Gatekeeping bots, piles of slop: Welcome to the age of AI weirdness at work

Somewhere in Chicago, one 40-year-old project director spent her summer wondering if she's been working with a human or a bot. She was recently put on a project with an artificial intelligence expert who started using AI agents to manage his inbox. But in the course of their partnership, the bots began filtering out important emails and texts, leading to delays delivering on promises to their client and no other way to reach him, the project director tells CNBC Make It. Now, despite previously being in touch over phone and video calls, she says her team can't reach the AI expert to honor their contract and pay him for the finished work. "I actually looked up their local speaking engagements to see if I could just go maybe meet them," the project director says. At this point, she's second-guessing whether he's even a real human. "I will take a messy human over a robot any day," she says. "How do I get through to a machine?" Welcome to the age of AI weirdness at work. AI is reshaping jobs, businesses and, if tech bosses' predictions come true, the future of the entire workforce. Talks of an uncertain AI-powered future aside, the developing tech is also creating a mess of how humans interact in the workplace right now. People are passing off workslop to their colleagues, accusing each other of lazy AI use, picking fights over who's smarter than AI and punting questions from their direct reports. For this article, CNBC Make It reached out to over a dozen employees and business leaders to take a closer look at the frustration brewing among workers, some of whom declined to be identified for fear of professional repercussions. The picture that unfolds is messy, awkward and, in the case of the missing AI expert, downright strange. AI is making coworkers suspicious of everyone else Since generative AI burst onto the scene in 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT, people have generally been left to their own devices to experiment with AI. Today, roughly half of workers say they use AI anywhere from once a week up to multiple times per day, according to the CNBC and SurveyMonkey Quarterly AI and Jobs Survey published Thursday. However a majority, 84%, of people say they're self-taught with no formal training in AI, and 55% say their workplace doesn't have an official AI policy, per the survey of 1,686 workers. Is that what you believe, or is that what Claude told you?Copywriter in Chicago Workers are getting mixed messages from every direction of their orgs about how, when and why to AI: Their boss may encourage them to use it to work faster, better and smarter, while peers side-eye them for taking a shortcut or question whether they're actually doing the work. That was Joanna Briggs' concern when a colleague complimented an email the 30-year-old HR worker in London had sent, then immediately followed up by asking whether she'd used ChatGPT on it. Briggs, who says she researched and crafted the message without the help of AI, took it as a backhanded compliment. "It kind of just puts your back up a bit, and you think, 'No, I really worked on this,' and you want the credit. You want your skill to be recognized," she says, adding that her snap response came from feeling like her hard-earned skills were reduced to being able to prompt an AI tool reasonably well. Assumptions like the one that made Briggs bristle can carry big penalties: People were perceived as lazier and less likely to be put up for big projects if they said they used AI in their work, according to one Atlassian experiment involving 1,000 U.S. workers. One 26-year-old copywriter in Chicago laments that her job has been reduced to editing her coworkers' AI writing and challenging what they copy from a chatbot. She once felt comfortable sharing critiques of their work, like if the writing wasn't clear. "Now that people have access to something that they see as this like all-knowing CEO of writing, they feel more emboldened to push back" on her revisions. "Don't get me wrong, I am not an expert [or] the primary authority on all things correct writing," she says. In the past, she would have heard her colleagues out on their opinions. Now she questions: "Is that what you believe, or is that what Claude told you?" Workslop is fueling resentment Then there are the workers fuming at colleagues for making their jobs harder with piles of slop. Some 40% of U.S. desk workers said they received workslop, or AI-generated content that looked good but lacked substance, leading to additional hours of work to fix errors and a potential multi-million dollar business productivity hit, according to research from BetterUp and the Stanford Social Media Lab conducted in September 2025. It's hard to tell whether or not they think it's actually good and satisfactory, or if they're like, 'I know it's not good, but I'm going to send it over anyways.'Marketer in the Midwest Kim Bode, founder and CEO of a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based communications company called 8thirtyfour, says she lost $10,000 when she hired a contractor to work on a campaign. She says she had to "rewrite every single piece of content" because what she received appeared to be "clearly generated by AI." "The quality of work has significantly decreased" due to AI, and it's "very much straining relationships," says Bode, 47. Other than being an annoying time-suck, workslop is leading people to question their coworkers' competence or consideration. "It's hard to tell whether or not they think it's actually good and satisfactory, or if they're like, 'I know it's not good, but I'm going to send it over anyways,'" says one 20-something marketer from the Midwest. "I'll get really upset, and I'm like, 'Are they doing it on purpose or not? Do they actually think this is fine?' Both are problematic in their own ways." The behavior makes her slower to respond to some requests, she says. "I just know it's going to be more work, and I'm like, I just don't even have the mental space to deal with this right now." Job insecurity is making things extra tense AI's rise at work is putting many workers on edge: Roughly 1 in 5 workers say it makes them feel like their job is less secure, and some 1 in 3 are more pessimistic about the current job market because of it, according to the CNBC survey. Worker anxiety has been simmering for months in the current low-hire, low-fire job market, where people are either clinging to their jobs, searching for months on end without success or dropping out of the workforce entirely while AI looms as an ever-growing threat for layoffs. Meanwhile, businesses are directing workers to move faster and see AI as the solution to do so, oftentimes leaving individuals with the task of figuring out how AI will save them time and money, says Leena Rinne, vice president of product portfolio at Skillsoft, a Nashua, New Hampshire-based skills management company. That can put workers in a stressful situation: "Everyone needs to do everything now — more with less," she says. So far the results have been mixed: A May report from the tech research firm Gartner found businesses that laid off workers in favor of AI spending did not see a return on investment. And an often-cited 2025 report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers found that 95% of organizations saw zero return on their $30 billion to $40 billion investment into generative AI. The pressure to perform, from boards of directors to executives to managers and their teams, could lead to people leveraging "AI just for the sake of using AI," says Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, a London-based AI video platform. Earlier this year, Riparbelli says he had to call out his own staff for using AI to create overcomplicated written documents that amounted to little but fluff. AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT can prop users up as "the world's most articulate person," Riparbelli says, but upon closer inspection, "sometimes it's just a lot of filler" that others then have to decipher. 'Social offloading' is crushing coworker connections Some workers are using AI as a "middleman" to interact with their human colleagues. The disconnect between intent and impact could be sowing discord. Roughly 1 in 4 workers who use AI have redirected a colleague to ask AI before coming to them, according to the CNBC survey; the top reasons they cited for punting were to encourage their colleague to be more self-sufficient as well as to save time and avoid interruptions. There's a psychological cost if everything is mediated through AI.Leena RinneVP at Skillsoft These redirects, however well-intended, may miss the point. "It feels really lazy and sloppy to people" and "borderline insulting," says Alison Green, the former chief of staff turned management consultant and creator of the Ask a Manager advice column. "It's almost like sending Google results to someone. You're perfectly capable of feeding it into AI yourself if you want to. The reason you're asking them is because you're looking for their particular expertise." Resorting to AI to save time at the expense of human interaction can hamper creativity and innovation, says Jennifer Birdsall, chief clinical officer at ComPsych, an employee assistance programs provider. "Human connection — it's not the opposite of productivity," she says. Social offloading from bosses, who are both more enthusiastic about and more likely to use AI at work compared with individual contributors, can crush teams. When leaders use AI as a substitute for developmental conversations, like for mentorship or career advice, workers' desire to quit increases by 29%, burnout rises by 26%, and team coordination drops by 12%, according to research conducted by BetterUp Labs, Stanford Social Media Lab and Saïd Business School at Oxford University that was released in April. "There's a psychological cost if everything is mediated through AI," says Rinne of Skillsoft. People are stumbling through the growing pains of a new technology Figuring out how to use new tech leaves plenty of room for potential gaffes. When employees of a Washington, D.C.-based architecture firm began using Microsoft's Copilot, they found an AI-assisted notetaker was added to every meeting created, and meeting transcripts were sent out to everyone on the invite list. Sometimes general team meetings moved into "more sensitive information that was not planned" or critiques of work "where context is missing" from transcripts, says Aura Telman, 38, the company's chief people officer, leading to several HR-related fire drills. Telman says she now has a rule that notetakers can't be added to meetings unless agreed on by all participants beforehand, and she encourages staff to write their own notes. "We want people to be innovative, and we want people to use AI for different things," she says, while also "keeping human interactions human." So far, people can't agree whether AI is making their jobs better or worse. About half of employees in workplaces that adopted AI say the culture has changed in the last year, and they're pretty evenly split among those saying it has worsened to some degree (25%) or improved (24%), according to a February Gallup survey of 23,717 people. Chalk up the split feelings to the growing pains of using a new technology, says Green of Ask A Manager. AI may not be introducing brand new problems into workplace interactions, Green says, but it's putting a new spin on issues that always existed, from jerk bosses to sloppy coworkers and poor judgment all around. It's a lot to wade through when "work is already so complicated," she says. There are "so many different power dynamics to juggle" and "so many different ways that you have to figure out to how to be diplomatic." It was complicated before AI, and "now we're throwing this additional thing in the mix that people have to grapple with."