There’s too much vested interest in being certain about AI’s inevitable positive outcomes or its inevitable negative outcomes. The attention and engagement from a definitive point of view are too strong to avoid. So, of course, points of view on AI will drift toward the extremes, all in or all out.
But I’m going to be honest. My view—to the extent it even matters outside my own cozy head—moves all over the place. I’m uncertain. Pick a day and I see AI as:
- A valuable convenience in handling lots of complex information at scale, such as summarizing and synthesizing regulatory documents and technical white papers
- A scary tool to create disinformation at scale on any topic
- An improvement on traditional search for finding pieces of information or explaining complex topics, such as explaining how Greeks work in options and derivatives
- A risk of acquiring a misleading understanding or a fake example, especially in areas that already suffer from a lot of lies, scams, and false takes like cryptocurrency
- A useful shortcut if you somehow get stuck in the right way to put together a sentence or find a word you’re looking for
- An easy way to get a second pair of eyes and some basic editorial feedback when finishing something at or near the eleventh hour
- A clear temptation for lazy writing riddled with cliches and conventional wisdom that pulps the word salad of SEO blogs into a nauseating sludge
- A fun set of toys to play with to create media in areas where you have little to no skill
- A symptom of the inevitable involution of content into nothing but content about content about content, which fulfills the essence of what it means to think of ideas as content in the first place
- A frightening prospect of replacement for writers, creators, marketers, strategists, and so many other kinds of knowledge worker
- A fiscally sound means for taking people costs off of individual organization’s balance sheets without any social or economic alternative to keep people functioning at or above subsistence levels
- A future elimination not just of thought leadership that benefits business decision-makers but decision-making itself as AIs make buying high-stakes decisions and AI boards approve them
Do you think you know? I don’t. And I don’t think you actually do either.
PS: I doubt this AI usage research will change anyone’s mind. But a study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities.
It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline. Statistical analyses demonstrated a significant negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking scores. Frequent AI users exhibited diminished ability to critically evaluate information and engage in reflective problem-solving.
Perhaps, AI will make itself less and less subject to critical scrutiny by making it harder and harder to exercise critical scrutiny itself.
In other words, maybe we’ll never know.
