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by treesknees 3 hours ago
This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.

I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.

2 comments

I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else.

Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared, they see it as the ultimate way to take credit for work they didn't do: Put everything into Claude, let it do the work, copy and past output back to someone else. Minimum effort invested, maximum visibility achieved.

It will continue as long as they think they're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.

Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would look different in different contexts.

Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."

Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.
I think you're over-estimating how much some people care.

I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.

Sure, some people have no self awareness. In that case you can change your approach, if you are a manager or otherwise invested in the company you can put pressure on them to increase the quality of their work and to own the things they submit. Bring up specific examples of poor quality work, errors in documents/messages, etc.

Or if you don't care you can just ignore this persons messages.

This feels like a BOFH response but I'm strangely not opposed to it; If you generate something, you should own it ... regardless of what tool you used to generate it.
I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it
Communicate with your boss. "I'm ignoring this guy's slop because he's spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to deal with all of it, I won't be able to do my job".

Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his job.

Management, responding to someone who takes your advice to "ignore it": "So we've noticed that there's this guy who is doing tons of work, and you have chosen to do no work?"