'My coworkers are using AI instead of actually working and it’s about to blow up in our faces.' UPDATED (5 MONTHS LATER)
"My coworkers are using AI instead of actually working and it’s about to blow up in all of our faces."
I work in R&D (editor’s note: Research & Development), and I’m so ashamed at what some of my colleagues are churning out. We’ve had a big push to implement AI into our work streams to make things easier and push products out faster and I’m seeing it start to turn us into brainless monkeys clacking out garbage for our customers.
We are split up into analysts and data scientists. I’m an analyst. I’ve used AI to format citations of sources and occasionally summarize long, technical articles so I’m not reading 20+ pages for every source I use, but I’m using those summaries to pick out trends etc.
Over the past 6 months I’ve heard multiple analysts saying, “I coded this dashboard!” “I made this website!” And on its face it’s very impressive and I’ve heard higher ups be astounded at how versatile some of these folks have turned out to be.
Well, now it’s finally coming out that they’ve all been generated by Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT. I’ve started correcting coworkers who try to show me their code or make claims that they themselves have made something by asking - did you make it, or did you have AI make it?
And they brush past “oh yeah, well I had Claude make it at home.” I usually just stay silent because I can’t help but wonder - how can you brag you made something when you don’t even know what it is you’re making?? I was working on a research paper about macroeconomics as a side project to something I’m working on.
One of the co-leads for my project came over to ask me what I was working on, and after I told her she said “oh! I already wrote a paper on that!” … like, okay I’m happy for you but I’m going to keep doing my thing just for my own benefit and knowledge. Here we are a month later and she’s talking about 12+ papers “she” wrote and offered to send to me. I look at it and I ask, “did you write this or ChatGPT?”
And she sheepishly admitted that ChatGPT did. At least she seemed embarrassed, but this is a woman who’s 5+ years older than me and getting paid $25k more than me. I looked at her program management schedule for while she’s on PTO and it makes NO sense. When I asked her for clarification, she could not explain half of it and ended up deleting most of the tasks that she put on there.
How am I supposed to trust my team when they’re taking ownership of things they’re pushing out - and they don’t even know what they’re sending?! Well, things are not getting better. Our analysts continue to ‘work’ on their dashboards and websites and are trying to get it sent out to clients for review.
On first look, the clients love it. When we send it to our data scientists for them to just figure out “the final touches” on shit that they haven’t worked on, the curtain is drawn back to find TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LINES OF REDUNDANT CODE. That’s like being asked to edit a novel in a week, for something that should be a 4 page essay.
If we try to push it to live systems it instantly breaks and the data scientists basically have to start from scratch - except our customers are now expecting a quick turn around since they’ve already seen a ‘functioning’ product, and the data scientists are now left with MORE work and SHORTER deadlines to try and meet expectations than if they were tasked with it to begin with, and we’re able to manage expectations.
It’s embarrassing and I do not know for the life of me how more people are not seeing this. In fact - my team lead actually asked for one of us to give a demonstration on how easy and valuable working with AI is, and all its applications to our work. Analysts (specifically the 2-3 biggest offenders of this AI slop) were jumping at the gate for the opportunity.
I plan on calling a meeting first thing this week between our leads, partnering companies who are doing the same stuff, and customer to address these concerns because wtf. I feel like I’m going insane. We are pushing out crap and pretending it’s lightning in a bottle. Rant over.
Here's what people had to say to OP:
I really love talking with vibe coders, they never offer to share their code.
sweet_clementime OP:
It’s funny, because one vibe coder at our office is so oblivious that it’s the opposite problem - he showed me all of his code, bragging about having thousands of lines completed, not realizing that was actually a negative in the product he was working on
I dearly and sincerely hope more businesses have people like you, OP, who can see through the fog of AI and know what garbage it is. And more importantly, choose to DO something about it. Unfortunately weak minded people fall for that slop so quickly and easily it’s truly staggering.
I suppose these are also the same people susceptible to conspiracy theories and other such rabbit holes. I fear for our future with so much AI BS out there that won’t be easily sorted anymore. Too many people believe in it…want to believe it’s real, bc it feeds into whatever craziness they’re ready and willing to clutch onto. Sigh.
sweet_clementime OP:
Thank you. I’m not quite in the ranks where I can make immediate change, but I have good relationships with the folks who are, so I hope they take my warning seriously. Either way, I see the outcome being the same - the products are undeliverable and we either stop it ourselves or our end customers will stop buying.
I think the problem is twofold - feedback is not being delivered to the channels where it is actually impactful (the analysts & managers), and people are being hired with either lack of skill, confidence, or training and are expected to deliver groundbreaking products.
AI feels like a shortcut to them and if they’re only getting positive feedback, why stop? I think their ideas are great, but it needs to be vocalized that they must work with people who actually know what they’re doing.
It’s like when I tried to make a carrot cake the first time. I had an idea of what I wanted, and my idea was glorious (delicious carrot cake). I did not yet have the skills to make it, but I followed the recipe and by the time I put it in the oven, the dough looked good enough. Being a novice at baking and not actually knowing what I was doing, I figured I could substitute baking powder for baking soda.
Disgusting results. If I had someone knowledgeable guiding me, I probably would have been saved from disaster. Our office is headed towards a disgusting, salty, carrot cake-soup because we are not consulting with people who know what they’re doing, despite the resources (human SMEs) being there.
I literally am starting to feel insane cause of people like your coworkers forcibly surrounding themselves around me.
Five months later, OP shared an update:
I figured I would give an update to this as it’s been a few months, and I think it’s resolved fairly nicely. At first, when I rang the alarm bells about my colleagues’ overuse and lack of oversight on AI, my direct management was very supportive. All of that went out the window when we met together as a group and the colleague with the most egregious products in question exploded.
It was not a very pretty sight, and I am honestly still aggravated that my team did not back me up and instead let me take all the heat.
There was not much opportunity to get a word in edgewise, but I repeated the fact that the quality was far below what we could expect to bring to our customers, that she never asked for help or review from the team before pushing products as deliverables and was assuming all of this risk herself.
And the people below her felt blindsided that their work product was being ran through AI and made into a worse product than what they initially delivered. Her response was to essentially call me a backstabbing snake, and that I had plenty of opportunities to review her work before it went out, which was false.
Of course, after that meeting my direct management came up to me to tell me that I did a great job sticking up for myself and that they still support me raising the flag, which was more frustrating than having to deal with the initial outburst. Whatever. I then alerted our main client about the quality control issue and let them know that I would be personally reviewing it.
Well, it turns out they found a lot more AI slop deliverables that were turned in before I officially joined the team that no one caught. My colleague’s direct superior was put on notice, but she STILL consistently poured out unusable AI products. When checking the metadata of the documents, she rarely spent 30 minutes reviewing her own work.
Other lead duties such as coordination and communication were suffering as well. She has since been transferred to a different project without taking any accountability for her role in everything. I actually feel a little bad for her, she came up to me a month ago asking why no one gave her any responsibilities or tasks.
This is after being given consistent feedback (mostly negative) that she ignored. I imagine it’s going to be an uphill battle for her wherever she goes, but I’m so relieved it’s not my problem anymore!
Our main clients have put out new guidelines for when and who (specifically data scientists and people with coding backgrounds) should be deemed responsible for implementing AI into products, and I have yet to come across the egregious mis-uses that I was seeing previously. My sanity is slowing coming back to me.
Here's what people had to say to OP's update:
[deleted]:
But the most important question remains unanswered: did you get the ego boost you were looking for?
sweet_clementime OP:
And why do you think I was looking for an ego boost? I wouldn’t have cared that AI was used if the work that was being pushed wasn’t crap. It would have been great if my colleague was able to manage the tool in a responsible manner, and I would have celebrated her wins with her. It’s a shame it didn’t turn out that way.
How is she still employed with all that?!
sweet_clementime OP:
I wish I knew. That’s the most baffling part. I don’t have high hopes for whatever project she moves to, but I’ve let everyone know that I will be looking at my options if they try to move her back to this one.
Good on you, OP.
I read your original post just now, and am confused as to how someone is churning out 12+ papers? Like research papers?
sweet_clementime OP:
Yes, research papers into industry-relevant topics. I’m not sure why that employee made them because they weren’t submitted as products nor do our clients ask for them.
So, that’s a relatively harmless example compared to some of the coding nightmares that we witnessed, but the fact that the employee claimed authorship was problematic, especially since she couldn’t actually talk about the content of them in conversation when it came up. It’s kind of like… what’s even the point of burning tokens in that case?
I am in the process of building AI elements in to our workflows and BEFORE I built anything I wrote the rules on how things would go through quality gates. Well, it turns out that I may have been a little too literal in the rules I wrote because at one point, one of my plugins demanded a slack screen shot of my boss giving permission for the next stage of a project.
After boss and I had stopped laughing it dawned on us that actually this is a good thing (but might have to tone it down a little). Trouble is, that if any of my colleagues use AI direct then they are not governed by these rules (affectionately known as Lizziemov’s rules as a homage to Asimov’s rules of robotics).
So, for key customer facing work we are going to force them through our new front end to ChatGPT which also creates audit trails and logs work to our PM system. It will be painful but they either adapt or well, there is no alternative.
sweet_clementime OP:
This is awesome. I wish we had something like this in place. Admittedly, I’m not a data scientist/software engineer just a project manager so I’m naive to actually going in and changing processes like what you’re doing.
I’ve instead enacted that non-coders who use AI have to manually track what models, the prompts they use, and to give justification before they use AI in critical work streams. Your comment gave me some ideas to bring to the team to make it less of a pain if we can just automate AI tracking.
I don’t want to punish folks who do use AI by making more tedious work for them, but I’m shocked that some of our folks just go wild with this stuff. Good employees aren’t catching errors or hallucinations, and it passes by multiple reviews before it gets to my desk. Anyhow, thank you for the comment and if you have any tips as to how you’ve approached what you’ve done I’d love to hear it!