> I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks

It's wild that you just outright admitted this. Seems like your employer would do best to let you go and find someone that can use tools to increase their productivity.

Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. More than once I've had my hand slapped professionally for taking ownership of something my immediate superiors wanted to micromanage. Fine, here I was trying to take something off their plate that was in my wheelhouse, but if that's where they want to draw the line I guess I'll just give less of a shit.

If you actively deny your employees ownership, then the relationship becomes purely transactional.

It's also possible OP is just a bad employee, but I've met far more demoralized good employees than malicious bad ones over the course of my career.

A lot of orgs are bad about giving credit to employees for productivity, what's the point of working 4x harder if it'll just result in a few % point difference in yearly raise, and you're still going to have to job hop to get a respectable pay bump? Might as well work less and spend time polishing your resume/side projects to make yourself as employable as possible. This is 100% the fault of poor incentives on the part of employers.