TL;DR
When bosses demand that workers use AI, they are not buying quality; they are reassuring themselves that they could do the job without knowing how.
The author keeps hearing one odd recurring scene in stories about the AI labour wars: bosses chasing their workers down to ask whether the job was done with AI.
Odd, because for most people AI is a synonym for sloppy. Nobody says with delight that their kid's maths teacher was replaced by AI. The author's teenage daughter and her friends say 'that's so AI' to mean 'that was low-effort junk'.
Bosses disagree. They really are badgering employees to use AI, and workers are complaining about managers obsessed with ChatGPT.
Who cares which tool you used
Set quality aside and there is a second oddity: if the work is finished, on time and correct, why does anyone care how it was made?
No client ever asked an illustrator whether those lines came from a drawing tablet, or whether an element began life as vector or raster. A bookkeeper being asked 'did you get a chatbot to help with the syntax of that Excel macro' is a genuinely absurd question. Care whether the accounts are right, not how the macro was typed.
Asking a writer 'did you use AI to outline this' is just as silly. It is like asking whether they cut text with a keyboard shortcut or by mousing over to the little scissors icon. The finished document is right there. Judge it on its merits.
This was tried a century ago
The playbook has precedent, and it is the origin of management consulting. The first consultants were the Taylorists, paid large sums to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing every step and producing a mandatory choreography of 'the best way'.
These men could not do the job themselves, and they never asked workers why an 'inefficient' movement was used. They wanted workers to move like precision machines, turning the factory floor into a stage where workers pantomimed 'efficiency' for bosses who also could not do the work.
Bosses said they were buying efficiency. What they were really buying was reassurance: that the workers they depended on were just a set of breakable, replaceable mechanical steps.
The toy steering wheel wired to the drive-train
Put an AI tool in a boss's hands and he no longer needs to draw, keep books or write technical documentation. He only has to prompt, and the thing appears. AI is sold as a machine that distils workers' skill and judgement and pours it into an obedient automaton.
Giving workers instructions exposes how little you know; they may roll their eyes, or mock you in the break room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that the steering wheel is not connected to anything.
So the demand makes perfect sense. Once you convince yourself your subordinates produce things by typing prompts, you convince yourself you could do their jobs. You are not relying on their skill; you are doing them a favour, paying them to do work you are too busy and too important to do but could do perfectly well.
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