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People say nothing funny ever happens on LinkedIn and in my experience, people are right.<\/p>\n
But the other day, a colleague showed me a post<\/a> on the site from a man named Chris who said he had started joining online meetings 30 seconds early, all the better to be discreetly recorded by the AI note-taking assistants now used to transcribe virtual meetings.<\/p>\n He then starts screaming that he is on the Titanic, which has just hit an iceberg, and needs help pronto, before carrying on normally for the rest of the meeting.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the meeting ends,\u201d he wrote, \u201ceveryone gets an emailed transcript where the AI summary is: \u2018Chris hit an iceberg, is trapped on a sinking ship, and general Q2 pricing updates.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n I enjoyed this story and hope it travels far on the grounds that finally, someone may have found a good use for AI in the office.<\/p>\n Obviously I hear constantly about the latest \u201cuse case\u201d in the \u201cAI space\u201d that is going to make working life more productive, efficient and streamlined.<\/p>\n I also realise that scientists at Google DeepMind were joint winners of last year\u2019s Nobel chemistry<\/a> prize for an AI model that is already helping to speed up work on intractable problems such as antibiotic <\/a>resistance and plastic <\/a>pollution.<\/p>\n In the right hands, artificial intelligence can clearly be a force for great good. It\u2019s just that I keep coming across people like Sarah Harrop, who know how dire it can be in the wrong hands.<\/p>\n Harrop is an employment partner at the Addleshaw Goddard law firm in London, which means she deals with claims of unfair dismissal, discrimination and other forms of mistreatment.<\/p>\n Since the arrival of ChatGPT, she says there has been a distinct rise in the number of vastly more detailed, lengthy and outwardly credible correspondence to HR departments and employment tribunals.<\/p>\n The documents often contain references to legal precedents and other references to the law that don\u2019t always turn out to be accurate but take hours to sort through.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have seen examples where there are dozens and dozens of pieces of correspondence sent to the employment tribunal,\u201d she told me. The length of the documents and the speed at which they are generated suggests they are almost certainly produced by robots rather than humans, she said, adding this causes \u201csignificant pressure\u201d for employers and tribunals.<\/p>\n I can well imagine what a tedious and costly burden this can be for employers, and I am sure they are not alone.<\/p>\n I mentioned Harrop\u2019s observations to a few people last week and quickly learnt that employees are by no means the only ones using AI to turbocharge complaints.<\/p>\n A man who has been a school governor for many years said the volume and intensity of what were almost certainly AI-assisted complaints from parents had skyrocketed in the past 18 months.<\/p>\n The complaints were often well crafted and included convincing references to legal precedents that made them hard to ignore, he said, even though the longest ones invariably turned out to be specious.<\/p>\n I do not see this situation easing any time soon. The internet is now awash with sites offering to harness the power of AI to generate powerful, well-written complaints.<\/p>\n