D&D General Todd Kenreck Let Go from WotC

[Belen]

They want your expertise and to increase your workload, with the teaser of a 30% haircut to your pay? Renegotiate. You should not be agreeing to that. If you feel like it would take a while to find something else in your field, give it a shot anyway. After that, whatever the outcome of the renegotiation: look for something else. Don't wait to be laid off; leave now. You're welcome.

I made more than the senior leadership as a contractor. (I had multiple clients) They just cannot pay me those rates because then I would never get a "raise."

Yes, I am looking elsewhere and I have several companies that have reached out.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

It's that AI could be put into a book and the vast majority of people wouldn't notice. And with a halfway decent editing pass, or uploading a style guide into the AI, you could make it almost impossible to recognize.

Minus the stuff it got wrong, and thus would require a human to go and fix.

And no. I'm not going to go through all that. If you would like to hold that up as evidence it cannot do it, feel free to create it for yourself. I'm not buying a subscription to an AI generator.

Probably shouldn't it's a waste of time, and will require many decades to get to a more useful point. I doubt WotC is going to bother doing the same either.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I made more than the senior leadership as a contractor. (I had multiple clients) They just cannot pay me those rates because then I would never get a "raise."

Yes, I am looking elsewhere and I have several companies that have reached out.

Nice!

What do you think about your current CEO's statement re: AI with respect to your field? If you have several other companies reaching out, it can't be that accurate.

 

[Belen]

Nice!

What do you think about your current CEO's statement re: AI with respect to your field? If you have several other companies reaching out, it can't be that accurate.

The off-shoring in the industry has been awful over the last 10 years.

If they can find a way to use AI, then they will. They are already using it for integrity and paper mill detection.

I have even seen models for AI peer review.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

The off-shoring in the industry has been awful over the last 10 years.

If they can find a way to use AI, then they will. They are already using it for integrity and paper mill detection.

I have even seen models for AI peer review.

Peer review! That's a dangerous task to offload I would think. Paper mill detection seems like one you would gladly hand over to AI though? Laborious and thankless. Or am I reading that wrong?

 

[Belen]

Peer review! That's a dangerous task to offload I would think. Paper mill detection seems like one you would gladly hand over to AI though? Laborious and thankless. Or am I reading that wrong?

Paper mill detection still needs a person to check and follow up just like ithenticate plagiarism detection.

The peer review issue is serious. Many journals are looking at AI to replace finding reviewers and many reviewers are illegally using AI to review.

Many younger scientists no longer want to peer review. They see it as unpaid work, which it is, but that leaves middle career and elder scientists to handle the burden. Of course, those younger folks are desperate to get their own work peer reviewed.

The scientific peer review industry may collapse under the weight of government mandates, open access BS, and apathy.

Peer review has problems but that it nothing when compared to things like pre-print servers where it is mostly unreviewed and lay readers are consuming med research that is highly misleading due to spin.

 

[Staffan]

Many younger scientists no longer want to peer review. They see it as unpaid work, which it is, but that leaves middle career and elder scientists to handle the burden. Of course, those younger folks are desperate to get their own work peer reviewed.

The scientific peer review industry may collapse under the weight of government mandates, open access BS, and apathy.

I object to the term "open access BS". If the government funds research, that research should be freely available to everyone. That might require changes to the business models of journals, and possibly adding funding to that end of the research chain, but the idea of paying again for access to research already funded with my (or someone else's) tax money is repugnant.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Peer review has problems but that it nothing when compared to things like pre-print servers where it is mostly unreviewed and lay readers are consuming med research that is highly misleading due to spin.

I had to look up pre-print servers. It's easy to imagine the danger of having unreviewed studies/research exposed to the public like this.

One reason I was asking about the usage of AI in your field is because I wanted to compare it to the effect on mine (software engineering). Chat bots like ChatGPT and Perplexity are of great assistance with tasks like research and code generation. If I need to write a simple bash script or similar (i.e. using a language that I use infrequently), asking a chat bot to whip that up is many times faster than me having to go dig up a reference on the constructs of the language and piece something together. Similarly, if I'm researching a specific aspect of a framework or library unfamiliar to me, I would, in pre-AI days, have to Google, comb through the search results for tidbits relevant to my topic, eliminate all the duplicate information, then collate and aggregate everything I've learned into something useful. For an extra degree of difficulty, maybe I'm only curious as to how this particular framework interacts with features of another library, which adds a lot of cruft to my search results. Now, I can ask Perplexity a specific question, and it will under the hood duplicate my efforts and present me in seconds what might have taken me hours, or even days, before.

In software engineering, I think the greatest threat to existing jobs is to junior roles. Complex design or fact/solution checking tasks, the province of more senior developers, are still safe. It's the simple tasks, generally carried out by more junior developers, which are easily replaceable by AI. As well, the very considerable time savings that AI affords to senior developers (as in my example above) means that senior developers can now accomplish a lot more in a given time allotment. Those two facts together has definitely had an effect on the size of the job pool for junior developers. Obviously, you still need juniors! The seniors will one day retire. But the barrier to entry is higher; fewer positions available, and those are now restricted to those with the talent and drive to reach senior levels.

 

[AlViking]

He got laid off, Perkins and Crawford bailed, Jess Lanzillo...

It's all pretty high profile.

Perkins and Crawford worked for WOTC for over a decade, Lanzillo for 8 years. It's not particularly high profile when people leave after completing a big project and not seeing anything that big and challenging coming down the pipeline for years to come.

 

[Afroconan]

Perkins and Crawford worked for WOTC for over a decade, Lanzillo for 8 years. It's not particularly high profile when people leave after completing a big project and not seeing anything that big and challenging coming down the pipeline for years to come.

Two great creative minds working over a decade on the same system, settings and environment deciding to leave when the prospect is at least 5 more years of the same?

I'm surprised they lasted as long