Micromanaging AI

Situational Management is a framework for deciding how to manage a report depending on their skill level & motivation. 

Where does AI fit today?

The answer is easy. It’s in the micromanage category where the motivation is high but the skill is low.

The computer is relentless in wanting to users’ questions or complete their code. But the skill level is relatively low - about the same as a high-school student.

Micromanagement means defining a task, reviewing the work early & often to refine the output, & guiding the progress at each step. This is how we work with AI today.

Imagine a project to create an image for a generic business website with Midjourney.

The prompt evolution might look something like this :

“an image of two people shaking hands in a work context.”

“an image of a man and a woman shaking hands in a modern office dressed in casual but nice clothes. both are smiling. "

“an image of a man and a woman shaking hands in a modern office dressed in casual but nice clothes. Both are smiling. Shallow depth of field. RED camera. photo-realistic, high-contrast HDR. –aspect_ratio 16:9 raw”

At some point in the future, perhaps, we will see models that are task-specific and accurate enough to simply get out of the way of their work. Today, we manage them like high-school interns.

We covered this topic & more on the SVIC podcast with Jordan & Joe.