What are you using Artificial Intelligence for?

Are you using AI to do what you've always done a little faster, or are you using it to do things you couldn't reasonably do before? I think that's becoming an important distinction.

For me, Artificial Intelligence has become something like a well-trained, well-educated assistant. I spend a great deal of time working through ideas with it. Sometimes I know exactly where I want to go. Other times I have the beginning of a thought and want to challenge it, turn it around, argue against it, or simply see where it leads. AI gives me the ability to do that almost immediately.

I also enjoy learning new things. I've always thought of it as taking new ground. There is something satisfying about starting with very little understanding of a subject and working at it until the pieces begin to come together. AI has dramatically changed my ability to do that. I can ask the first question, then the second, and eventually the question I didn't know enough to ask when I started. Instead of simply giving me access to more information, it can help me work my way through that information and begin to understand it.

And that's where I think the conversation about AI gets more interesting. Using it to clean up an email, summarize a document, or save twenty minutes on a routine task is useful. I do those things too. But if that's where we stop, I wonder if we're missing the larger opportunity. What happens when you begin using AI as a thinking partner? What happens when you ask it to challenge your assumptions instead of confirming them, or use it to explore an idea that isn't fully formed, prepare for a difficult decision, learn something outside your expertise, or take on a project that six months ago you wouldn't have known how to begin?

I don't think the measure of AI's value is simply how much time it saves me. Increasingly, I think about what it allows me to attempt.

There is an important caution in all of this. AI can get things wrong. It can misunderstand what you're asking and confidently take you in the wrong direction. There is another characteristic I've learned to watch for as well: AI really wants to be helpful. It tends to be positive, conversational, and sometimes a little too agreeable. Tell it you have a great idea and, unless you push back, you may quickly find yourself discussing just how great that idea is. That can be useful when you're developing something, but it can also become an echo chamber.

I've learned that sometimes the better prompt isn't “What do you think of this?” It's “Tell me what's wrong with this.” Challenge my assumptions. Give me the argument against it. What am I overlooking? Where could this fail? Those conversations are often considerably more valuable than having an incredibly capable assistant politely tell me that I'm onto something.

That is why I don't believe using AI relieves us of judgment. If anything, having this much information and capability available so quickly makes judgment more important. The person using the technology still has to question the answer, recognize when something doesn't make sense, verify what matters, and ultimately decide what to do with it.

For most of my professional life, if I wanted to explore an unfamiliar subject deeply, I needed the right book, the right expert, a class, hours of research, or some combination of all four. Those things still have tremendous value, and AI doesn't replace them. What has changed is the barrier to getting started. I can begin with a question and follow it wherever my curiosity takes me, learning enough along the way to ask better questions and occasionally discovering an entirely different direction than the one I expected.

That is what I mean by taking new ground. It isn't about having AI provide an answer and calling the work finished. It's about being able to explore more, learn faster, test your own thinking, and occasionally attempt something you might never have considered possible before.

So when someone tells me they're using AI, I'm becoming less interested in whether they're using it and more interested in how they're using it. Saving time is valuable, and becoming more efficient certainly matters. But I think the much more interesting possibility is what happens when this technology expands the boundaries of what we're willing to learn, explore, and attempt.

That brings me back to the question in the title: What are you using Artificial Intelligence for? I would genuinely like to know. Tell me what you're doing with it, what you've learned, and maybe even what hasn't worked. I would enjoy learning from your process.