Yesterday morning, I woke up to a striking notification from Google on my phone. It was a news article that said an employer tried a bold experiment for a 4-day workweek, but it failed because the employees revolted and wanted more days of work.
This struck me as quizzical. It was from a publication I hadn’t heard of, but it was intriguing enough that I was willing to click. I’ve been following the manifold debates about issues like shorter working hours, working-from-home, Universal Basic Income (UBI), and the Job Guarantee for a very long time. It’s just part of my perversion as an undercover, embarrassed, fake, only sort-of labor historian.
But all of these discussions (since at least 2010) have been about whether the eternal practice of frog-marching people into misery at a factory, office, warehouse, or store could ever possibly be changed. UBI debates mainly assumed that providing an income floor would be a way to solve the imminent, extremely inevitable, apocalyptic problem of technological unemployment (due to AI and automation, of course).
But still there was a distinct strain of “anti-work” or “fuck work” thinking in the very same discourse. After all, who wants to go to fucking work?
Then COVID rolled along, and we had to hear infinite whining about people working from home, far from the big thumb of their managers, or even not working at all because of government relief checks. These little goblins don’t want to work, or at least not hard enough and in the correct way. What is this world coming to?
So, the idea that a “bold” business would try a 4-day workweek, but then the employees didn’t like it seemed like…well, what we in the business call “surprising.”
First of all – the actual headline was, “‘Four Days Weren’t Enough’: Company’s Bold Workweek Experiment Backfires as Employees Demand Full Seven-Day Schedule.” It came from something called Rude Baguette.
The article itself is primarily about how managers need to worry about trusting workers to be self-disciplined and responsible, if granted the autonomy of minding their own time.
Most of the article meanders around mentioning various situations and examples, but it never once showed a specific case where employees at one of these businesses revolted against the 4-day week. Literally, no example was given of employees saying they want to work harder and longer, as the headline implied.
I wondered how this could be. Even the most mendacious online propaganda from Human Events or whatever usually comes with a title that conforms with what the text of the thing actually says. Then I noticed at the bottom – “Our author used artificial intelligence to enhance this article.”
Let me humbly suggest that “used artificial intelligence to enhance this article” is an understatement of world-historical proportions.
It gets worse. About an hour later I got another push-notification from Google with a slightly renamed version of the same article, from a thing called the Farmingdale Observer that pretends to be a newspaper. As long as I’ve been getting news notifications from the Google app, I don’t think I have seen two articles with nearly identical, clearly AI-written content being pushed out at once.
What was going on? Was this a covert (but not-so-covert) attempt by Google to support the great cause of getting workers chained to their desks 40 hours a week once again — or, more realistically, 60? Was it a hiccup of the AI that the Google app uses getting into a donnybrook with the other AI kids on the playground?
It all felt actually ominous.
Let me be honest: anyone who somehow manages to still be friends with me knows that I am a confirmed skeptic of nearly all big ol’ claims about AI. But this episode struck me as worrying in a new way. AI can churn out automated slop that plays to the prejudices of whoever is using it, but to see a “hallucination” where the headline appears to push a political agenda contrary to everything in the text below is just weird. And people mostly just read the headlines anyway. All of it feels more intentional, in an unsettling way.
It also reminds me of the popular canards of the 1980s and 1990s, when the ascendant right wing in the US fixated on the idea of “unintended consequences” of liberal policy efforts. Welfare and the 1960s War on Poverty (supposedly) made the lives of the working poor even worse. Oopsy-daisy. (See also theorist Abigail Faust’s work on the topic.)
Here we see much the same: an idealistic move to help workers work fewer hours turns out to fail so miserably that they begged to work longer and harder. “I know it sounds crazy,” you could hear Elon’s Grok saying, “but it’s true!”
Unfortunately, many people are susceptible to this superficial form of irony. We all can imagine trying something well-intended, but maybe it doesn’t work. Except that this particular slop gives zero reference to any of it actually happening.
AI probably isn’t going to destroy the world, as the peripatetic carnival barker Sam Altman so ardently wishes. But it’s going to make our world confusing and stupid in new and innovatively unexpected ways, ways that put the old idea of cognitive dissonance to absolute shame.