Discussion
Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the *weirdest* is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will *absolutely* use AI to get the job done.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/14/cult-taylorism/#ctrl-x-it-out
1/
@rasteri @pluralistic and back in the day, all the suits were adamant that XML must be used, whatever you were trying to do.
That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a *happy* tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."
2/
Not bosses, though. Bosses *love* AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively *harassing* the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/
Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: *why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job*?
3/
This is exactly the issue a friend and coworker complained about: she writes a lot of documents. Her manager pressured her to use AI to write those documents, but to her, the process of writing the document itself helps her understand the details of the issues. If she outsources that to AI, she doesn't understand it anymore, and without that understanding, she can't do her job, and can't honestly take responsibility for the document she created.
I've experienced something similar in coding, although I've never had that pressure and have since found more effective ways to use AI. But naive use of AI is a trap. A massive pitfall. And pushing people to "use more AI" is dangerous and stupid. You need to think about how, about what the impact is, and what it actually does to quality in the long term.
@mcv @pluralistic a friend of mine (he has a phd in cognition science) did a post about this issue that I found useful: https://simojarvela.fi/EN/Writings/Case+Study+-+How%2C+Why%2C+and+When+LLMs+Fail
I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care *how* it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?"
4/
It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from *bookkeepers.* "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely *weird* thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are *correct*, but caring about *how the macros are written* is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.
5/
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@pluralistic TBH you see this with every new tech. When my former boss learned about Virtual Machines, suddenly EVERY server had to be running under VMWare on Windows, even if it was Linux.