This is one outlet's own report from CNBC — the article as it was filed.
AIPROPX ReportCNBC · 39m ago
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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."
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, lo...
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