The AI craze has been getting worse and worse. Everyone nowadays wants to infuse their business with yet another reskin of ChatGPT. The peak of AI stupidity has to be AllBirds, a dying shoe company that pivoted to AI computing and in a day raised their stocks by 580%. This isn’t normal. It isn’t sustainable growth. But I want to ask a more specific question here. What exactly has AI done for us productivity-wise?

Where is the productivity?

Suppose that you are drafting a report for your manager, and now with AI you can generate that document with only a prompt and a mouse click. Done and sent over. A job that used to take at least an hour now takes only 2 minutes.

The report gets seen by the manager, they read it, and they correct “your” mistakes. Depending on the complexity of that report, it is either only a few errors or a full rewrite. Essentially what you have done is passing your responsibility onto someone else. You did it a bit faster, but what’s the point if someone has to correct your errors along the way. You’re not productive; you are a slacker.

Suppose another scenario. You want to learn a topic and you ask AI. It made such a good summary that you copy-paste it into your notes. You have successfully dodged learning the topic in favour of an easy and quick win. In both scenarios, it’s regression.

Where the productivity actually is

Let’s take a step back in that first scenario: Do not send that document to the manager just yet. Proof-read it thoroughly. Critically analyse it. It’ll take you half an hour, not two minutes, but you are not hired to pass responsibilities onto someone else. Your manager will appreciate it. A half-hour is still better than two hours. People forget that GPT is called a co-pilot for a reason.

A lot of people miss the biggest advantage of AI: You can force it to teach you. I have designed skills for Claude that encourage this: Tutors that enforce socratic learning and code tutors that will never write code for me, but will teach me the concepts instead. Don’t make an editor skill that will do your writing for you. Write one that pushes you in the right directions.

The future of AI

The most important thing is this: Even if all writing and programming will be 100% written by AI and fully automated, mistakes will happen and there needs to be someone there to fix them. You are not going to fix them if you only use AI for your writing or programming. Learn concepts properly and strive to be better. If not for your business or employer, then for yourself.

Don’t let co-pilot become your crutch.