The majority of workers agree: AI has turned their lives into slop-filled misery, making them yearn for the good old days before the tech existed.
According to a new survey of office workers by professional services company Adaptavist, just shy of two thirds of respondents say they regularly long for their old, pre-AI work life. Over a third of them would delete generative AI tools from their lives in their entirety if that was an option. And some 36 percent admitted they didn’t even understand why AI was being forced on them in the first place.
In many ways, the results shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The advent of AI has led to widespread frustration and added stress for workers being forced to carefully comb over the output of hallucinating AI models and engage in prompt engineering that wasn’t part of their original job description.
The survey’s results are a strong indication that the once-promised boost to productivity thanks to AI has yet to materialize. Worse yet, AI is actively getting in workers’ ways. Some 42 percent of respondents said they “spend more time verifying AI output than they save using it,” while 49 percent reported that “poor-quality AI output slows down projects.”

