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To write this piece, I ran prompts through ChatGPT and generated a series of interview questions—the majority of which were good enough to pose to my experts. I also used an AI-powered transcribing tool, which saves me countless hours a month. When inspiration ran dry or I found myself drifting off course, I put in a different prompt to get a nudge in a new direction. On publication, I might use generative AI to help write a social media post to accompany this article. (I always talk myself out of sharing my writing, so outsourcing part of that legwork is just the kick I need.) Will generative AI make the piece markedly better? Who knows. Does it make me lazy? Well, there’s a question.
Plenty of UK workers, like me, are experimenting with the emerging raft of tech tools and products, whether it’s AI-based image generators such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E-2, or the likes of Google’s chatbot Bard, Scribe, and ChatGPT. Research conducted by work management platform Asana’s Work Innovation Lab found that 29 percent of the UK’s workforce uses generative AI and AI on a weekly basis, compared to 46 percent of workers in the US. However, the decision to do so in a professional context is fraught, and there’s a growing fear among employees that using AI makes them less valuable and leaves them with fewer creative competencies. The same study finds that 30 percent of workers worry they will be seen as lazy for using AI, and 21 percent say they feel like a fraud for doing so.
This shame compels people to hide their use of AI. Some 34 percent are nervous to tell managers about the ways they incorporate the technology into their work, according to a study of 1,000 full-time and part-time workers in the UK by Advertising Week Europe. That goes up to 42 percent among Gen Zers and 40 percent among millennials—who, coincidentally, are most likely to want to use AI to help them with tasks. At a time when workplace surveillance is at a high and layoffs are spreading, the AI panic isn’t surprising.
“The speed at which AI has arrived and been taken up, combined with the breadth of what it can do, has only increased the fear,” says Neil Maiden, a professor of digital creativity at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London and director of CebAI, the National Centre for Creativity Enabled by AI. No one’s expecting rules to be written in stone, as it’s a moving beast for everyone, but company guidelines and the reframing of AI as a productivity aid could reassure employees enormously.
“Workers who use AI feel like outliers and fear judgement from peers and managers—there’s this niggling sense that they’re shortcutting the system or taking the easy way out,” explains Rebecca Hinds, who heads up the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and produced its State of AI at Work report, published at the end of August. Hinds believes that the fear and uncertainty is partly down to the atmosphere in British workplaces, which are increasingly characterized by looming layoffs, stagnant wages, and inflexible working policies, rather than explicit criticism. However for some it’s clear-cut. Apple, DeutscheBank, JP Morgan Chase, and Verizon have all blocked the use of ChatGPT among staff, citing concerns about security and the risk of data leaks.
The landscape is pretty murky—certain companies are prohibiting AI, others are loud in their support of it, and some are still keeping schtum—which only feeds staff guilt. Attitudes vary too, by industry and job function. Tech employers are the most supportive in getting their employees educated on AI, followed by finance sector leaders. However, people working in medicine, education, retail, and hospitality reported that their employers weren’t at all supportive of them using it, according to Advertising Week’s study. Asana’s research flags greater fear and hesitation depending on job function within a company, particularly among those in marketing roles, for example, versus folks in IT.
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There are more deep-set, fundamental forces at play here, says Maiden. “AI, which mimics expertise and effectively closes the gap between the expert and the novice, threatens our professional identity,” he explains. “If used for idea generation, it gets increasingly fraught, as ideas are a projection of people and their values—they create emotional and social capital.” Besides that, there’s the notion that by applying AI in your work, you’re speeding up the path to making yourself, a human worker, obsolete. The hope is that the more we know about AI, the more we can see for ourselves that it’s unlikely to wipe out swathes of the workforce.
Even with my very basic applications of the tools to write this piece, AI bought me back time for productive noodling and general structural pruning. It’s clear that if I knew the extent of what’s possible, and set aside time to learn about it, I could seriously boost my productivity (and, hoorah, cut out the dull freelance admin jobs). Wider proof and affirmation that AI will boost productivity, rather than steal jobs, is the most obvious business reason to spend time easing these fears. It could take a while to persuade business leaders of its possibilities—52 percent of UK executives believe that using generative AI will increase productivity—but the proof is there. A recent study by Nielsen Norman Group found that using generative AI tools in business improves employees’ productivity by an average of 66 percent, with more complex tasks and less skilled workers seeing the biggest gains.
As all the advantages and strategies for applying AI emerge, businesses must act proactively. “Similarly to hybrid working, leaders are adopting a wait-and-see mindset. Many are fearful of moving too quickly and developing the wrong type of guidance,” Hinds says. “But in reality, employees are craving more policy and guidance around AI.” Indeed, 48 percent want more policy at an organizational level; right now only 24 percent of companies provide guidance on how to use AI in their day-to-day work, and only 13 percent of workers have received training on it.
That might be a tall order when the tech is so box-fresh, but Hinds points out that businesses can treat it as a work-in-progress, using the space to share successes, missteps, and company learning. “Employees want to trust their employers, as there’s been a lack of trust these past few years,” she explains. “If leaders can show they’re being intentional about how they’re bringing this technology into the workplace, it will minimize some of the anxiety.” Language helps. Arti Zeighani, then chief data and analytics officer at H&M Group, spearheaded the company’s reframing of “artificial intelligence” to “amplified intelligence,” because it needed to be rooted in “amplifying existing knowledge and competence of colleagues,” not simply replacing their functions.
Tech consultancy firm Hedgehog Lab, which provides custom app development and digital transformation services to global clients, runs regular town hall sessions and discussions on how they could better leverage AI internally. It also uses its #ai Slack channel to discuss AI, its wider implications, and ways it can be leveraged by everyone in the business. “The most useful application for our teams has been Midjourney, as it allows people who don’t have design skills to express the ideas in their head on paper and make them a reality,” says James Hacking, founder of the social-first marketing agency Socially Powerful. “We’ve also expressed that ChatGPT is useful for summarizing content, but limited for creative writing, because by being honest about the positives and negatives, we can help our team have a rational view about generative AI as a tool.”
Experts believe that, soon enough, the application of AI in the workplace will seem obvious, to the point of mundanity. “We’re in the age of genuine cooperation with tech, where you become an expert in something because of the tools and skills,” says Maiden. “It’s been the case in certain domains for a long time—pilots no longer grab a joystick and fly a plane—they have expertise in a complex system, which makes flying the plane safe and effective.” The more AI is integrated into workplace systems, the less of a conscience workers will have in using it. “Rather than in a separate window, like ChatGPT, AI will be part of work—it will simply be the norm, not some alien or monster in our midst.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
