We’re seeing a lot of students, teachers, and scientists produce more, and worse, outputs because of improper AI use. It’s possible to use it better: Have it imitate a critic. Learning and creativity come from getting criticism and experiencing friction.
We found that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas – to generate friction – they can significantly improve their performance. Previous research on human-AI collaboration for loan evaluations had similar results.
A study I was not involved with found that creative writers produce better copy when they use AI as a sounding board rather than to ghostwrite.
This is what peer review, teacher feedback, and group workshops are for. In college I didn’t need an llm to critique my work. That was the job of my classmates, and mine for their writing. And for those outside of college, you can still just seek out writing circles, either irl or online. It takes some work, but you’ll get better feedback from real humans who can actually feel the emotion in your writing. You can also seek out similar communities for other hobbies. The only reason for someone to pick an ai critique over a human one is convenience and the cost is way too high to justify that
Idk about you, but my mentors and peers are all busy stressing over the polycrisis.
I’m sure the subjects of the research mentioned in the article do all that.
I can say AI is being used for a lot of stupid wasteful things. I don’t know what it costs for AI to seemingly improve our knowledge workers, but to me that is worth something.
Knowledge work is generally pretty expensive; it’s done in dense places, uses a lot of air travel, has pretty big long-term consequences. Even the high-end estimates on AI costs are probably worth modest gains for knowledge workers.