AI Is a Buck-Passing Technology

How AI usage makes your work someone else’s problem

Photo by Tom Krach on Unsplash

The other day, I was going back and forth with a colleague over email, planning a future event. We had nailed down the logistics and schedule, and it was time to figure out what we were going to have our students do.

She emailed me her ideas… Only they weren’t her ideas. The email had all the telltale signs of something that had been pasted in from ChatGPT — a superficial bullet-pointed list, complete with the irritating little emojis that the chatbot slips into its output.

I skimmed the list and sighed. The ideas were just as shallow and irrelevant as you’d expect an AI chatbot with no real understanding of our context or situation to provide. I realized I was going to have to do all of the planning myself.

Work email has long been a medium for buck-passing. Sending someone an email about a shared project is a way of putting the ball in someone else’s court, if only for a few hours.

A skilled practitioner of the dark arts of office politics will take full advantage of this feature of electronic communication. Forwarding something to a colleague (“Let’s loop Bob in, who might have more insight”), asking for more information (”Can you provide some context on this?”), or sending a vague request to a large…