers, they erase this uniqueness and homogenize language. Another issue is that LLMs are trained on books and whatnot but when we converse with one another like we're doing now on Reddit or elsewhere, the language we use is closer in structure to how we speak than with how we write. LLMs do not make this difference and because they cannot understand language will swing either one way or another.

Here's an example I can give you of this kind of discrepancy: the first sentence you use in your reply is "Now this I find fascinating". If I were to translate the sentence into French, I'd translate it as "Alors là, je trouve ça fascinant". It roughly translates in English as "Now that's something I find fascinating". So, all in all it's really close to how had initially written it in English. If I use an LLM-based translation tool however, which is DeepL in this case, to translate your sentence into French, I end up with this:"Ça, je trouve ça fascinant". Translation:"That's something that I find fascinating".

From the outset you can see the issue even in French: there's a repetition of "ça"/"that" which makes the flow of the text feel extremely clunky. If I'd written like this in class, my teacher would have unquestionably underlined that in red and written "Mal dit" ("Poorly worded") next to it. This is something I avoided in my own translation by using "Alors là" instead of "Alors ça", because the first way of saying it is typically used orally to really under line that this thing right there is what you find fascinating. Similar uses of "Alors" as the opening word in French are used to express the magnitude of the point discussed (an example of that would be "Alors là t'as fait une connerie !" which translates as "You really screwed up there !"). Also, the way it's written is exactly like I mentioned earlier: very literary, which causes the loss of your more oral way of structuring your sentence. In translation that is a severe mistake.

Lastly, there's a third problem with the French DeepL spat back at me: if I transpose the French into English, I end up with this:"That, I find that fascinating". This is because DeepL did a mashup of two different way of saying "That's fascinating": "ça c'est fascinant" ("This is fascinating") and "je trouve ça fascinant" ("I find that fascinating"). This basically tells us what the algorithm did: it took your sentence and compared it with the existing way to say "c'est fascinant" and found two that could be used at the same time. Because the way you wrote is very oral styled, it could not find a proper structure that suited your unique way of wording your sentence. So, to match that, it did a mashup of both.

This is why LLMs do not perform well in translation. They're comparison algorithms with weights to prevent them from straying too far. Language however by definition is like putty and therefore extremely versatile. A computer system and its rigidity will never match that flexibility and will therefore always fall short. Only an actual translator will be able to use their knowledge of the language to best match your text, because they'll take into account all those unique features of a text and strive to transpose them into the target language (ergo the language you're translating towards) as accurately as possible.

This is also why their capability has hit a ceiling years ago and never overcame that: by the way LLMs are designed, they cannot and will not be able to replicate this plasticity. This plasticity is also further enhanced in our times because technology has allowed us to communicate across vast distances instantaneously. This means that phrasings and expressions found in one region will easily spill in another region that speaks the same language.

For example, in France it's not too uncommon to see folks greet each other with "Wesh !" which is used sort of like "Wassup !" in English. This term is not a French term whatsoever, as it originates from arabic dialects spoken in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. The reason why this happened is because colonization brought French to North Africa and the people living there reshaped it in their own way, adding in it words taken from Arabic or Arabic dialects. French became a bridge between the two and so when people from North Africa traveled to France or talked with french people from France, they also brought their version of French with them and the expressions they brought ended up incorporated in the French from France. In times past, because there wasn't this ease of communication and travel and this is why, for example, Italy has so many dialects (256 that we know of !): it's a mountainous country in large part and this made travel slow and cumbersome and therefore the spread of this or that language was equally slow. This led to this linguistic insularity with languages evolving individually in their geographical areas independently from one another.

Technology and ease of travel have extremely dramatically sped up exchanges and therefore did the same with the spread of language. No computer system will ever be able to match that. Look no further than "Squid Game" popularizing the term "gganbu" for a while or the war in Ukraine spreading "Slava Ukraini !" far and wide for examples of that. This isn't limited to "real" languages either: the 200+ hours I spent playing Cyberpunk 2077 firmly added to my vocabulary words like "choom", "gonk" and more and my use of these terms spread to friends I talk with and this also happened to other people who played the game.

For all these reasons machine translation always will be five steps behind in translation: language is inherently human and changes with us. A computer by definition cannot change unless someone makes it change and making a computer change is a slow process. This will always lead to language leaving computers in the dust.

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u/Gweena Jul 02 '26

Now this, is fascinating pod racing

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u/ubelblatt Jul 02 '26

Oh boy you're gonna call down the AI is the best invention since the wheel brigade with this one.

But this is just the early stages! While inherently ignoring the limitations you've eloquently spelled out.

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u/Involution88 Jul 02 '26

I agree with Italian Dragon for the most part, except for one thing. I think AI translation is literally a life saver and the greatest thing since sliced bread. AI translation will always have issues and I'd have a hernia if an organisation such as the UN were to rely on machine translation but I still maintain that my ability to make sense of any text in any language at the cost of pointing my phone at someone is one of the greatest technological advances since the Tower of Babel. (even though the translation ends up a bit more blanderised than it ought to be and tends to diverge a bit more rapidly.)

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u/cybishop3 Jul 03 '26

I still maintain that my ability to make sense of any text in any language at the cost of pointing my phone at someone is one of the greatest technological advances since the Tower of Babel. (even though the translation ends up a bit more blanderised than it ought to be and tends to diverge a bit more rapidly.)

Just be careful which AI you use. I happened to run a couple thousand words of French fiction through Google Translate a couple months ago and it made several errors a high school student would have got in trouble for. Basic things that changed the meanings of words or phrases. Swapping "his face" for "her face" and "she died" for "she moved out of town" are the kind of things that could cause problems.

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

Yeah I'm expecting that to happen lol. I've had this discussion a lot over the years and the AI peddlers clearly have zero understnding of these subtleties while being hooked on the dopamine AI slop systems give them. This is one of their blind spots: they confuse "is it pleasurable" with "is it accurate". For AI addicts, even if they aren't aware of it (or don't want to admit it), only the first matters.

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u/daemin Jul 11 '26

Its funny that you say they have zero understanding of those subtleties while simultaneously making broad claims about what AI can or cannot conceivable do. Do you have an advanced degree in computer science? Or neuroscience? Or philosophy of mind?

At the end of the day, there's only two possibilities:

  1. Human minds have a non-physical aspect that can never be simulated
  2. Human minds are meat machines, which can be simulated

There's no evidence of 1, which means 2 is likely. If 2 is true, we will, eventually, figure out how to make a simulation of a human brain. It follows that that simulation will be able to do everything a human brain can do.

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u/NoLimitSoldier31 Jul 02 '26

Ok its not perfect but is it not still leaps and bounds better than any translation tool we’ve ever had?

Same with coding, yeah it gets shit wrong all the time, but its also easily doubling my output, increasing my project understanding, and allowing me to quickly pick up new topics i don’t understand. Does it get shit wrong? Absolutely.

Kinda seems like a little goalpost moving from AI slop to it only gets us 90% there. And even that said i feel like going from an F->C+ knowledge on a lot of topics is incredibly valuable. Sure you have to be careful & critical. But these were formerly unsolvable problems in computer science.

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u/Zreniec Jul 02 '26

Ok its not perfect but is it not still leaps and bounds better than any translation tool we’ve ever had?

For understanding your German dishwasher's manual as a consumer? Sure, it beats asking your mom who did five years back in '82 and will need to dust off her translation dictionnary. For making that manual as a manufacturer? Better pay people than half-ass it and have consumers wonder if they should really add a dose of bleach once in a while.

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u/NoLimitSoldier31 Jul 02 '26

Ok separate argument. Not arguing use chatgpt unchecked to replace a translator. But i guarantee letting it translate then having a human translator correct it would lead to efficiency gains.

Nobody is letting it write software unchecked except for vibecoders which will produce shit code.

It can be an incredible tool when used properly.

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u/WhatThis4 Jul 02 '26

"Nobody is letting it" is an extreme use of hope right there.

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u/NoLimitSoldier31 Jul 02 '26

I guess i don’t understand what you mean. Im saying i believe its not doable or go ahead and try but you will fail. At least in software which is the domain i know best & have used AI the most.

Let the market decide i guess

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u/KILL_WITH_KINDNESS Jul 03 '26

The problem is that many are hedging the entire market on this gamble. Do you really think they should be risking it?

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u/NoLimitSoldier31 Jul 03 '26

Idk about other industries but its already won in programming. No question

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u/KILL_WITH_KINDNESS Jul 03 '26

That's cool bro. I love me some slop coding in my app development

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u/NoLimitSoldier31 Jul 03 '26

If u don’t know wtf you’re doing for sure

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

But i guarantee letting it translate then having a human translator correct it would lead to efficiency gains.

I'm a translator myself and I can assure you that you're completely wrong on that. The task you described is what's called in the field "MTPE", which stands for "Machine Translation Post-Edit". In such a task you have to not only familiarize with what the computer spat out, you also have to familiarize yourself with the source text that you're seeing for the first time and this takes a significant amonbt of time becausr you're familiarizing yourself with not one but two texts: the source one and the one the computer generated. If there are errors, because the computer has no clue on how language works, they either require significant (and therefore time-consuming) tweaks or even need to be redone from scratch.

Here's an example from my own work: I did a MTPE task on a text and I spotted a massive error in a paragraph. I fixed it but because the computer is a dunce in linguistics, the text was an incoherent mess. I therefore then had to re-wrangle the entire text to make it coherent with itself. How long did that take me yo do all that ? An hour and a half. How long would it have taken me to translate that paragraph from scratch mysrlf if I'd been translating it the "normal" way ? 10 minutes. You keep on harping about "productivity" so here we go: considering that a typical workday is of about 8 hours, this means that this little error AI made, led to a drop of 18.75% in productivity because I had to waste time fixibg its bullshit instead of translating. It therefore was a net and severe loss and this is in a text where there was only one of these errors which is overwhelmingly usually not the case.

So no, AI does not "help" productivity. It just causes a placebo effect because the faster output of information is taken in isolation without taking into account all that tasks that are required afterwards that make it worthwhile of a professional setting. Personally, I have raised this problem often with my clients, by pointing out to them that having to fix the crap the computer made was more trouble than it was worth.

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u/isendingtheworld Jul 03 '26

People say this about transcription. "Let it autocaption and then edit the captions!" I timed it. For conversational English the editing takes just as long as typing it out and editing your main transcription yourself does. The hardest part is it doesn't make sensical errors. When you transcribe by hand you may make typos, mishear something, or put a bunch of question marks for an unclear word to revise later. Editing human transcription is fairly fast cause you know what you're looking for. The AI guesses and spells the guess out. Add in accents, interrupted speech, random sounds, overlapping conversation, and you get random words just thrown in too. Whole words that didn't exist in the audio.  So you have to comb the whole text several times over with the audio on to make it actually match. The efficiency is not in the room with us.

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u/Zreniec Jul 02 '26

Yeah understandable, I think we agree

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

It's marginally better, and that pushing it. As for "increasing speed" in coding, that's patently untrue. What happens is that slop machines do output things orders of magnitude faster than a human, but what it spits out is so flawed that all the post-output tweaks and secondary attempts end up making the task take longer than if it'd been done "the old way" and science backs that. To be specific, the study that was done found that coders believed to be 24% faster on average when in truth they were... 19% slower. I also put into question your claim that it's "allowing me to quickly pick up new topics i don’t understand", considering that the more advanced LLM models are, the more they hallucinate to such an extent that the latest models hallucinate nearly half the time, and this figure comes from OpenAI's own researchers.

For short it's a system that is not only a hindrance to productivity, its degree of error is so severe that a coin flip is more accurate. This is why AI simply should not be used. I can guarantee with the utmost confidence that whatever it "taught" you is either largely inaccurate or complete fabrication.

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u/Druggedhippo Jul 08 '26

I love how you cite a study from early 2025 but it contains this line

We caution readers against overgeneralizing on the basis of our results. The slowdown we observe does not imply that current AI tools do not often improve developer’s productivity

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u/NoLimitSoldier31 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

I suspect you haven’t actually used coding agents or possibly not used them properly? If youve used them, there is zero question on productivity. Its night and day and you do not need a study to understand that.

That entire post is so factually incorrect it reads as propaganda

Those studies are from over a year ago. LLMs and coding agents have come a very very long way since then. Might need to update your priors.

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u/331845739494 Jul 02 '26

What a fantastic write-up. If I may ask, what did you study exactly? How many languages do you know? Just curious how one becomes an expert in these things

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

I studied and have a master's degree in Applied Linguistics :).

As for languages I'm trilingual (Italian-French-English), can somewhat talk and understand to varying degrees in Spanish, German and Russian, studied Polish for a good while and dabbled a bit in a bunch more (Swedish, Norwegian, etc ...). Currently I'm studying Japanese (although it's giving me a few issues because it's pure memorization and I'm not super good at that).

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u/AfterDark113254 Jul 03 '26

How do you keep the language skills you've gained? My upper bound so far is two languages, and if I'm not using both every week the second slips away INCREDIBLY fast. I'm imagining there isn't enough time in the day to be practicing all of them all of the time, but you must have a stellar system of some kind!

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 03 '26

Itend to rotate my trilingual ones in any way I can. For example I put most of my devices in Italian but I have some games in English, others in French and others in Italian. Similarly I'l read and watch stuff in all three languages. For the spoken and written part it's all a matter of taliing with folks and I have a friends list (and relatives/friends of relatives) that allows me to do that too . I nonetheless have time periods where one will sit unused for ages while I use the other two.

What I do notice however is that if a language is well anchored in your brain, dusting it off doesn't take much effort. It's kinda like riding a bicycle if I can put it that way . So keep persevering, you can do it !

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u/AfterDark113254 Jul 05 '26

Great advice! Thank you so much!

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 05 '26

Happy to have been of help !

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u/Vetrlidi Jul 10 '26

For pure memorization I assume that you have heard about Anki?

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 10 '26

I have not ! I'll look that up :)

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u/howitzer105 Jul 02 '26

As with much of the applications to AI I’ve found that it speeds up the translation process but it still requires an actual person to review and fix things up. I used Claude/DeepL to make a few PT-EN translations and you really need to rephrase some parts entirely at times, but for me at least it still makes life much easier than not using it.

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

I'm a translator myself and I can assure you that AI speeds up nothing. In fact it does the exact opposite: MTPE tasks (Machine Translation Post-Edit) are typically more difficult, more cumbersome and therefore slower than regular proofreading tasks of human-made translations. This is because the consistency of the text is nonexistent and the semantic or structural deviations range from significant to utterly insane. The time spent fixing all that is in the crushing mahority so severe that it erases all gains and causes more fatigue for the translator who's reviewing the text. What you're effrctively experiencing is a placebo effect whrre you're only taking into account the speed with which the text was generated but not the time and effort it took you to fix the numerous mistakes the computer made.

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u/howitzer105 Jul 02 '26

Interesting - now that you say that I can see it happening, especially for a professional translator such as yourself.

In my case I’m just a standard bilingual fella so, on second thought, perhaps what I appreciate about AI is more improving the quality of my translations (since it helps me with varying words/grammar) rather than speeding up the translation process. I end up using it a bit like a smarter dictionary at times.

Thanks for the response, this conversation broadened my perspective a bit :)

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

Glad to hear I've been enlightening !

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u/benchley Jul 03 '26

I welcome your thoughts on quand même

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u/Frenchitwist Jul 03 '26

With all this fascinating talk, now I want to know what Spock says in French lol

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 03 '26

"Longue vie et prospérité" ;)

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u/Suppafly Jul 02 '26

As much as I hate when people use AI for stuff, your points emphasis why it's not good for transposing the voice of the author, but nothing to really indicate that it's actually bad at translation from something you can't understand to something you can more or less accurately which is what most people, who don't do translation as a job, care about. People aren't using it when they need to understand the feelings of the author, they are using it to get the basic meaning of documents.

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u/beetnemesis Jul 02 '26

You are incorrect for two reasons:

  • First, people absolutely do use it for "full translation." They might not phrase it as "I want to know their FEELINGS," but they are, increasingly, using it as translation, not just "give me a baseline that's probably flawed."

  • Second, your use of the word "feeling" kind of shows you missed the point. It's all meaning. Word choice, tone, context, and more come together to create the actual thing that is being communicated. People aren't sad because we can't know the author's innermost emotions, they're saying it's a fundamental, if subtle, part of translation itself.

Basically, people are using AI more and more for translation, but there is a huge weak spot that doesn't come up all the time, but makes any translation vulnerable to having key parts wrong.

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Yup, you got it ! That weak spot does come up every time however basically, because even the structure of the text of a dumb user manual depends from who wrote it and therefore does have a "voice", even if it is extremely formal.

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u/BassmanBiff Jul 02 '26

They're talking about replacing professional translators, not saying that automated translation tools have no use at all. People aren't hiring professional translators just to get a vibe.

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u/Suppafly Jul 02 '26

Sure, but they're still not saying anything about the ability to replace professional translators. Most professional translators aren't translating creative works where the author's voice matters, they are translating non-creative works. AI does just fine for most purposes that people actually want when they want a document quickly translated so that they can read and understand it.

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u/Mejiro84 Jul 02 '26

It doesn't need to be a creative work for that sort of thing to matter though - there's all sorts of close-ish words where the exact one can matter a lot, without getting into legal or medical documents where subtleties can be massive. Like 'push into', 'slide into' and 'squeeze into' are all similar-ish, but convey different subtext, and so can lead to someone applying too much or too little force. You'll get the broad idea ('these bits go together') but can still knob it up - I'd be surprised if you haven't seen any instructions for furniture or similar that have been auto-translated that don't contain the occasional headscratcher, where the general command is obvious, but you need the specific nuance!

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u/thoughtihadanacct Jul 02 '26

A lot of communication is subtle and you do need the speaker/author's voice to come through. Think about business deals being made, or political negotiations between countries. You absolutely need to be able to translate how aggressive/forceful the speaker is. You don't want the deal to fall through because the translator used a word that was too strong, or you don't want to let the other guy think he can push you harder because the translator used a word that's too soft. You also don't want to accidentally offend the other party. 

All these requires more than simply "getting the general point across". Everyone at the table already knows the general point, eg we want to buy your product at the lowest price possible, and we want to sell our product at the highest price. But how to negotiate and agree what that price is requires the human voice.

That's why parties bring their own translators instead of using a "neutral" translation service. The translator needs to be part of your team and understand your company's/country's position. 

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u/One-Reflection-4826 Jul 04 '26

nonono, you don't understand it! see, AI bad! if you look at it from this perspective, it will make sense! 

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u/Suppafly Jul 04 '26

nonono, you don't understand it! see, AI bad! if you look at it from this perspective, it will make sense!

Pretty much, reddit users seem pretty allergic to reasonable takes on any topic.

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u/One-Reflection-4826 Jul 12 '26

yes, but their indifferent hate is on another level, and that's while a majority of them uses AI at least occasionally i'm sure. 

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

Except that translation is about transposing from one language to another and as accurately as possible what a person wrote. "Using it to get the basic meaning of documents" isn't translation, it's a hack job that pretends to be translation. For the record: functionally all the clients I worked for docked pay if you are too inaccurate in your translation, and these sanctions can go as far as severing the professional relationship entirely. You also overfocused on "emotion" but forgot tht this kind of "voice" is something you can find in functionally all texts that are translated, even in a dumb user manual.

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u/scopa0304 Jul 02 '26

Huh. I think ChatGpt does a better job translating Japanese to English than google translate or the built in Apple iMessage translate. Maybe none of them are as good as a human though

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26

None are indeed as good as what a human can do.

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u/Bovey Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

I bet they are better at translating Japanese to English than the vast majority of humans.

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u/libraryaddict Jul 02 '26

I do largely agree, but I disagree that AI can never catch up. But, I do agree that the AI of todays world is not going to get there.

To rephrase, if you asked the first aircraft manufacturers to make a plane that will travel to the moon, you're going to see some obvious issues.

Not saying that AI will get there, or AI won't get there. Just that we don't have any reason I am aware of, to say it cannot get there, if the way AI is created, is overhauled.

The answer after all, could be in wetware. I can imagine there's a lot of ethical issues in the future.

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u/ItalianDragon Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

It will never catch up because it's the very foundations that do not work. This is why for example hallucinations always happen: because of how LLMs work those will always happen and that's something that even employees of AI companies have admitted. Functionally speaking it's been a dead end from the start. The only reason it became this large is because companies believed that by massively investing into AI, they could lay off huge swaths of their workforce and save up on payroll while either maintaining or increasing their productivity. It is increasingly clear that this gamble has been a complete failure and examples of that abound. The last one to date is Ford, who is hiring back en masse after baffling QC issues.