Do humans and AI work better together?

Have you ever wondered how the future would be with humans and AI working together to solve complex problems and make critical decisions?

This intriguing subject has been the focus for researchers at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI). Their latest findings might have you looking at this idealistic vision with a more discerning eye.

The team included doctoral student Michelle Vaccaro, Professor Abdullah Almaatouq, and Professor Thomas Malone. The researchers chose to steer clear of the often-debated topic of AI’s potential to replace humans in certain jobs.

Instead, they wanted to delve into questions such as: When do humans and AI work together most effectively? How can organizations ensure these partnerships succeed?

Focus on human-AI systems

The study authors noted that people are increasingly working with artificial intelligence (AI) tools in fields such as medicine, finance and law, as well as in daily activities such as traveling, shopping, and communicating.

“These human-AI systems have tremendous potential given the complementary nature of humans and AI – the general intelligence of humans allows us to reason about diverse problems, and the computational power of AI systems allows them to accomplish specific tasks that people find difficult.”

Does AI perform better alone?

The researchers conducted a meta-analysis that spanned over 370 results from 106 different experiments.

The experiments compared three different ways of performing tasks – with only humans, with only AI, and with collaborations.

What the researchers discovered was a fascinating contradiction to the prevailing belief that the symbiosis of humans and AI would always lead to better outcomes.

Human-AI teams indeed performed better than humans alone. However, they did not surpass the capabilities of AI systems operating on their own.

“There’s a prevailing assumption that integrating AI into a process will always help performance – but we show that that isn’t true,” said Vaccaro. “In some cases, it’s beneficial to leave some tasks solely for humans, and some tasks solely for AI.”

Human-AI performance

The type of task also played a significant role in the effectiveness of collaboration. Decision-making tasks like classifying deep fakes, forecasting demand, and diagnosing medical cases were better tackled by AI alone.

Yet, when looking at creative tasks like summarizing social media posts or generating new content and imagery, it was found that human-AI teams often outperformed both people and AI working independently.

“Even though AI in recent years has mostly been used to support decision-making by analyzing large amounts of data, some of the most promising opportunities for human-AI combinations now are in supporting the creation of new content, such as text, images, music, and video,” said Malone.

Dual nature of creative tasks

The researchers attributed this unique advantage in creative tasks to their dual nature. While creativity, knowledge, and insight are vital human talents in these tasks, they also involve repetitive work where AI often excels.

“There is a lot of potential in combining humans and AI, but we need to think more critically about it,” said Vaccaro. “The effectiveness is not necessarily about the baseline performance of either of them, but about how they work together and complement each other.”

This study’s findings offer crucial insights for organizations aiming at successfully integrating AI into their workplaces. The research team advises organizations to assess whether collaborations would actually outperform either entity working independently.

Future of human-AI collaboration

““Many organizations may be overestimating the effectiveness of their current systems,” noted Vaccaro. “They need to get a pulse on how well they’re working.”

Additionally, organizations should evaluate how AI could assist their workers, especially in creative tasks, and establish robust guidelines for AI usage. The idea should be to leverage the complementary strengths.

“Let AI handle the background research, pattern recognition, predictions, and data analysis, while harnessing human skills to spot nuances and apply contextual understanding,” Malone suggested. In other words: “Let humans do what they do best.”

As the researchers continue to explore the potential of artifical intelligence, they firmly believe that the future does not lie in replacing humans, but in finding innovative ways for both to work together effectively.

The study is published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

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