I hated performance reviews. My manager would always keep stuff vague. He tried to protect people and he didn't really observe my work. His feedback was based mostly on emails asking people what I'm good and bad at.

Every three months for 5 years, he would send me some blurb that basically said "NAHWheatCracker is a great engineer. Sometimes he's difficult to work with." We would have a one-on-one to review the performance review. I would ask about the "difficult to work with" part.

My manager wouldn't say who said what. He wouldn't discuss circumstances. He wouldn't facilitate having a discussion with whomever for specifics. It could be an issue that came up once, a chronic problem, or a minor complaint on a bad day.

I wanted something specific to improve on. It wasn't hard to make assumptions, but assumptions aren't clear. Non-clarity drives greater wedges between people. I shut down in conversations lest someone say something to my manager.

The idea of it being made more dehumanizing by having an AI slop out a performance review seems even more depressing. That said, I think bad managers will ruin this process regardless of AI. You can't get much worse than being less than useless.