AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett

Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways

Techno-optimists are evangelizing a vision of superhuman" artificial intelligence (AI). Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, predicts within a few years, AI will be better than almost all humans at almost everything". Elon Musk's so-called department of government efficiency" (Doge) is proposing replacing government workers with chatbots in the name of efficiency. And some scientists are claiming that AI can already outperform humans even in domains previously thought to be exclusively human, like empathy, creativity and conflict resolution.

It's true that in several prominent studies, researchers have staged competitions" in which AI technology appears to outperform humans in these very human areas. But a closer look reveals that these games are rigged against us humans. The competitions do not actually ask machines to perform human tasks; it's more accurate to say that they ask humans to behave in machine-like ways as they perform lifeless simulacra of human tasks.