Appearing Productive in the Workplace

Appearing Productive in The Workplace Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available.

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In the era of AI, workers now have a tool that expands to fill whatever a large language model can be persuaded to generate, which is to say, without limit.

What I have watched happen in my profession in the last two years, I am still struggling to describe.

The first time I knew something was wrong, roughly a year and a quarter ago, I noticed a colleague replying to me using AI.

His response was obviously generated by Claude.

The punctuation gave it away — em dashes where no one types em dashes, the rhythmic structure, the confident grasp of technologies I knew for a fact he did not understand.

I sat with it for a while, weighing whether to debate someone who was visibly copy-pasting verbatim from a model.

The channel was public, and I spent more time than I should have correcting fundamentals.

Eventually I stopped.

He was not, in any meaningful sense, on the other side of the conversation.

Generative AI can produce work that looks expert without being expert, and the failure arrives in two shapes.

The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce, faster or more advanced than their judgment.

The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in.

The two failures look similar from a distance and are not the same.

Research has mostly measured the first.

The second is what it is missing, and in my experience it is the more riskier of the two.