15 Times to Use AI, and 5 Not To

In my experience, the most useful approaches to AI are:

1. Ask clearly bounded questions, where you can easily inspect the results.


2. Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Instead, challenge it to broaden your options.


3. Take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t have feelings, and use its honesty to get useful feedback.

A lot of active research is happening around the best way to “program” an LLM, but one practical implication is that it can help to give the AI explicit instructions that go step by step through what you want. One approach, called chain-of-thought prompting, gives the AI an example of how you want it to reason, before you make your request. Even mo

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Here are my four principles of working with AI: Principle 1: Always invite AI to the table. You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiari

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In the most practical sense, we are now much less limited by ideas than ever before. Even people who don’t consider themselves creative now have access to a machine that will generate innovative concepts that beat those of most humans (though not the most creative ones). Where previously, there were only a few people who had the ability to come up ... See more