My Irritation With The Phrase "AI Will Free Up Time To Do X Or Y"

Unfortunately it doesn't take much to irritate me at the moment. This morning for example I read the above article in The Times.

The piece basically outlines that the government is proposing a streamlining of departments and that there will be, from what I can tell, about £85m spent on AI transformation and tools, that will "reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and improve outcomes." Also, and this is was the irritating phrase in the article, "to free up civil servant's time to improve public services." I have no idea what that actually means in reality, but it is a very familiar phrase to one that I've heard being used in education. Something along the lines that AI will help with your workload to free up time to focus on direct interaction with your class, for example, or in the case of an advert from a popular AI platform for teachers, to 

Take up a new sport - Learn to cook delicious new dishes - Spend more time in the great outdoors - See more of your family and friends. Our 100+ AI tools save our teachers over 10+ hours every week! What will you do with your free time?

My irritation lays in the belief that AI will reduce teacher (or civic servant's) workloads and that it will therefore, free up time. This is something I've written about and questioned on several occasions. I'll certainly concede that while AI may help you to complete some tasks quicker, often all that means is that you fill the time you saved carrying out another task. Now, whether those tasks are what a teacher might believe is a boring, bureaucratic burden or is something that is more exciting, high impact and pupil focused, the point is the same, the teacher is still completing tasks. Therefore, workload does not reduce, a teacher may find that the more boring bureaucratic stuff is done more quickly, but the time saved is now filled with something else. Therefore, time is not freed up and you did not gain an hour, you gained another task. Something borne out by a recent report "AI use among UK teachers doubles, but working hours still don't come down."

So, going back to The Times article, I think that phrase about freeing up civil servant's time to improve public services, is just there as a sweetener to civil service unions, the civil servants themselves and the public, to make the introduction of AI products into their work roles, seem more palatable. That it is helping them and the public. When I believe the reality is that the government really wants to use AI to cut costs, in other words, inevitable job losses.