“Why AI Workers Won’t Let Bots Do the Most Basic Tasks” WSJ

Perhaps we should be more thoughtful in deciding if and when to use AI, or any digital tool for that matter. Because not everyone has access to the WSJ through Apple News+ or a direct subscription, I’ve excerpted a few paragraphs. Below is a link to the full article in Apple News+

Stella Dong is a machine-learning engineer and co-founder of an AI startup called Reinsurance Analytics. Yet when it’s time to write an email, she taps out the message with her own 10 fingers.

“I don’t trust AI to draft by itself,” says Dong, who also has a day job at a healthcare-technology company.

People who are immersed in AI often have some surprisingly old-fashioned habits, from scrawling meeting notes on paper to inputting calendar entries manually. Notably, some of the duties that the rest of us are most inclined to give to bots are the very things AI super users insist on doing themselves.

This should make us consider whether we are doing AI adoption backward in some cases, or using the latest technology simply because it is shiny and new. AI savants’ greatest strength may be their ability to tell the difference between the to-do’s that robo assistants improve and those that are better done by hand.

Dong sometimes uses Copilot to revise emails but prefers to write her own drafts because no one knows what she wants to say better than she does. This is the reverse of many professionals who edit—or copy and paste—whatever an AI tool composes in response to a prompt.

She also eschews AI calendar managers …

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im experimenting with handwriting notes during meetings and then uploading the photo to Claude and having it create resulting tasks and followups now that their OCR and comprehension capabilities are at human levels for most things.

This is pretty much my workflow.

Meeting notes (very few) on Remarkable Paper Pro Move.
—> send to AI for processing
—> AI sends to Notion as a) pdf of my handwriting (the “original” note) b) handwriting conversion to text c) AI produced key items to remember and do

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Does it increase your overall productivity?

That’s cool! I dont have an epaper device so I’m curious about the workflow here. How exactly do you ‘send to AI’? Via sync or some other means?

Yes. I spend more time doing the “quality” part of my work and less doing basic input, organization, and research.