Employee disappointed as company party turns into AI-driven disaster: 'Depressing look into future'

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into nearly every aspect of our lives. While it offers solutions to almost everything, its inability to grasp context or nuance can sometimes leave us feeling silly or frustrated. In one such instance, an employee—known as u/ThePromptWasYourName on Reddit—shared how ChatGPT turned their company's holiday party into a depressing look into the future.

"It was a two-hour Zoom party, and we were split into groups of five to build gingerbread houses and then come up with silly HOA rules for our gingerbread neighborhood," the employee wrote at the beginning of the post. "It's a small-ish creative agency, and while not everyone there is a designer or artist, you would still expect a higher-than-average level of creativity and imagination on display, so I was excited to see what my coworkers came up with," the employee added. However, things took a turn when the group's leader began using ChatGPT to come up with the neighborhood name and HOA rules and even generate an image of the neighborhood.

"I threw out some ideas, but the rest of the group was just trying to finish as fast as possible, and I'm not as quick as ChatGPT," the employee wrote. While they were disappointed with what their group had come up with, they were still hopeful about what the other groups had created. However, it turned out that all the groups had done the same thing. "Just immediately turned to ChatGPT to shortcut human imagination and pump out mediocre, unmemorable sh*t with as little thought as possible," the employee wrote. "I was kind of surprised how depressed the whole exercise made me feel," they expressed.

"I know what you're thinking. This was a corporate holiday get-together. The workers just wanted to get things done and get back to work. But I promise that's not the general vibe of where I work... It's a pretty small agency, and we actually pride ourselves on being fun and different, and 95% of the people seem to genuinely love working here (as I do)," the employee wrote. The employee was deeply disappointed that no one came up with anything interesting without relying on AI. They realized that all the creativity and playfulness had been offloaded onto soulless machines. "Anyway, sorry for the rant. I'm actually really excited for a lot of what AI has to offer, but seeing how quickly ordinary (and extraordinary) people give up on coming up with their own ideas is just really defeating," they concluded their post.

People in the comments pointed out that a 2-hour Zoom party sounded awful to begin with. "Let me guess. You're the one who came up with this whole 'Zoom party' idea. The fact that no one except you wanted to take part in it is not ChatGPT's fault nor does it diminish the people's creative abilities. They simply didn't want anything to do with it. A lot of people simply don't want to waste their time, skill and effort on some HR-seminar-originated-generic-activity," wrote u/GingerSkulling. "What value does this provide your employees? Have you considered what they care about and incorporate that into the activities? I would hate to do this activity unless my job was on the line..." added u/SoroushTorkian.