Uncanny valley in an AI workplace apocalypse.

To some extent automation always seems to be a bait and switch.

Brian Merchant has published stories from workers about AI ruining or replacing jobs, and perhaps the most telling statement from one of the stories was someone who said: "Looking back, I wish my goal hadn't been to persuade managers but instead to organize fellow workers."

I like worker stories a lot because there's usually something in them that's entirely relatable, and yet also something that you find out about another profession or industry that's just mind-blowing, and often not in a good way. I remember describing a demoralizing job I had to David Graeber, a job he was familiar with from another angle (as described in his book Utopia of Rules). He said to me that he thought someone should probably write a sequel to Bullshit Jobs on what it’s like to "have a job that you know is just intrinsically wrong", and he said “hopefully not me!” and then unfortunately he died a few months after that. The problem is that such a book would likely surpass Debt: The First 5000 Years, as well as Ulysses and War & Peace, if you put all 3 together, because so many of today's jobs are intrinsically wrong, or at least have something intrinsically wrong with them.

Here are a few other eyebrow raising lines from stories that I recommend reading, if you have a stomach and appetite for horror.

Blood in the Machine AI Killed My Job: Tech workers Tech workers at TikTok, Google, and across the industry share stories about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs. Brian Merchant Jun 25, 2025

"The speech and movement wasn't as clean as what I see in videos now, but it was close enough to leave me with an eerie sensation."

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"These young engineers - squandering their opportunities to learn how things actually work - would briefly glance at the AI-generated code and/or explanation messages and continue producing more code when "it looks okay.""

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"We haven't hit an actual recession in stock-prices due to aggressive cost and stock-price engineering everywhere, and cost-engineering typically tanks internal worker satisfaction."

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"The irony here is two-fold: one, it does not seem that the people who left were victims of a turn to "vibe coding" and I suspect that the "AI efficiency" was used as an excuse to make us seem innovative even during this crisis. Two, this is a company whose product desperately needs real human care."

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"It feels like every week there's a new sales pitch from a company claiming that their AI tool will solve all our problems—companies are desperate to claw back their AI investment, and they're hoping to find easy marks in the public sector."

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"Looking back, I wish my goal hadn't been to persuade managers but instead to organize fellow workers."

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"I found out that a colleague who had been struggling with a simple programming task for over a month—and refusing frequent offers for help—was struggling because they were trying to prompt an LLM for the solution and trying to understand the LLM's irrelevant and poorly-organized output."

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"So I would say the private and public sector have this in common: the higher up you go in the organization, the more enthusiastic people are about "AI,” and the less they understand about the software, and (not coincidentally) the less they understand what their department actually does."

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"Obviously we are told that we need to review the AI outputs, but it is starting to kill my enjoyment for my work; I love the creative problem solving aspect to programming, and now the majority of that work is trying to be passed onto AI, with me as the reviewer of the AI's work."

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"Real use cases where AI can be used to do work that regular old programming could not are so rare that when I discovered one two weeks ago, I asked for a raise in the same breath as the pitch."

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"There’s a meme going on Pinterest that I believe sums up this moment: “We wanted robots to clean the dishes and do our laundry, so we could draw pictures and write stories. Instead they gave us robots to draw pictures and write stories, so we could clean dishes and do laundry.”"

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"I would stop short of saying that the existence of genAI tools within the company is directly increasing the per capita workload, but an argument could be made of it indirectly accomplishing that. The net result is not a lightening of the load as has been so often promised."

I don't really mind doing the laundry, though I wish I could spend more time drawing and painting. But nothing compares to how much I do mind AI slop; because it's not just aesthetically displeasing, and it is offensively off-putting, but it's also a time waster in so many ways, and I value my time.

But the thing I so often come back to is that it seems like it's turning out that even with what little automation is being introduced with the AI bonanza, it's the same old story. They said they automated secretaries and administrative assistants, but that's not really what happened, I know because I've worked in jobs where I had to do work that I had done in the past as a clerk or an administrative assistant or secretary, but there I was, I then had to do it as a professional as an extra in my job, because the employer refused to have enough clerical assistance or because of funding structures. That's a big part of the story about automation, that it seems to not be about robots actually doing the jobs, not actually replacing the jobs, but tech tools that increasingly allow employers to reduce job positions by shifting more arduous work onto people not as well equipped to do it, and having to do it while also doing what's in their actual expertise. I’ve seen ads recently promoting the idea to employers that employees expected to travel on business should be doing their own travel bookings, which is incredibly frustrating and time consuming work to pile on top of someone with a tight schedule, expertise in something else, and having to travel for work!

To some extent automation always seems to be a bait and switch. The lack of robust overtime laws, and salary position manipulations being unregulated, allows for more work to be loaded onto less people, and AI LLM chatbot tools are just another log on that fire, rather than being a way to douse the problem of being overworked.

"Looking back, I wish my goal hadn't been to persuade managers but instead to organize fellow workers."

One thing is for sure, management is never going to fix the problems of laborer interests.

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