Why AI Can Push You to Make the Wrong Decision at Work
Chatbots help craft emails and act as customer support. Algorithms help banks decide loan eligibility and assist in reviewing job applications. AI is gaining a foothold in many workplaces, aggregating information and helping people make smarter decisions.
At least that’s how AI is sold. Designed to reduce ambiguity and simplify decisions, AI algorithms can instead lead us to doubt years of expertise and make the wrong decision because of a cognitive shortcut — automation bias. Simply put, it’s our human tendency to reduce our vigilance and oversight when working with machines. This bias can push us to place our faith in the perceived reliability and accuracy of automated systems. And because AI tools are prone to gender and race biases, those can become automated, too.
“People expect the machine [to] actually generate very consistent results,” says Yong Jin Park, a professor at Howard University and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. In reality, Park said AI systems, like ChatGPT, subvert these expectations by providing inconsistent outputs and hallucinations, or incorrect outputs.
