For the love of God, stop calling your AI a co-worker
Generative AI comes in many forms. However, it is increasingly being marketed in the same way: with human names and personas, which makes it feel less like a code and more as an employee. A growing number of startups is anthropomorphization AI to quickly build trust – and to mitigate his threat to human jobs. It is dehumanious and accelerates.
I understand why this framing started. In the upside down economy of today, where every rent feels like a risk, startups of companies-a lot rising Of the famous accelerator Y Combinator – Pitching AI are not as software but as a staff. They sell replacements. AI assistants. AI coders. AI employees. The language is deliberately designed to appeal to overwhelmed recruitment managers.
Some are not even concerned with subtlety. AtogFor example, a “AI employee for furniture stores” recently introduced that processes everything, from payments to marketing. One good manager, it, can now perform 20 stores at the same time. The implication: You don’t have to hire more people – just let the system scale for you. (What happens with the 19 managers who replace it is unspoken.)
Startups on consumer -oriented start lean in comparable tactics. Anthropic called his platform “Claude” because it is a warm, reliable sounding companion for a faceless, non-neural network. It is a tactic directly from the fintech playbook where apps such as Dave, Albert and Charlie masked their transaction motives with approachable names. When handling money it feels better to trust a ‘friend’.
The same logic crawled in AI. Would you rather share sensitive data with a machine learning model or your bestie claude that you remember, greet you warmly and almost never threaten you? (In honor of OpenAI, it still tells you that you are chatting with a “generative pre -trained transformer.”
But we reach a turning point. I am really enthusiastic about generative AI. Yet every new “AI employee” started to feel more dehumanized. Every new one “Devin‘I wonder when the actual Devins of the World will push back to be abstracted in jobs-expanding bots.
Generative AI is no longer just a curiosity. The range is growing, even if the effects remain unclear. In mid-May, 1.9 million unemployed Americans received continuous unemployed benefits of the highest since 2021. Many of them were dismissed technical employees. The signals are piling up.
Some of us still remember it 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL, the computer on board, starts as a calm, helpful assistant before he becomes completely murderous and decreases the living support of the crew. It is Science Fiction, but it hit a nerve for a reason.
Last week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate in the following entry -level books one to five yearsPushing unemployment up to 20%. “Most [of these workers are] do not know that this is about to happen, “he told Axios. “It sounds crazy and people just don’t believe it.”
You could claim that this is not comparable to cutting someone’s oxygen, but the metaphor is not That Far away. The automation of more people from salary will have consequences, and when the dismissals increase, the branding of AI will look less smart and insurer as a “colleague”.
The shift to generative AI happens regardless of how it is packaged. But companies have a choice in how they describe these tools. IBM has never called his mainframes ‘digital colleagues’. PCs were not “software assistants”; They were workstations and productivity tools.
Language is still important. Tools must empower. But more and more companies are launching something else, and that feels like a mistake.
We no longer need AI “employees”. We need software that expands the potential of actual people, making them more productive, more creative and competitive. So please stop talking about fake workers. Just show us the tools that help great managers run complex companies, and those individuals help to have more impact. That is all that everyone really asks for.
