I need a refresh on here. I've had this tumblr for 6 years now, which is most of the time I've been on tumblr. Im following too many people (largely notorious tumblr "microcelebs") id rather not be following anymore, and if Im going to continue using tumblr I want to use it less anyway. Watch this space for a new account ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Corporate Glossary: every Friday, learn the secret meaning of common corporate words
“They’re trying to discharge her constructively. Do you know what Constructive Discharge means?” She asked.
As soon as I heard the term ‘Constructive Discharge,’ I knew I’d never seen it on a vocabulary quiz.
“No. What does it mean?” I asked.
She explained.
“Constructive discharge is a fancy way of saying “being forced out.” It’s not good. And if you’re not a lawyer or in human resources, you’ll probably learn what it means when it’s happening to you.”
“Oh my God. I’ve seen this my entire career and never knew it even had a name.” I thought.
You’ve seen constructive Discharge too. You may have experienced it. We’ve all made choices to avoid it.
Constructive discharge defined
“We can’t fire you, but we’ll make you so miserable you’ll quit, and then we won’t have to pay your unemployment.”
Then there’s the textbook definition:
“A constructive discharge occurs when your employer has made working conditions unbearable, forcing you to resign.”
Or as one person put it.
“I didn’t get handed a pink slip, but when you’re not wanted, people have a way of letting you know.”
HR isn’t always the secret police.
Employees aren’t always victims of evil-doers.
However, employers push employees out all the time to maintain and protect the, “We didn’t do anything wrong, YOU did,” power structure.
Constructive Discharge looks like this:
— Meeting invitations slow to a trickle, and you’re excluded from emails and generally looped out of what’s going on.
— People stop talking to you or stop talking when you walk in.
— Your emails don’t get answers, or they arrive too late to be of value.
— Suddenly, your work is not good enough, though nothing about your work has changed.
— Reviews, once good or even glowing, are now mediocre or bad.
— Instead of a bonus, you get a Performance Improvement Plan.
— Warnings and write-ups start so they can justify your eventual termination with documentation of your “poor performance”
— Your work, clients, assignments go away, or they overwhelm you with work.
— The words “Set up to fail” were practically invented to describe this scenario.
Constructive Discharge is illegal
It isn’t easy to prove you’re a target, and it’s even more challenging if you don’t even know constructive discharge is a real thing.
If you’ve ever experienced this and don’t fully understand what’s happening to you beyond knowing you’re in the process of being excommunicated, it can be hell. It’s not uncommon for the experience to leave long-lasting scars.
Talk to anyone who’s ever been through it. They’ll tell you.
Knowing constructive discharge exists and how it’s used gives you power to predict what’s coming and to protect yourself.
Seeing the endgame helps you in two ways.
You know what to expect. Having a sense of what’s coming next is enormously empowering.
You can go on the offensive and protect yourself. Constructive discharge works to crush your ego, making you feel you did something wrong and deserve this treatment.
Without strategy, you end up being a miserable pawn in your employer’s endgame.
Remember, they’re almost certainly building a case to fire you in the event the hellscape they create for you doesn’t persuade you to quit.
If you’re getting pushed out, and you know what to look for you can prove constructive discharge and you can get unemployment benefits, be released from payback obligations on a signing bonus, and protect your mental health.
You’re not crazy, incompetent, or a failure. This is real and it’s carefully executed to leave you holding the bag and feeling like you did something wrong.
If they force you out, in addition to feeling horrible, you lose your paycheck, benefits health insurance, and possibly owe them money.
So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.
However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”
Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”
The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.
And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.
And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.
Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.
Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.
My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:
Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.
Some other notes:
1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-
2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.
3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.
4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.
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