Two ways to misuse AI
Workslop and outsourced thinking weaken the people who depend on them
AI is a multi-tool and can be used almost any way you see fit. Given the mind-boggling variety of possible uses, wanted to plant a flag and strongly recommend against the following 2 uses of any AI tool:
1. Workslop:
We’ve all received stuff like this in the past year or so: Emails that are grandiose in scale and 5 paragraphs longer than the situation would require. Also riddled with all kinds of tells indicating 100% AI authorship with no human review: em-dashes, weird phrasing, etc. Not a good look, not helpful to the recipient, and ultimately bad for the brand of the sender.
We all have access to AI models, so an email that amounts to just some more AI spam invalidates the point of people emailing one another in the first place. We send emails to convey specific knowledge, not to just repeat what the other person could have discovered by asking their own AI model instead of emailing.
To be clear: AI-powered email review and drafting is a powerful and useful toolset. But seriously, I think the modern workforce could benefit from cutting back on the size & quantity of AI-generated emails by like 75%. Let’s work together to make authentic ideas and writing cool again.
2. Outsourced thinking:
AI can be a powerful tool for strategic thinking/planning in the many complex personal and professional situations that we deal with each day. However the super-personalized nature of an AI chat interface turns it into the ultimate echochamber. It has unlimited time for you and it will hype you up because you are the customer.
So if you have a really good idea, it can become a seed that AI will help you to grow into a flourishing tree. But on the flip side of the coin, if you have a really bad idea, AI will nourish that into a super-weed. The temptation is to run every idea exclusively through AI instead of other people because AI will always tell you that you’re right. But of course that can’t always be true.
Don’t forget that disagreement from other people is one of your most valuable assets, because unlike an AI model, other people have no incentive to rope you in further down a bad train of thought. AI has unlimited time for bad ideas, but other people do not. Be sure to take advantage of that fact by keeping your AI tools close but your trusted humans closer.