In an age of digital shortcuts, new evidence underscores the vital importance of safeguarding our sense of personal ability and self-worth.
5-minute read – 100% written by humans
Carl is 15, neurodivergent and part of an inspiring community of peers who share their digital artwork online. They tend to have a devotion to Japanese inspired art in the style of Studio Ghibli and the anime tradition. In spite of his acute social anxiety, he talks animatedly about the way in which doing art has built his sense of confidence and self-worth.
Anger about AI is spiking among the young
Like many in his community he eschews AI and deeply distrusts the vision of the future that it presages. These young people frequently adopt open-source data poisoning tools to protect their work from what they see as theft (scraping) by the big Tech firms. The simple fact is that big tech is increasingly losing the PR battle over AI among the young. According to a major Gallup and Walton Family Foundation Survey, among Gen Z, anger toward AI spiked by 9 percentage points reaching 31%.
It’s at this part in the conversation that Carl demonstrates a precocious insight not uncommon among his community. When he discusses his concerns about AI with other young people, he explains that the pushback is often, “Well it’s okay for you because you’re good at art. I’m not good at art.” And this for Carl is the point. He continues. “But I wasn’t always good at art. At first everything I did sucked. I had to work at it.” In other words, while it may appear that the discovery that he was good at art built his confidence, the real dynamic worked the other way round. Confidence is only built through a process of: suck at it; work at it; fail some more; work at it some more; finally get there!
Self-efficacy
What Carl was describing is the concept that the psychologist Albert Bandura called self-efficacy. It’s the process by which our perception about ourselves changes and grows on learning that we can do or achieve something that challenges us. It is a vital component in learning and growth.
What happens when we follow the path of least resistance?
So what happens when AI presents us with a world in which we are forever tempted to follow that digital path of least resistance? This is what Wenlong Wang and colleagues sought to find out in a new study published in BMC Psychology.
The team surveyed 1,623 undergraduates, via a questionnaire which assessed their belief in their ability to cope with challenges and succeed at tasks, alongside self-reported levels of AI use for thinking, problem-solving and doing academic work.
There was a clear correlation. Students who relied more heavily on the use of AI tools reported a reduced confidence and belief in their ability to do academic work. What’s more, heavy AI reliance was closely associated with increased anxiety and burnout.
In other words, don’t use AI tools to reduce the struggle. Because the struggle is the point – at least if we intend to create something of value and to learn and grow in the process.
The struggle is the point
This is something that the dramatist David Simon, creator of The Wire profoundly understood. President Barack Obama called the HBO series, “one of the greatest, not just television shows, but pieces of art in the last couple of decades”. Simon was often the first to point out that The Wire worked not because of his innate genius, but because of his willingness as a journalist to spend years embedded with the Baltimore Police Department. The hard graft is the point, along with the direct firsthand experience.
This is David Simon being interviewed by the journalist Ari Shapiro on National Public Radio around the time of the Hollywood writers’ strike:
SHAPIRO: Okay, so you’ve spent your career creating television without AI and I could imagine you today thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems …
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: …or saying …
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into AI and say give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
A writer saying that they use AI tools to help them write, is a bit like a chef saying that they use supermarket ready meals to help them cook.
The struggle is the point. AI tools can write a 13-episode gritty police drama, but nobody’s going to put their phone on airplane mode, break out a bowl of pretzels and binge-watch it.
Like many writers, Simon happily encourages the use of AI for the things that AI does best. It can rapidly speed up the accessibility of source material. For me personally, AI has saved me hours of drudgery, which would have previously been spent trying to locate a research paper on the internet of which I have a hazy memory. But I have a rule never to use it for actual writing. If the final product is less slick, so be it.
Our advice – assuming that a sense of self-efficacy is important to you – is to use AI as a power tool to expedite the dull, the energy-sapping and the time-consuming, but never use it to circumvent a creative challenge.
Create something!
There’s a further way to protect and grow that all-important sense of self-efficacy. It’s one that we strongly encourage leaders at our workshops to embrace: Create something. Draw something. Write a poem or a short story. As Carl puts it, “Just create something. Even if it sucks. That way you always have something to improve.” Learning a musical instrument, or a new language, has similar benefits.
The booing of former Google boss Eric Schmidt when he referred to AI by students at The University of Arizona, is now infamous. What’s less well known is what Schmidt said just before this: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on”
We should be grateful that we have communities of young people who have the sense to ask serious questions about where it’s headed, before strapping themselves into a rocket ship.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
