“Have You Tried Running it via ChatGPT or Claude?”: Navigating AI in the Workplace
Worrying words are increasingly being heard in the office, as a growing number of tech workers feed their thoughts to chatbots and pass the results on to colleagues as if they were their own.
To many, this looks like: I don’t care enough to write it myself. “I’m promised to save time, but that doesn’t kill motivation,” a friend of mine recently told me, after receiving an instruction written by the AI. “This seems incredibly inauthentic,” said another.
On dating apps, there is already a term for someone suspected of using AI to send you a message: a chatfisher. Reddit is full of office workers talking about their corporate equivalents.
The Chatbot Conundrum
One commenter described a co-worker’s email that immediately gave the game away: “This girl at my work recently sent me an email starting with the words ‘Here’s a polite, less angry version of your email’.”
Artem Kuchukov, CEO of German robotics company Kewazo, is one founder who admits he used to overuse ChatGPT to communicate with his team. “I started personally announcing every new person who joined our company,” he says. “When I did it the first two times, I used ChatGPT and it saved me a lot of time.
“After that, however, I started getting sarcastic comments from my team, such as ‘This email looks so ChatGPT.’” In fact, people picked up on this very quickly and didn’t like it at all. “So I had to change my approach and combine ChatGPT messages with personal touches to make it seem less robotic,” says Kuchukov.
The Bar is Lowering
The stories kept coming. A saleswoman at a Berlin software company described receiving a suspicious AI-generated response from her boss after she sent a message saying she would be sick. “Was it really that hard to type ‘no problem, I’ll feel better soon’. No, this guy had to ask ChatGPT for an answer. The bar is getting lower and lower.”
This, at least, is relatively harmless. More annoying are cases where managers use AI to question their own employees. “I’ll show our founder something and he’ll literally say, ‘great, let me just see what Claude has to say,’” an employee at a London-based fintech told me. “I will then have to justify my work after Claude has made holes in it.”
Claude, according to this person, is becoming a sort of second boss at his workplace. A consultant like no other, who throws “trick” questions at staff.
To be honest, not everyone is concerned about communicating via AI. “Honestly, I would prefer if my boss didn’t write to me at all, but if he is [going to] trouble me, he might as well use ChatGPT to get the spelling correct,” one worker told me.
“We Cannot Automate Humor”
Some patterns are in the clear. Ilan Fisher, communications manager at AI startup Wonderful, does not suspect his superior of any AI foul play. “It would be difficult to automate insider, niche British humor,” he says.
Jan Čurn, CEO of Prague-based web scraping startup Apify, also doesn’t use AI to write to colleagues. “I have the opposite problem,” he told me. “Instead of senior managers, sometimes it is the most junior people who write meeting minutes, performance comments, specifications or launch plans, from which one can clearly sense the slope of AI.”
Some sympathize with the chatbot-dependent boss. The Berlin saleswoman admits her boyfriend put things into perspective when she complained about her CEO. “He said, well, ‘at least it uses AI. You don’t want to work at a company that hasn’t figured out chatbots yet’.”
It also admits to deploying AI in its own customers’ emails as a last resort. “It’s a plan B when you can’t find the strength to be polite to assholes.”
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