minoanmiss: Poe Dameron as a bull-leaper (Poe Bull-leaping)
minoanmiss ([personal profile] minoanmiss) wrote in [community profile] agonyaunt2025-07-11 10:43 am

Ask a Manager: Can I Be Fired For Not Using AI?

AAM is spicy this week!



https://www.askamanager.org/2025/07/can-i-be-fired-for-refusing-to-use-ai.html

I am a senior manager at my workplace. In the last year, some of my colleagues have adopted AI for what I think are quickly becoming normal office uses — summarizing meeting notes, etc.

We were recently told that every report we file should include a summary, which we can write manually or use a specialized generative AI tool to produce. I’m not a Luddite, I love technology … just not this technology. I have ethical objections to the use of generative AI for a lot of reasons — its frequent inaccuracies (in my field, there have been some pretty embarrassing, high-profile AI goof-ups), the way it’s being pushed on us everywhere, the baked-in racial bias and horrendous environmental cost, and, of course, the likelihood that it will ultimately replace almost all of our jobs. And surely there’s a value in producing your own work — particularly, the thought process of digesting and understanding meaning — even in seemingly menial work like summarizing a report or a meeting?

Thus far, I have not been told that I must use AI. I have been clear with my boss and my fellow senior managers that I have these ethical objections, and have urged them to consider their own use carefully. No one thinks I’m nuts — reactions have ranged from mildly annoyed to agreement in principle — but no one objects as strongly as I do. The general attitude seems to be that it’s going to happen whether we like it or not, so there’s either no point in objecting, or that we have to learn to use it for our own advantage. We’re already short-staffed, and I imagine few of my colleagues are willing or able to take on additional work when an AI tool will do it for them. I understand and sympathize with this position.

If the use of generative AI becomes more widespread (which is really a “when,” not an “if”) and I am told that I have to use it, what are my options? Can I be required to use a tool with which I have sincere ethical problems? Unlike a lot of workplace objections, my refusal to use AI creates more work for me, not less, which I’m okay with, but as generative AI proliferates in the workplace, I can also see a potential future in which it’s simply not sustainable for me to manually do the work others are using AI to complete. Could I be fired for not using AI? Could I be fired for not meeting goals that de facto require use of AI to reach? As a senior manager, what’s my responsibility to push back on something that I strongly feel is deeply problematic?


Yes, your employer can legally order you to use AI in your job and could legally fire you if you refuse to.

The exception to that might be if you had a sincerely held religious belief objecting to its use, but that’s not the situation. (Is it anyone’s situation? It would be interesting to see. Even then, though, if your religious belief prevented you from doing the essential functions of your job, even with accommodations, you could ultimately be fired over it. They’d probably have to let you avoid AI for minor things — like, say, note-taking — but if it took over large pieces of your work, they wouldn’t.)

Now, whether or not they would fire you depends on a lot of other things, like how much value you bring to the company, how much standing and respect you have there, and how much refusing to use AI affected your output and outcomes versus other people’s. So far it doesn’t sound like you’re anywhere near that happening. But could it change in the future? Yes.

The question about what your responsibility is to push back on something you find deeply problematic is harder. I’d argue that you nearly always have an obligation to push back on something you find deeply unethical, particularly as a senior manager. But man, it feels like the horse is out of the barn on this one, and I just don’t know that you’re going to make much headway.

Your best bet is to make work-based arguments against its use when you can. You’re unlikely to win on the ethics (as right as you may be), but you’re better positioned to win on things like “this is producing an unacceptable error rate” or “we’re suffering in X ways because human judgment wasn’t applied here” or so forth.
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)

[personal profile] redbird 2025-07-11 03:19 pm (UTC)(link)
The subject line should say "for not using AI."
lethe1: (ds: rained on)

[personal profile] lethe1 2025-07-11 06:29 pm (UTC)(link)
How odd that a religious belief would be seen as valid, but not her non-religious ethics.
jadelennox: Senora Sabasa Garcia, by Goya (Default)

[personal profile] jadelennox 2025-07-11 10:19 pm (UTC)(link)

That's the US for ya.

(Weirder is that your religious belief can be incorrect and is still protected. That is, if a Catholic says "it is my sincerely held religious belief that my Catholicism says I am prohibited from serving hot dog buns at my job in the school cafeteria," and the parish priest, bishop, and pope all say "uhhhh, no?" that person is still protected in their refusal to serve hot dog buns. Or in practice, sell contraception or get a vaccine, which is how we know the courts' opinions on the matter. An atheist's moral choices -- or even a religious person's moral choices which they don't ascribe to religion -- get no such protections.)