: Has workplace AI entered the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era?
I think maybe. Today I got a pull request that was suspiciously … long. I haven’t decided how to review it yet.
Loads of people have determined lately that they can use ChatGPT to fulfill their job responsibilities more easily. Easily doesn’t mean better or even faster, necessarily. Just less cognitive effort. Put the prompt in, copy/paste, @ your boss for review and deal with the negative feedback later.
Using the AI without telling anyone is equilibrium behavior, because going back to the manual way requires exercising executive function that you could use more effectively elsewhere, and telling your boss “I used AI to write this memo btw XD” invites your boss to start comparing the cost per hour of you vs. ChatGPT—and we know how that will end.
There’s also no incentive for your boss to ask proactively if you have automated yourself yet: First of all, that sounds weirdly threatening, but more importantly, in corporate America, prestige is measured by the number of people you supervise. If word gets out that your boss’s team could be AIified—even if your boss leads the charge on the AIificication—the benefits will ultimately accrue to the boss’s management, not to the boss. People equals power, so Boss’s incentive is to persist in the delusion that the team’s magic is its people, and that’s why we need more of them. But I digress.
Let’s be honest: AI is deeply unpopular. Microsoft has done everything in their power to ensure that Copilot is annoying as fuck, and the only people crazy enough to claim they like it are trying to sell it to you. But! Just like evangelicals who crusade against porn, there are a lot of people who say all the hip edgy takes about how AI rewires your brain and soul, but secretly let Claude write all their emails when the lights go out.
Like the army’s famous policy on being gay, if you are in the group of people whose job/skillset is just in the “sweet spot” of bullshit where AI is not quite good enough to replace you, but good enough to make a passable attempt at your work when nobody’s looking closely, then you may find that the optimal move for you is to use the AI but never talk about it with your boss.
To be clear, I don’t like this world. I’m a shitty idealist who hews closely to our (very restrictive) corporate policy on AI as well as bleeding-heart literary fiction enjoyer whose ideas about the Soul have prevented me from attempting much more with AI than the “better stack overflow” use case. But if my shitty principles keep me from “moving fast” compared to those who giddily goon Cursor YOLO mode, at least they also require me to be honest about what I do do with AI chat.
And at least I have the dignity to write my own goddamn emails, ffs.