Why Your AI Keeps Telling You What’s “Worth” Doing

Every time you fire up a chatbot to ask it to do some work thing that you should be doing yourself, you’re playing career Russian Roulette. Because your chatbot can get into the habit of prescribing you nonsense, innocuously disguised as helpful suggestions.

The most obvious of these is the “worth doing” suggestion it constantly throws at you.

“The customer seems to be engaging with the new feature. Worth following up in a couple days.”

“That update is now 4,378 days late. Worth checking to see if it might be in your spam folder.”

“Your boss just emailed you saying he will have to miss your meeting because his wife had car trouble. Worth asking if she’s still hot.”

I started ignoring this kind of chatbot advice immediately, because, honestly, I just can’t be someone who lets a chatbot tell me what to do. But then I discovered that people are indeed taking this advice, and they’re doing it at work. Which means – inexplicably but somehow inarguably – they’re taking on-the-job work advice from a chatbot.

So I started paying attention to the suggestions my chatbot was making. And then I went down a rabbit hole.

The thing is, it’s an easy trap to fall into.

Because it’s not just a throwaway line slipped into the response to keep you engaged. It’s horrible fake predictive analysis couched innocuously enough to let the chatbot get away with guessing. It’ll be fine nine times out of ten. Maybe 99 times out of 100. But that one time, yo.

You’ve derailed your career.