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The story
In August, a post on Hatena Anonymous Diary went viral on social media: after the author streamlined their own work using AI and shared the method internally, they just ended up with more work filling the freed-up hours — so nothing actually got easier. Companies like DeNA have cut workloads by as much as 90% in some cases, but that doesn’t automatically translate into “going home early.” On 5ch, comments ranged from sympathetic (“this is SO typically Japanese-company”) to frustration at a corporate structure where productivity gains never show up in wages or staffing, alongside counterarguments from people who say using freed-up time within work hours for other tasks is only natural. The discussion spread from there.
On August 3, a post titled “The story of how streamlining my job with AI somehow only increased my workload” appeared on Hatena Anonymous Diary and went viral on social media. The poster — described by coworkers as a hard worker — had, with good intentions, tested out ways to use AI and shared them with the company. But once an 8-hour task got compressed to 4 hours, that task was thereafter simply treated as “a 4-hour job,” and the remaining 4 hours got filled with something else.
In the end, the poster writes, it wasn’t a case of “someone who used to work 8 hours can now go home after 4 hours thanks to AI” — it was just “someone who used to finish 1 task in 8 hours now finishes 2 tasks in 8 hours.” The person who shared the technique ended up fielding all the explanations, training, and follow-up questions, with no change in pay. The poster called themselves an “inconvenient Santa Claus.”
Reactions were split between people who found it painfully relatable (“SO typically Japanese-company”) and skeptics who suspected it was a fabricated story written by AI. But the tendency for time saved to simply get reallocated to more work — rather than translating directly into shorter working hours — also shows up in survey data. So who’s actually benefiting from the time AI frees up, and for what?
Source: itmedia.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
That's exactly why it ends up like this — Japanese companies can't fire people or cut their pay.
Going forward, simply hiring someone at all is going to be a liability.
When a giant corporation with a ton of employees rolls out AI, the costs are absurd — since they're using it for dumb questions and typing into Excel, the waste is next-level.
On the other hand, a one-person operation that uses AI well can generate several times the output of a big company for next to nothing.
Lol, don't start trimming letters out of your sentences too (the original post accidentally dropped the "ba" that turns "reduce" into "if you reduce" — a little irony given the topic)
Just ask AI, it'll tell you.
This thread's probably full of AI bot posts too.
Making documents doesn't take much brainpower, but I feel like it still wears you out.
Exactly this. That's precisely why I went self-employed. When you're self-employed, the harder you work, the more you earn — and if you finish early, you're done, no need to go help anyone else out.
Regardless of AI, the whole point of raising productivity is to increase profit per person. I'm not saying work overtime for it, but isn't it normal to just use the extra time within your regular hours for another task? Discretionary-labor or contract-work arrangements might be different, I don't know about those.
It'd be an easy sell if wages actually rose proportionally for employees whose productivity went up — but Japanese companies keep that fixed no matter what.
What's actually going up is AI's productivity instead. In other words, you're teaching your job to some outside company's AI and training it — so it can eventually replace you entirely.
That's what "promoting AI" really means. And which companies make this AI? The Japanese are using American AI. So in the near future, it's America that's going to end up taking most of these jobs.
If engineers at other companies are tripling their efficiency with AI, doubling yours doesn't mean much — and that's on top of Japanese productivity already being called low to begin with.
I have generative AI do the fact-checking and double-checking too — I pit ChatGPT and Claude against each other.
If you're still complaining that AI at its current stage makes a lot of mistakes, that's on the skill level of whoever's using it. Build yourself a harness that runs verification passes over and over.
If that's how it plays out, it's fine.
This is exactly the difference between staying an employee forever and taking the path toward becoming a manager/owner.
You're being short-circuited in your thinking there — "short-circuit" being the electrical term applied metaphorically to a person.
> it was just "someone who used to finish 1 task in 8 hours now finishes 2 tasks in 8 hours."
This is exactly why I hate commuting to the office and prefer working from home. If you're remote and streamline things with AI, you can just quietly wrap up your work on your own terms. But if you're in the office, you can't just get up and leave whenever you want.
That's just because your company can't manage properly. If you go by deliverables, there's a demand for double the output either way.
That's a bogus comparison — no one who actually knew anything about the Yayoi period would say that.
Sounds like complaints are the biggest problem at your company.
For disability hires, pay sits right at minimum wage — capable or not, everyone gets the same hourly rate.
That alone would be fine, but even just through email, all sorts of people fling work at you however they please. I don't know the first thing about AI, but I'd love for something like AI to judge "this person's at their limit" and just handle the replies for me.
A capitalist's dream.
A proper manager hands the profits over to shareholders, lol.
Your talented employees are going to quit, you know.
That's why you make sure your talented employees get shares.
This is exactly why publicly listed companies are going to keep getting more and more obsolete going forward. Streamline existing work with AI. Cut headcount to hand profits to shareholders. Huh? Somehow there's nobody left who can take on anything new. The streets fill up with unemployed people, the economy tanks, and nothing sells! Why is that?!
CEO: "AI cut our workload by 90%, so we don't need more than half the staff anymore — you don't need to come in starting tomorrow~"
Employee: "You're telling us AI makes us unnecessary and firing us — that's illegal dismissal!"
Court: "The dismissal is invalid. Pay each employee 10 million yen in damages."
That's the kind of country this is, lol.
In Japan, companies just corner people into "voluntarily" quitting through exile rooms, power harassment, sexual harassment, moral harassment, and general bullying.
So going forward, we're headed into an era where startups that minimize hiring and optimize on labor costs come out on top.
Can you actually use the free version for work?
Depends on the job.
No idea. I pay for both.
Background and key points of this discussion
Behind this topic lies Japan’s deep-rooted culture of evaluating work by hours spent rather than output. Even when AI shortens the time a task takes, since there’s no established system for evaluating people by the volume or quality of what they produce, the time saved tends to just get replaced with an additional assignment. In the thread, the argument that “productivity gains should show up in pay” ran alongside the argument that “of course you use your freed-up time within work hours for something else” — both partly valid, which is why opinions split. One point that tends to get overlooked is a structural constraint under Japan’s Labor Standards Act: companies find it difficult to unilaterally dismiss people or drastically change their workload simply because performance has improved, which feeds a cycle of “we can’t cut staff, so we just pile on more work instead.” Going forward, the key question may be shifting the framing of AI adoption’s benefits — away from “shorter hours” and toward “handling a greater volume of work in the same amount of time.”
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Management: “Use AI to take it easy and go home early” → Employees: “We’re not going home” — Even DeNA, which cut workloads by up to 90%, is grappling with the wall of AI efficiency.”
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