Closer to co-intelligence
I operate with AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) every day now. Join the club, I guess! What’s interesting is I’ve recently moved from being a passive AI user to collaborating with it more actively, as a kind of co-intelligence. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way.
You’re AI’s assistant, too. AI’s strengths and weaknesses are uneven. It’s superhuman at summarizing Tesla’s 10-K (complex analysis), but weak at adding the dollars and cents (basic arithmetic). Wharton’s Ethan Mollick calls this AI’s “jagged frontier”. This means you need to stay on your toes and help the model recognize its own blind spots. There are a few ways to do this:
Be its coach. Try to poke at its flimsy arguments.
Be its editor. Simplify its overwritten prose, including its dependence on em dashes (“—”).
Be its skeptic. Fact-check any hallucinated sources or websites.
Be its interpreter. AI often spews out more info than necessary. It’s your job to interpret what’s relevant and actionable. As economist John List recently wrote,
“An interviewer just asked me what skills AI will make more important. My response? Critical thinking skills. This is because in the past there was value in creating large quantities of information. That is now costless. The new currency is how to generate, assimilate, interpret, and make that large amount of information actionable.”
Equally important to what you ask AI to do is what you don’t ask it to do. If you only ask AI to find evidence supporting your existing beliefs, you’re using just 50% of its power. Instead, ask it to find evidence against your beliefs. Ask it to prove you wrong or critique your thinking. In general, make sure you aren’t just using AI to fool yourself. Ask it those uncomfortable, critical questions that might not be top-of-mind. It’ll make your ideas even stronger.
Your personal voice is your edge. Your personal stories, battle scars, and memories aren’t in AI’s training set. So those are your assets to protect and cultivate. When composing articles, blogs, or speeches, lean into that personal material to the degree it’s relevant, because it’s intensely, seductively human.
Dale Carnegie’s advice on giving a great speech applies just as well to creating in the age of AI:
“Talk about something that you have earned the right to talk about through long study or experience. Talk about something that you know and know that you know. Don’t spend ten minutes or ten hours preparing a
talk: spend ten weeks or ten months. Better still, spend ten years.”