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Keen bosses, strange mistakes and a looming threat: workers on training AI to do their jobs
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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Technology
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"We are not replacing anyones job, this is just saving time" is something we keep hearing at work, if its saving time that means fewer people are required. I am sure it won't replace 100% of any 1 persons entire workload any time soon, but if it replaced 20% of 10 peoples workload, HR will make 4 of those people redundant and spread their tasks among the 6 remaining now increasingly overworked employees.
The story is ultimately the same as it ever was: Businesses are looking for ways to make employees work harder while paying them less. But now an editor can be told to fix an AI-mangled manuscript and paid less... Because the business class has fallen under a collective delusion that the AI is actually good at its job.
Going to have to challenge the math here ... 20% of 10 is two, not four. Granted, HR may cull four anyway, but in terms of what LLMs can currently do, HR is a perfect thing to replace. Literally all they do is follow rules to benefit the company. Sounds a bit like coding to me ...
My point was that HR will replace some of the workload, and remove more of the workers. Then those remaining get lumped with an even greater workload than they had before.
Tale as old as time.
Let's say AI increases productivity by 10%. So you'd reduce staff by one person out of every ten. But how many teams actually have ten people on them? My biggest development teams might've had 10 between PM, devs, and QA. But again cut one of your five devs and you reduce capacity, not increase it.
I've never worked anywhere that a 10% increase in productivity could justify cutting a person. I'm sure those places are out there, but it seems uncommon.
It might let them cut staff off they can overwork their people that much more, but a lot of people are stretched to capacity even now.
There's slack time in people's daily work hours. You work an 8 hour day, possibly you're only actually productive for 4 to 6 hours.
Take that into account and suddenly that thing that claims it can cut an hour or two here and there gets a lot more interesting.