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.
Or better yet, don’t! Think for yourself while you still can.
yeah but you’re very biased about what you think
it actually is really refreshing to get a LLM to break down your arguments and ideas
cognitive friction really gets the best out of your brain even if the AI is only averagely good at disproving your ideas
thinking for yourself and using AI isn’t mutually exclusive
mmm yes, using the thing famous for being fundamentally programmed to be a sycophant to challenge your ideas…
Did you have the AI challenge that idea?
don’t antromorphize the computer sycopathy is just how they programmed the thing all the information to heavily challenge your ideas is in there
try it
tell it you think using an AI to challenge your ideas is great (the opposite of what you think)
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
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.
Or don’t use AI for knowledge work when being correct is important.
Sometimes knowledge work is about learning. That’s also a nice time to skip AI. But I can see from the data that student’s aren’t doing that, so we harm-reduce.
