Johannes KoskiI sit in a lot of video meetings, and lately I've noticed a new kind of problem arise. I call it "guess the robot". It works like this. 1/6
In a meeting where everyone is pitching ideas or ways of proceeding with something, you notice someone is being extra prolific. Like, sudden bursts of highly thought out responses. Not just reacting to proposed ideas but proposing like 5 new ideas and a few new angles that tangentially touches upon what you're discussing. 2/6
It's not just someone being enthusiastic or someone working under a fresh dose of caffeine. It's like someone were processing and outputting information at a higher capacity, but working on a set of facts oddly removed from the realities of your organization and the meeting at hand. 3/6
That person is, of course, feeding prompts into ChatGPT (or equivalent) and passing off the results as their own takes. And, look, generative AI is good enough to make sort of passable suggestions. But when you pull from ChatGPT which has NO DATA on your organization's ability to follow up on ideas, and bring with you a torrent of new actionable (but pretty mid) ideas, it only floods the discussion and bogs down everything. 4/6
If everyone is already working at close to full capacity, it doesn't help to rush in with overachieving mediocrity. I'd take one brilliant (and realistically doable) idea over a buffet of kind-of-ehhs any day! This method of "increasing productivity" quantitatively but not qualitatively is bonkers! 5/6
Lilly Hunter@personamatters About 20 years ago, way before "AI", my partner was talking about his day at work and mentioned that there was this one guy who always has a zillion ideas, but "99% of them are crap."
You meet people sometimes who don't seem to have any kind of built-in filter - every thought they have just gushes out, unredacted.
It makes me sad to think that in addition to these people, we will now have AI-assisted ones!
@LaChasseuse Yes! This! I’m OK with people being people! We all have our own ways of communication and brainstorming. But we don’t need tools that amplify noise over signal.