1️⃣ using emojis instead of bullet points or
🤪 overusing the word “shenanigans”
Yeah. You’ve seen the signs. You know them. Are you tired of them yet? When you catch a whiff of robot, does it give you a little dose of skepticism about what you’re reading or have you surrendered to the inevitable future of robot-generated everything? AI is a tool with many valid uses, but watch out: it does have meaningful limitations and relying on it may cause a decrease in your own depth of reasoning.
AI’s Strengths, Limitations, and Tradeoffs
What Does AI do Well?
Most businesses have already incorporated AI’s powerful tools to automate repetitive tasks, analyze data and patterns, and provide quick customer service/troubleshooting responses. However, despite its strengths, AI has inherent limitations, and areas where human intuition, creativity, and oversight remain irreplaceable.
AI’s (According to Users)
I crowdsourced some specific examples (from actual humans) to demonstrate AI’s limits. These are some of the responses.
Meet Jack: He’s Jumping
This AI-generated image of a jumping jack demonstrates AI’s tendency to be a little too literal.
Smells Like Robots (And Cheese)
This is another example of a perfectly fine, coherent, and even reasonably clever (if a little cheesy) post. But it just smells of AI. You know it. I know it. And the would-be social media users who scanned right over it know it, too.
AI’s Limits (According to AI)
Can a robot be self-aware? Well, below are ChatGPT’s self-identified weaknesses, which leads to another question: Can a robot be its own therapist?
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Emotional Intelligence and Human Connection
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Understanding Nuance and Context
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Ethical Judgment and Moral Decision-Making
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Adaptability in Unpredictable Situations
The Cognitive Tradeoffs of AI (According to a Study)
I expect to see many, many studies in the coming years about how using AI impacts both society as a whole as well as individual users and their brains. For now, searching for research about the impacts of AI on humankind yields surprisingly limited results. Still, one study shows that while using AI did decrease mental load for study participants (compared to those using a search engine), it also weakened the users’ strength of reasoning. The title of the article–“Cognitive Ease at a Cost”–suggests that, like so many things in life, the conveniences of this evolving technology come with meaningful tradeoffs.
The Bottom Line
AI has the potential to automate tasks, enhance data analysis, and reduce troubleshooting challenges, but humans still have a leg up when it comes to intuition, creativity, ethical judgment, and depth of reasoning (at least for now). If you’d like to conduct your own quasi case study, use what you see as the thesis of this post as a prompt and see if what it spits out passes your sniff test. As a human, I predict it won’t.
