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 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.
Using it for learning stuff that’s already well known (e.g. beginner level coding) is fine.
Using it for “knowledge work” is a bad idea idea, because AI pushes toward the mean, while research by definition is focused on new edges of knowledge. This is is exactly the space where AI will introduce biases and untruths that will be very hard to spot. Using it also reduces critical thinking ability which is critical in this space.
If you’re doing knowledge work, you are an expert. You’re very likely to catch biases and untruths (and those you don’t catch, humanity couldn’t catch. These concerns are just as applicable to a human by themselves.)
Sorry, but that’s just not true. Researchers might be experts in teir field generally, but day-to-day work is very rarely focused on well-known parts of their domain, because the whole point is to obtain new knowledge.
Source: I’m a climate scientist, have been in and around academia for nearly 20 years.
Could you flesh this out for me, I’m not sure I understand? I think you’re saying:
- experts are not well posed to catch biases and untruths generated by genAI in their (research work)
- because as an academic climate scientist, your day-to-day work is spent on new climate science (and not established climate science).
I don’t see why (2) implies (1), but I agree with (2). As I intended it, (1) is my main claim. I follow it up with
- if an expert cannot spot a bias or flaw in genAI output, then they wouldn’t catch it from a peer either.
I don’t see how (2) helps with (3) either.
GenAI is an averager (as all empirical models are), so it tends towards predicting the mean of whatever it’s trained on (in a given context). But it also has noise added, so some variance comes back, but there’s no guaranteed that that mean+noise produces something meaningful/true/valuable.
But, GenAI is very good at producing syntactically correct language. This is a problem because it lulls the reader into a sense that the author knows what it’s talking about, when it doesn’t. When a junior scientist produces text, the awkward language alerts the reviewer to the poor thinking (same with a junior coder producing weak code). With an LLM, you don’t get that - it produces the impression of knowledge without any actual understanding.
This, combined with the lure of efficiency and the feeling of effectiveness, make it a honey pot for quick but sloppy thinking. I think this is what connects 2 to 1, especially in domains where it’s hard to get external validation from other people who can understand what you’re trying to mean, and not just say.
As for your point 3: I agree. People don’t spot flaws already, and that’s part of why we saw the replication crisis in behavioural science. Adding LLMs to the mix will just make things like that more likely.
So I think you’ve landed on the problem that I have with student use, and that the article has with scientist default use. It is very bad for folks to use AI to try to do the knowledge work directly, yet people are making this mistake constantly. YSK: it’s much better when you make AI increase the friction of knowledge work. (note neither are claiming that this use is particularly good; we’re doing damage control.)
I definitely notice sloppy thinking when I see it in someone else’s review of my papers. You certainly pick it up when you read climate-change-denialists. Experts are great at noticing sloppy thinking when it disagrees with them. That is the relationship you want with genAI if you are using it for knowledge work. Make it disagree with you, so you notice where it is very sloppy (and sometimes where you’ve been sloppy because the bad thinker is kinda right).
(There is a separate claim about genAI producing the average/typical behavior from its inputs; this isn’t true for RLHF and boosting reasons, have a gander at boosting and wisdom of the crowds for how you can take a cheap source of mediocrity and create something much better. It is true that genAI outputs feel unoriginal and omnipresent, as so very many folks are throwing around genAI outputs everywhere. But I think that’s not a property of the statistics, rather of the economics/behavioral science.)
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
I’m not walking around touting it, cause this is a time of battling cults. But I have been using an AI as a tutor to teach me how to write C code, with an eye towards kernel contributions and other things that require that speed. Obviously it’s a more marketable dev skill, even in this time, than the Python I know. It is very good at teaching, actually. Too bad about us all perishing by asphyxiation.
prompt like this:
"what did Nietzsche think was the influence on western society of the victory of jewish christian moral on the ancient greek values
and why was he so stupid about it"
Yeah, right. I’ve tried to do this everywhere I’ve worked.
Why do we think managers are suddenly going to appreciate being told that they’re wrong just because a robot does it?
AI is going to tank academia. It’s already going down hill after decades of corporate-style management.
