Remember When Bosses Were Forcing Their Workers to Use AI? They’re Now Realizing They Made a Huge Mistake
Futurism ·
"AI is changing not only how we work, but also how we judge the people we work with." The post Remember When Bosses Were Forcing Their Workers to Use AI? They’re Now Realizing They Made a Huge Mistake appeared first on Futurism .
For years, many bosses have been adamant that employees use AI at all costs — despite research suggesting there’s little to gain from it in terms of productivity , evidence that flies in the face of the tech industry’s repeated promises of a workplace revolution brought on by the tech.
But now that execs are drowning in meaningless “ workslop ,” they’re starting to sing a very different tune. As Business Insider reports , one CEO of a tech recruiting company suddenly found herself being inundated with Slack messages from employees that they’d clearly generated using AI, leading her to implement a new policy that strictly forbids the practice for internal communications.
She’s not the first. One anonymous CEO got so fed up, they threatened to “fire the next person ” who blasted them with unedited ChatGPT slop, as Inc reported earlier this year . Instead of fundamentally reshaping white collar industries for the better, it’s finally dawning on bosses that the extensive and often counterproductive use of AI tools could be doing far more harm than good.
Case in point, in a new study published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly , a team of researchers led by Hebrew University of Jerusalem PhD student Samuel Meyers found that employees who doubled down on using tools like ChatGPT are being trusted less by their employers, actively hurting their chances of promotion.
That’s even at workplaces where the use of AI tools are still actively being encouraged, suggesting there’s a paradoxical price workers who embrace the tech are paying.
In a series of experiments, the team asked supervisors to decide whether to trust an employee’s report, while knowing whether they had used AI or not — but not basing their judgment on the quality of the work itself. Employees who didn’t use AI had a 68 percent chance of earning their trust. When they used AI, that number shrank down to just 24 percent.
“AI is changing not only how we work, but also how we judge the people we work with,” said coauthor and Hebrew University of Jerusalem senior lecturer Yochanan Bigman in a statement . “An employee may use AI to produce better work more efficiently yet still lose their manager’s trust simply because AI was involved.”
As a result, “organizations need to recognize that adopting AI is not just a technological challenge — it is also a psychological and managerial one,” Bigman added.
Beyond eroding trust, executives have also found that the use of AI agents and coding tools in particular have sent costs soaring, seriously hurting their companies’ bottom lines and often forcing them to reverse course and cut spending .
Meanwhile, researchers have yet to detect a meaningful windfall from using AI at work, making it an expensive distraction. Polls have shown that the vast majority of CEOs haven’t seen any productivity gains.
It’s a particularly unfortunate reality as the job market continues to deteriorate , with or without any AI-related productivity boost.
Employees are now stuck between a rock in a hard place: either follow their supervisors’ instructions and use AI, or earn their trust by ignoring those calls. Meyers and his colleagues worry this growing tension could give rise to “shadow AI” — undisclosed use of the tech at work, that could further hurt their career prospects.
More on work and AI: There Are Now Growing Signs That AI Is Hurting Employment in the Job Market
The post Remember When Bosses Were Forcing Their Workers to Use AI? They’re Now Realizing They Made a Huge Mistake appeared first on Futurism .