\n<\/p>\n
Generative AI comes in many forms. Increasingly, though, it\u2019s marketed the same way: with human names and personas that make it feel less like code and more like a co-worker. A growing number of startups are anthropomorphizing AI to build trust fast \u2014 and soften its threat to human jobs. It\u2019s dehumanizing, and it\u2019s accelerating.<\/p>\n
I get why this framing took off. In today\u2019s upside-down economy, where every hire feels like a risk, enterprise startups \u2014 many<\/a> emerging<\/a> from the famed accelerator Y Combinator \u2014 are pitching AI not as software but as staff<\/a>. They\u2019re selling replacements. AI assistants. AI coders. AI employees. The language is deliberately designed to appeal to overwhelmed hiring managers.<\/p>\n Some don\u2019t even bother with subtlety. Atlog<\/a>, for instance, recently introduced an \u201cAI employee for furniture stores\u201d that handles everything from payments to marketing. One good manager, it gloats, can now run 20 stores at once. The implication: you don\u2019t need to hire more people \u2014 just let the system scale for you. (What happens to the 19 managers it replaces is left unsaid.)<\/p>\n Consumer-facing startups are leaning into similar tactics. Anthropic named its platform \u201cClaude\u201d because it\u2019s a warm, trustworthy-sounding companion for a faceless, disembodied neural net. It\u2019s a tactic straight out of the fintech playbook where apps like Dave, Albert, and Charlie masked their transactional motives with approachable names. When handling money, it feels better to trust a \u201cfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n The same logic has crept into AI. Would you rather share sensitive data with a machine learning model or your bestie Claude, who remembers you, greets you warmly, and almost never<\/a> threatens you? (To OpenAI\u2019s credit, it still tells you you\u2019re chatting with a \u201cgenerative pre-trained transformer.\u201d)<\/p>\n But we\u2019re reaching a tipping point. I\u2019m genuinely excited about generative AI. Still, every new \u201cAI employee\u201d has begun to feel more dehumanizing. Every new \u201cDevin<\/a>\u201d makes me wonder when the actual Devins of the world will push back on being abstracted into job-displacing bots.<\/p>\n Generative AI is no longer just a curiosity. Its reach is expanding, even if the impacts remain unclear. In mid-May, 1.9 million unemployed Americans were receiving continued jobless benefits \u2014 the highest since 2021. Many of those were laid-off tech workers. The signals are piling up.<\/p>\n Some of us still remember 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>. HAL, the onboard computer, begins as a calm, helpful assistant before turning completely homicidal and cutting off the crew\u2019s life support. It\u2019s science fiction, but it hit a nerve for a reason.<\/p>\n Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years<\/a>, pushing unemployment as high as 20%. \u201cMost [of these workers are] unaware that this is about to happen,\u201d he told Axios<\/a>. \u201cIt sounds crazy, and people just don\u2019t believe it.\u201d <\/p>\n You could argue that\u2019s not comparable to cutting off someone\u2019s oxygen, but the metaphor isn\u2019t that<\/em> far off. Automating more people out of paychecks will have consequences, and when the layoffs increase, the branding of AI as a \u201ccolleague\u201d is going to look less clever and more callous.<\/p>\n The shift toward generative AI is happening regardless of how it\u2019s packaged. But companies have a choice in how they describe these tools. IBM never called its mainframes \u201cdigital co-workers.\u201d PCs weren\u2019t \u201csoftware assistants\u201d; they were workstations and productivity tools.<\/p>\n Language still matters. Tools should empower. But more and more companies are marketing something else entirely, and that feels like a mistake.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t need more AI \u201cemployees.\u201d We need software that extends the potential of actual humans, making them more productive, creative, and competitive. So please stop talking about fake workers. Just show us the tools that help great managers run complex businesses, and that help individuals make more impact. That\u2019s all anyone is really asking for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n