Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage–so they're making up tasks

Amazon’s big artificial intelligence push is getting roasted by its own workers, and the comments are treating it like the most predictable office drama ever. According to the report, some employees say they’re under heavy pressure to use Amazon’s internal AI tool more often—even when there’s no obvious reason to. The result? People allegedly creating pointless little AI jobs just to make their usage numbers look busy. In plain English: if the company wants more AI clicks, some workers will gladly give it more AI clicks.

The community reaction was immediate: this is what happens when management turns a metric into a game. Multiple commenters basically screamed “called it” with references to Goodhart’s law—the idea that once a number becomes the goal, people start gaming the number instead of doing better work. One person said they do the same thing at their own job, feeding tokens into boring documentation tasks just so they don’t go to waste. Another summed up the whole mood with the brutally perfect phrase “Token-driven development.” Ouch.

But not everyone was dunking on Amazon. One hot take argued this may be the point: push workers to mess around with AI, let them “waste” time, and they’ll eventually figure out what it’s actually useful for. So is this a ridiculous corporate leaderboard culture moment, or a messy training exercise in disguise? Either way, the crowd agrees on one thing: when workers feel watched, the numbers start performing too.