Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

GPT-4 provides, with unprecedented speed and scale, each of us with probabilistic syntheses of the world’s existing words to consider as inputs, challenges, and inspirations for our own work.

using GPT-4 is like directing a scene from a movie.

Here are three key principles I’ve found useful in my own attempts to use GPT-4 in my work. Principle 1: Treat GPT-4 like an undergrad research assistant, not an omniscient oracle. If you’ve ever worked with an undergraduate research assistant (or if you were one in college), you know that a helper like that is both powerful and limited in specific

The takeaway: in your overall quest for authoritative information, GPT-4 helps you start somewhere much closer to the finish line than if you didn’t have it as a resource.

humans could thrive alongside AI by: (1) specializing in asking the best questions, (2) learning insights or skills that are not available in the “training data” used by the deep learning networks, and (3) turning insights into actions.

Principle 3: Just try it!

When people make the choice to see GPT-4 this way, I call it an “AHA!” moment, to underscore the “Amplifying Human Abilities” perspective at the heart of that choice.

But unless someone has already taken the trouble to compile and publish the exact information you’re looking for, it could be very time-consuming to find. Even if that information exists on a single website, like Wikipedia or NFL.com, it will likely be spread across multiple pages. Getting your answer will still chew up a lot of your time.

we need new processes and formats where verification, context, and accountability can be easily applied in very transparent, persistent, shareable, and easy-to-evaluate ways.