Shopify CEO says employees’ ‘slop grenades’ are making more work for everyone else

The tech leaders who once hailed AI use as the key to unlocking every employee’s full potential are now changing their tune.

This includes Shopify cofounder and CEO Tobias Lütke. He told employees last year that using AI is “a baseline expectation,” and they should first prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more resources. He’s now saying Shopify employees are producing unexamined emails and code with AI and not taking responsibility for the sloppy output.

“We call those ‘slop grenades’ that people toss at each other,” he said during an interview on The Knowledge Project podcast  on Tuesday. “That’s definitely a bad thing.”

Lütke said it’s easy to let AI “go nuts,” but abusing it creates more headaches for the people receiving and reviewing the work. For instance, he suggested AI use is supposed to help synthesize points in an email rather than turning it into........

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