Artificial Intelligence promises many things, and a lot of those revolve around time saving, or efficiency. Such promises are most likely to be realised by the bosses, not the workers. Have any modern home conveniences (dish washers, washing machines) reduced the number of hours we work, or just allowed us to find hours of other tasks to do instead? So, at best, AI will allow your bosses to expect more from you in the same number of hours.
But at the same time AI is going to create a whole lot more work for you, whether you use it or not. And this isn’t in the sense of ‘new jobs for more people’. This is ‘every job will need more work’. And that’s on top of the more that your boss is already expecting of you.
AI – what is it good for?
It’s recommended to at least try to read a little bit of AI-positive analysis. In that vein I’ve tried a training course – AI for Designers, and I read the renowned blog One Useful Thing, by Ethan Mollick.
Run by someone who used to work for an AI product company, the training course covers all the ways in which you can use AI to help with your design process. I’m sure the skills are transferable, just like the problems. Mollick’s blog, meanwhile, essentially monitors the ever-expanding capabilities of AI through an increasingly accurate picture of an otter on a plane. Again, I’m sure the skills are transferable.
The key takeaway from these sources are that AI can generate impressive resources – ideas, images, diagrams, slides – at a rate any purely human team would struggle to match. Another takeaway (made explicit in the training) is that chatbots and the like are prone to producing mediocre, average or slightly off-track ideas unless your prompts are tuned. Already we see that we’re now working for the AI…
And the advice is to always keep humans in the loop. AI produces ideas, but the true designer is the person who sifts through all this with a trained eye, and produces the best (or discards the worst). And chatbots can be asked to come up with 50 ideas at the touch of a button! That’s a genuine suggestion. But why not 100? Or 10,000? It’s all the same to AI.
Humans as AI conduits
So now that PowerPoint addict in the office suddenly has a robot that can spit out dozens of graphs, images and slides, each with a unique design. AI bots can submit software bugs by the bucket-load. Your own ‘companion’ is giving you a million mediocre ideas that you need to sift through, at a speed to satisfy the boss who thinks everything should be done sooner now.
The saddest trend is for people to get bots to go out into the real world with their credit cards and try to earn some passive income. I wonder how many ideas it has to trawl through before it loses $147.17 for every $0 it earns.
Everything AI gets involved with is going to increase the workload as much as it automates it. That’s baked into their business model, as you’re paying by the amount of computation you get the AI to burn through. It’s great that AI will be ‘democratising’ design and writing novels and creating art, but it’s going to generate a tidal wave of ‘content’ that someone’s going to have to deal with.
It’s like spam for all parts of your life.