I realize that whenever I post I am speaking to people who are already predisposed against AI, but I want to argue again against using generative AI (particularly text-based genAI).
And this is not about plagiarism/theft, it's not about the environment, it's not about any of the myriad ethical issues with AI.
My job is one that requires a fair amount of critical thinking. I do (among other things) strategic, operational, and tactical planning, which means that I have to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking through what the path forward or the process should be for stuff.
One of the biggest failings I see in some people I work with, and one of the things that differentiates someone who is successful at the job versus someone who is not, is their ability to do critical thinking.
This is critical thinking at the big level, but it's also the little things. Do you know what the words you have written down say? Do you understand what you are advocating for? When faced with a challenge, big or small, do you have the ability to reason through to a solution?
This last one is most generalizable to basically all aspects of life. Your life will be very difficult if you can't look at a problem and reason through to a solution.
What does this have to do with genAI?
A lot of generative AI is about bypassing those skills. Even when you're "just" asking chatGPT to write you an email or edit your email to make it easier to read, you are bypassing the skills involved in reasoning through how to write a good email.
And those skills will atrophy. If you never need to think about how to articulate an idea clearly and concisely, you won't improve your ability to articulate an idea clearly and concisely. And when you need to do so without the aid of generative AI, you are much less likely to succeed at it.
The act of working through a problem is one of the main ways that you get better at solving problems.
Without the ability to do the thing, you also don't have the ability to check the genAI platform's work. How do you know if an email is clear, if you don't know what it means to write a clear email? How do you know if a summary of a text is right, if you don't know what happens in that text?
GenAI hallucinates. It makes stuff up. It can't do math. It's wrong, a lot, in a lot of different ways.
In the end, these are two big things that you need in your life that using genAI steals from you: 1) the ability to think critically and solve problems and 2) the ability to check work.
You will reach a point in your life where you can't genAI your way out of something. And if you don't know how to work without it, you will fail.
So do the work, even if it's harder, because you need to be able to do the work.
dailybridgerton
dededos
romaincrisis
titsay
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
