Posted on 09/21/2026 4:40:47 AM PDT by Cronos
The tech leaders who once hailed AI use as the key to unlocking every employee’s full potential are now changing their tune.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke said during an interview on "The Knowledge Project" podcast, released on Tuesday. His take: AI helps employees produce more material, more quickly — without taking responsibility for whether it is useful or correct.
"We call those 'slop grenades' that people toss at each other," he said. "And that's definitely a bad thing."
the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.
He offered an example: Someone might send an unnecessarily long AI-written email, forcing its recipient to use another large language model to summarize it.
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
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AI is a powerful tool
On the machine learning side it does amazing things
On the soft side it is user dependent
The same kind of person who uses AI to do their homework for them is the same kind of person who produces AI junk
AI is only as good as the person using it
“Slop grenades”
That’s a good one!
What’s truly alarming is the amount of code now being produced that no human has really reviewed. Too many reviews now are done by people who use LLMs to “help” review when it reality they are delegating the review of code produced by an LLM to an LLM. The result is often inefficient or just plain wrong code which has bugs that the test automation (also written by LLM) sometimes deliberately ignores.
“Slop grenades”
That’s what they served us in the chow hall in the Marines................
It sounds like AI is for lazy people.
The HR manager at my last job thought that my job as a payroll processor (actually a payroll manager in all but title and someone with 20+ years of payroll, benefits, tax and compliance and accounting experience) could be replaced by a combination of AI and an outsourced 3rd party provider and directed me to research how to move to this model, basically researching how to eliminate my job. The company was also pushing all of us to use Microsoft Co-Pilot.
I left. Last I heard from a former co-worker, it was a disaster.
Is AI all bad? No. Do I use it sometimes? Yes.
I mostly use it as a grammar checker or how to make my writing more concise, or to begin researching a topic but then always use verifiable authoritative sources for confirmation.
For example, let's say I have a complicated PR tax question, I might use Co-Pilot to ask the question but then always go to the source such as the IRS website for further research and confirmation.
I've used Co-Pilot in my personal life such as when I became disabled after a 17-day hospitalization with a heart failure, A-fib and kidney failure diagnosis as a starting point for navigating applying for SS as I had just turned 65, questions about Medicare vs Medicare Advantage and SSI and or other benefits, I might be qualified for and it was a good starting point to learn the basics, but didn't replace the hard work and many phone calls I had to make.
You are right. Just like Flock cameras, not all AI is bad, but how it is used.
2A supporters get that.
Agreed. There are some who seek to dominate the world, and will use AI in their attempts to do so. So far, those efforts have been fruitful, overall. Great uses of AI do not require ‘Data Centers’; nefarious ones do.
It’s also the legacy legion media and fake news product.
it depends - if you use it in chat mode, yes it is user dependent.
Using the project setting you can define the structure for specific structure
I agree.
Increasingly I see that AI is not going to reduce tech jobs but may actually increase tech jobs and salaries - like the days of macros, when users created garbage and then tech had to productionize it.
So lots of people will create quick hacks that ultimately become product but no one knows how they work.
then tech will be told - productionize it - and “it should be easy” - whereas it is a completely rewrite
That's certainly true here on FR, when people post excessively long screeds. The good thing is, the rest of us get to just ignore it. But it steals bandwidth and burdens the budget bit by bit.
Recent example-- scroll down:
Of course. The idea that AI was going to wipe out the workforce in 5 years is laughable - and some allegedly “smart” people were saying that and allegedly “respectable” publications (including The Wall Street Journal no less) were hyping this idea. AI is simply a tool. Its just like the Microsoft office tools were in the 1980s - word processing programs and spreadsheet programs. They revolutionized the workplace and did impact jobs. But workers adapted and productivity soared. In the 1980s, there anecdotal horror stories about the mid-level manager who got fired and ended up as a bagger in a grocery store. And there will be anecdotal horror stories now, especially in industries like transcription simple analysis tasks. But if workers are even moderately smart, they will adapt and use the tool. This article is proof that we are in a learning stage. Companies stupidly threw AI at workers with no plan or training, and ended up getting “slop” as a product. They will fix that and we will see a productivity boom. There will be pain associated with it and the anecdotal horror stories, but overall, it will be a huge benefit to the workforce, incomes and productivity.
AI has turned us all into beta testers.
Zoinks!
Just the simple AI can produce reams of information amazingly fast. A lot of it is just volume, junk really. You can only use it as a guide and with great discretion. If you don’t have background on the subject and a healthy dose of skepticism you will be misdirected.
I thought Microsoft did that?
’ If you don’t have background on the subject and a healthy dose of skepticism you will be misdirected.”
Quite frankly this is like what happened before but escalated.
I remember in 2003 I was on a trip in Athens and a retired American bloke was talking about the Da Vinci code as if he actually believed it.
Dan Brown is a liar and a copier of liars and millions believed him...
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