The Double-Edged Sword of Using AI
From summarizing meetings to drafting content, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool that helps you save time at work. But it's not without its downsides, and these drawbacks may cost you more than just productivity. The key is to strike a good balance and to use AI as a tool, not a crutch. With that in mind, here are 10 ways AI can make your job easier—and 10 ways it might do more harm than good.
1. Summarize Meetings
Got a long call scheduled, or back-to-back-to-back meetings crowding up your calendar? With AI, you can now rest assured that if there's anything you couldn't catch in real-time, you can rely on the summarized notes that are automatically generated afterwards, provided that you have the feature set up and ready. No more having to jot every word down!
2. Organize Inbox
Need help sorting your cluttered inbox? Don't worry—AI can easily organize it all for you. It can do much more than just sort your senders, though: AI can flag urgent emails, summarize long threads, highlight key points, and even draft suggested responses.
3. Transcribe Meetings
Not only can AI summarize meetings into key points, but it can also transcribe entire calls. If you're a journalist, this feature can save you hours of time—though you'll still want to run through the audio to clean up the script, in case anything was missed.
4. Brainstorm Ideas
If you're stuck in a creative block and can't seem to come up with anything new or refreshing, AI can help. Give it a prompt or a general concept, and it can easily give you a few ideas to jump off of and build around.
5. Draft Up Content
Writing content? AI can easily adapt to different styles, tones, and concepts, allowing you to draft up anything from a short one-liner for a marketing project to a long article for an interview feature. Keep in mind, though, that this should act as a base for you to spice up and elevate; you shouldn't be copying AI content word-for-word.
6. Conduct Research
Need to do research but short on time? AI can help compile and condense large amounts of content and data from various sources into something easily digestible, so that you don't have to go through the painstaking work yourself. You will still want to fact-check, however.
7. Design Concepts
If you're an animator, graphic designer, artist, or a UX UI designer, you can draft up concepts by hand and have AI make them come to life by simulating a prototype or mockup. That way, you can gain a better perspective of which direction to take your ideas and whether they solve the problem at hand.
8. Prioritize Tasks for Smooth Workflow
AI can also smooth out wrinkles in your workflow by knowing which tasks to prioritize. This will allow you to focus on the projects you should tackle first, so you can always stay on top of your deadlines. No more starting at the last minute and rushing to get everything done!
9. Analyzing Data
As mentioned, AI can handle and interpret large amounts of data, and it can do so much more than analyze it, too. It can also spot patterns, trends, and abnormalities, in addition to giving insights, in a fraction of the time it might take a human to parse through the same pool of information.
10. Create Personalized To-Do Lists
AI isn't just able to prioritize tasks for you—it can create personalized to-do lists, too. By predicting your patterns, factoring in your workload, and analyzing whether you're on track to meet your goals, task management tools can help keep you on top of your game.
Yet, as helpful as AI can be, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, there are plenty of ways AI can trip you up and even ruin your productivity. How? Here are 10 ways it might play more bad than nice.
1. Overreliance
Using AI as an occasional tool is fine, but when you're depending on it for every task and project you take on, it can become a problem. Overreliance on AI can interfere with skill development, critical thinking, and decision-making, and may lead to more errors than you might think.
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2. No Room for Creativity
As mentioned, when you become overdependent on AI, it leaves no room to let your own creativity shine. If you're someone who works with art, whether you're a writer or designer, it's important to treat AI as a tool that might help kickstart a project, but not something that fills in all the blanks and crosses the finish line for you.
3. Generic Outputs
AI can often generate outputs that aren't specific to your concepts or vision. It might spit out ideas or solutions that have already been previously suggested, leading to wasted time, given that you'll need to put in more effort to make its suggestions interesting or engaging.
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4. Hallucinations
AI can be helpful as a research tool, but you'll still want to be careful. After all, it can sometimes generate erroneous data—details that don't exist at all. Since you'll have to go back and double-check every statement or bullet point it makes, that might end up taking more time than if you were to conduct research yourself.
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5. Misinterpretations
AI can misinterpret your prompts, data, and outside context, which can lead to incorrect summaries or suggestions. This means that you'll, again, need to go back and check to ensure everything's correct and accurate, which may end up taking more time than it originally should've.
6. Misleading Analytics
As mentioned, AI may misinterpret data, meaning it may highlight trends, patterns, and anomalies that don't actually matter. If you take its analysis at face value, you might end up making the wrong decisions based on false correlations.
7. Generate Distractions
Remember Clippy, the AI assistant on older versions of Microsoft Office? If you do, you probably remember it most for the unhelpful (and incessant) suggestions it prompted. AI tools now are no different; while they might boost productivity in some ways, they can generate ideas and notifications constantly, which can give you a headache.
8. Overcomplication
AI can overcomplicate simple tasks, making them seem harder to accomplish than they actually are. Because of this, it may generate workflows or to-do lists that hurt your productivity rather than boost it, leading to wasted time and effort.
9. Degrade Critical Thinking Skills
Overreliance on AI can significantly degrade your critical thinking skills. After all, if you never brainstorm, research, write, design, or interpret data on your own, instead always depending on AI tools to do it for you, low cognitive engagement can eventually lead to skill erosion and poor performance.
10. Loss of Human Touch
You might already be able to spot AI-generated content, and the reason it's so easy to point out is probably because it lacks the human touch. Sure, an AI can draft an email or article quickly and with surprising accuracy, but it can't add the emotional nuance or personal flair that only people can give. In the long run, that absence doesn't just hurt productivity, but it may also damage relationships, trust, and make others question the authenticity of your work.
