Gen AI: The Liberal Arts Majors Strike Back!

This recent Fast Company article discusses a recent study on how Gen AI tools influence employee creativity. The bottom line is that the study found that AI boosted the creativity of some employees, but only those who, as Liam Neeson might put it, have a “particular set of skills.” This excerpt explains:

Researchers randomly assigned 250 employees to either use ChatGPT to assist with their work or not. The employees who used the artificial intelligence tool were ranked higher in creativity by evaluators—but not all of them. Only the ones who had displayed strong “metacognitive skills” performed better, creatively speaking.

According to the research, employees who displayed such skills “could reflect on what information they lacked, keep track of how effective their approach is and reassess their approach when noticing a lack of progress, and refine their AI prompts accordingly.”

Metacognitive techniques essentially allow people to tune into their own thinking and learning processes; those who are able to think about their learning process and make changes are most likely to use AI tools well.

“Metacognition—thinking about your thinking—is the missing link between simply using AI and using it well,” Jackson G. Lu, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says of the results. “It allows people to ask better questions, recognize knowledge gaps, and extract real value from AI tools instead of relying on them passively.”

Hmm. . . so “thinking about thinking” is the key ability needed to unlock AI’s potential? Looks like colleges running away from the liberal arts may need to do a little rethinking. You don’t have to take my word for it – just look who folks like Anthropic & Google are hiring.