Loads of stories have emerged over the past few months of corporate executives realizing their all-out drive to use AI was getting them absolutely nowhere. If anything, it was a net negative, as office workers set about wasting their budgets on costly AI tokens to appear productive.
Now, it seems even top tech industry players are cutting back, as they realize their workers are frittering away money and churning out reams of low-effort AI garbage.
As Reuters notes, companies like Meta are scaling back ambitious plans to lay off staffers and replace them with AI agents. Microsoft seems to be doing the same, as the Guardian reports, after executive vice president Ryan Roslansky groused about the rise of low-quality workslop on his public-facing LinkedIn account.
“AI slop isn’t happening just on social networks… it’s happening in the day to day of work,” Roslansky lamented. “Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking to the idea… This is a doom loop.”
As CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management Johnny Taylor Jr told the Guardian, corporate executives are increasingly feeling that, when it comes to AI, “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem.”
“If we could all rewind… we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way,” Taylor continued.
As consumer-grade AI agents make headlines for troubling capers, practical AI at the enterprise level remains stunted. And though low-effort AI slop might be the most prevalent consequence of AI in the workplace, some side effects are much worse.
As a September survey by the firm Ernst and Young found, some 36 percent of senior AI executives at firms with over $1 billion in annual revenue have already experienced a catastrophic “AI incident” which ended up causing financial damage, operational disruptions, data loss, or brand damage.
Put it all together, and it’s not hard to see why corporations are starting to balk at the AI revolution — even those, like Microsoft, whose own success depends on selling the promise of AI to everybody else.
The post Companies Are Realizing They’re Spending a Fortune on AI Just So Their Employees Can Generate Error-Riddled Slop, and Suddenly Cutting Back Budgets appeared first on Futurism.
