The telltale signs you’re working for a ‘ChatGPT Boss’
Warning signs are easy to spot. Long emails with bullet points, overly formal language, wordy answers to simple questions, or extensive reports and attachments.
A few years ago any of these might have been signs of a hard-working boss or a deep thinker, but today they all point in a different direction. Any of these are signs that you have an AI-addicted manager or ‘ChatGPT Boss’.
Work is inherently a human-centered process. An important aspect is interacting with other people to achieve a result, and when you start outsourcing more of your work to technology, it has some unintended consequences.
Take performance reviews, one of the most common rituals in every workplace. The process usually involves a manager reviewing the direct report’s recent work and evaluating it against established criteria. Did they perform well? What are the areas where they can improve?
There is now a growing trend for some managers to delegate the deep thinking and complex decision-making required for this to AI, asking it to draft reports and communications based on the data fed into it.
There are Reddit threads full of examples of employees complaining that their bosses cut and pasted performance reviews directly from the AI and gave them generic, inaccurate, or contradictory feedback.
‘ChatGPT Bosses’ may think the emails they send make them look good, but the people who receive them have a different view.
Some even include cases where a ‘ChatGPT Boss’ forgets to delete AI prompts at the end of their response asking: “Would you like me to make this feedback more professional, more direct, or adjust the tone?”
As most employees will know, these are important moments when two people can sit down and offer honest assessments, genuine appreciation, and discuss areas for improvement. If your boss delegates this thinking to artificial intelligence, we have a big problem.
A study of 1,100 professionals published last year by the University of Florida found that managers who use moderate to high levels of AI assistance to help write their communications are putting their own credibility at risk.
‘ChatGPT Bosses’ may think the emails they send at a suspiciously efficient pace make them look good, but the people who receive them have a different view. Published in research International Journal of Business Communication, It identified a ‘perception gap’ where content thought to be heavily AI-authored causes the recipient to question the honesty, interest and competence of the person sending it.
Of course, there’s a big difference between using AI lightly for low-level assistance, like correcting spelling or crafting an occasional sentence, and asking AI to write entire sensitive communications and reports from scratch.
The researchers found that when communications were predominantly written by AI, only half of employees viewed the writer as friendly, while only two-thirds thought the writer was professional.
In other words, using too much AI to communicate is a shortcut for people to question the leadership abilities you’ve worked to develop throughout your career.
Findings like these should be an alarm bell for any employee who has been persuaded by the siren call of AI to outsource everything. There may be extraordinary uses like data analysis or behind-the-scenes calculations that save hours of time every day, but we need guardrails in human communication.
If you find yourself working for a ‘ChatGPT Boss’ you should politely request clearer or shorter communication and explain your reasons for this. Tell them enough times that you expect a genuine, personal response rather than long-winded answers; so they should start getting the message.
And if any of this sounds too familiar for the way you work, consider this a gentle wake-up call. The real power of AI is in what you do and don’t use it for. Our workplaces are complex enough as it is, so turn off the AI prompt, step away from the computer, and strike up a simple conversation with the person in front of you. You never know where it will lead.
Tim Duggan is the author of: Worc Backward: The revolutionary way to work smarter and live better. He writes a regular newsletter timduggan.substack.com.
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Tim Duggan is the author of Working Backward, Cult State, and Killer Thought. He is one of the founders of Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET.
