How To Filter AI Noise Without Missing Game-Changing Tools

0:00 Are you sick of AI bros screaming that your job is already dead? You feel like every AI related headline is one step closer to a panic attack. uh educator and trainer, Patti Aluskowitz. We'll talk to her about overwhelm, scams, and why the serial aisle is the perfect metaphor for AI. also talk about why unplugging is your best weapon, how to filter out the hype. and the one piece of career advice that actually matters in the chaos. This is BroBots, the podcast that talks about how technology can be beneficial to your health and well-being and why sometimes unplugging from it is the best thing you can do for your sanity.

0:41 so my first question is just a personal one. This is something that I have been feeling lately. We talked about this on the show recently. Seeing the new Superman movie actually relieved some of my anxiety around AI because the good guys won against the machines and I felt very good about it. Oh, there's hope for the future. But there's just, mean, anyone who's following this stuff is just battered over the head daily with like the new thing you must be doing. If you don't know this, then you're going to be left behind and your job is going down the gutter. It's overwhelming the amount of content that we are hit with every day about how AI is changing the world. So validate my feelings here. Am I the only one that feels this overwhelm and this fear or is this something you're seeing a lot of? oh So I'm glad you asked.

1:24 No, often we do feel like we're the only ones experiencing something, but when you talk to other humans, not machines, but humans in this case, you realize that we are more alike than we are different. uh Yes, I am overwhelmed with AI as well. uh I try to keep up with it and I just realize I can't. I can't. um It's in my face every day. I work in the AI space. uh I curate content for AI. So I'm constantly watching videos, reading articles, and it does get overwhelming. So I have felt like I have to put some boundaries around it. So they always talk about boundaries, don't they?

2:08 Yeah. So what does that look like for you? What kind of boundaries have you set up for yourself to protect yourself? um Yeah, like I said, for my job, part of what I do as a content strategist and curator, um especially in the AI space, is to review content. And I often review a lot of content on the same topic. So AI is killing jobs, or new college grads, guess what? You have no jobs. Sorry. um and you just watch video after video and at some point I start to get anxious and I have to stop. I have to press pause and I have to walk away and say I will pick this up later and I will do something else because getting anxious, I mean it's very easy for humans to get anxious especially when your mind goes to the worst place possible but it doesn't help because I know I have no control over this.

3:06 You have no control over this so... Panicking doesn't help the situation at all. signal to noise ratio, uh looking at what's coming in towards this, because AI has done some great things. But some of the things that I think it's done terribly, or been terribly to the infosphere, is homogenized perspective and homogenized viewpoints. Because it's no longer dealing with the facile human existence of made up perspective and variation. And because it's homogenized everything in such a way that the inference functions have become very similar.

3:50 So like I can ask chat tpt to create me something or a question and I can run it across. I can run it through Claude or anybody else out there. And I get an answer in a response that's like 80, 85 percent similar. But if I went to different people and I asked the same question, it would there be a lot more variance. And when I look at that, I wonder if the value of AI is in homogenizing these perspectives and creating kind of a universal talking track and understanding of things for people. If that is a good thing, and if it's not a good thing, what do you recommend people do to disconnect from that or to try to alter things when interacting with AI to try to get responses that aren't so, I guess, monolithic uh in the way that they approach questions?

4:42 I ask because I see a lot of people go through and like craft email questions or try to ask, ask AI to do things for them. And they get crappy answers and crappy responses, but because they don't have a lot of information on it, like it's the self-imposed Dunning Kruger effect, where I think I know a thing because the AI has the Dunning Kruger effect and it is following that kind of same pattern. Is this something that you're actually seeing? Or again, am I making this up all on my own and thinking that I have the Denning Kruger effect because I've seen this? No, it's just you. Just you, sorry. uh No, that's a really great question and that's a tough one um because there is that risk, isn't there?

5:27 um Are we going to lose our ability to think and reason and uh interact with each other and just get the same answers spit out to us because we're interacting with this interface and I'm sure at some point it'll have an avatar in front of it. It's what it's, I mean, to try to maybe steer this a little bit. oh One of the things that reminds me of is when we had three TV channels, we all got the same information. We were all operating from the same facts where now we are so divided over all of our social media channels and whether we watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC or just the local news or only read the paper, we're all getting so much different information that it's hard to know what's what's fact, what's right, what is the common like, what does everyone accept as the fact here?

6:17 So I do wonder if this is sort of accidentally accidentally steering us back to something like that, where we're all sort of asking the same question of the same machines. And then we'll suddenly have, Oh, we're all sort of operating from the same place based on what the machines are feeding us rather than our own research of, you know, tick tock that day or whatever. Yeah, especially because those new seeds are all designed and set up to sell you more toilet paper, Kleenex, anything else out there that you may or may not need. And the perspective itself is not necessarily the valuation of it. It's the engagement function of how you push those pieces. Sorry, just adding color to that example, because I think it's apropos in today's world, because their motivation is kind of the same. Get you to look at this.

6:58 um Yeah. What's interesting about the TV, em when you talk about, used to have all have the same three TV channels. There's a lot of people that did not have that experience because they grew up after that. So we're not going to talk about how old we are. But if you think about it, right, we have infinite choices. I'm just thinking of Netflix. But we're all we are all steered towards the same top 10. You know, I mean, I don't know what what um shows you watch, but I'm sure I can mention them and you might have seen them. But there are millions of shows out there.

7:38 So what are the chances? So we're all being steered to the same content anyway. Interesting, interesting. So I don't know if homogenization is good or not. Maybe in some senses because there's too much out there. Sure. But is it going to lead us to all think the same thing? And I think that could be dangerous. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think of it, well, so one, it's maybe not new services, it might be the serial aisle. So when you look at it back in the day, You know, when I was a kid, there were probably 10 cereals I could choose from.

8:19 And there was and then there were 10 generic versions of that same. Again, Jason and I are 85 years old in case you millennials are listening. same age, right? Born in the 70s or 80s or something, right? I didn't say that. that's OK, we can edit that out. But along those lines, like we've created so many small micro variations of the same pieces and we've gone through and we've gone, know, this is now a general cereal that has no gluten in it. And this is a variation of blah, blah, blah, blah. Now there's 20 million things in the cereal aisle. and we think we're getting something different, but it's slight variations in flavor profiles. And the macronutrients are essentially the same. So it doesn't matter which cereal you choose.

9:02 You're probably putting the same garbage in your body over and over and over again. But it tastes good, so we keep going back to it over and over and over again. Are we running into the same problem with AI where we're going after what we think might taste, feel good for us and getting these kinds of confirmation bias put towards us and essentially getting crop nutrition as a result of it. And we're going to grow up being the you are what you eat kind of thing from a digital and information perspective. And going back to this idea of homogenization of information and sources and losing the creativity pieces, how do we get out of the cycle? Like how do people stop eating the same garbage cereal?

9:45 and switching them usually in yogurt is not really going to be an option. Like, how do we break this pattern? And I don't know because I like cereal. Yeah, that's a really good question. It's almost like you have to force yourself out of the box that is being built around you. um If we're talking about the information theme, right? Go to the library and take a book off the shelf that you would have never read before. That's not within, you know, your, I guess, four or five topics of interest and try something else.

10:30 em That would be my suggestion. How do you do that with AI? Yeah. It's funny, I literally did that the other day. I was at the library and there was a book, it was about AI, but it was from an angle like I haven't read a book about this. I wanna see what this perspective is. But I also think like sometimes the simplest answers are the easy ones. And I think you are the correct ones. And you alluded to it earlier. It's like when we're just getting hit over the head with this constantly, go outside, just turn the thing off and go take a walk in the woods for God's sake. Like we are just, I mean, it's just the nature of our society. Now we're constantly on this screen or the one looking at now.

11:10 And we just got unplugged and that I think that is how we beat that. mean, the I did this the other day. A friend of mine had a terrible thing happen to them. They posted about it on Facebook and I was trying to find the right words. And in those situations, there are never the right words. And I did by default. went to A.I. and I was like, what is what is something appropriate to say here? And I felt horrible. I'm like, how am I so out of touch with my own human feeling that I can't find the words for this? And ultimately, they came back with sort of the same bland thing I did because I desperately wanted someone else to be able to to have the perfect words that don't exist, no matter how brilliant you are. ah So it is interesting how much we're outsourcing a lot of our human interaction.

11:52 But I think it does change when you are face to face and you have to on the fly, connect with that feeling or the thought in your head and make the words fall out of your mouth in the right way, rather than perfectly crafting the right comeback to really nail that sucker on Twitter or whatever. It's just a different interaction. And so the more that I think we unplug and reconnect in reality with nature and human beings, I think that that's probably the best way we can combat this. Well, quickly from an agility perspective and a Scrum perspective. So I mean, my background software. um So yeah, so we can nerd out like real hard on this. And I was CPO for an observability stack company out of Sweden for a while.

12:34 I work in AI kind of frequently. But looking at these pieces and taking these types of tools and going through and trying to understand how you're going to build things and create break fix functions and kind of handling these pieces over and over and over again, I've applied the same kind of practice to myself with my own processes and logic and trying to put those things into context. And it kind of works at an individual level. But from an overarching perspective as to how it is people go through and actually use these tools to go through design and build things. Are you seeing AI creep more and more into this space where people are trying to go through, you know, PRDs and MRDs and everything else using AI and watching it do things that they thought were really, really black magic that they could only do themselves and put these pieces together.

13:29 And now they're seeing AI do these things, you know, 90 % of what they did before, how many people are just giving up? Or just like, fine, whatever. I don't care about the 10%. Because I can make this thing happen now with the PRD or an MRD or write these component pieces in like 60 seconds with chat GPT versus going through and taking a week or two weeks to go through and craft these pieces altogether. What's the fallout going to be for those of us that are writing software or consuming software? When all these things start to play out in this kind of way, how does that actually Does it actually benefit us? Does it break us? A lot of companies right now are saying, hey, we're seeing these things come through, and our development core is actually not getting better.

14:09 They're getting slower because they're leaning on these tools. And I kind of wonder how much of that is because they're not using their own brains to do this, and they're just going, I can kind of complete the same work in this period of time, doing that, and then doing other things. Yeah. Yeah, and that's a really good question. I'm not here to represent my company or talk about them, but just very high level, the company that I work for is very much on the forefront of AI adoption. And they're using it everywhere, and everybody needs to use it, and every place they possibly can.

14:53 The people that I'm around and interacting with are really excited about it. But I'm sure that there are companies where that's not the case. um Maybe I'm just incredibly fortunate. But I have stopped to think. you know, understanding the software development life cycle, if 90 % of the work is replaced by AI and whether it's, you know, it takes the same amount of time or doesn't take the same amount of time, I don't know, I guess the jury's out on that. But let's say it does cut out 80 % of the work that people do. What else are people gonna do?

15:34 And I don't know that anybody has that answer, but I was watching something from the... This is a video from the World Economic Forum and they said software engineers are going to be completely replaced by AI. And like if you are in that, if that's your job or you're going, like you better pivot quickly. And maybe it's not tomorrow, but it's going to be soon. And I'm seeing that, you know, if you, if everybody doesn't have to learn to write code, like what is that going to make our software products? But I've also seen like, you know, vibe coding and such where, you know, the people that have the technical experience can actually take that tool to the next level.

16:19 Whereas somebody that doesn't have the technical skills, they can't build as much. And I don't know if that's just a matter of where the tools are currently, or like senior developers or tech leads will always be a step ahead of the people that just don't have coding experience. and they'll come out at the top anyway. But all these software engineers that sit around and write code, what are they going to do? It's interesting, Bill Gates said recently that the three professions he thinks are unlikely to be replaced by AI are biologists, energy experts and programmers because he believes that they require human creativity and critical thinking and the ability to make intuitive leaps that AI systems currently don't.

17:05 I mean, I'm not going to compete with, you brain power with with Bill Gates here, but I would think that a lot of that can be replaced. I mean, we see so much. I mean, literally is artificial artificial intelligence. It's a simulation of how our brains work. And if if we code it to think like our brains do and when we get to a point where it's literally merging, you know, the meat space that Jason likes to talk about and the technology. I think every job is suddenly replaceable. Other than and I even question this is as I say it out loud, but like I heard Gary V talking about, you know, in 20 years jobs are going to be like going for a walk with a human because they just need to, you know, connect with the human being. Like I think that that will be sort of the space that can't really be touched unless we get really good at making like incredibly lifelike robots.

17:52 But even then, like I would know, I would think that I'm talking to a robot and I would miss that human connection. But again, I'm 85 years old, so maybe somebody who's being born today wouldn't even know the difference, right? So it's so interesting to consider that what if we did end up in a situation where all of the actual work is being done by machines and we're left to just still, I mean, we struggle with this now to discover purpose, but to then really have to discover purpose when all of the work is being done for us. you But is it going to be like that because I mean, I look at like a large corporation, for example, like they have 100,000 workers.

18:33 I'm just throwing out a number. Are they really going to replace all of them? And there's going to be like one person operating the machine. Is that what we're talking about? Or is it? I am going to be. It's we don't know, right? And then the 999, like they're all unemployed? Or do we need all these people to operate all these agents or whomever? Well, I think Microsoft, Amazon and Google are giving us a really good early preview of what's happening there because they are eliminating huge portions of their workforce.

19:14 And they work from five to 10%. And they have been doing it really over the last 18 months. And most of the people that they're getting rid of are middle managers. people that kind of manage workflow and help people to... operate and get done what they need to get done. And the people that are getting, that are sticking around are the really good individual contributors that they see being able to use AI to augment their skill sets and create more things faster and better. Whether or not they actually do that, that's a protracted period of time they have to look at before they can actually get a really good result. So it's hard to understand, you know, what the value is of the folks actually doing these pieces until you've got a couple of years.

19:58 of life cycle iteration to figure out if what they're producing is good or garbage. if you, so I've, I've worked at AWS, I've worked at Microsoft, I've done all kinds of work at Google for different companies and they all have very, very smart people, but it's all about how you apply your intelligence and your motivation to push those things through. And those big companies that, you know, really run in these big cloud environments that have huge numbers of GPUs. uh, uh, LPUs in place, running these big LMs, they're profit motivated and they're trying to make money because they have a fiduciary responsibility to do that for their shareholders.

20:41 So anywhere they think they can actually save money and increase revenue, um, or at least increase margin, they're going to do that because that's what their motivation is. Do we have the wrong motivation? Are our motivations as a society to go after and chase money completely antithetical to the ability to have a world that's driven and dominated by AI because we know that people are going to use this tool to do those things. And I think at some level, we all kind of want this. But as an employee who makes a fair amount of money, now suddenly not having a job because I don't fall into the AI scope of model, what's that long-term effect look like?

21:29 then going back to the idea of doing spot checking, iteration testing, if you lose all those voices and all those independent thought thinkers, how does How does that help? Does that actually make products worse? Right. Well, and that's an unknown, right? That's a big question mark. But it's making me think of, uh you know, the first industrial revolution, maybe like, I know it kind of started in England and it was there for about 100 years before it came here. But thinking about like Henry Ford. So he didn't invent the assembly line, he didn't invent the eight hour workday, but he standardized this and he revolutionized how things were manufactured in this country.

22:15 What he was trying to do was make the car affordable for the average person so people could buy it. And he was paying his workers enough so they could be the customers, because he knew that. He said, I have all of these employees, these are going to be my customers. And then of course they go out into their communities and more people buy cars. So it seems kind of like the opposite is happening, right? They want to get rid of all of these employees, whether they get other jobs or everybody's just unemployed. Who's going to buy all the products? Yeah.

22:56 that doesn't make sense as a business person. And I don't know, are they thinking long term or are they thinking short term? Like we've got to increase our stock this quarter. Well, I they think short term. I mean, they think quarterly revenue numbers and how it is am I going to survive from quarter to quarter? And you look at these large companies and organizations, I mean, yes, they've got long term plans and long term methodologies, but I mean, their line of horizon is typically less than 36 months or less. And I mean, we're actually taught that. So if you look at most companies out there that have a vision, the vision when it changes, changes about every three years because they've gone through that cycle and it's like, okay, well now we've kind of hit this vision or the horizons changed on it.

23:38 And now we have to move things in this different directions. If, if there's nobody to buy this cool stuff that everyone's making, like, well then you're making something for nothing, but we're not exactly known as a species for making good long-term decisions. Like we shoot ourselves in the foot consistently. I mean, in this country alone, We do things like, hey, let's make healthcare for profit. people are gonna, the number one cause for bankruptcy in the US is healthcare. Like expenses gone out of control and they want to declare bankruptcy because they can't afford to do these things. If we're putting the collective value of human intelligence into the hands of these things and saying, go do great stuff.

24:28 It's probably not going to do that because the people actually giving it motivation and telling it to go and do certain things. Aren't motivated by the long-term benefit and value to human society and empathy. They're, they're doing it for money. So. How do- I get nothing. I just- I mean, I just- so, I mean, I'll try to sort of bring this full circle. We started with the idea of overwhelm and all and we see just from this conversation, like we're overwhelmed with with the unknown of the future that we're walking into.

25:08 I just on a really small scale, I'm overwhelmed with the the posts of the here's the seven prompts you need to be using right now or else you are a thousand years behind in your toast and your jobs out the door like. It's just like, it starts to eat at you. Like, am I so dumb that I haven't figured out how to be an overnight millionaire because this amazing new tool exists? Like, there's got to be a lot of people feeling that way. yeah. Yeah, they all are. Yeah, they all are. That's the thing. Yes. on like you have to be very mindful and realize what is that person trying to sell me so sorry to interrupt but keep going And I think that's it. It's just like trying to. And this is where like we have to hang on to that critical thinking.

25:49 And we have to be able to look at the information we're given and rather than just assume, they must know more than me. I better follow whatever this thing says. Start wondering like, OK, is there a link to the course that they're selling for a thousand dollars at the bottom of this or like where is this going? So I guess I'm just kind of wondering, like, are there some simple things that you recommend to people that are like, here's what to look for when when you're getting this advisory? hearing about this new thing, we've talked about just to unplug, go away, like take a walk, know, go talk to an actual human being. What are some other like sort of takeaways that people can take from this and just go like, I'm overwhelmed, I'm scared to, how do I feel better today about this? Yeah, I've thought about this a lot and this actually, my answer has nothing to do with AI.

26:36 has nothing to do, it probably predates AI. um This is just general career advice. um Find the three things in life that are important to you. What are your goals? really commit to them and then see what is coming into your space and does it align with your goals. And if it does not, push it away. If it does, go for it. So whenever you decide, should I take this new job? I have an opportunity to apply for this, should I take it?

27:17 Is it going in the direction of my goal in life or is it not? Is it taking me away? That's why Jason only watches cat videos on TikTok. No, no, I have no TikTok account. I use Reels. I intentionally have trained my feed to do this. So I used to work in ad tech and I used to watch demographic profile targeting functions work in this direction. So that Facebook algorithm. Definitely knows who I am very, very well. And every now and again, through my cat between my cat feeds, like it'll stuff in something either political or or old male related that apparently I need more testosterone all the time and my hair is falling out. ah But it's.

27:59 seven prompts that you need to fix that problem, Jason. Just click on my course link and you're all set. Well, and the prompts are pretty simple. Only watch cat videos. That's the solution. Only watch cat videos and choose two serials out of the serial aisle and you're probably okay. If they would just bring back Mr. T serial as we've discussed in depth on this show, then our lives would all be so much better. Patty, you do some work with folks to help them with their AI overwhelm and issues. Where can folks learn more about you and what you offer? Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. try to post content. You know, we talked about putting boundaries down. um I used to post content every single day, but I've decided like that's not necessary anymore because you get sucked into that machine, into that algorithm, and you have to put boundaries around.

28:46 But I do try to put meaningful content out there, talking about topics just like this so people could follow me on LinkedIn. I have a meetup, which I'm always promoting through LinkedIn. Thank Meat Machine, where I bring intelligent folks like yourselves on and I ask them questions just kind of like we're talking about here. How is AI affecting their space? How is it affecting their life? And what are we doing to get through this together? Because this is a journey, this is a human journey. We gotta figure this out together. uh But I would say that, that's a good way to find me. Awesome, we'll make sure there's a link for that in the show notes for this episode. You're awesome. This was a lot of fun.

29:27 Thank you so much for doing this. We'd love to do this again with you sometime. Yeah, thanks again for your time. Thanks, Our thanks again to Patti Oleskiewicz for joining us on the show today. Really fun conversation there. If you're feeling overwhelmed like we are, she's a great resource. You can follow her on LinkedIn. We've got the links to that in the show notes for this episode. And you can find that at brobots.me. If you have found any value in this episode and enjoyed this conversation, know of somebody else who might feel the same way. Feel free to share the link to this episode with them. You can find that at brobots.me. That's also where you'll find a new episode from us next week. We'll see you again at robots.me.