TWISS #1: Humans in an AI World
AI and the future of work
Welcome to This Week in Social Science. This edition explores recent research about how the rise of AI is affecting the work of humans.
Human-AI Collaborations Are Best for Creative, Open-Ended Tasks
Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of experiments comparing the performance of humans, AI, and human–AI collaborations across various tasks. They found that while human-AI teams consistently outperformed humans alone, human-AI teams generally did not outperform AI working independently. However, performance varied by the type of task. AI alone performed best at decision tasks that required deciding between a finite set of options, such as image classification and baggage screening. For those tasks, adding humans decreased performance. Human-AI collaborations performed best at creative tasks that required generating open-response content, like persuasive text or artistic images. This research suggests that humans can benefit from collaborating with AI on creative tasks while using AI to automate tasks focused on pattern recognition and classification.1
Working with AI Can Improve Productivity and the Emotional Experience of Work
Researchers worked with the firm Procter & Gamble (P&G) to understand how AI affects workplace collaboration and productivity. In a real P&G product development workshop, they randomly assigned business professionals to work either individually or teamed with another professional, and either with or without AI. They found that AI significantly enhances performance; one person with AI could match what previously required two people. The top performers, however, were teams using AI. The benefits went beyond idea quality – individuals using AI reported significantly more positive emotions, comparable to people working in human teams. AI was especially helpful for professionals with less product development experience and less technical knowledge. This research underscores the growing role of AI in the workplace, challenging how we think about collaboration in the age of intelligent machines.2 Read more.
TL;DR: These and other studies suggest that AI will augment, not replace, human creative work, while taking over pattern recognition and other tasks focused on detecting signal from noise.
Vaccaro, M., Almaatouq, A., & Malone, T. (2024). When combinations of humans and AI are useful: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-11.
Dell'Acqua, F., Ayoubi, C., Lifshitz, H., Sadun, R., Mollick, E., Mollick, L., ... & Lakhani, K. (2025). The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise (No. w33641). National Bureau of Economic Research.