Al-Amn Magazine

CREATIVITY D ario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, predicts within a few years, AI will be “better than almost all humans at almost everything”.  In the United States, the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is proposing replacing government workers with chatbots in the name of efficiency. And some scientists are claiming that AI can already outperform humans even in domains previously thought to be exclusively human, such as empathy, creativity and conflict resolution. It’s true that in several prominent studies, researchers have staged “competitions” in which AI technology appears to outperform humans in these very human areas. But a closer look reveals that these games are rigged against us humans. The competitions do not actually ask machines to perform human tasks; it’s more accurate to say that they ask humans to behave in machine-like ways as they perform lifeless simulacra of human tasks. It’s no wonder we lose Take, for example, recent studies claiming AI expresses empathy better than human doctors and therapists. In these studies, researchers asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate written responses to posts on Reddit about physical and mental health struggles. Next, they compared the chatbot’s responses with those of human doctors and therapists responding to the same Reddit posts. Across these studies, the chatbot’s responses were rated as more empathetic than those of the human doctors and therapists. So, should we all turn to ChatGPT the next time we seek a sympathetic ear? The problem with this logic can be illustrated by a simple thought experiment. You’ve had a horrible day. Your boss yelled at you, your brother just filed for divorce and you’re waiting on results from a stressful medical test. You’re desperate for some support to help you deal. What do you do? All that these examples show us is that machines are better than humans at performing empathy and creativity in machine-like ways You’re probably not logging into Reddit to receive a generic written response from a stranger – even one who is expertly trained to respond empathically to strangers. You want support from people who care about the story of your life and know the characters involved: your work buddy who’s also clashed with your bummer boss, your best Wi l l AI rea l l y be bet ter t han humans? More and more of us now behave l i ke mach i nes