Humans trust hard work. That’s why AI’s efficiency is its weakness | Opinion
Like all new technologies in history, the popular use of AI has created mixed feelings in humans, from anxiety to great hope. Some believe the world will never be the same and that many talents, concepts and jobs will disappear.
There have been many revolutionary technological changes in history — from the invention of paper to gunpowder, and from combustion engines to computers. All of these leaps changed the world forever, creating demand for new jobs and new skills.
Yet, we see miraculously that the old world and habits were able to adapt. We embrace new technologies — we read our books on Kindles, newspapers online, listen to music on Spotify and take courses on Coursera — yet we instinctively continue to appreciate “true” art and the craftsmanship behind it. We still attend live concerts, send our children to study face-to-face in colleges even though Nobel Prize winners post their lectures on YouTube, and buy expensive hardcover books, as Umberto Eco patiently explained in “This is Not the End of the Book.”
While we think AI-generated newsletters are convenient, we prefer to read long New York Times articles which are obviously and consciously edited by humans.
Why are the old methods of doing things so resilient? Why is “inefficient” craftsmanship as much of a complement as new technologies are?
The answer is simple: While new technologies can increase efficiency tremendously, they cannot satisfy another basic human need: trust in the authenticity and reliability of the product.
As the 20th-century economist Thorstein Veblen observed, we tend to value what is costly and acquired with effort, even if those costs do not improve our material welfare. New technologies help us to do the same tasks effortlessly, and sometimes they do them better, but we can’t be sure that what they produce is right or better.
In an era of AI-generated content, news on a website can seem perfectly edited, a video perfectly produced and a lecture perfectly planned, but what if the news is fake, the video is misleading, and the lecture is one-sided and not loyal to the truth? The only way to have peace regarding these questions is knowing if the producer is wise enough to care about their product and consumers.
This conclusion can cause optimism about the future of literature, art, teaching, and other creative human activities that can be produced by AI with considerable success. Whether AI can replace human creativity is a different question, but as long as it is at the disposal of everyone, the products of AI will be perceived as less reliable and also less valuable, as only hard work and labor is a sign of care for the consumer.
We can already see this in daily life. Friends complain about receiving emails that were obviously written by AI, or legal petitions prepared with ChatGPT. People don’t grant status to those who don’t bother themselves to prepare something personal and unique but prefer to just push a button on their screen.
The use of AI may acquire the status of craftsmanship only if it can invent a way of proving hard work and signaling the costs. But the signals are similar to languages, which can be effective only if everyone can understand them. Until we reach the point where these new signals appear and are learned by everyone, the old language will continue to dominate.
Emre Balikci, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Economics Department at Boise State University.