I have been working with AI for 4 years and in IT for over 16. When I started, I liked writing code. Then I discovered that a developer's life is not just made of pretty apps, successful deploys, and components that magically work on the first try. There were always those awful tasks I considered useless: first the calls, then the client documents that, in my opinion, we could very well have lived without. Documentation, explanations, reports, statistics, slides: whatever kind of material comes to mind, back then, it WAS USELESS.
Why did I have this cognitive bias, this idea that none of it was worth anything? Simple: while doing the first thing I hated, namely calls, it was obvious that nobody had read the documents I had spent DAYS writing, editing, or rewriting, often because "the text was not good enough" for my boss.
But in the "non-AI era veritas," the client knew they were also paying for those documents destined to gather dust on their NAS, on top of my beautiful app written in JavaScript with love, sweat, and a few console.log statements accidentally left in production. They were paying for the whole package.
Today, in the "AI era veritas," the client has realized one uncomfortable fact: those documents you bill as 100 hours of work were created with AI. And with that same AI, they can have them summarized in one click. At that point, they are no longer so willing to pay for something useless bundled into the package. Especially if they can do it themselves.
Most of the documents we create have always been useless. Sooner or later, somebody would summarize them for you verbally on a call anyway, while the documents themselves sat there: still, forgotten, buried in some dark archive on Google Drive or Microsoft Teams.
AI has simply proved one thing: we can optimize the production of junk too. Reports, documents, slides, and attachments that nobody reads, let us repeat that because it deserves repeating, but which still need to be uploaded into a form, attached at the end of a project, or produced because of some corporate policy written by someone who probably never read it either.
For twenty years, we created useless documents that nobody wanted to write and nobody wanted to read. They were just things to archive, attach to an email, or mention in a meeting to pretend the process was under control.
What really hurts is that we trained a huge number of people to do this job. A job that, for years, was considered a skill. Let us call it that, just to be kind: today it is only a questionable skill.