Even when AI performs tasks like chess at a superhuman level, humans still gravitate towards watching other imperfect humans compete. This suggests our engagement stems from fallibility, surprise, and the shared experience of making mistakes—qualities that perfectly optimized AI lacks, limiting its cultural replacement of human performance.

Related Insights

AI is engineered to eliminate errors, which is precisely its limitation. True human creativity stems from our "bugs"—our quirks, emotions, misinterpretations, and mistakes. This ability to be imperfect is what will continue to separate human ingenuity from artificial intelligence.

Like chess players who still compete despite AI's dominance, humans will continue practicing skills like writing or design even when AI is better. The fear that AI will make human skill obsolete misses the point. The intrinsic motivation comes from the journey of improvement and the act of creation itself.

When Good Star Labs streamed their AI Diplomacy game on Twitch, it attracted 50,000 viewers from the gaming community. Watching AIs make mistakes, betray allies, and strategize made the technology more relatable and less intimidating, helping to bridge the gap between AI experts and the general public.

Contrary to fears, AI surpassing human ability has fueled chess's popularity. AI engines are used as personalized coaches in products like Chess.com, analyzing games and helping millions of users learn and improve, making the game more accessible.

True creative mastery emerges from an unpredictable human process. AI can generate options quickly but bypasses this journey, losing the potential for inexplicable, last-minute genius that defines truly great work. It optimizes for speed at the cost of brilliance.

If AI were perfect, it would simply replace tasks. Because it is imperfect and requires nuanced interaction, it creates demand for skilled professionals who can prompt, verify, and creatively apply it. This turns AI's limitations into a tool that requires and rewards human proficiency.

AI's occasional errors ('hallucinations') should be understood as a characteristic of a new, creative type of computer, not a simple flaw. Users must work with it as they would a talented but fallible human: leveraging its creativity while tolerating its occasional incorrectness and using its capacity for self-critique.

People often dismiss AI for telling bad jokes on the spot, but even the world's best comedians struggle to be funny on demand with a stranger. This reveals an unfair double standard; we expect perfect, context-free performance from AI that we don't expect from human experts.

The challenge in designing game AI isn't making it unbeatable—that's easy. The true goal is to create an opponent that pushes players to an optimal state of challenge where matches are close and a sense of progression is maintained. Winning or losing every game easily is boring.

Instead of forcing AI to be as deterministic as traditional code, we should embrace its "squishy" nature. Humans have deep-seated biological and social models for dealing with unpredictable, human-like agents, making these systems more intuitive to interact with than rigid software.