Started 2w ago 7 replies 2.2K views
At the library help table, people mostly ask what AI can do. I'm more interested in the opposite. Which jobs did you try handing over, then quietly take back, and why?
Mine: writing thank-you cards to our volunteers. The drafts were perfectly nice. But a volunteer told me she keeps every card I've written her in a shoebox, and I realised a perfectly nice card is not the point of a thank-you card.
Naming things. Products, features, files, even my plants. It gives me forty options in a second, and none of them have a story. A name I argue about for a week sticks; a generated one never does.
Replies to angry customers. The drafts were calm and polite and somehow made people angrier. They could tell. Now I write those myself, badly, and they work better.
Report-card comments. It saved hours, and every comment sounded like every other comment. A parent asked me what 'demonstrates a growing understanding' actually meant about her son. I had no answer. Never again.
Colour scripts for animation. Generated palettes look fine frame by frame, but they don't carry emotion across a whole sequence. That arc has to be in one person's head.
Negotiating with a supplier over email. It was too reasonable. It conceded points I would never have conceded because they sounded fair. Turns out a bit of stubbornness is a feature.
Interview synthesis, but only half of it. I let AI cluster the notes and pull quotes, then took back the 'so what' part. The patterns were right; the insights were bland. The interesting stuff was in what people avoided saying.
Writing the specials board. The descriptions were lovely and nobody ordered anything. 'Gran's lemon thing, back by demand' sells out by eleven.
