Did you try using AI, but it didn’t produce the desired result? Or perhaps you ended up spending time fixing the mistakes made by the AI. It may be that the AI you used isn’t yet good enough to solve your problem, but it’s also very likely that you used it incorrectly, relying on old ways of working. AI works better when you dare to question your own approach: do things always have to be done this way?
Email takes twice as much working time compared to fax
Let’s imagine a world where an employee is used to typing a document on a typewriter and then faxing it to the recipient. The process is simple: once the document is ready, it’s placed in the fax machine and, with the push of a button, it’s sent.
When the employee is told that they should use email instead of fax, they become frustrated. Now the work takes twice as long! First, the document has to be typed on a typewriter, and since it can’t be fed directly into a computer, it has to be retyped using a word processor before it can be sent by email. Surely working time could be used more efficiently? Email was supposed to make everyday life easier!
Only when the employee questions their way of working and changes it do they gain the real benefits of email. Why does the document have to be written first on a typewriter? Could it instead be written directly on a computer? Is it even necessary for a paper copy of the document to exist somewhere in a folder? Many clever people can come up with good reasons to cling to old ways of working. For example, they might argue that writing on a computer weakens literacy and accuracy, because spelling errors are automatically highlighted and mistakes are too easy to fix—so you can write carelessly, whereas a typewriter requires real professional skill, and so on. But these are just excuses. The world is changing, and we must change with it.
AI shouldn’t be used because…
In higher education, the same arguments against using AI tend to come up repeatedly. Students will never learn the conventions of scientific writing if they use AI to write everything. To this, I would like to pose a question: what are the conventions of scientific writing actually needed for? In my opinion, no longer for anything at all. Let AI do what it does well, and leave to humans what AI cannot achieve. I know many academically very talented and intelligent people who simply are not good writers. Writing skill and the ability to conduct research and produce new knowledge do not go hand in hand. It is actually unfair that academic success has so far been measured by the ability to arrange words into an eloquent form.
Writing is thinking, and if you don’t do it, you won’t learn to think. This argument makes me sad. I feel sorry for those who cannot think without writing. You can think and reflect better without pen and paper, if you give it time. For example, a one-hour walk outside gets your thoughts flowing in a completely different way than staring at a blank page. And going for a walk is something AI will never do on anyone’s behalf.
AI consumes a lot of electricity and harms the environment. If someone wants to rely on this argument, I hope they also refrain from using social media, watching videos, or listening to music via streaming. Hopefully, they also don’t play video games or use a computer or phone for anything beyond absolute necessities. Of course, AI uses electricity—but so does everything else. If this argument is used to avoid only AI, while continuing to use all other data center–driven services, it sounds somewhat hypocritical.
“AI doesn’t know how to write”
Sometimes I wonder how people have the patience to use AI for brainstorming ideas and outlining structure, only to then become frustrated when the AI can’t actually write the article. This is an example of how old ways of working prevent the effective use of AI. Many people cling to the idea that text is somehow the ultimate end goal of writing. In my view, the text itself is secondary—unless we are talking about novels and poetry.
More important than the text is conveying an idea— yes, an idea that a person themselves must have. I can get perfectly good articles out of AI when I provide it with the desired structure and clearly explain the main idea of the article, along with the key points of thinking and argumentation under the headings. And just like that, the AI produces exactly the kind of article I wanted. If something is off, I simply ask the AI to fix it. I don’t start manually editing anything longer than individual sentences.
Of course, it may be that the AI’s text doesn’t fully please you or doesn’t feel like your own. What matters more, however, is asking yourself: does this say what I wanted to say? ChatGPT will probably never write in exactly the same way as I do, but that doesn’t matter. The style may feel unfamiliar, but if the content reflects my thinking, I’m satisfied. I have abandoned the old-fashioned idea of ownership of the text. For me, it is enough that I own the idea behind it.
What does the future of work life require?
Now, and increasingly in the future, we must break away from old practices. Nothing should be done just because it has to be done, or because it’s supposedly necessary, and certainly not because ‘it might be good to do.’ Why does it have to be done? Why is it necessary? What are we really aiming for? Give AI the intellectual core of the work—the part that requires expertise—and let AI handle everything else around it.
This requires creativity and self-criticism. Unfortunately, our education system does not support the development of creativity in all fields. This is a shame, because continuously adapting one’s way of working as AI evolves is not possible without creativity. I challenge you, dear reader, to reflect on how you could do your work differently. Start by dismantling the ‘musts’ and question why you do what you do in the first place.
If this text provoked a reaction in you, I hope you reflect carefully on where that reaction comes from. In the end, the question is which side of history you want to be on after the AI revolution.
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