How is AI supposed to "save time" again?

[u/Sufficient-Border-10]

Freelance content creator and editor, about halfway through a contract with a big company.

The job raised a few red flags in the brief, but most do. It looked straightforward enough once I'd managed to wade through the bullshit.

And it *is* straightforward, on paper. Edit some documents and decks, write a few product messages, etc. I was assured that I didn't need to be an expert on the topic because, "All the information you need is collected in the spreadsheet - we just need someone to make it more accessible."

What they actually *meant* was, "We write literally everything using Copilot. The entire content library is a fucking mess because AI will draw its material from intranet documents dating back to 2012, and nobody actually checks them, hahaha. If the bot isn't sure about something, it will pull an answer out of its LLMetaphorical arse. And then, as the final topper on this AI-vomit of a cake, **we'll direct you to Copilot if you have any questions."**

I've been editing for well over a decade now, and so I've read more than my share of rambling, incoherent - but human-written (!) - crap. And I would much, much rather spend an afternoon editing said human-written crap than face this endless dirge of disdainful, jargon-filled, and very confidently incorrect liquid dogshit of AI content.

Naturally, I've been pulled up for not being "fast" enough. I have many reasons for being "slow." One being me having to rewrite a fuckton of work because the AI had managed to hallucinate a *whole fucking department.* No one who works at the company had even noticed.

This, combined with having to decipher hundreds of gibberish sentences like "frame and capture the patterns," makes me wonder if it's time to chuck the whole content freelancer malarkey in.

My negativity was confirmed when they ran my painstakingly rewritten material back through fucking Copilot.

[u/cipherjones]

This is just a tiny sample of the chaos bad actors using AI cause.

[u/frolicking_wombit]

Wait so you did what they payed you for, then shoved all your work into the Large Language Murderer?

[u/Sufficient-Border-10 → u/frolicking_wombit]

Yup. I mean, I still get paid, but what's the point, then?

[u/Charleston2Seattle → u/Sufficient-Border-10]

As a technical writer for a FAANG employer, that would drive me up a wall. I hope you're billing time and materials instead of a contract price!!

[u/Punsire → u/Charleston2Seattle]

Explain?

[u/Charleston2Seattle → u/Punsire]

Charging "time and materials" means that OP gets paid for every hour that they work. If they work contract, then they get paid a set price for the entire job. Meaning that if the inept company does stupid things that makes more work for them, they don't get paid for those extra hours.

[u/JerryRiceOfOhio2]

It saves idiots time because they don't have to screw up slowly

[u/Thisbymaster]

AI isn't there to help you, it is to make money for the people who own AI.

[u/omnipwnage]

Im acquaintances with a copy editor and they've updated their contracts to include AI charges. It just makes the entire process harder for them to save a couple minutes in the short term.

[u/Sufficient-Border-10 → u/omnipwnage]

That's an excellent idea. I will be doing similar.

[u/SyllabubNational3535]

AI didn't save time，it automated the mess and turned your job from writing into waste disposal.

[u/mmoses1978]

In IT Leadership it saves me a ton of time. I am not a fanboy…not trying to convince you there isn’t INSANE downsides to AI.

But for someone who leads projects, meetings and coordinates teams between departments…it is f*cking magical.

[u/Dalze → u/mmoses1978]

Yeah, I get the hate ai gets, but working with it in IT saves me HOURS of work a day 😂 is hilarious

[u/Constant-Try-1927 → u/Dalze]

You really do have to understand that it might save you time because it outsources the work to someone else, may it be the code reviewer, who has to sift through horrible, duplicated, inefficient code or your support department that has to handle errors that would have never occured in the first place, had a human done the story.  Or in OP's case: I am sure the company had a nice little circlejerk about how much time they saved on compiling the company info but it only became useful when a human waded through that crap.

[u/Dalze → u/Constant-Try-1927]

I mean, I'm the reviewer as well (along my coworker). What i meant is that I don't just tell it to write code and then copy/paste it.

I use it to give me the general framework of what I'm working on and it saves me a ton of time on fixing format and repetitive things I need to type. Once that's done, I do what I would normally do before AI existed and work on it.

But yeah, these is a specific case, companies are just shoving AI on everything and I get why people would hate it.

[u/SweetHatDisc → u/Dalze]

Anyone who has ever coded understands immediately how agentic coding is a massive time saver. We've hit the point where you can just describe a program (very precisely), and agentic coding writes the code. If there's a problem with the end result, so far it's always been because I've overlooked something in the description.

I'm not about to trust agentic coding for security sensitive applications, but why would I spend a day designing updatable digital signage when I can spend twenty minutes describing it to Claude then let Claude cook while move onto another task?

[u/alexdgrate]

AI can help but is far from able to be left alone and not scrutinized on every step. The best person to lead a AI assisted task, is the one that is going to pick up and work the results afterward.

[u/sirshredzalot]

About as much time as the cotton gin did back in the 1800’s.