Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI

In study after study, the people who get the biggest boost from AI are those with the lowest initial ability—it turns poor performers into good performers. In writing tasks, bad writers become solid. In creativity tests, it boosts the least creative the most. And among law students, the worst legal writers turn into good ones. And in a study of ear

So how do we do it? Let’s imagine that we want to come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order cheese shop. The AI can generate those for us, but we will get even better quality if we remember the principle of telling AI who it is: You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that ar

We have already outsourced the worst part of writing (checking grammar) and math (long division) to machines like spell checkers and calculators, which freed us from these tedious tasks. It would be natural to use LLMs to extend the process. And this is indeed what we have seen in some early research on using AI for work. People who use AI to do ta

Even slow-moving educational institutions are recognizing that teaching about AI will play an important role in education, with the US Department of Education suggesting, within just months of the release of ChatGPT, that AI will need to be embraced in classrooms.

If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel; what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far. And remember, AI is only going to get better at guiding us, rather than requiring us to guide it. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer.

This doesn’t mean

Imagine introducing high-quality AI tutors into the flipped classroom model. These AI-powered systems have the potential to significantly enhance the learning experience for students and make flipped classrooms even more effective. They provide personalized learning, where AI tutors can tailor instruction to each student’s unique needs while contin

For example, we know that in-class lectures are not the most effective way to teach and that topics need to be interwoven together in order for students to retain what they know. Unhappily for students, however, research shows that both homework and tests are actually remarkably useful learning tools.

So how should we use AI to help generate ideas? Fortunately, the papers, and other research on innovation, have some good suggestions. When you do include AI in idea generation, you should expect that most of its ideas will be mediocre. But that’s okay—that’s where you, as a human, come into the equation. You are looking for ideas that spark inspir

You actually have likely read enough at this point to be a good prompt engineer. Let’s start with the third principle I shared earlier—treat AI like a person and tell it what kind of person it is. LLMs work by predicting the next word, or part of a word, that would come after your prompt, sort of like a sophisticated autocomplete function. Then the