With all of the optimism about how synthetic intelligence will make issues extra productive within the office — in addition to the concern round its potential to displace staff — one other dimension to AI in life and work can be changing into extra obvious: How individuals are starting to work together with the expertise in new (and generally unsettling) methods.
HR Dive spoke with Michael Elkon, companion at Fisher Phillips, about what’s on the horizon for compliance and AI within the office.
Staff utilizing AI to harass a co-worker
When the web turned commonplace within the mid-to-late ‘90s, employers marveled at the way it made the office extra environment friendly. On the similar time, “individuals discovered, ‘Oh wait, there’s porn on the web,’” Elkon stated.
Immediately, specific photos and movies couldn’t solely be accessed simply, however shared with or despatched to others. That sharing led to Title VII lawsuits alleging sexual harassment.
Elkon famous the latest story of a teenager in Spain who used AI to deep-fake nude photos of classmates. It isn’t a lot of a leap, he stated, to think about staff utilizing the identical expertise and strategies towards co-workers.
Finally, “lurid tales like that … are going emigrate into the office,” he stated.
Employees changing into overly connected to AI — romantically or in any other case
Lately, a narrative went viral of a New Jersey man who reportedly fell in love with an AI chatbot and proposed — regardless of already having a spouse and a two-year-old youngster. Removed from being simply the plot of a science fiction movie, individuals are already starting to develop seemingly unhealthy attachments to AI instruments, and a few of these attachments are occurring at work, Elkon stated.
Elkon spoke on the subject at a SHRM 2025 convention session earlier this summer season alongside his spouse, Andrea, a medical psychologist. In the course of the Q&A portion of the session, an HR chief stepped ahead to say the difficulty had already cropped up at her office with a former worker.
“You’ve gotten this entire overlay the place you’ve got youthful people who find themselves used to AI of their day-to-day lives. You’ve gotten youthful people who find themselves particularly utilizing AI for emotional capabilities, as a result of it will get across the loneliness that lots of people really feel. And you then dump AI instruments into the office,” Elkon stated. “It then turns into one thing that you just type of have to deal with.”
Employees requesting AI as an inexpensive lodging
As staff develop extra accustomed to — and probably depending on — AI, each to perform duties and for emotional help, employers are prone to see a rising set of AI lodging requests, Elkon famous.
AI is poised to be a game-changer with regards to accessibility, making it doubtless employers will cope with quite a lot of requests to accumulate or use instruments that higher allow staff to do their job. Whereas a lot of these requests are doubtless acquainted territory, a employee with anxiousness or autism may equally request fixed entry to a chatbot for emotional or social help — one thing most employers doubtless haven’t handled earlier than.
Whereas these new considerations might introduce new conditions for employers, going again to the fundamentals will help them start to develop insurance policies and make choices. For instance, regardless of the request, the interactive course of continues to be the gold normal for deciding on lodging: “Courts have frameworks already,” Elkon stated. AI is “only a new piece of expertise that may probably become involved in an inexpensive lodging evaluation.”
And for extra novel circumstances, like AI situationships within the office? There’s no actual playbook fairly but.
“I believe we’re type of on the cusp of numerous issues,” Elkon stated. “Like some other technological advance, individuals are going to have to determine, , what are the precise and unsuitable methods to make use of it.”
