Bosses, Stop Using AI And Do Your Job
ICYMI
Slate Podcasts
3.9 • 800 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by Slate Good Job columnist Laura Helmuth. In a recent Slate piece, Kate spoke to employees who say their bosses’ use of AI is making their work life harder. Laura and Kate discuss why bosses are using AI at such higher rates than their employees, and how employees can push back against their bosses’ attempts to shirk their responsibilities in favor of chatbots.
This podcast is produced by Vic Whitley-Berry, Daisy Rosario, and Kate Lindsay.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture. |
| 0:21.7 | And today we are joined by writer Laura Helmuth. |
| 0:24.6 | Welcome Laura. |
| 0:25.6 | Thank you. |
| 0:26.2 | It's wonderful to be here. |
| 0:27.6 | Laura is one of the writers behind Slate's good job advice column and was actually Slate's |
| 0:32.6 | Science and Health Editor for a while back in the early 2010s. |
| 0:36.6 | But her reasons for being here today could not be |
| 0:39.1 | more futuristic, as we'll be talking about AI in the workplace, specifically how much bosses |
| 0:45.1 | love it, but employees seem to hate it. |
| 0:59.1 | But first, Laura, we have to ask you the question that we ask all first time guests. |
| 1:01.3 | What is your earliest internet memory? |
| 1:06.2 | Yeah, I think for me, so I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley in the 90s. And the first time I remember using an internet versus an intranet is the program called Fetch, |
| 1:12.2 | which was just a filed transfer protocol where you could log into another university's database |
| 1:18.6 | and find emails of friends I hadn't talked to from high school. |
| 1:23.3 | So even before it was a social network, I was kind of using it as a social network. |
| 1:27.4 | Yeah, that's one of using it as a social network. |
| 1:38.0 | Yeah, that's one of my favorite sort of ways that people will use technology these days is we kind of can make anything we want a social network if we try hard enough. |
| 1:45.7 | Like I know people will have used Strava, which is like a running app and like a workout app, to find dates and things like that. |
| 1:47.1 | Like we will always find a way. |
| 1:53.3 | But I am also curious if sort of your introduction to the internet happened in grad school, I feel like so, for so like I'm a millennial. |
| 1:57.7 | And so to me, the internet is so interchangeable with like being a kind of weird |
... |
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