If AI doesn’t drive you into a mental breakdown, then at least it’ll find a way to make you lose your marbles at work.
As one beaten-down employee confessed in a recent Fortune piece about how the tech is reshaping workplace dynamics, she’s now resigned to asking an AI to interpret and respond to her boss’s nonsensical dispatches, because she suspects those were written with AI, too.
“‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, an executive at the edtech firm Skillsoft, in the Fortune piece. “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’”
At Futurism, we’ve extensively covered how AI is causing mayhem in the offices of all sorts of industries. It remains divisive among the regular rank and file, but bosses are absolutely entranced by the tech and forcing their underlings to use it, ignoring their complaints and listening only to the advice of their AI consiglieres. At tech companies, the push to use AI agents has created such a deluge of code that it’s causing an “identity crisis” among the software engineers who’ve been reduced to reviewing the error-laden AI outputs. At Meta, some employees are using AI agents as personal secretaries, deploying them to coordinate with their colleagues, and even their colleague’s own AI secretaries.
Addressing this phenomenon, Rinne introduces us to the scourge of “socially offloading,” a play on “cognitive offloading,” the term that researchers use to describe the habit of outsourcing our thinking to tech like AI. AI, in Rinne’s view, is going beyond taking over our thinking skills and is now handling our interpersonal ones, too. Why fuss about how you want to phrase an email to your manager when a chatbot can do it? Conflict avoidance has never been so convenient.
“If I’m always asking AI how do I respond to my boss,I don’t actually learn how to engage with my boss,” Rinne told Fortune. “I don’t actually learn how to build a relationship with my boss.”
Of course, Rinne, whose company sells AI tools, believes that the solution is simply teaching people how to use the tech better — which is easier said than done, since part of the problem is how addictively designed the tools are in the first place.
There’s a growing body of research documenting AI’s propensity for upending the workplace. A notable one warned of how AI was creating a bureaucracy of “workslop” in which employees quickly create and pass along shoddy AI-generated outputs to their colleagues, creating the illusion of increased productivity, when in reality that work needs to be corrected, slowing down production.
It may sound like a niche problem, but the Fortune story provoked some strong responses from readers.
“It was very disheartening at work — a coworker used Copilot to create content for a scope of work for an external trainer,” one Redditor wrote, referring to Microsoft’s AI productivity tool. “They just copy-pasted it into a word document, Copilot formatting and all. It was nowhere near what we needed, so I had to waste time reviewing their AI output and provide them feedback on it as if they wrote it.”
Another recalled how they had to deal with two colleagues who had spent two days blaming each other for a code related issue, only to find out that both parties were convinced they were right because they used Anthropic’s coding tool.
“They spent the entire time looping around it with Claude!!” they fumed.
More on AI: CEO Says He’ll Fire Any Employee Who Sends Him More AI Slop
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