I’ve been thinking about it, and the conclusion of my last post was wrong: I wrote:
My suspicion is that this will eventually dawn on management and we will see corporations implementing policies to restrict or at least monitor how GenAI is used in the workplace. Eventually, GenAI use is going to be a scarlet letter, an indication that a product, service, or professional is low-effort and poor quality.
That’s not it. Corporations don’t care at all if their production is mediocre, so long as it is profitable. If using GenAI makes the product 50% shittier but 5% more profitable, they will actually mandate that their employees use GenAI.
And this is the problem: GenAI use will go from a neat hack that a corner-cutting worker bee figured out to shorten their work day to a top-down requirement for employees to be able to handle a ballooning workload.
So, if you are a professional and you like your job and the satisfaction of producing 5 good things per day, tough shit, you will now have to produce 20 mediocre things a day using this GenAI-forward SaaS solution for which your employer just signed a 5-year support contract.
Everything will speed up. You will have to use GenAI to draft e-mails because you won’t have time to do it yourself. You will have to use it to write memos, copy, presentations, and analyses, summarize meetings, summarize research, write performance reviews, draft annual reports, because the three other people that were supposed to be sharing the workload retired or got laid off or found a new job and the positions were never filled.
The job that used to be satisfying to you will become stressful and dull because instead of doing good work, you have to use GenAI to churn out shit.
That’s what’s coming: The enshittification of jobs.
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