From the MIT study, is it smarter to resign than to use forced AI?

Shrug If you are being told by your boss to use AI or quit and you absolutely refuse to use AI yes you should quit.

The end. No anger at you or your boss. It's an incompatibility.

I understand why some companies mandate usage these days. Especially for programming. The honest truth is that it does speed up development. The other honest truth is that there's resistance to change that harms productivity at times like this and the only way around that is for leadership to be very direct on this point.

To use a metaphor employers don't want weavers who refuse to make use of the loom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Past a certain level of seniority, your job increasingly becomes translating imprecise mandates from on high into practical outcomes.

If I heard someone making a blanket mandate for using AI, I'd translate that to them hearing this "new AI thing" allows people to do more work more efficently, and they to see that increase in their org.

I'd take that mandate as a chance to explore AI on someone else's dime, but continue doing my work otherwise, only using AI as it benefits me.

If expectations rise to un-reasonable level because of unrealistic expectations around AI, that's a seperate problem you'll have to deal with.

(It's also not a great look that your leadership wouldn't dig in to realize how silly forced AI is, but a charitable reading is that they're trying to force interactions with AI so employees can discover where it works and where it doesn't)

Let me ask you a related question: if there was a study that handwriting is better for your brain than typing, should secretaries have quitted when typewriters and computers were introduced?

The thing is, there is no going back. There will be no significant demand for output that's created by humans even though a machine can do it as well. You can try to find a niche where AI is worse than humans. But that will be increasingly difficult to find.

So if you want to continue doing things without AI, that's fine. But most likely it will be a hobby, not a job.

I don't think a lot of us here write essays for a living.

This is an interesting study. I wonder how the LLM option might compare to human written responses in the same format (but with higher latency), or even to having a physical human in the room. Given some of the points from the conclusion about teachers being able to detect LLM inspired work, I wonder if either of these options may, at times, be better forms of learning due to improved quality.

+1 for the article, don't have an answer to your question.

This paper makes me glad I am not a researcher.

Smarter is a very poor metric.

And a convenient excuse.