alt Hacker News> In fact, the researchers found that almost half of employees who receive AI-drafted emails see senders as less trustworthy as a result of their sending it, and over a third see them as less intelligent. So much for AI enhancing us.
Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.
There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.
There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.
> There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort.
Quoting the article...
"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."
If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.
The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.
So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).