AI makes tech jobs easier. Right?
Not always, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke said during an interview on "The Knowledge Project" podcast, released on Tuesday. His take: AI helps employees produce more material, more quickly — without taking responsibility for whether it is useful or correct.
"We call those 'slop grenades' that people toss at each other," he said. "And that's definitely a bad thing."
The problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.
He offered an example: Someone might send an unnecessarily long AI-written email, forcing its recipient to use another large language model to summarize it.
"Why did we invent decompression and recompression?" he said. "This is terrible."
Shopify has aggressively embraced AI. The e-commerce platform has rolled out AI tools for agents. Internally, Lütke said it's internal agent, River, handles a large share — possibly as much as half — of the company's production code pull requests.
Lütke said AI is most valuable when it makes people's thinking clearer and more concise. The tech is least valuable when it's adding slop to a coworker's desk.
"Humans take responsibility," he said. "Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better."
Shopify didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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Ben Shimkus is a reporter for the Business News desk. He writes about cars, transportation, retail, and jobs. Ben's reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Verge, Automotive News, USA Today, AutoBody News, LGBTQ Nation, TopSpeed, and Out Magazine. He's also held staff writing positions at The U.S. Sun and the Daily Mail. He graduated from NYU with a Master's in journalism in 2024. Email Ben at [email protected] or message him privately on Signal at bshimkus.41.
