Blame It On The Bot - The Get Out of Jail Free For Personal Ineptitude
AI has become the latest excuse machine for human incompetence. Unlike blaming junior staff, blaming a bag of algorithms feels harmless and even relatable. For now, “the bot did it” is a surprisingly effective get out of jail free card.
Bad workers have always blamed their tools. The bucket’s too small, the knife’s too blunt, the oven’s too hot. Much as the excuses might be true, we’re unlikely to pay for a cremated pizza or a new door that doesn’t shut. The doctrine “You chose the tool, you own the outcome” is well accepted.
But if the tool is ancillary to the main deliverable, and particularly if we’ve personally experienced similar pain with the tool, ‘own the outcome’ is much fluffier. “The satnav was wrong” or “my mobile battery died” can get you a long way papering over late arrival or completely forgetting a meeting. Exhortations like “If you’re charging premium rates then invest in premium tech and learn how to use it” are more likely to get me labelled as unreasonable rather than changing behaviour.
Technology is so pervasive and so hard to use that it affords an almost limitless supply of excuses, and you don’t even have to be that inventive to get away with quite a lot quite often.
Although most of us are quite sympathetic to a fellow human let down by technology, it looks mean spirited or disloyal to blame a junior colleague for a mishap, a failed delivery or a badly worded email. A business owner’s job is to train juniors well, provide clear procedures and adequately review what they produce.
Managers who throw their juniors under the bus are rarely respected and even more rarely loved. Loyalty is a two way street, and disrespected employees will ultimately walk away.
But two things happen when your juniors are bags of algorithms not flesh and blood.
- A patient and unemotional bag of algorithms won’t walk however many times you blame it for your shoddy output , even if the algorithms were not actually the culprit
- Like satnavs and mobile phones, your AI personal assistant is just technology. Consequently I find myself empathising with a fellow human let down by this new technology rather than condemning them for inadequately training the assistant, providing it with inadequate procedures or failing to properly review its output.
So right now AI is the new personal Get Out of Jail Free card. Of course if you use AI to write your exam essay or to create the company’s annual report you will be rightly held to account for the output of the tool. But if you’re writing a summary email that contains a factual error, blaming it on an accidental AI edit may elicit more sympathy than castigation.
Hopefully this is just a phase. When everyone uses AI all the time to produce or edit their output, blaming the AI will just be labelled as yet another bad worker blaming their tools.