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.

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[–] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 8 hours ago

    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.

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