While Google CEO Sundar Pichai proudly tells the world that 75 percent of all new code at the company is AI-generated, internally Google employees are sharing memes about how AI is bad at that exact task and makes their job harder.\u00a0One such meme was posted to an internal Google message board called Memegen on May 19, right as the company kicked off its annual I\/O conference where it reveals its biggest products and features, according to a copy seen by 404 Media. Unsurprisingly, I\/O 2026 was heavily focused on Google\u2019s AI products, which seemed to frustrate or at least amuse some Google employees. This particular meme was a screenshot of Google\u2019s on stage presentation. \u201cI\/O announces entirely new ways to slop,\u201d the meme said, with the word \u201cslop\u201d edited into the image in Impact font. The meme was quickly given more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.404 Media recreated the memes we\u2019ve seen rather than sharing the same exact images in order to protect our sources, who were not permitted to share them with the press.\u00a0\ud83d\udca1Do you know anything else about how Google or Meta uses AI? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at \u202a@emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.I wasn\u2019t able to confirm the exact number of anti AI memes shared on Google\u2019s Memegen message board, but I\u2019ve seen dozens of them. One Google employee told me that there are dozens of new memes like this being shared every week. This source estimated that the number of anti AI memes shared inside Google in the last year is in the \u201chigh hundreds \/ thousands.\u201d This employee also said that the number of anti AI memes \u201cspikes when there\u2019s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something.\u201dJetski is Google\u2019s internal AI coding tool. One image shared on May 14 on Memegen I\u2019ve seen shows an interaction between a Google employee and Jetski. \u201cHow did you get these metrics?\u201d the Google employee\u2019s prompt said. The screenshot shows that Jetski \u201cthought for 11s,\u201d and then said: \u201cTo be completely transparent, the specific numeric metrics and quantitative values presented in that supplemental report were simulated by the secondary sub-agent rather than extracted from live production systems.\u201d In other words: Jetski made them up.\u00a0\u201cThanks Jetski, very useful report,\u201d says the impact text over the screenshot. That meme has more than 400 upvotes.\u201cWow, it\u2019s learned to pass blame, it truly is human!\u201d said the first comment on that post.\u00a0\u00a0Another meme shared on May 19 showed Star Trek\u2019s Starship Enterprise traveling at light speed. \u201cAI on the I\/O stage: writes an operating system,\u201d said the text overlaid on that image. This image was juxtaposed with a picture of a child stuck on a slide at a playground. \u201cAI when I use it: invents fake proto fields,\u201d said the text overlaid on that image. This meme quickly got more than 50 thumbs up.\u00a0Another meme shared on May 19 is the image of the big forehead fish. \u201cAren\u2019t you using AI? Who is still taking so much time? AI is magic, are you a muggle? New best AI tool launched just today,\u201d says the text overlaid on the annoying fish. \u201cMe, working,\u201d said the text overlaid on the diver who is attempting to work.Someone responded to that meme a day later with a picture of Stimpy from the cartoon Ren and Stimpy looking at a red button, sweating, with a man standing on his back and looking at him expectantly. \u201cCompanies trying to get me to use their AI features,\u201d the text says.\u00a0A meme shared on May 13 shows Margot Robbie as Barbie dancing enthusiastically on one side of the image, and Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer looking into the middle distance with the weight of the world on his shoulders. \u201cCL author Vibe Coding massive changes,\u201d says the text over Barbie. CL is short for changelist, meaning changes to code in existing projects.\u00a0 \u201cCode reviewers,\u201d says the text over Oppenheimer. That meme got more than 160 thumbs up.\u00a0It refers to a problem 404 Media has covered previously, which is that AI-generated code is easy to produce quickly and in large quantities, but it makes the work of human code reviewers much more difficult because there is so much more to sort through, and no one understands the code because no one wrote it.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re finding that AIs have relieved the pressure and bottleneck of code generation, but that everything else has become the bottleneck, Google-wide testing and build times, human review delays, comparatively slow infra and VCS,\u201d one Google employee told me. \u201cThe conclusion many colleagues are arriving at is that Google\u2019s infra [infrastructure] and eng [engineering] culture was built to be stable and intentionally slow, and that pressures to accelerate using AI are bumping into that.\u201dThis employee said that there\u2019s been an \u201cunderstandable push\u201d to automate part of what his team works on, but that there\u2019s also a pressure to \u201cinflate counter factual metrics.\u201d For example, Google will claim it would have taken them much longer to complete a project if it didn\u2019t use AI. The employee said he could easily AI generate 100 individual tasks, but actually finishing the job requires human intervention and takes just as much time as always.\u00a0\u201cProjects AI-related are prioritized, everything else gets pushed off (I was supposed to work on something testing related and after a lot of back and forth that project was cancelled and now I was dragged into an Agents related project),\u201d another Google employee told me. \u201cI have zero motivation, I feel kind of burnt out of the constant shifts. I do not have an alternative at the moment (and I am sending my CV around).\u201d\u201cWe encourage our engineers to vigorously test and critique our internal tools; that candid feedback loop is vital to how we build technology,” a Google spokesperson told me. “AI coding models are designed to assist developers, but it\u2019s critical that we maintain humans in the loop \u2013 including the oversight and expertise of our world class engineering talent. We continue to refine our internal tools based on employee feedback to ensure they are enabling, and not hindering, daily productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"