AI Is Your New, Unpaid Internship

I want you to think about your job. Not the one you interviewed for, but the one you actually do today. Are you spending more and more of your time cleaning up the messes of a machine?

Maybe you’re a graphic designer. A few months ago, your boss, high on some blog post about "generative AI," started sending you AI-created images to "touch up." He thinks he’s saving time. You know you’re spending two hours fixing a six-fingered hand and a background that looks like a melted Dali painting, when you could have made a better image from scratch in one.

Or maybe you’re a project manager. You’re now expected to use an AI assistant to generate project plans and status reports. The problem? The AI hallucinates. It makes up project milestones. It confidently states that tasks are complete when they haven’t even been started. So your job isn’t managing the project anymore. It’s managing the AI’s lies, fact-checking a machine that has no concept of facts.

You’ve been given a new job, one you never applied for. Congratulations, you’re now a professional robot supervisor, an unpaid intern wrangler for an intern who never sleeps, never learns, and confidently screws everything up.

The Great Unasked-For Promotion

This isn’t a hypothetical. I’ve talked to marketers who are now forced to churn out soulless, AI-generated blog posts that they then have to rewrite to sound even remotely human. I’ve talked to programmers who spend more time debugging the clumsy, inefficient code written by a "copilot" than it would have taken to just write it correctly the first time. They’re all miserable.

The pitch from companies like Google, Microsoft, and the endless parade of startups was that AI would be an "assistant," a "copilot" to "augment" our abilities. They sold us a dream of efficiency, of ditching the boring parts of our jobs to focus on the creative, strategic, human parts.

It was a lie. For many of us, it’s a bait-and-switch.

The "boring parts" of the job were often the foundational tasks where you learned your craft. Now, you’re just a janitor for algorithmic slop.

AI isn’t "augmenting" jobs; it’s diluting them. It’s deskilling them. The new primary skill is learning how to coax a semi-intelligent machine into doing a mediocre impression of your actual job. It turns experts into editors. It transforms craftspeople into content janitors. Your years of experience are being devalued in real-time, replaced by the “skill” of writing a clever prompt to get a machine to do 70% of the work, badly.

Your Job Description Is Now a Terms of Service Agreement

Think about the creepiest part of all this: You were never asked. Your consent wasn’t requested.

Your company’s leadership, in a desperate race to not be left behind, is unilaterally rewriting your job description. It’s like a software company updating its Terms of Service in the middle of the night. You don’t have a choice but to click "Agree" if you want to keep your job.

Suddenly, you’re expected to feed your company’s—or your clients’—sensitive data into a third-party model owned by a tech giant. Was there a security review? Did the legal team sign off on this? In the gold rush for AI, most companies are sprinting ahead with a "figure it out later" attitude, and you’re the one taking the risk. You’re the one on the hook when the AI leaks confidential information or produces something biased, offensive, or just plain wrong.

The promise was that the robots would work for us. The reality is that we are now working for them. We groom them, we train them, we clean up their messes, and we do it all for our existing salary. This isn’t innovation; it’s the oldest trick in the corporate playbook: squeezing more labor out of workers without paying for it.

It’s time to call this what it is: exploitation. It’s a silent, creeping renegotiation of our jobs, our skills, and our value. And it’s happening right now, on your screen, one useless AI-generated paragraph at a time.