A Shocking New Development for AI in the Workplace

Hi friends! How’s everybody’s Tuesday going so far? I hope it’s better than mine! (To be clear: my day has been very pleasant. I just hope yours is going even better because that’s the kind of guy I am.)

I was poking around on Bluesky earlier (it me) and came across a fun thing that former punting great and current all-around great Chris Kluwe re-posted from Carl Quintanilla. Carl?

I’ve written about AI here before. Pretty recently, too. My post was a tongue-in-cheek look at the promises AI has made versus what I — and others, presumably — could actually use.

10 Actually Useful Things AI Could Do for Me

As a rule, I don’t use AI and I have no plans to start. I even had mixed feelings about using it to generate the header image up there but ultimately decided it might prove my point better than words will. (Verdict: Eh.)

GG JSGJoe St. Germain

Seeing a headline that suggests AI adds to our workloads doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still nice to see it written out, right in front of our faces, coming straight from the Harvard Business Review. I’m not a subscriber, but the abstract in the linked article is illustrative:

One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making.

Well, I’ll be a robot’s uncle! You mean to tell me that volatile new tools are adding an extra layer of complexity to jobs that people were already doing beforehand? And that the outputs from any AI model demand extra scrutiny to ensure the AI performed as expected? Quelle surprise! Somebody ask Claude to code me a script I can feed to Gemini to write me an alarm app that plays a sound I created on Suno so I can properly convey my panic!

I’m sure there are some limited practical applications for AI in the workplace. I’m not SO strident that I believe it couldn’t be used in clever, useful ways. But most people can’t (or at least aren’t) looking for small, incremental improvements — least of all the people spearheading the AI bubble. Add “makes work more intense” to the ever-growing list of cons along with the social risks, the environmental impacts, the ethics, and everything else. And all for a small, still mostly conceptual list of pros?

AI is the worst. I’m glad we’re starting to see some more evidence confirming as much.