CEOs have eagerly grabbed onto AI as a tool to make offices more efficient, and often to reduce headcount via brutal layoffs.
There’s a problem, though: the workers who remain often say they now have to fix a flood of error-ridden AI-generated “workslop” that’s burdening them, paradoxically, with more work than ever.
All this pointless busywork to correct AI-generated output results in hidden costs for companies that embrace the tech, according to The Guardian. One recent survey of 1,150 desk jockeys found that the 40 percent had encountered workslop — defined as “AI-generated content that looks good, but lacks substance” — in the course of their duties, forcing them to waste 3.4 hours per month dealing with it. At scale, that’s significant: all those hours wasted tally up to an estimated $8.1 million of lost productivity for a workplace with 10,000 workers.
The hypothesis is supported by previous research that found that computer programmers become slower when using AI. A widely-cited MIT study found that 95 percent companies that deployed AI don’t see any added revenue from its adoption, despite massive enthusiasm among CEOs.
One stark example of AI’s drag on the workplace, per The Guardian: a copywriter at a Miami cybersecurity firm told the newspaper that his employer let go several of his colleagues while pushing everybody left to use AI — but he and his remaining colleagues found that while AI could effortlessly spit out seemingly polished content, they had to spend significant extra time rewriting or correcting errors.
“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” the copywriter told the paper. “Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.”
Workslop problems are also dragging down medical staff. Philip Barrison, a sixth-year MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School, told The Guardian that a survey he conducted found that many medical workers had to waste time fixing errors, while patients received incorrect or flawed AI-generated emails.
All these anecdotes also illustrate the difference of opinion between workers in the trenches and CEOs in their glass-walled offices; in a survey of 5,000 office workers, 40 percent said using AI didn’t save them time, while 92 percent of executives said AI made them more productive.
With this dissonance of opinion, something has to give. Employees’ direct experience with AI show that detailed work that requires accuracy still needs trained human discernment, which can’t be easily replaced by a bot, hence the spotty adoption and mixed views of people directly involved in production work. That’s a tell that should blunt any eager CEO who’s hot to replace workers with AI.
This issue leads to a logical question that anybody with sense should start asking: if employees find that AI can’t easily reproduce their work at the same level of a trained human being, and CEOs who heavily use AI find that the technology makes them more productive, doesn’t that suggest that workers can’t be replaced while CEOs could be replaced by a bot?
That’s a question some AI experts are starting to ask, because it’s becoming clear that regular office workers — the lifeblood of any company — can’t be easily traded out.
More on AI: AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns
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