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Recently I've been catching myself having these little moments at work, when I'm trying to read a document someone has sent me and my brain somehow refuses to analyze it. It feels like I'm reading it, but I'm unable to focus on its content.
I end up getting dragged into an endless back and forth with the sender, asking questions about things that have been covered in what they've already sent me. It's rather concerning, because I've spent the last year trying to re-learn how to focus and these situations show the exact opposite.
I sat down to analyze these situations and realized they all have a common denominator: the documents all show a strong trace to AI.
For example:
A design document that looks like a copy-paste from Claude. While it does cover the design of the specific feature in question, it also carries a lot of Claude-specific analysis and lingo. "This cuts just through it", "The first gate is real".
or
A 20-page marketing concept deck that mixes up (a rather reasonable) marketing strategy with some nonsense product technical architecture gibberish. How does it pitch the idea? "It's not selling X, it's selling Y". "The Redis backbone redefines the product".
or
A technical requirements document that describes a rather simple concept in a very verbose way. The thing is, a lot of this document reads like someone's "internal" reasoning that's not fully sure about certain decisions. Sounds like an LLM to me.
There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. It's not that difficult, at least when we're talking about the low-effort results. Florian Roth wrote a pretty good summary of the common patterns in the context of social media.
I see a similar thing happening for work-related texts. Besides the obvious choice of words, the general flow of sentences and the attempt to pitch every small detail as a breakthrough quickly give it away. If your document describes the checkboxes in an RBAC configuration view for an enterprise application, don't sell it like you've just invented fire.
I feel like I've been "pre-trained" on all the AI-generated LinkedIn posts, emails and websites that are full of text but empty on meaning. My brain learned to quickly spot signs of AI-generated content, at least the content generated with low effort, and it now ignores it and moves on without thinking much about it.
I've heard some people comparing it to "banner blindness". It's not surprising. With the amount of content being pushed at us, filtering it out is how we need to stay sane.
What's fascinating to me, is that the same AI that was supposed to make me more productive, is what's now slowing me down in an unexpected way.
I don't usually go on vacation, but this year I really needed a break. One evening I was really hungry, walking past some restaurants on the Baltic coast. There was a single one I immediately ignored, but a minute later something in my head asked "Hey, did they really put up a photo of quiche with mold?" I walked back just to see this.
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