AI May Be 'Coming For Our Jobs,' But It Really Sucks At Doing Them

We definitely don't have to worry yet.

Jan 14, 2026

For the last two years at least, we’ve barely been able to escape the parade of tech bros excitedly talking about how AI is going to take all of our jobs (especially the creative jobs that people actually kind of like doing) and human beings will be relegated to whatever manual labor the robots can’t do. Also, because we hate socialism here and there really won’t be enough manual labor jobs to go around, the rest of us will just live in abject poverty (not to mention extreme thirst) at the feet of our robot and billionaire overlords.

Hell, Elon Musk just announced the other day that it is “pointless” to go to medical school (or get any other kind of education) because “in three years time” his Optimus robots will have replaced all of the surgeons. As I learned from the captions on some medical soap starring Theo Huxtable (RIP) that was playing the last time I was at the nail salon, there are already robots that do surgery, but they are controlled by actual doctors, with medical expertise and good judgment. An AI robot probably can’t tell if they’ve made a mistake and fix it. Human surgeons are far from perfect, but every surgery is not the exact same surgery and if things go wrong, I don’t think you want a robot thinking on its feet. If it has feet at all, which it probably will not.

Still, this really is the dream for a certain segment of people. Especially the men who dream of a future where they all have super hot AI girlfriends and all of the human women will be very sad and jealous and wish that we had loved the misogynists when we had the chance. Oh how we will rue the day.

But, as we seem to keep finding out … the AI revolution isn’t working out quite like they thought it would. Outside of people who seek vengeance on artists for being too left-wing (and doctors for being pro-vaccine), no one is really all that excited about it.

The Remote Labor Study, a project of both Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety, found that while AI can technically “do” some jobs, it cannot do them very well. In a sort of modern John Henry scenario, researchers compared hundreds of different sorts of work assignments from remote work freelance sites completed by both humans and AI bots. These included a variety of projects like “3D product animations, transcribing music, coding web video games and formatting research papers for publication.”

How did that work out? Well, Manus, the highest performing AI program, was only able to complete 2.5 percent of the tasks … so, not great?

According to The Washington Post, “the AI systems failed on nearly half of the Remote Labor Index projects by producing poor-quality work, and they left more than a third incomplete. Nearly 1 in 5 had basic technical problems such as producing corrupt files.”

On the other hand, it was also a lot cheaper than human labor, so it is ideal for employers who don’t actually care if the work is good or not.

For example, here is a floor plan designed by a human being, based on a hand drawn sketch …

And here is the AI version of that.

That is definitely an entirely different apartment, and not a very good one at that. I’m particularly confused by the closed off living room situation and the size of the kitchen. Pick a random human off the street and they will probably do a better job than that. As a bonus, they also will not convince your teenager to commit suicide or produce fake CSAM of them, so that is always a lovely bonus. Sure, they might become a Nazi, depending on whom you pick, as that does seem to be going around lately, but otherwise, you’ll probably just get a floor plan.

In another example, the bots were asked to produce an infographic based on “world happiness scores” by country. They also did very poorly on that.

However, I am pretty fond of this one as the Grok version included a section that measured “Dystopia & Residual” and then made the entire US the color that matched it. It’s not how one would normally do any kind of infographic, but it’s pretty amusing nonetheless — especially considering the myriad ways in which Grok and its creator have contributed to making us all feel very “Dystopia & Residual.” Especially when said creator talks about how people should just not bother with getting an education, especially the kind of education that might lead you to disagree with him or question his judgment in any way.

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So far, it’s really not looking too good for AI, although this is the second time this study has been conducted (the first was in October) and the researchers say there have been some slight improvements since then. They intend to conduct it regularly to see how close we are to the robot takeover.

On the bright side, those of us here should be okay, at least for a while, since so far, Grok is pretty bad at making insightful commentary or jokes. Musk went on Joe Rogan’s show not too long ago to brag about Grok’s ability to do “epic roasts” of people. They were not, as it turned out, all that epic.

Via Wired:

Three of my coworkers and I set up shop in my boss’s office so I could privately undertake the embarrassing task of telling Grok to roast all of us one by one. I used Musk’s exact instructions, “forbidden words” and all.
Admittedly, we all burst out laughing when Grok told me my bangs looked like “pubic hair.” But it got tedious fast, with all four of us getting variations of the same sophomoric disses including: looking like a lumberjack’s “discard pile” or “crusty asshole” depending on the amount of vulgarity I encouraged; looking like a “goddamn librarian”; looking like a “thrift store tragedy”; wearing glasses from a “hipster’s landfill.” Eventually, these common themes culminated in one of us being described as a “tweed-wearing hipster who fucked up a lumberjack audition.” Grok advised the roastee to sit up straight “before those jeans rip open and expose your sad, corduroy-loving ass.”

Yeah, I’m not too worried.

Maybe I’m a luddite, but I like things made by humans. I like human creativity. I like human ingenuity. I like human teeth and hands. I like the human ability to know that they’ve nicked my spleen during surgery so I don’t bleed out on the table. That one might be my favorite, actually. Love not dying!

At best, right now, AI is a search engine that you have to fact check. Given how many times we’ve seen it go terribly, terribly wrong at this point and how bad it is at doing most things, I think it’s going to be a real long while before we have to worry too much about it replacing us and taking our jobs.

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