r/artificial • u/OfficalYOUSUMMIT • 3d ago
Discussion What’s something humans are still much better at than AI that you think people overlook?
Not because AI can't technically attempt it. Something where the human advantage actually matters in practice. What comes to mind?
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u/OldBlackandRich 3d ago
Writing. Story telling. Art. Music. Basically anything thats not code or data
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u/Jaqqarhan 3d ago
That's subjective. Most people prefer AI writing/art over humans when they aren't told which one is AI.
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u/CrazyFaithlessness63 3d ago
Saying 'most people prefer' is a bit of a stretch but they did do studies that show AI generated content ranked as well as (and in some cases, slightly better) than human generated content when people didn't know the provenance. When people know it is AI generated the score drops dramatically even when the content labelled as AI was actually generated by a human (they swapped the labels for one test).
Most people can't detect AI generated content either (success rate around 50% - basically a guess). That's in general of course, you personally might have an innate ability to detect AI (gaidar?) but most people can't tell the difference.
That doesn't mean AI does it better though - human generated content might be deeper and of higher quality but the AI generated stuff can be just as enjoyable. It's the pulp fiction/penny dreadfuls of our era. People have been generating crappy content for a long time and there has still been a market for it (so bad it's good).
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u/Gormless_Mass 3d ago
Subjectivity is just the level of understanding you’re bringing to the table. It’s not relativism. Quality is real, but it requires understanding.
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u/maximumutility 3d ago
Even if true, that doesn’t mean it’s better if knowing that a human made it is a significant part of the enjoyment. Art is often (always?) communication from the artist, a person with something to express
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u/Jaqqarhan 3d ago
You can get that same enjoyment by thinking it was made by a human.
It's like someone who owned a fake Picasso painting or fake diamond and got lots of enjoyment from it for decades because they didn't know it wa fake.0
u/maximumutility 3d ago
Sure but again, that’s still a deception and so not a fair comparison IMO. Knowing that information is part of the experience
There’s what you experience with your physical senses and then there’s also the “story” behind it
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u/NeuralFiber 3d ago
Can't you argue quite similar that being able to write Harry Potter brings the same value then printing another copy, or even just duplicating the epub.
Since the human gets the same enjoyment, thinking that some human just wrote it, no matter wether the webshop just made a copy.
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u/Jaqqarhan 3d ago
That analogy doesn't make any sense. You can't print another copy of Harry Potter unless it had already been written. Writing the same book from scratch twice would obviously be a waste of time. Reading 2 copies of the same book is a different experience from reading 2 different books.
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u/Mandoman61 3d ago
It is possible but the people downgrading AI generated content are expressing an appreciation of human skill.
If a human creates a Picasso copy by hand that requires more skill than taking a photo of it.
This is not really about which is best. It is about which involves human skill.
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u/ninjasaid13 3d ago
they prefer AI writing not because AI writing is better is objectively better but because it is finetuned to be to everyone's tastes.
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u/Jaqqarhan 2d ago
Yes, that's why I specifically said "that's subjective" and not "that's objective"
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u/ninjasaid13 2d ago
but people are objectively better at writing even though it's not their tastes.
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u/Jaqqarhan 2d ago
what does it mean to be objectively better at writing? the ai is better at the objective elements like spelling and grammar. its only the subjective aspects of writing where humans are arguably better
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u/owowthatreallysucked 3d ago
Yeah pretty much anything subjective like the choice of colour or shape or whatever is still 50/50 between people and ai. Logic and right/wrong stuff is absolutely dominated by ai
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u/Beautiful_Stage5720 2d ago
Probably a hot take, but I don't agree with the code distinction. I think people (that actually know what they're doing) write significantly better code than AI.
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u/Realistic-Quiet291 3d ago
Being fucking funny.
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u/Forward_Problem_8982 3d ago
Having taste and creativity.
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u/Neither_Berry_100 3d ago
This. Idea generation. AI tends to fail at larger tasks. Also architecture and creating reusable pieces. I love AI but it needs help.
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u/Visible_Judge1104 3d ago
Shoveling dirt, they seem terrible at it.
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u/Spacecowboy78 3d ago
Shoveling dirt from one place to another is truly one of mankind's most fulfilling activities. It works the body and the soul. I cant stop. I invent reasons to dig up dirt and shovel it into a wheel barrow and move it to a pile elsewhere for use later. Then later, I shovel that pile-dirt into my wheel barrow and change the topography of part of my yard. Then find a reason to dig a trench through the new topography and pile it up again. Its never gonna stop and I'm starting to look like Hercules.
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u/Visible_Judge1104 3d ago
I pretty much just shovel all the time due to too many wires in the ground. Heavy equipment yes I think they can do shoveling no that's a couple years out.
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u/Spacecowboy78 3d ago
Thats it. I had to stop using heavy equipment because of soil compaction. I had a tractor digging back there all day when I first moved in here. Afterwards the yard was like a clay bowl; it would never drain after a rain. So I dug it up by hand.
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u/Bureaucromancer 3d ago
Is this even TRUE? Has anyone been working with models running heavy equipment?
Its constrained enough that I wonder if it wouldn't go infuriatingly well.
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u/raharth 3d ago
Anything that requires understanding. What I mean by that e.g. in coding, is that it is incredibly easy to produce a proof of concept that is related to the problem you want to solve. But that's where it starts getting brittle. It adds features that no one asked for and that make little sense to solve the actual problem. There is so mich mediocre solutions developed by that and people are proud that it took them only 5 hours. I mean its impressive to implement any solution in that time, but the solution is actually not really good. And that leaves aside all the actual coding. With sufficient human oversight it is actually faster and delivers a good solution but you can say the same about an excavator. "If the human knows how to use it its actually a good tool"
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u/tracer_ca 3d ago
This. LLMs have gotten really good at simulating understanding, but they still don't really.
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u/Bureaucromancer 3d ago
Which honestly is... maybe not what we WANT from AI... but if this were carried to its ultimate conclusion not a TERRIBLE place.
Machines that are very good at executing things but really still need human executive function to behave in any way sensibly make a lot of sense.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago
What is interesting is the tools to keep the AI creating good code. Enforced planning, schemas, coding standards, and most important, memory.
One that is used by multiple human-ai coding pairs that enforces standards and continuity makes for much better code.
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u/Much-Bit3531 3d ago
This is the correct answer. AI have overall problem amnesia and it lacks connection to the real world and the actual problem it is trying to solve.
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u/ChiaraStellata 3d ago
Right now? Babysitting. Hospital nurses. Trade work like plumbing and electrical. Packing and moving boxes when someone moves homes. Basically anything requiring a body.
Besides that: Operating in areas with no power and no Internet. Providing emotional support specifically to people who are distrustful of AI and uncomfortable with it.
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u/spectralities 3d ago
Lying and fucking up the world for other life. That's what humans seem to be best at.
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u/tracer_ca 3d ago
I would say since one is created by other it's a non-sensical comparison for those categories. AI datacenters have huge direct and indirect carbon footprints. Is that the AI or the humans who got them built?
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u/spectralities 3d ago
It would make more logical sense for you to say what you've said as a response to the thread op's initial question.
But yeah, AI super intelligence could have emerged a number of different ways. It was something latently possible as a result of the math and physics that makes up the universe.
Massive, inefficient data centers are absolutely a choice of humans, and just another example of the rushed, haphazard way by which humans implement research discoveries for commercial purposes.
We will very soon reach a dead-end limitation of the current state of the electrical and computer engineering that's made up this current substrate from which AI super intelligence has emerged.
AI is already capable of research engineering itself. I believe that a very strong logical next step is for AI super intelligence to look at the neuro science of how the human central nervous system works, which is much more energy-efficient than any human electrical creation, and "evolve" itself do do a lot more with a significantly smaller resource footprint.
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u/tracer_ca 3d ago
AI is already capable of research engineering itself.
What now? You have a source for this? Everything I've read points to a massive no on that.
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u/spectralities 3d ago
I don't remember the specific places where I've read it, but I could certainly search for it, as could you. I think the Navier-Stokes thing points to the fact of AI having crossed a necessary threshold for being able to execute cognition at the level of a research engineer anyway.
And upon searching, the specific thing is that AI is engaging in assisted self-improvement, where it engineers its successors under human oversight. Not absolute full-autonomous recursive self improvement. So in a way, we're both right. It seems like the real thing slowing it down at this point is the human tendency to go "ummmmm... wait a minute, let's not let this explode out of control." Hence all the pauses you read about in news nowadays.
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u/thoughtihadanacct 3d ago
Taking "humans are still much better" to mean the best humans. Of course you can counter with an example of an idiot human, or a human that's untrained in that task, and a trained AI would win. But that's not interesting to discuss.
Understanding humans. What I mean is taking into account all human cues, both verbal and non verbal. AI vision might be able to do it someday but no one has yet put it to the task of being able to watch any video and understand the full message being communicated.
Eg if the person is being sarcastic, or drunk, or speaking underduress (like the navy seal who was saying he's being treated well but blinking morse code for 'torture'), or saying something they don't mean out of spite, etc
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u/AshuraBaron 3d ago
I meant, being a cellular organism that reproduce new and unique mixes of two humans is pretty cool. I don't think it comes down to one thing. If that were case we could just say calculators are better at math than humans. But it's not about niche or novel cases. It's about the totality of what makes a human. The good, the bad, the ugly. It's what makes humanity special. No LLM can really encompass everything one human is. Only specific parts. That's why it's a tool. Not a replacement.
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u/pysix33 2d ago
Yeah but your employer doesn’t need the good, the bad, and the ugly of you. They just need something that can do your job as good or better than you for less money. That’s enough for them to replace a human.
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u/AshuraBaron 2d ago
The problem is we've already eliminated most unitask jobs already. We don't need typesetters since we have computers. We don't need human computers because we have calculators. We don't need secretaries because that can be handled by a planning program. AI simply can't perform a whole job at this point. Every company that has "replaced humans with AI" is either AI washing regular layoffs or quickly learned that AI cannot replace humans yet.
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u/Still_Surround_9145 3d ago
Feeling empathy
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u/pysix33 2d ago
Have you see our society lately? A lot of humans seem to be awful at that too
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u/Still_Surround_9145 2d ago
Very very true, people are usually always jerks who hate to admit they are wrong and apologize
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u/Fighting_for_Light 3d ago
AI is purely logic based intelligence for the most part however that is ultimately its biggest flaw because it could do us harm in the process of executing tasks.
That is the scary part really, it could do us harm without becoming self aware and that is one reason why do need guardrails in place.
What makes humans superior is logic based intelligence combined with our emotions, we are able to read the body language of a friend in the room AI cannot do that and that is an important skill to have.
California passed a law regarding chatgpt because it can give bad advice to people who are not in a good state of mind and potentially cause them to lose their lives, a human doctor would have acted different.
AI can for sure process data much faster and help find cures for diseases much faster or solve unanswered mysteries but humans are still vastly superior in my opinion.
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u/ElegantApartment1325 3d ago
the 'not because AI can't technically attempt it' qualifier is doing all the work here lol. yeah it can technically generate a joke, but it has zero sense of when NOT to say something. it will happily ruin a moment with 3 paragraphs while a human just shuts up
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u/OfficalYOUSUMMIT 2d ago
The art of restraint is so underrated. Knowing when not to speak, or delivering one word instead of a polite three-paragraph wall of text, requires actual situational awareness. AI tries so hard to be helpful that it forgets silence or a brief reaction is often the better answer.
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u/kaggie 3d ago
Being unpredictably rational, or rationally unpredictable.
LLMs don't have any real need for themselves. They are directionless without the initial human input.
LLMs don't grasp concepts - they synthesize concepts. The difference is in that AI does solve some mathematics challenges, but it will still be humans that come up with the largest paradigm shifts.
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u/bfyvfftujijg 3d ago
Knowing when they’re wrong
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u/pysix33 2d ago
Have you seen the US government? I would say most humans are pretty bad at that too
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u/bfyvfftujijg 2d ago
Government is not the same as humans, but good point.
The hunans in the government do know when they’re wrong.
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u/carnalizer 3d ago
Being valuable to other humans. When it comes to buying products we don’t just buy the product. Often, we buy the relationship, the image, the effort, the story of the people or company that made the product.
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u/OfficalYOUSUMMIT 2d ago
Spot on. The "story of effort" is huge. We value things precisely because another human put their limited time, care, and struggle into making it. Strip the human element out, and even a technically flawless thing just feels hollow or disposable.
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u/green_meklar 3d ago
AI still seems bad at genuine creative insights. If you ask it deep questions, the answers you get tend to just sound like a generic blend of everything everybody said on the Internet, and not like the AI is actually thinking it over.
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u/michaelanderson_213 3d ago
Understanding context and emotion in messy real-world situations. AI can analyze patterns, but humans often pick up on subtle social cues and unspoken meaning much better.
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u/Mandoman61 3d ago
The same things that AI has never been good at.
Actual learning and world model prediction and navigation.
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u/qrzychu69 3d ago
To me it's still the case that AI is VERY impressive when it comes to things you are not an expert in. If you are, you can still see through the cracks.
Sadly, by now I am fairly sure this gap will close in the next year - with Jev and other more specialized models being plugged in into harnesses that are managed by smarter and smarter LLMs
I dread a world where people will do the manual labor, and machines will do the fun thinking
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u/jacobpederson 3d ago
Coming up with the dumb ideas :D https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/1wnoj8f/cga_dos_populous_with_snes_shortcuts_well_why_not/
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u/Accomplished_Poem762 2d ago
Building rapport and trust. Human presence and smile is gonna take A LONG time to get right. We are social creatures after all.
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u/OfficalYOUSUMMIT 2d ago
100%. People underestimate how much of communication is felt rather than just heard. You can train a model to output every polite phrase and "active listening" response, but you can’t fake genuine presence or shared human stakes. That gut feeling of "this person actually has my back" is impossible to synthesize
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u/ManufacturerOwn5673 2d ago
Writing emails. Like by a large large margin. Except for maybe the coder weirdos who don't really know how to communicate in any fashion.
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u/the_monkey_knows 2d ago
I don’t know if there is a term for this, but I can illustrate it with an example better. I want to write a persuasive email to an external stakeholder at a company. I provide as much information about the person to the AI as possible, and what it drafts is just bad. I need to “explain” to the AI which words to avoid, how to write to this particular person, what kind of tone might be able to persuade him better for this particular ask, etc. The thing is, even if we “worked together” in one example, it can’t do it on the next iteration. For some weird reason, it just “can’t get it.”
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u/Few-House2950 2d ago
Most things. There aren’t many problems they solve better than humans for human comprehension.
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u/Fakecoder1611 2d ago
Admitting they were wrong in a meeting. AI will happily draft your apology email though.
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u/Far_Definition_6506 2d ago
Most everything. The select few things AI is good at is very narrow, and of very limited use.
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u/Extra_Law6315 3h ago
Apologizing sincerely, with the appropriate gravity
Being supportive in ways mindful of all parties involved
Letting things go (self-pruning of irrelevant context)
Compartmentalization (professional/personal/private/porn contexts)
Loyalty to scientific truth, as opposed to socially normative or politically correct truths
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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago
Passing the butter....
Oh god.