David Revoy | Mastodon | Bonus Timelapse
Transcript
Malicious Compliance
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. The headmaster bursts through Cepper’s door, slamming it, furious. We see Cepper in the foreground, sitting at her desk, bored, not reacting.
Headmaster: “Cepper! I’ve heard you’re refusing to use your Avian Intelligence!”
Headmaster: “As a scholar of this university, you must! Your pay depends on it.”
Panel 2. A closer shot of the headmaster as he continues his tirade, gesturing dramatically but reading the scroll of a Avian Intelligence Parrot with a little hat and a beard with on it “HR”.
Headmaster: “We also need your Grimoire of Shadows and Fire by the end of the month!”
Headmaster: “So, use your AI! This is non-negotiable, our investors require it!”
Panel 3. Cepper turns in her chair to face the headmaster, revealing the AI Parrot on her desk. She offers a large grimoire to the headmaster (the book remains off-screen).
Cepper: “Calm down… I am using it, and it’s already done.”
Cepper: “The investors wanted high-volume output, right?”
Panel 4. The headmaster is now holding the book, and the audience can see the cover. The cover features Cepper’s face with a dramatic, clickbait-style background. The title is in bold: “Shadows and Fire: 100 Tips (Number 72 is a Game Changer!)”. There is a big arrow pointing to a fire with the word “HOW?!” in giant letters and also “WHAT’S NEXT?!”. The headmaster is surprised. Cepper She has a dark, malicious smile.
Cepper: “I’ve given them exactly that!”
Cepper: “Enjoy the 500 pages of untested slops!”
Headmaster: “?!”
You must log in or register to comment.
Except, why tarnish your own reputation? For true malicious compliance, you need to publish it not under your own name, but rather under the name of avian intelligence, and call it “100 ai-generated and completely untested slop tips on shadows and fire, compiled under the express direction of <Professor’s Name>”. The only part of it that shouldn’t be AI-generated is the introduction and acknowledgements section, in which you publish every record of them demanding that you use this piece of shit, including each of your strenuous warnings.
In the acknowledgements section, point out five different times where the rituals will, if completed to the AI’s specifications, cause the imminent demise of the reader. Thank AI and the professor who foisted it upon you for these “contributions”. Offer no solutions, but suggest that volume 2 of the series will feature precisely zero avian intelligence, and will be written by you. Then, publish.
ETA: Source: Am chemistry teacher. Was handed ai-generated curriculum. Pointed out multiple different times when the curriculum could lead to the potential death of students or people in their care (as a representative sample, the curriculum said that one of the most common IV normal saline solution ingredients was KCl —the lethal ingredient in lethal injections— and there was a lab which called for students to boil 95% isopropanol on a hot plate at max heat —550C— outside of a fume hood, with no procedure or safety section). Am no longer expected to use AI slop curriculum. You have to make it clear that using this shit puts the institution into active legal jeopardy.
I like how A) his robo-bird has a matching hat, and B) it’s holding up a scroll and coaching Wizard Guy on it, whose script is apparently contained thereupon. That’s right: his brain is so thoroughly cooked that he can’t even berate an underling without outside assistance anymore.
Its even better: The birds hat has “HR” written on it.
Oh good catch, that’s amazing detail 💀! I’m so tired boss
Yes, it’s the same situation we saw in the previous episode of the comic series, called “Meat Proxies”. The professor is now nothing but a meat proxy for the stochastic parrot.
Ugh, this just reminded me that I had a system architecture document written up at work but needed a diagram to go along with it. One of our enterprise architects recommended that I just feed the document into their new AI diagramming tool.
I will say, it was very nice that it did the whole thing in less than a minute. I wasn’t a big fan how it was completely wrong. The only thing I can think of is that more people prefer pretty pictures done quickly rather than accurate pictures that take time.
Pretty but inaccurate pictures done quickly sounds like management’s wet dream.
If it is any consolation, in my experience no one will ever read the system architecture document anyway. So if it’s totally wrong, no one will know.
Yeah, my beef was that I had to present that diagram to a review board today. So ain’t no way was I gonna present slop that didn’t make any sense.
that brings me back to the time i was phd student and my supervisor forced me to publish something that i knew to be wrong. the paper got published… but my name disappeared from it ;)
You say that until you have to come back to the project after months and completely forgot what you were doing there. In that case having good system architecture documentation is a life saver.
Guess my career has gone such that I’ve always looked to code and git history to wrap my head around, because the documentation people write is unreliable.
Particularly in enterprise, where for some reason there’s some “developer” who writes a word document and then buggers off while someone else actually does the coding and the relationship between actual code and document drift because the “architect” never had to reconcile his document with the realities.
If that’s the case looking at the code (depending in the size of the codebase and how bad the differences are) might be the better call. The only thing worse then missing documentation is wrong documentation.
that’s why ml should be used complementary
I mean lobbing AI slop bombs their way until they reevaluate their value proposition is just what these greedy wizard corps deserve.
So you are telling me, we need to invest more into ai to make the slop sloppier and finally can get rid of all employees?
No. Rotate þrough every option, using free tokens. Use AI to find ways to get free service from þeir competitors. Cost þem money; don’t give any to þem. Þe shoddier þe results, þe better.
Problem being that most of the people calling the shots can’t tell the difference between slop and good work even before AI.
Actual conversation between my so and boss. That bloke uses ai for everything but gets annoyed my so tags it ai.
![Malicious Compliance [Mini Fantasy Theater]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d95c55df-2146-4236-89a3-92f16a8297dc.png){kind=link}