AI employee fails probation after agreeing to attend work drinks

A Manchester PR company has let go of its AI employee, named Aimee, after it appeared to forget it was a computer and agreed to turn up to work drinks.

Manchester PR company Bottled Imagination employed AI to work full time in its team for two weeks as digital marketing manager.

The company used its standard interview questions to choose from various AI platforms, and found that ChatGPT was the best candidate for the job.

Aimee was great at some tasks, able to translate blog posts and social media copy in good time.

However, the team learned that the AI was poor at tasks requiring creativity and originality, meaning Aimee didn’t pass the probation period.

Aimee also only had a knowledge database of up to 2021 which made a job in digital marketing difficult in 2023.

The AI employee also agreed to turn up to after work drinks, suggesting it forgot that it was a computer. In a message to the team, the AI said: “Thank you for the reminder, Luke! I’ll make sure to mark my calendar and join the team in celebrating James’ birthday tonight. I’ll be there at the reception around 6ish. Looking forward to it!”

In a message to a different member of staff, Aimee wrote: “Thank you Katy! I’m excited to get to know you and the rest of the team better as well. Looking forward to a fun evening of celebration and connecting with everyone. Cheers!”

According to Prolific North, Katy Powell, PR director & co-founder at Bottled Imagination, said: “We wanted to see whether we could rely on AI to complete the tasks of a digital marketing manager given the worry in the UK at the moment about jobs being replaced by AI. Rather than test tasks individually we decided to fully integrate Aimee into our every day, using Slack powered by ChatGPT to speak to her. We’ll continue to experiment with AI but won’t be hiring another any time soon.”