Justin Pot

You can be forgiven if you have the impression that I hate AI. I do have profound concerns with the ways the technology is being rolled out, sure, but I’m still an enthusiast at heart and I love playing around with this stuff. 

This week I wrote about a free transcription application that took a half-hour episode of a radio show and gave me a text transcription in a couple minutes. Even more staggering: the entire thing happens on my device, with no need for an internet connection. Tools like this are going to make my life a lot easier. As a journalist, I can record a conversation, feed it to the app, and browse the resulting text to find the quotes I’ll end up using. This has the potential to make me better at what I do. Often, when I’m crunched for time, I’ll be typing notes during a conversation so that I don’t have to transcribe them later, which makes me a worse interviewer. A tool like this can help me be more present in whatever conversation I’m having, which could result in me doing better work.

I wish the companies that make AI were talking more about tools in this framework—”this tool can help you do what you do best”. That would be a hopeful vision of the future. Instead the emphasis seems to be overwhelmingly on workers using the technology to really excel at busywork: attending meetings, designing presentations, and otherwise talking about doing work instead of actually doing work. This would be great if the ads suggested you’d have more time to do real work, but instead they seem to suggest you’ll have more time for more busywork. There’s no better example than this Microsoft ad that has been making the rounds: 

Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings. 

Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job. 

Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings. 

But what’s even funnier is that the ad doesn’t even deliver on its dystopian promise. If you do “swipe right” there is no clear demonstration of how you can “attend three meetings at once”—just screenshots of the meeting summary tools. 

I do not know whether AI is going to transform the world for the better. I do know that, if it does, it won’t be by enabling middle mangers to add more meetings to the calendar of people who actually do things. Our work cultures aren’t weighed down with bullshit because the right technology to fix that hasn’t come around yet. They’re waded down with bullshit for cultural reasons. Tech can’t fix cultural problems—you need a cultural solution. 

So I don’t hate AI, not really. I just think a lot of the current imagined use cases are moronic, and reveal a real failure of imagination among the people who work at tech companies. This ad demonstrates that clearly, which is why I love it.