Coworkers using AI for everything
Colleagues are submitting misaligned resources, ugly designs, and nonsensical proposals with essentially zero professional input. This forces peers to redo the materials themselves, completely defeating the purpose of shared planning and collaborative work. The dependence is now so extreme that some managers use AI to fact-check their own staff, leaving employees feeling governed by a human proxy where the machine's words carry more weight.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- This comes up 24.3× more often in r/sysadmin than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Redoing the work from scratch to ensure it makes sense and aligns with requirements.
- 2Rejecting generative tools entirely and creating materials manually as part of an internalization process.
- 3Only using automation for formatting or menial tasks like mandatory lesson plan templates, while writing the core content manually.
- 4Pushing back and demanding the team perform a proper, manual workflow.
- 5Ignoring the machine-generated directives and continuing to do the work properly on your own.
- 6Looking for a new job.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“My IT department got a new leader early this year and since day 1 they have been very transparent about their AI usage. Except it looks like they are highly dependent on it because they are using it for almost everything they do i.e. setting KPIs, writing developer guidelines, troubleshooting, etc.”source ↗
“There have been instances where they would fact-check the team with AI to see if we were “correct” about our statements (luckily or unluckily(?), we always are).”source ↗
“It feels like we are now being governed by AI through a human proxy and that the words of the AI weigh more heavily than ours.”source ↗
“seems to be... my boss can't seem to even tie his shoes without the help of AI at this point. Everything that comes from him is AI generated and he constantly tells us to use AI for everything...”source ↗
“I had a brand new senior VP more or less demand I fully enable (rather than requiring allow) to a claude connector because he couldn't create a business plan that was overdue unless I did so.”source ↗
“People can't do the job I KNOW they were doing and even doing it pretty well just a year or two ago. OAI/Anthropic shits itself? Work stops. It's scary as hell.”source ↗
“The project team came to me with a completely ai generated RFP that had shortlisted the top 5 proposals based on our requirements and costs. Within 5 minutes of scrutiny I was able to realise a significant chunk of it was nonsense.”source ↗
“One of my coworkers that I share plan with makes ALL of her resources with AI. And they NEVER make sense! I hate it so much. I always end up having to redo it which defeats the whole point of shareplanning.”source ↗
“I have colleagues who rely on AI way too much, to the point where entire workbooks are created with essentially zero professional input.”source ↗
“The ai flyers and posters and shirts are so damn ugly. I won’t complain because teachers are already so overworked but the ugliness is so demoralizing.”source ↗
“For example a colleague created a “resource” for unit prep with a particular curriculum and I trusted her expertise. However me and another colleague realized she just ran a prompt through AI because the “resource” didn’t align with the curriculum design at all.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 6Why is everyone at work so boring and uninspired?
- 3Why are employees sending unedited AI-generated complaints?
- 4How to deal with petty nitpicking feedback at work
- 2Manager changing my timesheet to add unpaid lunch breaks
- 5Coworker taking credit for my work
- 3Unexpected performance review meeting request tomorrow morning