So you’re hiring for a technical role, and you end up comparing two people. One of them, let’s call them the Layperson, doesn’t have all that much relevant expertise, but comes across as thoughtful, organised, articulate and cooperative. The other one, let’s call them the Genius, seems to be the cream of the crop as far as their applicable skillset, but might not be such a pleasure to work with. You decide to go for the Genius and risk a hit on the interpersonal stuff because this person is seemingly a knockout in all other respects. At some point, the Genius starts using Copilot.
Maybe the Genius just thinks of this as a timesaver. Maybe they’ve become so confident in their understanding of the work that they no longer feel they need firsthand knowledge of their own output. Whether or not that rings alarm bells for you in itself, this is a problem: the job was to know certain things, stay across certain things, and stay equipped to handle certain issues as they arise. That was the labour. The Genius is now outsourcing his own labour to a machine that, generously, is right 60% of the time. That’s less often than the Layperson. And any way you slice it, he’s now less prepared than he’s supposed to be if anything goes wrong.
As any type of boss, it’s now hard to argue that you did the right thing employing the Genius. If you think Copilot is bad, you should have hired the Layperson. If you think Copilot is good, you shouldn’t have hired the Genius. If you’re the Genius, you’re now starting to realise you’ve fucked yourself in a pretty comical way: you just pitched your workplace on your own irrelevance, and you nailed it.
But less comically, this wasn’t very fucking union of you, was it? You knew your whole life about automation, and the risk of being pushed out of your livelihood by bosses who don’t mind if the work is worse or the community is hurt as long as they don’t have to pay workers, and now here you are actively facilitating all that out of sheer gormlessness. In Australia, we call this a Dog Act, and you a Dog Cunt. It’s pretty dog.
If you do this – use generative AI at work – you leave nothing and nobody unthrown under the bus. You’re saying of yourself that you don’t respect the work (or you wouldn’t play so fast-and-loose with it) and aren’t good at it (or this wouldn’t be helpful), and that you don’t respect your workplace (or you’d make an effort); that you don’t understand the thing you’re using (or you wouldn’t trust it), that you don’t respect your coworkers (or you wouldn’t endanger their jobs), that you’re not interested in developing your skills (because you’re skipping that), and that you don’t understand anything of your context as a human selling your labour. You think there’s some universe where this ends in you and the boss high fiving over how much time you saved. It’s not happening. If you fool them that this works, they fire you. If you fool yourself, they should.
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