It is admittedly only tangential here, but it recently occurred to me that at school, there are usually no demerit points for wrong answers. You can therefore - to some extent - “game” the system by doing as much guesswork as possible. However, my work is related to law and accounting, where wrong answers - of course - can have disastrous consequences. That’s why I’m always alarmed when young coworkers confidently use chatbots whenever they are unable to answer a question by themselves. I guess in such moments, they are just treating their job like a school assignment. I can well imagine that this will only get worse in the future, for the reasons described here.

In any case, I think we have to acknowledge that companies are capable of turning a whistleblower’s life into hell without ever physically laying a hand on them.

I would argue that such things do happen, the cult “Heaven’s Gate” probably being one of the most notorious examples. Thankfully, however, this is not a widespread phenomenon.

Yes, even some influential people at my employer have started to peddle the idea that only “old-fashioned” people are still using Google, while all the forward-thinking people are prompting an AI. For this reason alone, I think that negative examples like this one deserve a lot more attention.

From the original article:

Crivello told TechCrunch that out of millions of responses, Lindy only Rickrolled customers twice.

Yes, but how many of them received other similarly “useful” answers to their questions?