Generative AI: autocomplete for everything

Lawyers will probably write legal briefs this way, and administrative assistants will use this technique to draft memos and emails. Marketers will have an idea for a campaign, generate copy en masse and provide finishing touches. Consultants will generate whole powerpoint decks with coherent narratives based on a short vision and then provide the

Generative AI is quite good at certain parts of the value chain of knowledge work, but thinks quite differently from humans. Anthropic, a company that focuses on understanding how AI works, has found that humans working side-by-side with expert AI assistants to perform various tasks produce superior performance compared to either the AI or a human

What’s common to all of these visions is something we call the “sandwich” workflow. This is a three-step process. First, a human has a creative impulse, and gives the AI a prompt. The AI then generates a menu of options. The human then chooses an option, edits it, and adds any touches they like. 

No one knows, of course, but we suspect that AI is far more likely to complement and empower human workers than to impoverish them or displace them onto the welfare rolls. This doesn’t mean we’re starry-eyed Panglossians; we realize that this optimistic perspective is a tough sell, and even if our vision comes true, there will certainly be some pe