Bots Now Screening Your Emails Like You're a Spam Filter

AI changed the workplace. Changed it into what, nobody seems to know. But it definitely changed it.

Companies installed chatbots to answer employee questions. The bots don't answer questions. They generate walls of text that sound like answers if you've suffered recent head trauma. Employees now spend more time asking the bot to clarify its own response than they would've spent just walking to Karen's desk.

The gatekeeping bots are worse. Some genius decided AI should screen which emails deserve human attention. So now your urgent client message sits in digital purgatory while a language model decides whether "need this by EOD" constitutes actual urgency. The bot flags it as low priority. The client leaves. The bot suggests you improve your communication skills.

Then there's the slop. Mountains of it. AI-generated reports nobody reads. AI-written emails nobody believes a human wrote. AI-created presentations that look like a committee of algorithms had a stroke. Everyone knows it's slop. Everyone keeps generating more slop. The slop must flow.

Middle managers love this. They can now produce five times the output with one-fifth the clarity. Meetings got longer because someone needs to explain what the AI meant. Productivity is up, according to the AI analyzing productivity.

The awkward encounters are the best part. You're in a Teams call. Someone's clearly reading from ChatGPT. They're not even trying to hide it. They're scrolling while they talk. You watch their eyes move left to right, top to bottom, like they're taking a vision test. Nobody says anything. This is work now.

Some consultant made eight figures selling companies on this future. That consultant used AI to write the proposal. The executives used AI to read it. Nobody involved understood what anyone agreed to. Perfect efficiency.

Your job didn't get easier. It got weirder. You're not collaborating with humans anymore. You're collaborating with humans who are collaborating with bots who were trained on the work output of humans who were probably also using bots. It's turtles all the way down, except the turtles can't write coherent sentences and keep calling you by the wrong name.

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash