How comfortable are you with using generative algorithms?
By now, with generative AI assistants available for well over a year and subject to constant improvements to their performance, we should have a good idea of what it means to use them on a daily basis.
Experienced users no longer bother trying to catch them out with silly questions, and are more skilled at providing subtle prompts and applying filters; some are longer than the response they generate, and are no longer simply requests for content that can be copied and pasted, but instead are part of work carried out in phases. Speaking as someone who teaches innovation at a business school, it is enormously useful to see how people with several years of experience as executives put these tools to use to solve a wide range of questions.
That’s why I really liked this article in The Washington Post, “I used AI work tools to do my job. Here’s how it went”. The author tested two generative algorithms to do many of her usual tasks, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini for Google Workspace. The result, as expected, is uneven, and points to a significant reduction in the time spent creating texts, illustrations or videos, but also a very significant increase in the time spent supervising what the algorithms produce.
Basically, as Wikimedia Foundation CTO Selena Deckelmann points out, human input and…
