What is the value of human work in a world of generative AI? In her paper, Learning to Prompt: Human Adaptation in Production with Generative AI, Economics PhD candidate Sijie Lin investigated the role human creativity might play to answer that question. Lin investigated how people use Midjourney, an AI image generator, the users of Discord can access to create images based on text prompts. To Lin, the tool provided an interesting setting to conduct research.

“Midjourney allowed me to observe the creative process,” Lin said. “In many previous settings we only observed inputs and outputs, but in this setting, I can see exactly how people interact with AI, going back and forth to come up with the image they want.”

What Lin discovered is that using AI tools to produce quality work that meets specifications requires iteration and human effort.

“It’s not trivial to get what you want from AI,” she explained. “You need to write the right prompts, so the output goes in the direction you want. That judgment is very important and it’s mentally demanding. You can’t just press a button and magically get whatever you want.” [Read more…]