And so is your reputation.
Jensen Huang — CEO of NVIDIA, the company that makes the chips powering the AI revolution — has a message for his engineers. If you’re earning $500,000 a year and you’re not consuming at least $250,000 in AI tokens, he’s going to be, in his words, “deeply alarmed.” He’s spending $2 billion a year on tokens for his engineering team. And he wants more.
The signal is clear: organizations are pushing AI adoption hard. If you’re not using the tools, you’re already behind.
So people are responding logically to the incentives, and using the tools.
And that’s where the problem starts.
The New Performance Theatre
Meta. Shopify. Probably your organization too. Most of them are pushing employees to adopt AI, to incorporate use of these tools into workflows. And who can blame them? They are facing what they believe to be an existential risk.
Internal leaderboards are tracking who’s burning the most tokens. Managers are rewarding heavy AI usage. Performance reviews that look favourably on anyone who can prove they’re “embracing the tools.”
The incentive is obvious: be seen using AI.
And so people are gaming it. Prompting fast. Copying outputs. Shipping whatever comes back.
Not because the work is good. Because the activity looks good.
This is performative AI adoption. And it’s producing a tidal wave of slop.
The Slop Epidemic
We’ve all seen this play out.
A document lands in your inbox. It hits all the right notes on the surface; well-structured and fluent. It looks like someone put some time into it.
But it’s completely hollow.
It is generic analysis, with no real insight. Obvious points dressed up in professional language. Zero evidence that a human being with actual judgment was involved in producing it.
That’s AI slop. And the person who sent it thinks they did something useful.
They will almost always mention that they used AI to help them, pointing to how quickly they shipped the work.
As if the tool is the story. As if disclosing the instrument absolves them of responsibility for the output.
It doesn’t.
The Only Rule That Matters
When your name is on something, you own it. Full stop.
Nobody cares how you made it. They care if it solves their problem. They care if it’s accurate. They care if it’s worth their time.
You wouldn’t hand someone a spreadsheet full of errors and say “Excel made a mistake.” You wouldn’t submit a report full of typos and point at your keyboard. But many people are comfortable doing this with AI. Passing around sub-par work, and using AI as an excuse for the poor quality.
The tool is invisible, but the output is yours.
This isn’t a new rule that AI created. It’s the oldest rule in professional life. AI just gave people a new excuse for delivering sloppy work that wasn’t thought through.
The Opportunity
Here’s what Jensen Huang is actually saying — and it’s not “ship faster.”
He’s saying: you have access to technology that can amplify what you’re capable of. Use it like your career depends on it. Because it does.
That means something very different from generating slop quickly.
Use AI to challenge your thinking before you commit to it. Stress-test an argument before you walk into the room. Find the gap in your analysis before your boss does. Close the distance between what you could produce alone and what’s actually possible.
That’s the move. Not faster. Better.
The people who figure that out will not be replaced by AI. They’re going to be the ones running the room.
Before you ship your work, ask yourself a question:
Can I stand behind this, without blaming anyone or anything else for the quality?
If the answer is no, you’re not done yet.
Go back. Push harder. Make it yours.
The tools are extraordinary. The accountability hasn’t changed.
Your name is on it, and you only have one reputation. Protect it.