Does Using AI Make Me Lazy?

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.