As part of the AI insanity $employer forced us all to do an “AI training.” Whatever, wasn’t that bad, and some people probably needed the basics, but one of the points was exactly this— “use negative prompts: tell it what not to do.” Which is exactly an approach I had observed blow up a few times already for this exact reason. Just more anecdata suggesting that nobody really knows the “correct” workflow(s) yet, in the same way that there is no “correct” way to write code (the vim/emacs war is older than I am). Why is my bosses bosses boss yelling at me about one very specific dev tool again?

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incone123 3 days ago | parent [-]

That your firm purchased training that was clearly just some chancers doing whatever seems like an even worse approach than just giving out access to a service and telling everyone to give it a shot.

Do they also post vacancies asking for 5 years experience in a 2 year old technology?

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corytheboyd 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

To be fair, 1. They made the training themselves, it’s just that it was made mandatory for all of eng 2. They did start out more like just allowing access, but lately it’s tipping towards full crazy (obviously the end game is see if it can replace some expensive engineers)

> Do they also post vacancies asking for 5 years experience in a 2 year old technology?

Honestly no… before all this they were actually pretty sane. In fact I’d say they wasted tons of time and effort on ancient poorly designed things, almost the opposite problem.

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incone123 2 days ago | parent [-]

I was a bit unfair then. That sounds like someone with good intent tried to put something together to help colleagues. And it's definitely not the only time I heard of negative prompting being a recommended approach.

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corytheboyd 2 days ago | parent [-]

> And it's definitely not the only time I heard of negative prompting being a recommended approach.

I’m very willing to admit to being wrong, just curious if in those other cases it actually worked or not?

	▲	incone123 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I never saw any formal analysis, just a few anecdotal blog posts. Your colleagues might have seen the same kind of thing and taken it at face value. It might even be good advice for some models and tasks - whole topic moves so fast!

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cruffle_duffle 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair this shit is so new and constantly changing that I don’t think anybody truly understands what is going on.

	▲	corytheboyd 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Right… so maybe we should all stop pretending to be authorities on it.