A lawyer was working at a legal tech startup when her boss’s fascination with AI began to veer from enthusiastic to downright obsessive.
First he started using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate his Slack messages and emails. Then he mandated AI use for all employees.
“He called a company-wide meeting to announce that from then on, we had to discuss with the AI prior to all meetings or before communicating with him,” she told Futurism, “because if we didn’t develop and discuss our ideas with the AI first, it was a sign that we didn’t care about our jobs.”
Soon the boss started “making structural company decisions based solely on his conversations with ChatGPT,” the attorney recalled — including asking the bot who to hire and fire.
The boss had “clearly developed some sort of mental disorder,” she said. “Spending the whole day talking to ChatGPT and making decisions about the future of your company and the people who work there based on what it ‘tells’ you seems insane.”
The boss was also using AI for surveillance. He purchased a handful of paid ChatGPT subscriptions for the office, said the lawyer, which allowed him to “monitor our communication with the AI.”
“He paid like three Pro subscriptions that everyone had logins for access,” she explained.
But employees quickly realized that they were also able to view their boss’s conversations with the chatbot through the paid accounts, and they started to fanatically spy on his AI conversations, too — especially as they realized he was asking it to make personnel decisions.
Staffers “would monitor the conversations our boss was having with ChatGPT,” said the lawyer, “to find out who was going to be fired and who was going to be promoted.”
Making matters even worse, her boss’s AI infatuation made for constant pivoting.
“He would call meetings to tell us that ChatGPT had told him that the leading cause of death in the world was medical malpractice, so that’s what we were going to offer people now,” said the lawyer. “Then, after other [AI] conversations, we were better off focusing on bankruptcy.”
The whiplash extended to her own responsibilities, which she said were also at the whim of her boss’s chatbot vizier.
“During my time there, I had three different roles or titles,” she continued. “Based on the conversations he had with the AI week by week, my functions and responsibilities within the company kept changing: I had to automate certain processes, then I had to design legal strategies, then I had to manage teams, then I had to focus on sales, and so on for many months. All based on what ChatGPT was telling him.”
The last straw came when her boss created a document, which he called “The Bible” — a constantly-changing handbook, hundreds of pages in length, that employees were asked to study like a holy text.
“The goal of this ‘Bible’ was so that employees would never have to ask a human being anything. We were supposed to be able to feed this PDF to ChatGPT and ask it: ‘What should I do today? What are my functions? How do I solve this or that problem?’” said the lawyer. Eventually, the Bible mutated into a “hundreds-of-pages-long document that we had to study and which, to no one’s surprise, changed week-to-week.”
Faced with the “Bible,” the lawyer felt as though she had one option left: quitting.
“I quit 100 percent because of the AI use,” she said.
This attorney was one of numerous employees who spoke to Futurism about their experience with AI-obsessed bosses, relaying feelings of frustration and anger as managers and executives use the tech to barrage staff with nonsensical directives, unnecessary work, and perpetual pivoting. (Everyone we spoke to requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.)
Add it all up, and it’s a distinct new type of toxic work environment for the slop era. Slate found more evidence for the phenomenon earlier this year; one worker told the publication that managers “are getting cavities in their brains” due to the tech.
In some cases, employees said, they felt as though their employers had started living in a completely different reality. The workplace had become a constant battle between their version of reality versus the AI’s — and their boss, these workers said, always chose the latter.
“You’re on the front lines dealing with people day in and day out, and having the conversations, and being told what’s important to them, and taking that information back to a founder and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve talked to 15 people this week, and they’ve all literally said this exact same thing,’” recalled one man, a high-level sales strategist who also quit a job due to his then-boss’s AI fixation. “And the founder says, ‘Well, that’s not what we found. That’s not what Claude has said, or what ChatGPT has said.’”
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In many cases, a boss seemed to become hooked on a chatbot’s flattery, mistaking sycophancy for even-handed guidance.
“My view of AI was very different from my supervisor’s. I saw it as a tool that could help analyze information, find patterns, and make funny cat meme pictures,” said one worker, an IT staffer at a tech company. “He seemed to use it more as a digital priest whose primary purpose was to confirm that he was right and everyone else was mistaken.”
The supervisor “would routinely copy and paste nearly every conversation he had with employees and managers into ChatGPT, asking whether he had handled the situation correctly,” the IT worker added. “The answer was almost always some variation of, ‘Yes, your approach was appropriate,’ effectively reinforcing whatever decision he had already made.”
In other words, according to the staffer, it seemed as though his supervisor’s attempts to use AI to review his own behavior and decision-making were backfiring.
As they were pulled in, certain bosses seemed to become less and less receptive to human feedback as the AI continued to validate their ideas about what was working — or not — in the workplace.
“Dude lived AI,” the sales strategist recalled of the founder and CEO of his former employer, a software-as-a-service cloud platform for manufacturers that had rebranded as an AI-powered, all-in-one business management tool. (The new platform was largely vibe-coded by the CEO, the strategist says he later found out.)
But the new platform wasn’t selling, said the strategist. And when he tried to tell the company’s CEO what prospective clients were saying about why the product wasn’t a good fit, it fell on deaf ears. According to his boss’s AI advisor, it was the sales specialist who was at fault.
“The AI was like, ‘Oh, the reason why you’re not selling is that this guy’s the problem,’” he recollected. “‘He doesn’t know how to sell.’”
Convinced that the problem was the sales strategy, the CEO decided to vibe-code a “sales intelligence” and “feedback tool” that was designed to tell reps what they were doing incorrectly.
But AI will “spit out whatever you want it to spit out,” the strategist said. “The prompt was: ‘analyze this and find everything the rep did wrong.’ Well, what if the rep didn’t do anything wrong? What if it was actually a really good call? It wouldn’t call out anything that was good. It would just call out all the bad.”
AI is “going to spit out the narrative that you want it to spit out,” he added. “If you really want AI to tell you that your idea is the best idea ever, it’ll tell you that.”
At one point, the strategist said, the CEO became convinced that his employees were failing to find “greenfield” companies — a business term for a brand-new venture built in an undeveloped space or market — perfectly primed for his tech.
But according to the strategist, this idea was completely unrealistic. In their sector, greenfield companies tend to be small, with just a handful of employees; the CEO, meanwhile, was pushing employees to find companies with 100 employees or more.
“You’re not going to just walk into these companies that have 100 employees and say, ‘We’re going to be the replacement for nothing.’ It doesn’t exist,” the strategist recalled. “But AI was telling [the CEO] that those companies did exist.”
“It’s like being in an abusive marriage,” he continued. “I’m sitting here dealing with somebody that isn’t living in reality.”
The situation grew so untenable that the strategist ended up quitting his job, too.
If you have a story about AI in the workplace that you want to share, email us: [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous.
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Many workers pointed to an infuriating irony: the boss’s AI fixation was supposed to be a productivity booster, but instead fostered deeply unproductive workplace environments.
“Productivity is severely affected in my opinion,” said one woman, a social worker and employee of a non-profit that helps deliver food and nutrition counseling. She explained that her boss will constantly turn to chatbots for strategy advice, only to churn out impractical ideas and projections that are beyond what the organization can handle — a process that results in what the staffer characterized as a time-wasting “feedback loop.”
“My boss will see the AI-suggested ideas, ask that they be incorporated into the program design, and then ignore the reality that they won’t work successfully,” said the staffer. “Then when it is explained or my boss realizes that it won’t work within our current capacity, she will enter a new prompt, which provides a new example — that largely won’t work either — and the loop starts again.”
“It has led to a decrease in productivity, as she won’t approve any of my solutions or ideas that are within our capacity, because they weren’t suggested by AI,” she continued. “Nothing is decided upon.”
Employees of the startup are aware that their boss runs all of their work through ChatGPT, which she views as the ultimate authority. And “within minutes” of meetings, the employee said, the boss sends unhelpful AI-generated suggestions that make little sense to someone who actually understands the situation.
“After meetings where program ideas or a specific course of action is decided upon, I will often get an email from my boss within minutes of the meetings ending with additional ‘ideas’ on how to implement said course of action,” said the non-profit staffer, adding that “these ideas are clearly copy-paste from ChatGPT” and “often do not reflect the reality of how the program would work in the context of our org.”
“Orgs and business leaders need to either decide they are going to rely entirely on AI, and cost us humans jobs,” she added, “or trust that the people they hire know what they are doing.”
These days, said a project manager who works in website design and development, his job has largely been reduced to reviewing a “never-ending” slog through AI slop. His firm’s developers now mostly vibe-code their work, which is harder to quality assure; the developers, who are based in Pakistan, are also now using AI to generate their written reports, which tend to be long and full of hard-to-spot hallucinations.
In addition to the practical productivity hurdles that AI is causing in his particular role, the project manager continued, his boss — who is all-in on AI — now uses the threat of job-replacing automation to berate and threaten him and other middle-managers.
“The nature of my position as a project manager is attention to detail and documentation. Both of those responsibilities involve sifting through never-ending AI slop from the developers, and more and more these days from clients,” said the project manager. “And my work, according to my boss, will be used as training data to fine-tune AI so that when the time comes, I will be made redundant.”
“I am at a point where I am tired of hearing about it every other day,” he lamented. “I just want my salary and to not lose my sanity.”
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Most of the people we spoke to noted that they do use AI in their work and personal lives, and believe it has value when used with caution and self-awareness. But they found that their employers’ use had crossed the line from helpful to corrosive — to employees, and also to the actual interests of the businesses they work for.
“I like combining technology with law because I believe there are certain tools that allow you to automate repetitive and simple processes within legal proceedings,” said the lawyer who quit her job after her boss made her study an AI-generated business Bible. “But I would never delegate the representation of someone else’s interests to an AI, and I would never make business decisions based on what a large language model says.”
Her boss was always a tech optimist, she added. Before chatbots, though, he’d “never lost sight of the human side of the profession — which, at its core, is about legally representing people who are going through a difficult time.”
“But once LLMs became available,” she added, “he went completely off the deep end.”
“Maybe the predisposition was always there? Who knows. But whatever ChatGPT sparked in him significantly changed his mindset and how he views the profession,” the attorney continued. “He no longer works for people; his company isn’t a law firm anymore, it’s a tech startup aiming to use AI to replace lawyers as much as possible.”
After a disappointing annual bonus, the IT worker — the one who said his former supervisor used AI like a “digital priest” — decided to turn to AI for help navigating his concerns with his higher-ups.
“I kept receiving more responsibilities, higher expectations, and stronger performance reviews,” said the tech worker. “My annual bonus, however, was $120.”
“I asked an AI… whether a $120 annual bonus was reasonable for someone with consistently positive reviews and increasing responsibilities,” he continued. “It basically said the bonus was so low that many employees would view it as symbolic at best and insulting at worst.”
But this time, his employer didn’t take well to the AI’s input.
“I expressed my concerns directly to my supervisor and the company owner,” said the tech worker. “Shortly afterward, I found myself unemployed.”
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The post Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI, Using It to Make Every Decision, Barraging Their Employees With Nonsensical ChatGPT Directives, and Even Asking It Who to Fire appeared first on Futurism.
