They probably use it more than anyone else, but the things you need to remember is that they don't do real jobs and they're generally pretty terrible at the fake jobs that they have. AI is perfect for that. They think it's literally magic. Imagine if all you did was look at and send emails all day every day and you were bad at that and a tool came by that made it so you barely had to read or send emails yourself anymore and it was usually pretty close to correct. They think that God has intervened on their behalf.

And then you can take it further, because they're bad at what they do they think that everybody else's job is even more fake than theirs because they make so much more money than anyone else that what they do has to be way harder than what the idiot employees do. Well if the magic AI tool can pretty much do my job and everybody else tautologically has a much easier job than me, then AI should be able to do those jobs even better. Then tack on the fact that, if they're right, they should get huge bonuses for cutting so many costs and you can understand pretty easily why they think the way that they do.

Yes they absolutely do. They love it because it takes away all of the excuses of "this is too difficult or time consuming" from all of their underlings, so they think. What do you mean it takes you a week to write this highly technical document, just ask Gemini I did and it did it in seconds. What do you mean it will take you 2 months to write that application, just use Claude I did and it took me an hour. What do you mean it will take you 4 weeks to talk to customers and gather requirements, just ask ChatGPT I did and it took minutes.

And they aren't wrong you CAN do those things and you will get some output. What they fail to recognize is that output might be wrong, or missing important details, or missing functionality that they don't realize is important, or won't get you to an innovative solution, etc. They see an output and assume it must be the correct output so everyone saying to do it the right way must be sandbagging.

What will happen over time as more and more of the world is run off the back of stuff built mostly by AI is that those cracks will start growing and growing, the experts who catch them and fix them before they become real issues will become fewer and further between, and eventually it's going to all come crashing down.

AI is speed running the collapse of capitalism. Ridiculous investment into something that is obviously completely unsustainable is capitalism's MO and AI exemplifies this on an unprecedented scale. But execs don't think about that or care about that, they want to slam AI into everything so they can cash out as fast as possible. They have no interest in "can this application still be valuable in 10 years" or "will this document be useful in 5 years" or whatever they care about "can I cash my company out into the AI investment bubble before it pops and I'm left holding the bag."

I suspect many executives know this but you'll never hear them say it because they are not incentivized to be honest. The sooner they can cash out of the bubble the better and they won't do that if they don't buy into it to begin with.

It's the fundamental flaw of capitalism laid bare; capitalism is not interested in production, it is interested in profit. AI is largely an accelerator of profit, not production, and that's why it is being so heavily pushed by the capital class.

At a previous job, a multi-billion dollar Y Combinator darling, the CEO learned that our largest customer was walking away. His response was to hop into Slack and ask a ChatGPT bot for guidance. In a public channel. I am still not sure whether the bigger problem was the impending potential collapse or the fact that he was workshopping survival strategies with an AI in front of the whole company. This was prior to the loss of the customer being announced, too.

These people are not serious people. To quote Ed Zitron, they are business idiots. They think they are gifted captains of industry, yet they cling to a machine that tells them they are brilliant while it spits out work with no real substance. It matches the kind of employees they reward - the ones who perfect the performance of work rather than the work itself.

Anecdotally, it happens that I used to have frequent, close interactions with a boomer executive who loved AI. From what I could tell, he used it extensively for his own job which appeared to primarily be vibes-based nonsense to begin with. This bled over into the rest of his predictably vibes-based nonsense life, where he'd use ChatGPT to come up with political talking points to break out at lunch or help decide what junk to put in his next twice-weekly Amazon order. There was this time where I overheard him talking on the phone to his nephew who had been struggling with depression and he said something like "have you considered talking to ChatGPT about this?"

Anyway, the point being that these executives seem to live very vibes-based, consequence-free lives to begin with so of course they never see a downside to AI.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the "job" of a lot of people in powerful positions is to generate text in response to prompts. Their entire world has changed... therefor, the entire world must be changing in the same way they've experienced! AI does everything for me, so it must be able to do everything for everyone! We have to go all-in!

You interact with AI the same way a manager interacts with an employee.

It is not that surprising that working class people hate the shit, whereas everyone in management and up like it. The worker interacts with the brush by holding it and making beautiful art, the manager interacts with the artist by saying "hey artist, make me an art".

The exec doesn't actually make anything and this fits right into how they usually interact with people to make things. They also just expect it to get better, and like a fairly average employee they're willing to give it time to improve which is something they do already for employees that aren't always great.

We have a Dunning-Kruger economy, the c-suite thinks that the slop they're shitting out is good because they don't actually have any expertise in the commodities their companies produce. Every dipshit with a business degree thinks his vibe-coded app works great, and it took less than an hour, so his underlings should be able to churn out product as quickly as he can shit out slop.

Executives tend to be pretty wormbrained. They live for trends and are desperately afraid of not being in with the status quo.

Capitalism is full of rich idiots tricking other rich idiots with fomo

AI is one of those things that, like VR, hits incredibly hard right off the bat and then as you interact with it more the novelty fades and you can't ignore the issues. So have they used AI? Probably a bit. Not enough to see the shit part.

I deal with a lot of "entrepreneur" small business tyrants and they are increasingly using AI instead of hiring IT staff. The AI is always wrong but it's confident and the small business tyrants are clueless rubes, so it can cause a lot of irritation when they just paste in a giant block of text from an LLM, including the preface where the LLM is telling them how great this output is to send to us and how it's concise and to the point while getting across that the client isn't a techy person but they've covered all their bases beforehand. It's to the point where if I get any communications from a client that have the hint of LLM generation I paste in a line about LLMs not being trained on our documentation and therefore cannot be useful for this purpose and will only waste the client's time and our own.

I assume large corporations are run by very similar people who just have more resources and employees around them to tweak and adjust the outputs of the shitty LLM they use to think for them.

I don't think it's a coincidence that shortly after the rollout of AI at big tech companies we've seen AWS go down globally (multiple times?), Azure went down, CloudFlare went down (multiple times?), and Microsoft has pumped out broken update after broken update for Windows 11.

My company's execs talk to us through chatbots pretty much exclusively. Every email and slack message is filled with gratuitous amounts of emdashes and "it's not just x, it's y"

These people are increasingly tripping over their words when they speak, by the way. And the AI-generated shit they post is increasingly fluffly (and thankfully easily-ignored) nonsense. I just imagine their frontal cortexes look like shriveled up raisins more and more each day. If these people weren't Satan's minions, I'd be horrified watching them slowly lobotomize themselves, but they are evil greedy bastards so fuck 'em, I hope their brains finally melt out of their ears once we announce our intentions to unionize.

A few years back when genAI was the craze we had execs create full PowerPoints with genAI images. I still have some screenshots because that was the era where humans had 6 finger and text we incoherent, not even letters. They used these images for serious topics on company updates and were so proud of themselves

CEOs are the original bullshit extrusion machines, chatbots in suits. Using a gippity is like looking in the mirror for them

Wasn't one of the first AI products a way to have the machine write replies to emails and texts for you? I would be incredibly surprised if they don't use the machine to make slightly less auto-reply-y sounding auto-replied email responses.

Why do you think execs even give a fuck whether people don't like the tools? The people have little choice.

The CEOs? Probably not. But the other management levels have most definitely used it on a surface level to see if they can perform the same tasks as their subordinates. Then they proceed to force the same subordinates to leverage AI. When the subordinates don’t adopt it fully or as quickly as management wants there ends up being negative impact on their employment.

i think they used it superficially, were impressed compared to what level of technology they were used to which for 50~60 year old execs would be blackberry phones, and just bought into the marketing vision wholesale. some can see through the bubble but are still investing because they believe others have bought into the vision, and they want to profit from it.