Employees Long for the Days Before the Workplace Filled Up With AI Slop

The majority of workers agree: AI has turned their lives into slop-filled misery, making them yearn for the good old days before the tech existed.

According to a new survey of office workers by professional services company Adaptavist, just shy of two thirds of respondents say they regularly long for their old, pre-AI work life. Over a third of them would delete generative AI tools from their lives in their entirety if that was an option. And some 36 percent admitted they didn’t even understand why AI was being forced on them in the first place.

In many ways, the results shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The advent of AI has led to widespread frustration and added stress for workers being forced to carefully comb over the output of hallucinating AI models and engage in prompt engineering that wasn’t part of their original job description.

The survey’s results are a strong indication that the once-promised boost to productivity thanks to AI has yet to materialize. Worse yet, AI is actively getting in workers’ ways. Some 42 percent of respondents said they “spend more time verifying AI output than they save using it,” while 49 percent reported that “poor-quality AI output slows down projects.”

Meanwhile, generic slop is turning tasks that once required a modicum of creativity into a slog. Almost half of respondents to Adaptavist’s survey said that all the slop is making their jobs “feel more repetitive and less meaningful.”

Instead of being freed up to pursue a life of leisure while AI takes care of the brunt work, as tech leaders once promised, the conversation has shifted to an even unhealthier work-life balance. Workers are clearly afraid of being made redundant as company leaders push for AI adoption. Over half (54 percent) of survey respondents said they fear losing their jobs within the next five years as a result of AI.

“Without clear guardrails, accountability, and alignment, the promise of AI efficiency risks being offset by a growing burden on the very people it is designed to support,” Adaptavist wrote in its report.

In short, it’s no wonder workers are nostalgic for a pre-AI world order. While tech executives are enriching themselves, they’re being forced to adopt AI at all costs, even if it means a drop in productivity.

It’s a confusing and frustratingly incoherent new reality that’s already alienating an entire generation. Thankfully, Gen Z, which is facing a dire post-graduation job market thanks to AI, is choosing to fight back — a growing rebellion against polluting data centers and chatbots that erode our critical thinking skills.

More on work and AI: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week