AI Pushback

What do you do when AI indicates it's too busy to help you?

Sometimes the answer is to push back.

When I wrote an article late last year called Are AI Agents the Future of Haggling?, I wanted an image of two robots haggling with each other to accompany the piece.

Rather than spending time trying to find the perfect stock image I could use royalty-free on my blog, I asked Google Gemini to generate an appropriate image.

So I entered my prompt, and Google Gemini dutifully generated an image for me.

But I didn't love the result.

And so, as I learned was appropriate (and even encouraged) in the Google AI Essentials course I completed, I asked AI to try again with a specific modification I wanted to see.

That's when AI told me it was too busy to help, and asked me to try again later.

Something about a machine telling me that it was too busy to do what I needed it to do didn't sit well with me.

So I pushed back.*

I wrote, "No, this is time-sensitive. Please try again."

And it worked.

The AI immediately replied, "No worries, here is the image with a friendlier-looking robot on the right."

I asked my AI to complete a task. It initially told me it was "too busy" but then relented when I expressed a sense of urgency and repeated my request more forcefully.

AI will inevitably become an integral part of our everyday lives.

So we'll need to learn how to manage AI pushback sooner rather than later.

---

* Nicely, of course. When our robot overlords eventually take over, I want them to remember I was always nice with my requests.

P.S. The screenshot below shows the full interaction, in case you think I'm taking any creative liberties with this post for dramatic effect.