Comment by slg
7 hours ago
>This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
The primary difference is that it's much easier for the AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for example.
The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user and generally less productive than it is for programmers.
That's true. And: as long as you don't hit production mistakes are cheap and quick to fix. Not so in many other fields.
It is more that knowledge workers are less sophisticated at using AI. It is not that hard to check whether sources are real, using AI or other tools, for example. Something like functional testing will come to non programming tasks.
Consistently catching errors is vastly harder when you’re not the one doing the legwork. Send the wrong file, do a bad copy and paste, or skip one verification step, etc is all it takes for most people to majorly mess up.
For most professionals it’s just safer to avoid having output in your workflow. Keep using AI, but stop copying and pasting AI output.
It's not hard, but having to check work so carefully, at some point you're better off just doing it yourself.