The modern office worker wakes up, pours coffee, opens Slack, and gets mugged. Someone's tagged you in a thread. Before you can read it, two AI widgets light up like slot machines; one offering to draft a response "based on your personal context," another eager to summarize the whole conversation. You haven't even absorbed the question yet, but the machines are already composing your answer.
Switch to Confluence. You've written three paragraphs. A sidebar erupts with options: Find action items. Summarize writing. Rewrite… Brainstorm with AI. Suggest a title. Five different ways the software wants to interfere with what you're doing. You just want to finish a sentence. Confluence wants to be your co-author, your editor, your brainstorming buddy, and your title consultant.
Now Gmail. You've written an email. Clear, direct, done. You hit send. Gmail blocks you with a helpful suggestion: Would you like to rewrite this in a more professional tone? How about friendlier? Maybe the recipient would appreciate an easier-to-understand version? The email you wrote is apparently not good enough. The email the algorithm would write is, presumably, better.
By the time you copy a line of text anywhere, four different widgets are fighting to turn it into something you never asked for.
This is AI pollution. It's everywhere, like glitter after a kids' birthday party. You can't close a document, draft an email, or paste a sentence without tripping over a tooltip or pop-up menu. It isn't assistance. It isn't intelligence. It's a tax on focus, collected in tiny, relentless installments.
Clippy, that deranged paperclip from the late nineties, at least had a singular personality. He was one overly cheerful stalker with a fixed repertoire of interruptions: "Looks like you're writing a letter." Now imagine an entire battalion of Clippies, each with its own lightning bolt button and cheery insistence that this is the moment you need machine learning. That's the modern office.
The pitch is always the same; we're here to save you time. But what these widgets actually do is consume it. They hover, blink, jostle for clicks. They demand a decision: will you let them "enhance," "summarize," "reframe"? You decline them one by one, like a medieval knight fending off AI gnats.
Most software companies have embraced AI as if it were a compulsory ingredient, like salt in bread. Slack has AI. Google Suite has AI. Fellow has AI. Jira has AI. Nobody asked for this. Everybody's getting it anyway. It's the Silicon Valley version of Oprah: you get AI, you get AI, everyone gets AI.
The logic is painfully transparent. Investors expect "AI integration." Product managers demand it. Marketing teams wave it around like a talisman. The result? A Frankenstein ecosystem of bolt-on "intelligence," each piece more irrelevant than the last. It's the technological equivalent of smearing truffle oil on every dish, whether it improves the flavor or not.
What makes this so absurd is how little actual work the widgets accomplish. Meeting summaries miss the point. Automated rewrites sand off nuance. Suggestions to "make it more professional" produce prose that reads like it was ghostwritten by a middle manager in 1997. These tools rarely help. They never stop offering.
There are, in theory, better models. Apple's "Apple Intelligence," for example, doesn't scream at you from every corner of the screen. It sits quietly, waiting to be summoned. The intelligence itself may be questionable, but at least it has manners.
The problem isn't the concept of AI. It's the aggression of its deployment. Instead of being a tool, it's become a parasite clinging to every surface of modern software. Work is no longer about concentration, it's about dodging a barrage of suggestions, each one interrupting the fragile thread of attention. The interruptions add up. They drain. They corrode.
So every morning, we sit down to do our jobs and instead wage war with a thousand Clippies. We close the pop-ups. We swipe away the tooltips. We say "not now" to the hovering widgets. We're not working faster. We're working harder just to get back to the baseline of doing anything at all.
Until the industry learns that help should be optional and intelligence should be discreet, the corporate world will remain haunted by this swarm of digital assistants. The future of work, it turns out, isn't a sleek partnership with machines. It's an endless game of whack a mole with algorithms.
And the moles are winning.
♢ “This article was ironically written by AI and half-heartedly reviewed by a human.”