AI is cutting hours of office work, but also creating a new kind of busywork

[highplainsdem]

Source: LA Times

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There is a “thick, mostly invisible layer of human labor holding the whole thing together,” the report said.

The survey found that for every hour a worker spends getting useful output from AI, they spend roughly another hour making it usable.

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Part of the reason so much time disappears into botsitting is how often the tools fall short: Workers report that more than a third of AI sessions fail outright, requiring a full restart or substantial rework.

Paradoxically, as more workers hand over bigger parts of their jobs to AI, they are offloading personal judgment and responsibilities to the bots. The survey found 41% of workers say they sometimes deliver AI-generated work they couldn’t explain if asked.

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Read more: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-06-12/ai-saves-office-workers-hours-but-then-demands-hours-of-babysitting

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The study is here:
https://www.glean.com/work-ai-institute/reports/work-ai-index-report

Excerpt from that:

87% of digital workers now use AI at work. 75% say it makes them more productive, saving them roughly 11 hours each per week through automation alone. Yet only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better as a result.

So where are the gains going?

They’re being swallowed by a new, largely invisible form of labor. We call it botsitting: the work required to make AI usable, including feeding it missing context, checking its outputs, debugging its mistakes, rerunning prompts, and cleaning up the confident-but-wrong answers AI leaves behind. Workers now burn an average of 6.4 hours a week botsitting — most of a full working day, every week.

When that labor is untracked, unbudgeted, and unrewarded, workers start cutting corners. They stop checking outputs and deliver work they can’t fully explain or defend. That’s when botsitting turns into something more dangerous: botshitting — shipping AI-generated work that workers haven’t reviewed, don’t fully understand, or couldn’t defend if asked. Today, 69% of AI users admit to botshitting at work.

Bad as that is, the study also found that "48% reach for AI before they try to solve a problem themselves."

So we have something called artificial intelligence that's badly flawed tech that often returns incorrect results. Badly flawed tech that gives those results almost instantly and is designed to seem so authoritative that humans often defer to it instead of using their own judgment.

This is NOT a solvable problem. The flawed tech is creating the problem. And generative AI is inherently flawed. Anyone who imagines they're a genius using genAI effectively is much more likely tuning out all the failures they don't completely overlook - all the while the chatbot is telling them how brilliant and perceptive they are.

God damn genAI and the unethical AI robber barons who've inflicted it on society.

Ed Zitron put the stupidity of using genAI more colorfully, in a quote I used in a thread June 2nd:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221278425

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/

I don’t give a shit if you use them to spit out a script or do some simple sideline part of your job, or transcribe or dictate into them, or if you’ve used them as a search engine (and even then, you best check every source!), but the moment you rely on and run your entire process on these things, I immediately doubt your ability to do anything, or at the very least wonder how gullible you truly are when somebody ingratiates you enough.

Why? Because every single “AI setup” I’ve seen anyone ever use involves a rube goldberg machine of bullshit deterministic scripts to try and bring the hallucination-guaranteed nature of LLMs to heel, usually to the point that you’re doing more work making the LLM work than you did before they existed, and you’re only proud of it because you feel like you’re special.

And BootinUp posted a video that's an amusing illustration of what people often have to go through to "get AI to work":

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221289258