Is AI Bad, Or Are People Stupid

‘AI is rubbish, it’s content is crap. It can’t even think for me’

I keep hearing this.

Bits of it are true.

It can’t write anything anywhere near as good as you can when you write, and it certainly can’t think for you.

One of the issues I think we’ve seen with AI is just an Expectation Gap - People have been saying that it’s going to end all of us and our need to work and maybe our existence.

Yet it seems to currently fail with really basic office tasks. The promises are not being delivered on.

That aside, AI genuinely can’t do about three things well; taste, emotional resonance, and knowing what should exist in the first place.

I think what’s pissing me off is that’s what people are using it for to decide that it’s bad.

‘Write me a piece of content on X.’ ‘Tell me what five posts I should create on Instagram.’ ’ Write something that is going to make people want to work with me.’

And when it’s unable to do that, people declare that it’s not very good for anything.

Which is like suggesting that the chainsaw is useless and overrated because you weren’t able to do brain surgery with it.

What’s actually happening is that people are using AI for the 5% of tasks it genuinely can’t do because they’re the really easy ones to try and get it to do.

And they’re not learning the more challenging and nuanced stuff that it can be really powerful for because that is hard and requires actual effort.

Which goes again to why people are using AI in the first place, because they just want it to do their work for them so they don’t have to bother thinking.

The coaches doing well with AI aren’t asking it to have taste.

They’re using it for research or to create tools that they know that their audience needs because they have the taste - and they’re using AI to create things that they could not create without AI.

Which is very much the skill with AI. It’s how does this augment me, rather than how can I try and get it to do everything that I do and then moan about the fact it won’t.

I’m by no means an AI apologist or evangelist. I can see the gaps in what AI can and can’t do and the direction it is going.

But I maintain that the question I asked at the start is valid. Is AI really that bad, or are people just really, really stupid and lazy?