It says much about our current moment that “slop” is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year. Seems mediocrity is having a moment. In this moment, a delusion has taken hold, centered on AI and the future of work: the AI creativity delusion. For the past couple of years, companies and influencers have told us the world is our slop oyster. If we can imagine it, we can slop it. Ideas and creativity are what matter, and everything else should be automated. We are told that, despite the goal of replacing humans in the workplace, the near-term future of work is humans, still in the loop, doing what they do best, flexing their creativity and letting AI do the rest. Although conceptually sound, this vision falls apart under even the slightest analysis, and it will hit younger generations the hardest.
The AI Creativity Delusion and the Expertise Loophole
Let me address the AI creativity delusion fueling the push for AI-powered coworkers. The premise goes that humans at work will flex their creativity by delegating their AIs to handle other tasks. This way, the human does what they are good at (creativity and ideas), and the AI does what it’s good at (everything else). Many may nod in agreement. However, this premise falls apart under scrutiny. We’ll get to this in a moment, but first, a loophole.
I should note a loophole in AI tool productivity: the expertise loophole. This loophole applies only under specific circumstances, namely when the user already has domain expertise. A user with domain expertise and an understanding of how AI tools fail can provide corrections or put the tool back on track. You need to understand the task, what the correct outputs are, and have enough experience to know when you aren’t getting the right answers.
Expertise also informs when to use AI tools and when not to, because an expert understands what needs to be done and which tasks AI can assist with in delivering the best results. I believe it’s this expertise loophole that blinds people to the real issues we are about to face.
Given the conditions of the expertise loophole, any productivity gains are temporary and apply only to specific job tasks for a limited time. As experienced people leave, less experienced AI-powered coworkers cannot fill the gaps. Mainly because they never have an opportunity to gain experience, the very experience they need to develop creativity in the domain. Secondarily, they outsource the social aspects of their jobs, further isolating themselves from their co-workers. It’s a one-two punch that’s hard to recover from.
A significant flaw in the creativity argument is the misconception that ideas are unique, precious resources that must be protected and fostered. I’ve written about this before, explaining that ideas are common, run-of-the-mill daily occurrences for everyone on the planet. Most ideas are ill-thought-out, half-baked, or just plain stupid. This is our reality.
The Younger Generation as AI-Powered Coworkers
I read an article recently, where a Gen Z founder claims that the younger generation will have an advantage in the workplace because they are growing up fluent in AI and this is helping them stand apart from their older peers. This is the sort of unadulterated, bubble-living bullshit we’ve come to expect these days. Younger generations may be growing up in the flatulence of AI, but that’s something else entirely.
Prolific AI use will ultimately make the younger generation worse off, as they are not set up for success in key areas that align with their value as employees.
I’ll make a claim of my own, and it’s the exact opposite. Prolific AI use will ultimately make the younger generation worse off, as they are not set up for success in key areas that align with their value as employees. This would be true even in a reality where generative AI is near-perfect, and we all know we are far from that.
I’m not attempting to beat up on younger generations. I feel for them, and I want to help. There have been so many ways they haven’t been positioned for success, and now generative AI comes along, putting more nails in the coffin.
These companies want to make you less capable and more dependent.
These companies want to make you less capable and more dependent. If you are dependent, you’ll not only need to use their tools to do your job but also in your day-to-day life. This is not a great option.
Marshall McLuhan said that every augmentation is an amputation. Framing technology in this way opens the door to unforeseen circumstances. In the case of younger generations, the amputation happens before the limb even has a chance to develop. In our case, rather than a physical limb, we are referring to cognitive and social abilities.
When we peer beneath the paint, we find that the very skills needed to make someone valuable at work are precisely those not being developed by overly ambitious AI-powered coworkers. The ones not communicating with their coworkers because their bots attend their meetings and respond to email and text communication.
Revisiting Creativity In Younger Generations
How does someone develop their creativity in the first place without experience? They don’t. Generative AI today can assist people with experience in specific tasks and under certain conditions. It helps with some tasks better than others. This is because someone with experience, especially domain experience, knows how to approach certain solutions, identify the right conditions, and know when the system is malfunctioning. An experienced professional can flex their creativity in this environment. The same cannot be said of the effectiveness of younger generations in the same jobs, despite having access to the same tools. Effectiveness will decline sharply across multiple dimensions.
First, they’ll never develop the social and communication skills necessary to be effective members of an organization. Second, they’ll not gain the experience needed in a given domain. Finally, they’ll never develop the mythical creativity discussed in AI circles due to a lack of expertise and social skills. All of this will be due to the overreliance on generative AI tools.
Let us examine some aspects of AI-powered coworkers. AI-powered coworkers using generative AI tools to attend meetings, take notes, and create action items. They use generative AI tools to communicate with co-workers. Using generative AI tools summarize documentation, books, and countless other sources of knowledge. Using pre-made generative AI tools to perform the job tasks. And the list goes on. This may look productive, but it’s not effective, and that’s a critical difference. There is a subtle deception at work here because AI tools can make people feel more productive and even powerful, even when they are not.
You can’t summarize your way to expertise, you can’t build relationships by outsourcing communication, and you can’t get experience by not doing things. Does this sound like a successful future workforce? Yet this is exactly the vision on offer, and this fuels the AI creativity delusion.
We have a distorted view of creativity, perceiving it as exercised by lone geniuses, but the reality is that most of the creativity needed for success in a business context is exercised in groups through relationships and collaboration. The same relationships and collaboration that aren’t developing in the AI-powered coworker scenario. When people start treating their coworkers like apps, nothing good happens.
The reality is that most of the creativity needed for success in a business context is exercised in groups through relationships and collaboration.
This should all make sense. When has anyone ever admired someone’s creativity when they didn’t actually know anything? It even seems silly to say out loud. To break the rules, you must know where the rules are and what hard constraints exist, and that requires awareness and expertise.
Knowing a tool doesn’t make you an expert; it makes you a tool. But let’s dig a bit deeper with a specific example.
We are told that meeting recording and transcription services free us from taking notes, allowing us to focus on what’s happening. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. People pay LESS attention when they think a meeting is recorded, especially when they think it’s going to be summarized and bulleted for them. The reality is, taking notes IS paying attention.
When the human brain summarizes, it stores and reinforces. In a learning scenario, when people began taking notes on a computer, they could record everything the teacher said. But, this isn’t the benefit people thought it was. It seems that the act of taking notes with pen and paper forces us to distill what’s being said down to its essence, which is much better for learning and retention. I know it’s hard to believe, but pen and paper are technology too.
Not only that, but if we view this from a social context, there is a courtesy and respect that occurs when people see you taking notes, rather than simply grinning like a dipshit, or when people see you performing background tasks while they are talking. But, oh no. My AI has got this covered.
So you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that people who use LLMs to summarize and respond to their emails and text messages, attend meetings on their behalf, and have no domain experience or developed any workplace social skills are going to have a leg up on the competition.
What’s Old Is New Again
Some things never change. I’ve been on this tools impacting humans beat for quite some time. Back in 2010, I gave a series of talks at security conferences titled “Your Tools Are Killing You.” The premise was that people were completely reliant on their tools and couldn’t perform the task otherwise. If the tool was blind to an issue, the human was likewise blind to it. Newer people to cybersecurity learned the tool, not the task. These conditions ultimately reduced people’s effectiveness at their jobs. Sound familiar? However, the generalized nature of generative AI makes this far worse.
Mediocrity Is The Future Of Work
In September, Harvard Business Review published an article on how AI-generated “workslop” was destroying productivity. In essence, workers using AI tools were passing low-quality content to co-workers, which required them to do more work. This is a sort of productivity shell game where a speedup in one area causes a slowdown in another, pretty far from AGI if you ask me.
When everything is slop, everything is mediocre. We’ve allowed companies to reframe what’s acceptable into mediocrity. We don’t hire employees to give the bare minimums. Nobody responds to a job interview with, “If you hire me, I promise to do just enough.” This is hardly a selling point. When you hire someone to paint your house, you don’t think a mediocre job is acceptable, but if you receive a mediocre report, somehow it’s now fine if it is labeled as “AI-powered.” All the mistakes and inaccuracies are just how things are now.
AIs don’t care about quality; that’s a human’s job. Yet quality is on a steep decline. Some are making low-quality work product acceptable because AI is in the loop. But what happens when people forced to use AI tools in the workplace stop caring about the quality of the work they produce? Nothing good.
Encouraged or forced to use AI for everything, humans will be nothing more than meat-sack automatons providing the embodiment for AI. Most jobs don’t consist of a single task, which is why AIs still need humans in the loop for the current and near future. This vision is hardly motivating or inspirational.
Conclusion
We’ve built our AI temple atop fissures, allowing escaping gases to induce hallucinations, fooling us into thinking we are predicting the future. We remain blinded to the real issues confronting us and their negative impacts. We cling to the AI creativity delusion. Which, ironically, prevents us from using AI tools to their full potential.
Creativity doesn’t come without experience, and most of the creativity needed for success in a business context isn’t the work of lone geniuses, but through collaboration. If we don’t identify and correct these issues soon, we are all but dooming younger generations. We are currently in the f—k around stage, but the find out stage is on the horizon.