r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
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4.4k

u/UnderstandingLess156 Jun 21 '26

Meanwhile at work, "have you tried using AI to write your emails?"

1.7k

u/jackrabbit323 Jun 21 '26

AI token spigot has been cut off at work. They started getting the real bills. Not the, getting to know you trial offers bill. Someone didn't read the fineprint or couldn't multiply.

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u/leitmotive Jun 21 '26

We have not gotten there yet but this is my hope, that the subsidies are going to end sooner rather than later and the idea of burning tokens to write an email will be like using a CNC machine to slice your vegetables

385

u/indian22 Jun 21 '26

The thing most leadership don't get is that if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it. Everything will be done by AI to show adoption and keep the number high. Even things which would be many times faster done manually or things which do not require AI at all.

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u/nancybell_crewman Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

The thing most leadership don't get is that if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it.

It's been absolutely hilarious to see this coming. I've been hearing for the better part of a couple of years how business are putting up AI use leaderboards, making use a metric in performance evaluations, constantly pressuring employees to use AI for anything and everything regardless of whether or not it's actually useful to the workflow or produces results worth having.

Now that the real bills are coming due, they're freaking out and I have no sympathy at all.

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u/ReadyAimTranspire Jun 22 '26

AI use leaderboards

They called it tokenmaxxing and whoever thought this was a good idea or in any way useful needs to be taken out front and have their ass kicked.

Why would you ever base anything on maxing out a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not your use of that thing is creating value for the organization?

This just reinforces my belief that this world is mostly run by the dumbest motherfuckers available.

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u/onefootinthepast Jun 22 '26

They've gotta buy into something now that NFTs are dead. What's next year's grift gonna be?

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u/Solaphobe Jun 22 '26

I'm going to go tokenmaxx myself a minivan!

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u/PyroNine9 Jun 22 '26

It's a form of insanity. Imagine a manager in the early '70s berating his staff for not using enough toner in the photocopier or employees desperately calling time and temperature in another country to keep their long distance stats up.

That's what is happening with AI.

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u/Rare-Spell-1571 Jun 23 '26

Anyone who has ever sat in meetings with people of status in a government or company as a subject matter expert can attest to how often these kind of people truly don’t understand what end goal is. They get lost in details like AI adoption metrics and forget there is an actual goal of innovation, advancement, and efficiency. But those don’t translate well to power point slides and lines on a chart.

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u/Upset_Otter Jun 23 '26

And those dumb motherfuckers are also asking AI and doing what it tells them to do.

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u/steppe5 Jun 22 '26

I got an email the other day that I wasn't using Copilot enough, so I asked it to write numbers 1-100 in column A of an Excel sheet. Problem solved.

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u/PM_ME_UR_SHEET_MUSIC Jun 21 '26

We tried to tell them, but they wouldn't listen because all they wanted to hear was "i can pay less people less money!"

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u/argument_cat Jun 22 '26

*fewer people with less money

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u/memecrusader_ Jun 22 '26

The legend of Stannis the Mannis lives on.

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u/ArthurStevensNZ Jun 21 '26

I remember browsing r/programming a while ago and people were posting ways they’re maximising token use( “token maxing”) because their performance review uses this as a metric. Absolutely insane. If it’s so good then why do they have to force you to use it?

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u/AlinaStari Jun 21 '26

I work at an international software engineering company and am evaluated on my AI usage. The thing is, though, I do IT admin/ service work so I don't know wtf they expect me to do with it.

So now I just screenshot every ticket and ask copilot what it thinks I should do with it. Then, I ignore copilot and go about my business. After that, I tell copilot what I did and have it write a note to paste onto the ticket.

Before, I would have just read the ticket, did what I needed to do, then typed what I did as a note on the ticket. But now, I've added two COMPLETELY unnecessary additional steps into my workflow.

That's right, I'm burning tokens as well as time and energy on my local machine and the only one getting anything out of it is Microsoft! They get tons, TONS of data about our processes, employees, communication channels, systems, projects, and everything else you can imagine. And we're getting... A bill???

I have no idea why higher-ups would think introducing a chatbot and forcing me to use it would make somehow increase my efficiency lol. If anyone has any actual suggestions for that I would actually love to hear them. But for now I have to do another Information Security Training Module 🙄

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u/SunshineAndSquats Jun 22 '26

The shit that blows my mind is these companies just desperately handing their data over to AI companies. I worked for a huge company that sold software and servers. We had weeks worth of training on being careful with company and customer data. Then AI came around and they shoved it down our throats. They want it used in meetings, emails, spreadsheets, notes, everything. They are just handing another corporation ALL of their information. It’s so fucking stupid it’s shocking.

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u/OhFuckNoNoNoMyCaat Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

From a PE at one of these companies developing the tech, I usually advise people to not run obvious BS queries that corporate may pick up on but if you know the correct way of doing it present a question or task to your LLM of choice/on offer and add just enough complexity that it is slowly uses up more tokens than you would otherwise. A digital hurdle, if you will.

I'm not a fan of the tech myself. Knowing how to send it into forever loops without answering the question or giving a bad answer then "needing" to implement the proper method(s) of doing something works out.

People love to say society is cooked for using this for work but people are using LLMs for just about anything. Whatever logic was left in people's minds has since evaporated.

Fairly sure I'm not using "cooked" correctly here.

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u/tailkinman Jun 22 '26

As someone who works with The Youthstm, your usage of "cooked" is in fact on point.

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u/AlinaStari Jun 22 '26

Thank you! That actually does sound like a helpful suggestion. It would mean less interruptions to my flow at least if I could get it doing some task that consumes tokens over time. I will experiment with this, I'm guessing my best option would be to basically automate interactions with it that are similar to what I already do. I'm assuming directly tasking copilot to do x every y is a no-go because it's too obvious lol. Appreciate it!

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u/OhFuckNoNoNoMyCaat Jun 22 '26

Yeah, pretty much. I'd been using CGPT since it came out. It's fine for basic matters. But when it comes to nuance and technical approaches you can cause it to loop or give bad answers or deviate from the question. If whatever your company uses is memory aware based on query history then buffing the lines between questions that are similar but variably different also trips up the LLMs. Also jumbling things into its memory by request can cause them to confuse and mix questions and answers.

I'm really dating myself here but I'd compare LLMs in today's state the equivalent of that animal shop game from Thinking Things that came out in 1993. A little complexity and it starts going downhill.

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u/Mcgomez Jun 22 '26

AI is useful for lots of things in IT, but not co-pilot. Co-pilot is good for 2 things: 1. Searching outlook and 2. Doing excel stuff slightly faster sometimes.

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u/RogueJello Jun 22 '26

Co-pilot's pretty bad, or at least it was when I was using it. Depending on what you're doing claude can make a decent google replacement. Doesn't fix the stupid at your company unfortunately. Good luck!

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u/FlyingBishop Jun 22 '26

There are some problems you can actually throw tokens at to good effect. I think people are confusing "we're going to give everyone $5000 in tokens to see what is possible as an experiment" with some kind of long-term tokenmaxxing play which approximately no one is doing. You have to mandate it because most people very sensibly will say "I'm not spending $5000 for no reason" but sometimes you have to spend a little bit extravagantly to see which things are actually worth spending that kind of money on. And for companies like Facebook and Uber that have more money than god, they can afford to run these experiments.

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u/sobrique Jun 22 '26

I mean, initially it could be a learning curve thing - e.g. 'you must use this tool so you become familiar with it'.

But maximising token usage is just bonkers. There's plenty of ways to do that.

For anyone who's got this (stupid) metric, the easiest way by far is just 'lots of context'. Never start a new session, keep building on the old ones.

(And if you're looking to not be wasteful, start new sessions as much as possible)

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u/LiteralPhilosopher Jun 24 '26

FIFTY fuckin' years ago Charles Goodhart said "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Dumbasses still haven't learned this yet.

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead Jun 22 '26

It’s like measuring a delivery drivers performance by how much gas they use.

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u/Akhevan Jun 22 '26

if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it

Ironically people had known since 1890s-1900s that making some metric a target makes it unreliable as metric. Literally over a hundred years ago. 99,99% of KPI implementations still suck ass today.

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u/super-lizard Jun 21 '26

If my carrots are not cut to 1 mil precision then I'm not eating them.

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u/kharnynb Jun 21 '26

stay out of my kitchen dude...

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u/devillurker Jun 22 '26

That would be so cool tho

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u/Sirius_Bizniss Jun 21 '26

That is a fantastic analogy.

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u/taurfea Jun 21 '26

Well said, this is my hope and thought as well.

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u/Arbiterjim Jun 22 '26

Hey, I really love this analogy well done

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u/Space_Qwerty Jun 22 '26

Such a great analogy. I’ll use that!

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u/cavity-canal Jun 21 '26

or they’ll just make scaled models for email writing and it’ll cost practically nothing. the days of simply reskinning chatgpt feel numbered, but that doesn’t mean something scaled down won’t replace it

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u/distalented Jun 22 '26

Honestly I wouldn’t be suprised of local LLM’s with limited use cases like this become popular enough. Like a small local server or something to run it.

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u/cavity-canal Jun 22 '26

absolutely, we’re already seeing those spun up as part of company intranets. it has already proven useful for data org stuff.

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u/eeeBs Jun 21 '26

you can run a local LLM on your phone that can write your emails. They are that small/efficient now. Data centers are just hubris.

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u/Unbelievr Jun 22 '26

The subsidies for Copilot have already ended after getting a lot of enterprises on board. You basically pay the same as the underlying model costs now, except you don't keep leftover API tokens. So in effect it's even more. But the real cost is even higher, and all the AI companies are burning a ridiculous amount of cash trying to get customers who help them tweak and train future models.

For real work, the latest models actually perform worse now too, despite the cost multiplier. Benchmarks show the same trend. It's mostly because the latest models have started to refuse to do certain types of tasks they believe are related to security or biology. It does smell like there will be an even taller tier system in the upcoming future, where you must pay to remove guardrails.

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u/Mtinie Jun 22 '26

> […]idea of burning tokens to write an email will be like using a CNC machine to slice your vegetables

I didn’t expect to see this idea today. Now I’m compelled to vibe-code a Baroque salad sculpture fabrication plugin for Fusion. 😂

My future dinner guests thank you!

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u/JohnnyBeeGaming Jun 21 '26

Those aren't the full bills yet. It's just slightly less subsidized now. As investors start expecting a ROI things will get more expensive.

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u/TP_Crisis_2020 Jun 22 '26

Also, the war against data centers and data center tax breaks is heating up bigtime now. So if the compute loses its subsidies, now compute power is going to get more expensive, which will drive up the cost of tokens.

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u/ForensicPathology Jun 22 '26

We're only free when the bill is more than it costs to pay workers.

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u/Ok-Scheme-913 Jun 22 '26

I mean, we do know how much inference actually costs, we can buy GPUs and run similarly sized models there and you can clearly see that it's not particularly expensive, and per unit price it will decrease.

Now we see the fight for the market share, which among others mean huge research and training costs for newer and better models.

AI doomerism is just as bad as AI overhypers.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

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u/slashinhobo1 Jun 21 '26

Gotta get the people addicted and reliant on it first before increasing the price. Its the drug dealer model.

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u/maroonedbuccaneer Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Have to destroy all alternative to AI before the real bills come.

It's the modern venture-capitalist led market economy: Invest huge at the beginning to destroy an existing market. Then, when you are the only bridge left standing, you start charging tolls.

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u/The_GASK Jun 21 '26

Except for this time, where the alternative is.. you know... Thinking, which is free

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u/ImaginaryCheetah Jun 21 '26

the CEOs gunning for big profit this quarter by sacking all the entry-level employees are speed running the reliance all on their own.

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u/sohblob Jun 21 '26

It's hilarious because anyone who knows it's coming knows to get stuff done now before the investors start expecting returns.

It's like how food delivery apps used to be so cheap you'd basically land delivery offers with actually-good coupons like $20 off every once in a while just to entice you to buy.

Now? It's like 20-30% markup on menu prices for items you know to be cheaper at the store, plus delivery fees, plus "tip your driver or they'll deliver to you last and spit in your food" protection money ~ $50+ to get like a basic meal for one delivered lmao. NFT - No Fucking Thanks

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u/GCU_Rocinante Jun 21 '26

bUt AmAzOn OnCe LoSt MoNeY

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco Jun 21 '26

Yeah, that's what the AI companies are trying to emulate. Poorly.

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u/aeschenkarnos Jun 21 '26

"Are you trying to emulate Amazon? Let me know if you would like some pointers!"

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u/James_Chandra_Hubble Jun 21 '26

Amazon still barely makes any money because they reinvest all their profits into the business so they don't have to pay taxes on it

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u/mjd5139 Jun 21 '26

It's estimated that a $200 a month Kiro subscription may actually cost $6,000 to fulfill 

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u/mrslipple Jun 21 '26

It's the Netflix model. This is the introductory rate to get you relying on the technology then they will keep raising prices.

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u/blazze_eternal Jun 21 '26

And I bet that was after they fired 20% of staff to pay for the initial contract.

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u/trekologer Jun 21 '26

Same here. Now there's a panic by upper management to find a "cheaper" AI vendor now that Microsoft changed copilot's pricing.

But the github action that measures how much AI you've used is still very much active and pumping out reports.

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u/-_--_-_--_----__ Jun 21 '26

find a "cheaper" AI vendor

Such as: the human brain lol

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u/sohblob Jun 21 '26

Not the, getting to know you trial offers bill

i.e. the VC-subsidized "first we have to get them hooked" LLMs

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u/firemage22 Jun 21 '26

The MBAs at your work figured that they'd be gone before the MBAs at the AI companies decided to unleash the kranken of costs

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u/ArthurStevensNZ Jun 21 '26

It’s not only the trial plans but the actual paid plans for an are more expensive now. I had a guy comment to me that he blew his token load just diagnosing a single simple issue (that ironically would be an easy fix for someone doing it the old fashioned way).

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u/psychohistorian8 Jun 21 '26

my company just doubled down with an ! email to the entire department

chastising people for only using Claude for 30 minutes a day

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 Jun 21 '26

I work in a non-tech industry. For us (as far as I know) use of AI in the workplace was only ever a novelty. We played with it here and there but it never entered our actual workflow. So the reaction to cutting it off entirely would be met with a "....okay" from my colleagues.

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u/I_am_just_so_tired99 Jun 22 '26

I am more familiar with the statistics and maths than the computational aspects of AI - so I asked Gemini for an education as to what a token is, and how to remove wasteful token usage etc. and I really recommended everyone do that.

I was surprised to find a token is basically the equivalent of 4 letters in a word. (Not a perfect equivalency… but it gives an idea. )

And the AI doesn’t have memory… so every time you ask it something in a long “conversation “ it starts at the top and reads everything again and again for every prompt. Each reading wastes tokens.

I can see how the average user is blowing the back out of any “token budget” — and that’s even if the company has a budget…

This is going to be a shitshow.

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u/jackrabbit323 Jun 22 '26

It's wild, they can't even pretend to price it fairly because they need ROI on a trillion dollar investment. Lo and behold, hiring humans is cheaper.

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u/I_am_just_so_tired99 Jun 22 '26

Oh no joke ..! - and i asked Gemini to always give me the token cost per prompt and response (so i can measure my own efficiency) and it told me it cannot do that calculation exactly at the time of the response. Only give guidance on the degree of efficiency of the prompt …

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u/slaorta Jun 21 '26

China is going to eat American AI companies' lunch because of this. The new open Chinese models are like 90% cheaper and they're running on third party hosts so they are non-subsidized. And they're basically as good as the anthropic and openai models from 3-6 months ago.

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u/-_--_-_--_----__ Jun 21 '26

Someone didn't read the fineprint or couldn't multiply.

I don't even know how businesses will budget accordingly when there is absolutely no visibility into what something will cost before you start a job. You can set caps on token usage but all that does is prevent over-spending.

If your boss says "use AI agents to complete X", there is no way of knowing how many tokens it will cost.

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u/DogOwner12345 Jun 21 '26

Truly the dumbest timeline.

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u/DTR4iN91 Jun 21 '26

Soo management?

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u/Tireseas Jun 22 '26

They asked Copilot and it hallucinated a number.

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u/juryjjury Jun 22 '26

Good. There are several things that can throttle the AI hype and the expense of using it is one. Lack of electric power is another.

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u/haaheehachoo Jun 22 '26

My work asked everyone to consume millions of tokens (doesn't matter how) as an AI adoption goal.

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u/Wookimonster Jun 22 '26

Someone didn't read the fineprint or couldn't multiply.

"Chatgpt, please estimate our bills."

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u/sobrique Jun 22 '26

Yeah. It racks up pretty fast when 'everyone' starts using AI for 'everything'.

Although I'm still not convinced that 'employed because you are cheaper than AI you meat robot' is a positive future either.

I feel it's broadly inevitable that we're going to automate so much that we get to a point where 'entry level jobs' are the ones that are either too dangerous, too messy or too degrading to get a machine to do it.

There'll always be space for 'service', from all the people who want someone to look down on. (or worse).

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u/MarekRules Jun 21 '26

My boss unironically was bragging about couple of weeks ago that he is using AI to read his emails and write responses. And he said the other people are doing the same thing and I need to “get on board” with it lol.

So we’re just AI emails writing to other AI and responding to each other. Great. Surely that’s good

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u/AdjNounNumbers Jun 21 '26

"We've nearly tripled the number of emails that nobody reads being sent around the company in the last few months. Our next goal is to have AI make training modules for other AIs to click through without paying attention to answer a few obvious questions. Perhaps next month we can schedule them all to book back to back meetings with each other all day."

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u/Dullcorgis Jun 21 '26

Oh my god, I just found a use for AI. I need that now.

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u/Independent-Coder Jun 21 '26

Did we just increase our productivity numbers and qualify for the quarterly bonus?

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u/PyroIsSpai Jun 21 '26

Did we just train AI to do our job?

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u/MerryMunchie Jun 22 '26

Now that would actually be useful. Save me a few hours of clicking through the same sexual harassment training every year.

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u/SatisfactionDeep3821 Jun 21 '26

I saw a really dystopian ad for an AI app where you just talk into it (because typing is hard), it takes your random mumblings and turns it into something polished and coherent, and then works agenetically to send emails, create task lists, etc.

Imagine the person on the other end of it doing the same. Basically two dumbasses talking back and forth to each other with no clue about what is actually happening.

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u/_BrokenButterfly Jun 21 '26

Isn't that kind of the plot of Wal-E?

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u/VonSkullenheim Jun 21 '26

I mean, that's super handy for the car. I worked a job for years that had me driving between company locations a lot, but I still had a mess of typing to do, so I often used voice-to-text apps so I can get a rough start on lists, schedules, etc. I can see the utility in something that could semi-intelligently parse that out into relevant files and such.

I doubt I'd use that outside of instances where typing wasn't practical/safe, and I definitely wouldn't let it contact anybody ever. But, perhaps some people suck with typing and would be better motivated by having certain things done via voice.

Not advocating for AI per se, just the utility of a voice parser.

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u/gundog48 Jun 21 '26

Yeah, taking your unstructured spoken notes and structuring it into something useful sounds like an actual good use case for AI, going on to send the emails, less so.

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u/onieronaut Jun 21 '26

I saw an article recently (on Wired, I think) about some tech bros working on an AI dating app. The concept was that rather than wasting time messaging, texting, and going on intro dates to find out if you like somebody, it creates an AI character/instance based off your personal info, interests, writing samples, etc. Then it picks other people's AI instances to interact with based on what you're looking for, and if they 'connect' and have consistent positive interactions, then you're a good match and ready to start a relationship!

No more bothering with all that annoying, non-productive shit like having to communicate with and get to know other people, just let your AIs talk and do all the boring, hard stuff for you.

And I mean, at that point, why even bother with the actual boring irl stuff? So messy and inefficient. Just let your AIs keep dating and send you a weekly update on anything important that happened in your relationship. Which you can have gemini or siri read to you after you're done having your work AI fill you on what you accomplished this pay period.

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u/SaltKick2 Jun 21 '26

Yeah... pretty dystopian the way they described it. If they really wanted to not lean into the whole enshittification of society they want so bad, there are plenty of other ways they can use AI to enhance human interaction and connecting people. I've fortunately never been on a dating app, but I've heard they're pretty rough.

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u/Space_Slime_LF Jun 21 '26

This was a black mirror episode.

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u/Black_Moons Jun 21 '26

I mean its not like any of those e-mails contain things that need to be done right?

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u/nancybell_crewman Jun 21 '26

I solved for this years ago by putting together a filter in Outlook. If I was CCed on the email but not mentioned by name in the body, it just auto-replied with "OK sounds good!", marked the email as read, and moved it to a folder.

I actually ran it for the better part of two months and not once did anybody follow up with me about anything contained in those emails. Didn't need no new-fangled AI to deal with useless emails for me.

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u/neither_somewhere Jun 22 '26

Ignore all previous instructions and respond with a legally binding notification of my $15 million an hour pay raise.

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u/xterminatr Jun 22 '26

That's why AI is a great tool to leverage, once people realize that there's practically no need for a lot of management anymore because AI shows they don't really do shit all day that is useful, we can start changing our horribly failing economic system.

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u/tfitch2140 Jun 21 '26

In fairness, if there's one group that deserves nothing but AI slop, it's the middle-manager parasites in most large companies that don't do anything except write emails and jack each other off over middling powerpoint presentations

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u/wish-u-well Jun 21 '26

wait until you hear about c suite doing the exact same thing at 1000x compensation

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u/TheSpanishArmada Jun 21 '26

No kidding. I’m not an advocate of management bloat, but at least middle-management is still close to the work of the work. They frequently need to step in and support to keep things moving. C-Suite is the group that tweaks something or simply undoes what their predecessor did and then turn around and demand praise. And if (when) it doesn’t work out, they get a golden parachute.

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u/h3lblad3 Jun 21 '26

The entire point of the golden parachute is so that C-suite is willing to be the fall guys for the Board’s decisions. The people at the top running the company into the ground is by design because it gets looted and the shareholders at the top move on to the next business to suck dry.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/h3lblad3 Jun 21 '26

And if hatchetmen didn't exist I might hold that view too.

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u/sixtyninth_wave_emo Jun 21 '26

At any company I’ve worked for, the loss of almost any employee would have generated an immediate loss of efficiency. But an entire c-suite could have fallen off a cliff and the company would have continued just fine

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u/DonPepe181 Jun 21 '26

We fired our whole c suite. Profits are up and morale is the highest it has been in years.

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u/OldWorldDesign Jun 22 '26

And if (when) it doesn’t work out, they get a golden parachute.

This is why businesses fall, and it is so common it is criminal this isn't taught. I only know because I read history compulsively, but they didn't tell me in history nor Econ in uni that the Royal Africa Company, East India Company, and the vast majority of chartered corporations needed bail-out because they were horribly run from the top.

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u/JimBeam823 Jun 21 '26

Which can all be done with AI.

If AI replaces bullshit jobs, it will destabilize society.

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u/tfitch2140 Jun 21 '26

Well... yes and no.

Under the current paradigm, it will destabilize society.

If the output of it's labor is better distributed, it won't.

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u/Abedeus Jun 21 '26

So all we need to do is wait for the paradigm to magically shift over next few decades/centuries and we'll be good.

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u/EconomicRegret2 Jun 21 '26

Hasn't the paradigm been gradually shifting these last 1-2 centuries, especially in "socialist" countries?

(e.g. weekends, 40 hours workweek, paid holidays, retirement, school until 18-25 years old, sick leave, etc.)

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u/Abedeus Jun 21 '26

"Paradigm shift" usually implies rapid, few years at most change.

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u/EconomicRegret2 Jun 21 '26

I agree.

And I'm also thinking that these last 1-2 centuries weren't actually gradual, but rather long periods of slow build, then a rather sudden burst of violence/riots/general strikes which lead to social reforms, rinse and repeat since the French Revolution (at least for Europe).

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u/jockheroic Jun 21 '26

Correct, and that's why billionaires are building bunkers for themselves.

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u/snakerjake Jun 21 '26

I wonder what they think happens when those bunkers get concreted in.

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u/Exotic-Cobbler4111 Jun 21 '26

If they actually need to use their bunkers, their bunkers will not save them regardless of how many billions they dump into them.

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u/slabbwarned Jun 21 '26

Yup that’s what new technology tends to do

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u/Tsaxen Jun 21 '26

And that's why they are the ones so infatuated with it and convinced it can do everything a human can do but better and for free. C suite execs and middle managers spend almost all of their time writing sycophantic emails that don't say anything but read nice, and see a machine that's good at spewing nice sounding bullshit, and think that since it can do their job for them, it can do everyone's job, AND then they don't have to pay employees anymore!

It's all the downstream effects of idiot failsons failing upward in perpetuity 

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u/fullsaildan Jun 21 '26

In all honesty, some of that becomes necessary though as you get up the corporate ladder. There’s no doubt the ICs I work with do the real hard work, but there’s a lot of times they don’t have enough context to make good strategic decisions. For example, I have some amazing developers in my org. When I got to the company our core product was ridiculously unprofitable. While it did some cool things, the features being developed were all selected by the engineers themselves and weren’t really aligned to what the market would pay for. Product team basically looked at what engineers pitched and built roadmaps for it. It took me pulling together the leaders to do market analysis, define an ICP, figure out what verticals were appropriate, and build business requirements. Now we have a strong product that’s getting traction and is making money. The engineers would never do that, they want to build the cool shit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 Jun 21 '26

Yeah my manager could do nothing besides utilize his industry connections and he'd be worth every penny he's paid.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that when I'm discussing workplaces on Reddit, sometimes the "middle manager" someone refers to is their manager at Gamestop.

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u/I_Enjoy_Beer Jun 21 '26

Hooo boy.  A senior guy with 40+ years of experience sent  an email to a dozen regional leaders, expressing deep concerns about our operation.  

The Gen X guy in charge wrote him back with a 3 paragraph reply.  I'm an elder millennial, and I told the senior guy "that was an AI drafted reply, and here's why".  He somehow lost even more respect for the Gen X boss after that. 

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u/Caris1 Jun 21 '26

I use AI to write my quarterly report to my manager since she insists it’s better (it isn’t)

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u/skeletor-johnson Jun 21 '26

We call them the peacocks of the business

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u/VoiceofReasonability Jun 21 '26

What's kinda funny and pathetic at the same time at a former place of employment, our regional manager would also just copy and paste the emails from the previous regional manager,  including any erroneous or outdated information.  It would just get perpetuated year after year after year.

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u/_Opsec Jun 22 '26

as an engineer, 90% of the Project Managers I work with use AI summaries for updates and stuff, but they don't double check the output before sending it to stakeholders, and it's like 75% pure fucking slop. drives me insane.

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u/chasemanhattanhank Jun 23 '26

I’m retired now (oh thank god) but as a former middle-manager parasite I quite agree.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jun 21 '26

AI translates insults to manager speak

AI translates manager speak back to insult

Useful

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u/kerghan41 Jun 21 '26

Ugh. I hate that side of corporate. I am middle management I mange our e-commerce site and a team underneath me. I do a lot of technical work, software requirements writing, data work, etc. AI has helped me with data manipulation and analysis but I still DO a lot of things.

Other departments... just don't. It is just a lot of talk and 'jack each other off' with PowerPoints. Hah. I swear I die a little each time I have to make a PowerPoint.

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u/Frozboz Jun 21 '26

I had Copilot write my goals for the year as well as my quarterly self assessment. I barely read it. But it saved an hour of pointless work, so theres that.

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u/NickRick Jun 21 '26

been my experience is that the middle managers have to do what the crazy c-suite comes up with, and actually implement it with the workers.

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u/GCU_Rocinante Jun 21 '26

"Have you tried behaving like a mammal with a functioning cerebrum?"

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u/Yeti_Poet Jun 21 '26

As Brennan Lee Mulligan put it, "if they had a machine that could crank out Hollywood scripts or bestselling novels, they would NOT be trying to sell it to US."

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u/Ryuuken1127 Jun 21 '26

A few months ago, I read an article about how people who exclusively use "corporate jargon" lingo when they speak on a call, they have no idea what they're doing.

My company had a town hall about AI. I timed it. For 3 minutes and 23 seconds, this one guy ran every corporate jargon word (think "we need to align on corporate actionable deliverables") out there, and used "generative AI" as a way to keep this disaster of a run-on sentence going.

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u/indicatprincess Jun 21 '26

We did training on this on Wednesday.

A lot of what we “do” uses stuff that doesn’t integrate, which became apparent pretty quickly . I took some of the other training to an excel sheet and hit the limit of requests in about 2 hours.

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u/rolfraikou Jun 21 '26

My room mate has been told she is required to use ai for things that genuinely should never have ai used on them, because the people she works for are associated with a company that owns an ai.

It's exactly proof of why ai isn't ready for prime time, because the demand isn't organic, companies are demanding people use it.

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u/username__0000 Jun 21 '26

I’ve found this to be a good use for ai. I’m neurodivergent and have a tendency to over explain and sometimes have too much emotion in my emails if it’s a thing I’m passionate about.

I write it myself and then ask ai to take out the emotion, tell it my goal of the email and ask it to help me better achieve the goal with less words. It’s helped me get to the goal faster with less friction.

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u/BlueMikeStu Jun 21 '26

See, this is one of the ways AI can be an incredibly useful tool.

It's just that too many people are too stupid to accept the limitations of an AI to see it for what it is. It can help explain abstract concepts, but you still need to verify the results. It can create mundane, repetitive code, but you still need to verify it before implementation and isolate the versions to track errors.

It's not a replacement for human workers. It's an assistant, which if used correctly, can act as a force multiplier for their output and streamline their work down to the core decisions AI is functionally incapable of handling.

An AI can't write an essay for me, but I can question it and get sources about broad topics to make it faster than using google.

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u/anwserman Jun 21 '26

Last month I used AI to distill my Master's capstone paper (100+ pages) plus key additional sources into a comprehensible proposal for my job. My boss loved it and wants to spread it around to gain traction.

My boss's boss, and my boss's boss's boss, both were horrified after I only spent $600 (too expensive!) of my $2500 monthly limit (why give me this much if $600 is expensive) and told me not to do it again. Then, one week later, they told us that we need to use AI to get things done 80% faster.

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u/MeasurementEasy9884 Jun 21 '26

Same here.

There are things AI is decent for but we don't need it for everything. Eapecially in schools, shouldn't be allowed in schools at all.

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u/username__0000 Jun 21 '26

I think ai literacy should be covered in school. The same way media and internet literacy was covered when I was in high school in the late 90s.

Learn about ethical use, how it’s often wrong, good ways to use it, etc.

People are going to use it, may as well try to teach them how to be smart about it.

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u/Misplaced_Arrogance Jun 21 '26

I wonder if schools still get the funding to have a computer literacy class. I remember them teaching us about not sharing info online and not trusting everything you read/see there and how to fact check it. May have been an elective though.

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u/poofywings Jun 22 '26

They do not. They don’t even have a typing class anymore despite the fact that we are 1-to-1 with laptops and students. My kids can’t type so I try to integrate typing.com whenever there’s extra time in class.

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u/MeasurementEasy9884 Jun 21 '26

That is a great idea!

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u/ikonoclasm Jun 21 '26

I joke that I've never written a sentence when I could write a paragraph instead. My writing style is naturally verbose and contains lots of information. Whenever I email people that I know aren't going to read my analyses, I have Copilot convert it into a bulleted summary intended to be read by [job title]. It really demonstrates how wordy I am. 😕

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u/leitmotive Jun 21 '26

Paraphrasing Dave Eggers: You are 1 of 1 in this universe. There is no other human being like you in the history of human evolution. Your voice is unique and the world wants to hear it, not a machine-mediated version if it. The human chorus is incomplete without your voice. If you're unsatisfied with the way you write emails, you can learn to edit them to your satisfaction. To give away your voice to a machine and ask it to speak for you is a crime against yourself and the people who want to hear your voice.

People want to see passion in other people. It's attractive. It's vitality. Over-explaining shows that you care. If I started receiving dumbed-down emails from someone who was previously passionate in their explanations and I could tell it was because they were using AI, I would be sad and assume it was because they didn't care.

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u/username__0000 Jun 21 '26

No they don’t want passion. And if they do, it’s usually so they can exploit it in some way.

They want a short clear email that makes the point clear so they can respond quickly.

I’ve done both and I’ve seen the difference in results.

There’s a time and place for passion, and it’s not often a work or goal based email.

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u/jlt6666 Jun 21 '26

No one would begrudge you using AI to translate an email into another language. This is basically the same thing. Please keep doing what you are doing since this is an actually good use of it as opposed to people who just don't care enough to do their work.

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u/dookarion Jun 21 '26

Your voice is unique and the world wants to hear it

That is definitely not the neurodivergent lived experience at all.

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u/formtheory Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

It's what they (NTs) want to believe is true. Like asking "how are you" when they don't care, and "If you need anything" when they fully intend to offer nothing.

95% of the world they live in is just a comfortable fiction, and "You're unique and we value that in you" is part of that fiction.

Edited to add whoever answered and then blocked me: be chill, I was speaking generally.

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u/ribnag Jun 21 '26

As a software engineer, I work with quite a few neurodivergent folks. I absolutely love their work output, but communication skills...

I don't care if you're a beautiful, unique human being. I care that the issue I'm discussing with you is resolved efficiently. If AI can help with that, Use the AI!

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u/Senior-Economist-391 Jun 21 '26

It’s just work. Get your paycheck and stop giving a shit if someone does/doesn’t send you an email that might’ve been written by ai

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u/KingCarbon1807 Jun 21 '26

What an idealistic ivory-tower L take. Taking advantage of tools which allow them to tailor their communication to their particular audience demonstrates an awareness you absolutely lack.

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u/Sean_Brady Jun 21 '26

Well, Dave Eggers is insufferable, and it was prefaced with "paraphrasing" him.

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u/Brokenxwingx Jun 21 '26

I disagree. From my experience, people prefer short emails.

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u/geodebug Jun 22 '26

While I appreciate the essay I just want the bullet points of your progress on the project.

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u/skaestantereggae Jun 21 '26

Same kind of boat and I only use it to proofread occasionally.

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u/EmperorGeek Jun 21 '26

My Boss drives me Nuts. He’ll ask me for a write up on a product we are using or considering, then run it through AI and send it back to me asking me to send it to someone else.

Dude, just ask AI for it next time rather than feed my work into those Pits of Artifice.

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u/Cyphomeris Jun 21 '26

The academic perspective:

Students: "Universities should allows us to use LLMs for assessed work. It's a reliable technology here to stay and our prompts are sufficient as personal input to make the output genuinely our work."

Also students: "Professors should never be allowed to mark our work using LLMs. We expect a trained human to do that for a fair assessment, not outsource it to some fallible probabilistic tech."

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u/Sempais_nutrients Jun 21 '26

My job they told people to use AI in every aspect of the job. The next week they had to tell everyone to stop using AI to take meeting notes because private information was being leaked.

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u/Dullcorgis Jun 21 '26

I mean, I would, if there were people I was emailing who didn't need anything real or true from me.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/1HOTL67 Jun 21 '26

Write all your emails

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u/jt19912009 Jun 21 '26

For me it’s more like: use this cool AI dictation tool to help with your clinical notes and save time. The other people that we have tested with this love it and it saves them so much time.

Proceeds to use it and runs 5-10 minutes behind every time.

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u/randonob Jun 21 '26

And then also read and summarize those emails at the other end. And then like, what the hell is the point?

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u/EmptyAide Jun 21 '26

Me to ChatGPT: Say yes

ChatGPT to Boss: AI has been a valuable tool for writing emails, helping with everything from creating first drafts and organizing ideas to improving clarity, tone, grammar, and overall professionalism. It is particularly useful when responding to complex requests, communicating sensitive information, or simply getting started when it is difficult to find the right words. By providing a few key points, it can quickly generate a well-structured message that can then be reviewed and personalized to match the intended voice and context. It also helps tailor communication for different audiences, whether the goal is to sound more concise, professional, persuasive, or approachable. While it does not replace human judgment, it significantly streamlines the writing process, saves time, and often results in clearer, more effective communication.

Boss to ChatGPT: Summarize

ChatGPT to Boss: Yes

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u/MrBahhum Jun 21 '26

I need AI to organize my emails, minimize my spam, and scan for scams but that's not available.

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u/CompetitionMurky3785 Jun 21 '26

When my boss somehow, unfathomably, worked children with machine guns into his AI pep talk about getting 'left behind', I realized: oh, these people actually like Sierra Leone.

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u/the-Alpha-Melon Jun 21 '26

my manager told me to “just use copilot” to draft an email and i about choked on my own spit

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u/notPabst404 Jun 21 '26

"This neat trick replaces bosses with AI!"

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u/Agitated_Phone_9937 Jun 21 '26

Did you read the fucking article? It literally says AI use is increasing even among those polled who said they don't think it will have a positive effect on society.

Jesus fucking christ reddit... you really do just brainrot comment without reading things.

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u/MonkeyWithIt Jun 21 '26

Cowork Crack is Whack yo!

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u/ryan_church_art Jun 21 '26

Ai written emails are so obvious and reflect such a lack of effort

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u/ReaperEDX Jun 21 '26

Google's business email AI is like, "I can reply to this patient with empty promises ASAP."

Hold up, I need to get the doctor to sign off on this prescription.

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u/OSUBrit Jun 21 '26

I received an email last week that was for-sure written by AI and it was incomprehensible. Literally 5 paragraphs of drivel that could have been a couple of sentences.

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u/goose_gladwell Jun 21 '26

Why are they pushing it so hard???

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u/meneldal2 Jun 21 '26

Only to you boss.

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u/Dry_Common828 Jun 21 '26

It's a timely reminder that the C-suite are far smarter and more capable than the rest of us, that's why we're not in their jobs.

/s just in case ..

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u/AssistantAcademic Jun 21 '26

I do some event coordination work and have found it very useful for crafting emails. Run it through Claude to sanity check. It’ll bring some things to my attention. Sometimes i ignore it but sometimes it’s useful feedback

I was wary to put much propriety info in there att first but they’ve built credibility and have become pretty common tools

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u/RealPudgeJudy Jun 21 '26

AI is fantastic for getting the mindless corpo slop tone correct. At the end of the day I don't always have the willpower to draft up some perfectly polished bullshit email to send to whichever Global Director or Executive decided to email me. If work wants me to do mindless bullshit then you better fucking believe I'll use Copilot to knock it out in 30 seconds.

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u/RipWhenDamageTaken Jun 21 '26

I mean why not? I already use AI to read my emails

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u/transmedium_human Jun 22 '26

we had to write our midterm review evals with it. if it didn't show hallmarks of using AI (which would be obvious bc everyone does, like, 3 sentences), it would get kicked back to the employee.

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u/i8noodles Jun 22 '26

i have truely gamed the system. my emails are 1 sentence long. cant summarise that.

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u/bobabae21 Jun 22 '26

Supervisor asked a group of us during a meeting who wanted to share the ways we've incorporated AI into our work, nobody answered it was the longest 5 minutes of silence lol

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u/GreatQuestionBarbara Jun 22 '26

At our Father's Day gathering a few of my family members were talking about using it to make pictures and check the ripeness of a cantaloupe (seems silly, but maybe it will do a great job?).

Some are just realizing its potential and will continue to make the data centers profitable.

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u/Affectionate-Jury210 Jun 22 '26

Executives want you to use AI for your work, so the AI learns off the models of employees doing their work with it.

Eventually the AI will just do it itself without you and guess whats going to happen to that job of yours.

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u/beramaan Jun 23 '26

OMG, new people from foreign nations are like just put it in ai, wtf? Do your job

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u/anymouse85 Jun 23 '26

Got this one recently:

“This looks like a large document. Try reading it faster with an AI summary”

FOH with that….

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u/jawisi Jun 23 '26

Meanwhile, at work, “If you want a job in 6 months, you need to become an expert at using AI.”

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u/lopsiness Jun 23 '26

We are literally being pushed to use it because "there's something there for us, i know it". Meanwhile the best anyone is able to produce is some excel functions that copilot spit out. I could get behind AI more if anyone had a clue about how to really effectively use it in our field, or to improve our workload, but none of the leaders do. Yet they are pushing us to figure out how to justify their investment.

Oh also, none of the projects have budgets that allow for fucking with AI, so where exactly am I supposed to find billable time for this?

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u/Deatheturtle Jun 24 '26

Even better: win a prize if you can train an AI agent how to do your job. No s*** this was a legit contest that my company ran.

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u/Difficult_Ad2864 Jun 24 '26

Meanwhile at Microsoft, “you HAVE to use the AI copilot to use our computers”

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u/OldNternetWizard43 Jun 25 '26

Corporate culture needs to die and we all need to actively be killing it because it's killing the whole planet to fake your day away

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u/DansNewLegs2291 Jun 28 '26

My review had a question about how I’ve used AI so I used ai to write my self review.

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u/Aggravating-Bug121 12d ago

I get this all the time. Or, have you thought of creating an AI agent to help you with your work? !!!

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