When AI makes you worse at your job

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Adam is still away, but we wanted to highlight a new technology story we thought you'd find interesting. 

AI was supposed to make workers faster and more productive. At least, that’s been the claim of CEOs at companies like Meta, which sometimes even rank employees by how much they use the technology. But workers across industries are finding something different: Sometimes, AI tools actually make you worse at your job. 

The workers and researchers I interviewed described having to check and re-check AI outputs so much that any time savings were lost. Some studies even find that workers who use too many AI agents develop what researchers are calling “AI brain fry.”

AI tools have their uses, experts told me. But when they’re implemented in a top-down way without input from the employees who will actually be using them, the result can be worse than useless.

—Anna North, senior correspondent

Getty/Vox

If you’ve ever used an online patient portal to message your doctor in the middle of the night, you won’t be surprised to learn that responding to those messages takes an increasingly big bite out of clinicians’ workdays.

So in recent years, hospitals have begun adopting an AI tool that can draft responses for them. The tool was supposed to make a time-consuming task go more quickly and smoothly, said Philip Barrison, an MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School who studies AI in healthcare.

Instead, the tool has given doctors and nurses a new to-do list. First, they have to read the AI-generated response and decide if it “is actually something that they think they would say,” Barrison said. Humans are suggestible, and looking at something and deciding whether you would have thought of it on your own is a cognitively complex task.

Even if the message looks correct, the clinician still needs to “edit it to the point where they think it’s acceptable” to send to a patient, Barrison said. The AI tool introduces a totally new set of complicated judgment calls into what used to be a relatively straightforward process. As a result, many clinicians have chosen not to use it at all.

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