Each year, I have to fill in a progress report for each of my postgraduate students. I have no idea whether these forms are ever checked. They serve no purpose.1 I do know, however, that if I just write “yes” or “not applicable” under a question requiring a paragraph, the form will be flagged and sent back. So I get AI to write answers for me with prompts like, “For question 3, I want to write ‘not applicable’. Use a lot of words to say ‘not applicable’. Use the rest of the form for context.”

What I hope will happen

At some point, the university will realise that these forms actually need to be checked. But this will require a lot of effort. So they will be clever: let’s use AI to check all the progress forms! The result is a situation where AI-generated forms are checked by AI. Now this is my hope: the university realises how pointless this is. But they realise something deeper: the forms were pointless to begin with. The form is scrapped!

David Brooks wrote the following in an Atlantic article:

My core belief about this whole age is that artificial intelligence will reveal what it means to be human … AI will do the calculating and the synthesizing, but humans will still define what matters, what is worth exploring, what missions we go on, and where we end up.

Filling in forms without purpose is not part of being human. (And, of course, “forms” here is a metaphor for all the many, many pointless things that are required of us.)

What I fear will happen

The story starts the same: I have to fill in a pointless form, and I get AI to do it. Again at some point the university realises that all their forms actually need to be checked. They will be clever: let’s use AI to check all the progress forms! They realise: wow, this is so efficient! We are getting our staff to work really efficiently (because they are filling in all our forms), and we are accurately tracking all this progress. We are getting so much work done. Let’s introduce another form to get even more feedback!

My fear is this: because we can produce more with the help of AI, we are required to produce even more. Again I quote David Brooks:

Researchers from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business found that when using AI, workers started taking on tasks that they had previously outsourced … [M]any people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled.

We end in a situation where we are required to produce more essentially useless things.

We can of course decide to go a different route. But at the moment it looks like we will just be filling out more forms.

  1. For some reason, university upper management loves forms, and especially forms that serve no purpose. Introducing a new form fills them with happiness. Maybe I am a bit unfair: banks, the traffic department and my optometrist all love forms asking for redundant information. If you check these forms carefully, the actually important information could normally be obtained through three yes/no questions. ↩