Use AI to do Just One Job

Are you curious about AI but still a bit skeptical?  Then this post is for you.

First, a test: Have you found at least one important task that you can now do better or faster thanks to AI?

Yes! Hooray.

No? Keep reading.

To put the “no” into context, you are, in effect, making an active choice not to use a major productivity enhancer. It’s like insisting to do your calculations by hand instead of Excel, or writing by hand instead of using Word or Google docs.

If that choice is essential to your creative process, then I encourage you to stick with it.

But there is definitely somewhere that you should be using AI.

If you’re not using AI, you may have read about it or tried ChatGPT, but it’s not part of your daily workflow.

The road from here to there is short, just follow these steps:

1. Pick a task that you do often, that you understand well, and for which you are a good judge of what good quality looks like.
2. Log in to one of the new AI models. I would suggest you pick ChatGPT-4 (free) or Claude 3 Opus (I pay $20/month for this).
3. Play around for 1-2 hours, working to get the AI to help you do your chosen task.

A mindset shift around AI might help, and what helped me the most was this How Should I Be Using AI Right Now podcast by Ezra Klein.

My takeaways from the podcast were:

• Anthropomorphize the AI. Think of it like a person you’re working with, not like a computer. More specifically, think of the AI like an intern who’s a couple of years out of college who is very capable but who needs (and is open to) a lot of feedback.
• Tell the AI who it is / who you want it to be. Meaning, give it a personality. Tell it to be Steve Jobs, or tell it the characteristics of your college advisor or best friend or editor. When you tell the AI what personality to have, it responds with the right tone and syntax and, more surprisingly, you are changing the quality of the responses.
• Give the AI examples of what ‘good’ looks like. Share examples of the work product that meets the standard you want the AI to hit. Better yet, share 10 of those. I find copy/pasting text the easiest way to do this. Explain what each example is and how representative it is of the generalized output you’d like to see. The more you can share, the better.
• Give the AI tons of feedback on its output. This is where the “helpful intern” mindset helps. The AI needs to be told what to do, so tell it! Here are some examples from when I was playing with teaching the AI to write a good follow-up email from a sales call. (aside: the AI is reading what I write to decide how it will write. So I’m intentional about writing like I write.)
  • “It’s pretty good. The opening is a bit generic and I’m always trying to avoid more general statements, so please tone that down a bit and stick to specifics.”
  • “You’re getting there. Let’s leave that as a placeholder for now. It’s a good start for the more standard emails that I write. But sometimes I’m more open ended.”
  • “OK a few things – avoid unnecessary modifiers like “truly believe” and try to avoid repeating words (you used “believe” twice at the start of two paragraphs).”
  • “This sentence is terrible ‘Bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise will be critical in unlocking innovative solutions.’ It is a statement full of platitudes. Avoid writing like this always.”
  • “Yup. Better. But this sentence is still full of platitudes. ‘and have been impressed by the insights and leadership you’ve brought to the space.’ What would be better is either to delete it or to find something relevant to refer to that is more specific. Also on the prior example, ‘exciting opportunity’ is breathy and doesn’t need the word ‘exciting.’ Don’t be afraid to be direct and not too flowery.”
  • It finally produced something decent, so I wrote, ‘Good. This works as a point of reference, stylistically.’ I named that style so I could refer back to it in the future.

I expect you’re getting the feel for this…I gave more feedback on various iterations, either at the general level (“that is waaaay too wordy. Try again but cut 80% of the words”) or much more specific (“This sentence is terrible, the whole second half of it is a word salad that adds no value.”). Again, the mindset of “I’m talking to an intern” really helped me stick with it here.

After about an hour of this back-and-forth, the AI was giving me what I wanted at a high standard, and this standard got me an 80% first draft that will save me tons of time.

In addition, working on a real task—one that is important, and where I have domain expertise—helps me learn about what the AI can and cannot do well.

And the impact of that is huge. It’s like crossing a threshold as I imagine the amount of leverage each of the 120 people on my team could have if this becomes part of their workflow. What if each person could have a “very helpful and eager intern” at their beck and call? Imagine the impact of that, and add to it the operational stack that we can hack to pieces with the aid of this technology.

I hope this is the post that nudges you to take another shot at this, and that, in a weeks’ time, you’ll have played with and succeeded at getting AI to do SOMETHING meaningfully helpful in your professional or personal life.

If you need more ideas of where to start, here they are:

• Writing your professional bio
• Creating meeting summaries
• Writing follow-up emails from sales calls
• Resume screening to avoid bias
• Creating a negotiation training module
• Helping you prioritize your to do list
• Summarize this data set
• etc. etc.

Don’t forget: the assisted here is the point.

I generated that list with help from AI.

It gave me two lists of 10 ideas. All of them were too wordy. I liked 5 of the ideas, and I made those 5 better, added links, and I added two of my own

Voila.

(p.s. more On Interviewing Well posts are in the queue. Stay tuned.)