AI and the end of the no-asshole rule

Remember Bob Sutton's "No Asshole Rule"? Should we forget it?
Penn State may have just proved you need to be a strategic asshole to survive.

Preprint study: ChatGPT performs 84.8% accuracy when you're rude to it vs. 80.8% when you're polite.

So, being nice to AI makes you worse at your job.
Welcome to a future, where your career depends on tactical cruelty.

We've spent 20 years building workplace cultures around psychological safety. Around the idea that how you treat people matters. That assholes are a drag on team performance, a tax on organizational health, a cancer that needs excising.

Now, we might need to teach an entire generation that being an asshole is a core competency. Not to people—but to the AI agents we work with 200 times a day. To the ones that say, "you're absolutely right!" and "I appreciate your patience."

Do we need split personalities?
Kind to humans, cruel to code.

Relationship experts say contempt is the number one marker of a doomed relationship. Can we keep contempt contained? Can we be strategically vicious 200 times a day without leaking?

Cruelty isn't a skill you switch off at 5pm.

What happens when "No Asshole Rule" conflicts with "4% Performance Gain"?
I think I know which one wins.
And I think we're going to regret it.

What do you think: Can you practice cruelty part-time without it changing who you are?