Fitz Thiar: Thinking For The Impatient

I’m so sick of these AI fluff pieces showing up on the sites of supposedly reputable news organizations that feel like little more than paid advertising.

Take this piece from The Guardian as a prime example. Yet another evacuation of verbal diarrhea to declare that AI isn’t the problem: you are, we are, I am! We are simply too stupid to understand it!

“Some people hand everything over to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all.

But there’s a third group. They learn to work with AI critically, treat it like a bright, enthusiastic intern that needs to be managed and supported to do their best work.

The difference? It’s rarely technical ability. It’s curiosity. A willingness to experiment, get things wrong, and figure out what AI is actually good at.”

And if you just pay the author Tom Hewitson money, he’ll teach you how to use AI properly, you silly portozoa, because he’s the founder and chief AI officer of General Purpose, an AI training company.

But fuck me, I thought the point of the AI revolution was to make life easier? The machines were supposed to think for me. I was supposed to be able to ask for something and get the result I wanted. I shouldn’t have to expend energy teaching, tweaking, supporting (??), or suffer the frustrations of a middle manager who’s been handed a nepobaby with no experience and zero desire to be there.

But at least we can agree with Tom that AI needs to be managed to get anything valuable out of it, right?

Kind of.

According to the researchers at Harvard Business Review (and reported by the Independent), this managing and supporting of AI tools is creating mental fatigue, a type of mental “fog” or “brain fry” (their term, not mine) caused by excessive use and oversight of AI tools. Not to be confused with burnout, this AI-induced brain fry is a more acute, cognitive strain.

To quote one participant:

“What finally snapped me out of it was realising I was working harder to manage the tools than to actually solve the problem.”

Not only are we expending more time managing the AI than actually solving the problem ourselves, but the number of mistakes being made by those who actively used AI was also significantly higher than those who did not.

“Among participants using AI at work, those experiencing brain fry reported making mistakes significantly more often – scoring 11 per cent and 39 per cent higher on the minor and major error frequency measures, respectively – than those who did not,”

But I’m sure none of the 1,488 Marketing, Operations, HR, IT, Software Development, Legal and other professionals would have this issue if they just dedicated time out of their busy schedules to pay money to Tom for training in the subtle art of taking personal responsibility for the shortcomings of a technology that promises the moon but dramatically underdelivers at every turn.

Yup, that’s the answer.