AI is enabling low talent men to succeed in the workplace in a way they couldn’t have done on their own.

[lacklustre]

Last week I was in a senior leaders meeting, a man who is knew to the company gave a presentation and hadn’t even bothered to disguise the telltale AI giveaways - the capitalised headings, the emdashes, the lot. The other men in the room praised him enthusiastically for his excellent work and he happily accepted their praise.

I work in a male dominated industry and I’m seeing this more and more and while I love AI and use it as a tool, I’m seeing so much stuff sent to me by male colleagues that’s clearly not their own work. I have a boss who’s decided he no longer needs the services of a consultant because he can be his own consultant with AI. He also runs most of my work through AI and then sends me ‘his’ improved version. Another male colleague even uses AI to write his WhatsApp messages. And they all constantly congratulate each other on their incredible work.

Is this a thing now? Of course I imagine lots of women use it in this way too. But in my large company, this is increasingly common and it’s like robots praising robots. Find it all quite disturbing especially when I know that two years ago, some of them were on work performance plans almost at the point of being managed out of the company.

Does it even matter? If I can’t beat them, should I just join them and start doing it myself?

God how annoying. I have no advice but I would despair at that too.

This is nothing new, I have been used to help several men promote themselves by being a subservient employee and helping them with reports and presentations. AI is just cutting out the middleman or should I say middlewoman.

I’m cringing at the typo in my OP - ‘new’ not ‘knew’. Well at least it shows AI didn’t write it!

The meeting last week was particularly awful. This man in particular is quite insecure, very keen to be ‘cool’ etc and I’ve sat next to him in meetings while he’s literally on copilot drafting questions he’s going to ask the boss. He then asks his questions and boss says, ‘excellent question!’ And he smiles as though he really believed he came up with it himself.

We have a pretty decent AI policy but apparently when it comes to internal work and reports, we don’t need to declare if we used AI or not.

I thought your post was going to be about how AI has been shown to be sexist. It has been shown that it will draft different responses to issues like promotions and salary increases or disputes differently depending on if it is requested by a man or a woman. The responses to women tend to be more submissive and suggest compromising.

I wonder if this does mean women are less likely to use it as a tool.

What about low talent women? How do they fit in? Especially the ones that don't have the intelligence to enter the work place at all?

I think you just mean people

I see men and women doing this a lot now

I think, from my own observations, that a gender divide is opening up around use of AI. A lot of the early adopters seem to be men, women appear more sceptical to me, and some don't use it out of principle. I do worry this is leaving women behind in my area, but I don't feel like using AI myself, the thought of typing in crappy questions into ChatGPT, then reading them out, then some other robot answering, it all seems pointless.

I don't know what the stats say about any gender differences in use, this is just what I've seen in my field.

Very stupid people will struggle to use AI. You have to have basic literacy and some idea of what you need to achieve to prompt AI.

I’m sure both do but in my workplace it seems to be predominantly men. If the women are doing it then they’re better at covering their tracks. The men I work with either don’t know it’s obvious or they don’t care.

But yes obviously, men and women absolutely will do it. Perhaps it’s just more pronounced in my workplace as it’s a typically male industry.

In AI and IT conferences, mainly attended by men, they are deluged by low quality AI submissions, it's bringing the system to a halt. I don't see that in the fields dominated by women. I'm sure that men are both improving their work/gaining an edge using AI as well as inflicting more AI slop on us all.

I’m not sure this is true

It can make a guess from how you have phrased your query, but if you give it neutral words, then it won’t know. I suppose an in-depth query about promotions might give away enough for it to tell.

so for example, if I said to it “I need help building a case to increase my daily rate” I’m pretty sure that’s neutral enough that it wouldn’t know if I was a man or a woman.

Surely they are just using the tools available to do the job. It seems pretty daft not to.

My lovely but confused-by-the-details colleague is a huge evangelist for AI.

Today he proudly told me I could drop a tracker I've been building but falling behind on updating because he'd givem AI a prompt and it had built it for him in a few minutes.

Great! I said. How is it tracking the status of all the things? In theory it could probably find the info in a combination of Teams chats and meeting transcripts but it's very messy data, we'd need to review it a lot at first to be sure.

I don't know he said.

Ok look, it's given us a source list. Let's see.

First item on the list? My half maintained manual tracker 🙄

He's not wrong that AI should be able to track, update and visualise progress, but I'm already working towards that, starting with a set of reliable sources the AI can use.

But they are not doing the job, at all. AI delivers a summary of what is available online. I am taking a degree and my lecturer asked who was using AI. I said not, as i wasn't using AI, but then got curious. So asked a couple of questions. I was provided with misleading answers, which I knew enough to challenge and did; AI response varied their answer to acknowledge the errors. It would not have done that had I not challenged. AI is not accurate and there is no verification process.

@socialdilemmawhattodo ”AI is not accurate and there is no verification process”

but it’s still really helpful

You have to check everything that you find if you’re going to use it in a work presentation, for example, (or if you’re just going to use it for anything important really). But if you know how to ask the right questions, it can be incredibly helpful.

The GIGO problem is definitely there, but if you know it’s there, you can screen for it. I find if you tell it “you’re talking shit” it will go back and find you the correct information.

@bimblebomblebamble I presume you mean it had your tracker because that’s part of the information your colleague had fed in?

So what happens if you run that query without putting in your tracker?

He didn't feed any specific information in. He just told it what he wanted to see and to work it out for itself from Sharepoint, Teams etc So, it found my tracker which appeared to have all the info it needed and happily fulfilled its task. Which unfortunately would not make it a particularly effective replacement for said tracker 😂

I'll leave him to try and get it to work without that source. Main problem is he doesn't actuallly know if the output is right or not...

One of the many reasons I left teaching was because of the way it’s killing creativity. People who were bad at teaching would get AI to make their lessons and resources for them and the result was dull, inaccurate teaching that had all the spark and wonder taken out. Those people were always praised for embracing new technology whereas those of us who were old-school and could write a lesson plan on the back of an envelope and focus on learning and adapting to the class were criticised. It was soul-destroying.

and the result was dull, inaccurate teaching that had all the spark and wonder taken out. It was soul-destroying. @VashtaNerada

This is exactly it! I genuinely think AI is great. It’s made me considerably more efficient and automated some of my tasks. The difference between myself and my mostly male colleagues is that I use it to refine work I’ve already created. They use it as their starting point before they’ve engaged their brains and yes, there’s this telltale pattern of wonderless writing and flat ideas - no joy, no spark, no humanity. On paper, it looks good but you can just tell, it’s emotionless drivel.

I’m all for using it but using it responsibly. If I suggest otherwise I’m treated like I’m some dinosaur.

DP uses it in teaching because it saves so much time, with consistent detailed prompts it actually adds something good to lessons that would otherwise take hours of prep. That’s a real work/life balance game changer for the teachers who spend a lot of time on developing their own resources.

Bane of my life, mediocre men arguing with me like the meat proxies they are through AI.

meat proxies 😂😂😂

Adding that to my vocabulary immediately

I agree with pp that im beginning to see a trend of people who outsourced the thought process to AI and people who did the thought process and asked AI to show its weaknesses or omissions to help refine it. Even asking ai to summarise your work helps because if ai misses your point the chances are your colleague will to, so you can reword (not least because they might only read AI summaries)

My ceo literally asks copilot to create stuff from scratch and at this stage of copilot, which is all we are allowed to use, the things look superficially good till you try to use them and realise some is meaningless.

An Interesting and Thought-Provoking Perspective on AI, Gender and Workplace Competence! 🚀
Thank you for sharing your observations! You’ve raised some fascinating questions about the intersection of artificial intelligence, professional capability and gender dynamics in the modern workplace.
However, I think there are three important considerations worth unpacking:
✅ AI is gender-neutral: The ability to leverage AI to enhance professional output is not an inherently male or female characteristic. Both men and women can benefit from these transformative technologies!
✅ AI-assisted productivity is not necessarily incompetence: There is a crucial distinction between lacking the ability to perform a task independently and possessing the skills to harness AI effectively. Indeed, knowing how to use the right tools may itself be an increasingly valuable professional competency.
✅ Anecdotes are not evidence of gender differences: While your personal experiences are undoubtedly valid, observing this behaviour among male colleagues in a male-dominated industry does not establish that it is a predominantly male phenomenon.
Here’s the bigger question: If AI enables individuals to produce work that exceeds their unaided cognitive capabilities, are we witnessing the democratisation of professional excellence or a fundamental redefinition of meritocracy?
And, perhaps most intriguingly, if you use AI yourself, why interpret similar behaviour by male colleagues as evidence of their inadequacy?
Ultimately, this isn’t a conversation about men versus women. It’s a conversation about human intelligence, technological augmentation and the future of professional competence.
Food for thought! 💡
#AI #FutureOfWork #GenderEquality #Meritocracy #DigitalTransformation #ThoughtLeadership

All of the above is what I think about this issue