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The Paradox of Effort in the Era of GenAI: Is Less More?
We often seek ways to reduce effort in our lives as it can be costly; given a choice, we tend to take the one with least effort. I call this productive laziness. At the same time, if we make more of an effort when performing a task, it can be more rewarding. This is known as the paradox of effort. With the widespread appetite for GenAI we are facing a new ‘effort dilemma’: ChatGPT and the like enables us to do things more quickly and complete our tasks with less effort. What is there not to like about this development? The risk is it makes us more lazy, less aware and less connected. How can we design AI so that it deliberately requires us to make more effort so that we engage with our work more deeply and experience a greater sense of achievement? One approach is to slow down how we think and solve problems. To this end, I have begun developing AI with the aim of being more engaging, more effortful and more empowering; through prompting, conjuring up, counter-arguing, probing and even acting as a sparring partner.
More about the speaker, Yvonne Rogers, UCL
Yvonne Rogers is a Professor of Interaction Design, the director of UCLIC and a deputy head of the Computer Science Department at University College London. Her research interests are in the areas of human-computer interaction and human-centred AI. A central theme of her work is concerned with designing interactive technologies that augment humans. She develops humane applications of AI that benefit society. She has received various awards for her work including being elected as an international member of the National Academy of Engineering in the US; the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Research Award, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society Robin Milner Medal for computer science.