What follows is a quotation from a recent article The Guardian by Sophie McBain. She in turn quotes Michael Gerlich of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability:
Like many researchers, Gerlich believes that, used in the right way, AI can make us cleverer and more creative – but the way most people use it produces bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work. One concern is the so-called “anchoring effect”. If you post a question to generative AI, the answer it gives you sets your brain on a certain mental path and makes you less likely to consider alternative approaches. “I always use the example: imagine a candle. Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop into a lightbulb,” he says. To get from a candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving. When, as happen in many workplaces, companies roll out tools such as chatbot Copilot without offering decent AI training, they risk producing teams of candle-makers in a world that demands lightbulbs.”
Knowledge – having knowledge – is incredibly important, so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, “Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?”
