Why AI workers won't let bots do the most basic tasks

I tend to assume people who work in artificial intelligence live like the Jetsons.

- Callum Borchers [e-mail]

People immersed in artificial intelligence sometimes take an old-school approach to work.

(REUTERS)

Even if they don’t have robot maids, surely they automate as many tasks as possible, right?

Stella Dong is a machine-learning engineer and co-founder of an AI startup called Reinsurance Analytics. Yet when it's time to write an email, she taps out the message with her own 10 fingers.

“I don’t trust AI to draft by itself,” says Dong, who also has a day job at a healthcare-technology company.

People who are immersed in AI often have some surprisingly old-fashioned habits, from scrawling meeting notes on paper to inputting calendar entries manually. Notably, some of the duties that the rest of us are most inclined to give to bots are the very things AI super users insist on doing themselves.

This should make us consider whether we are doing AI adoption backward in some cases, or using the latest technology simply because it is shiny and new. Al savants’ greatest strength may be their ability to tell the difference between the to-do’s that robo assistants improve and those that are better done by hand.

Dong sometimes uses Copilot to revise emails but prefers to write her own drafts because no one knows what she wants to say better than she does. This is the reverse of many professionals who edit—or copy and paste—whatever an AI tool composes in response to a prompt.