A common sentiment that AI evangelists have expressed to me
is their eagerness to outsource their day-to-day communications to it. I am not
about to state that this is always a mistake. Certain missives are so rote and
return so little for the invested effort that it’s hard to justify composing
them from scratch. We’ve all sunk time into sending formulaic emails, which
could have been better spent doing almost anything else.
But here’s the catch: if you want AI to do its best work, you
have to stay sharp yourself. These tools are only as strong as the thinking and
language you bring to them.
What I suspect yields the best long-term utility is to do
some portion of your language composition completely unassisted. I don’t
advance this out of some metaphysical concern for preserving the human soul
(though it can double as that in a pinch), but as an appeal to the practical
pursuit of conjuring the best AI output possible.
Just as Formula 1 drivers physically condition to better
handle their finely tuned machines, practicing language skills without AI
augmentation hones your ability to wield AI deftly. In this article, I offer
three activities — really, two warm-ups and a high-intensity workout — that
help extend what you can elicit from AI and cultivate your self-expression.
On the Write Track
To start, do some writing without AI. Most of the time, our
thoughts crest and subside in unpredictable waves. This rhythm can surface
profound realizations, but inconsistently so. Focused, linear thinking
counterbalances the mind’s tendency to spontaneity with structure. By directing
attention to one thought and playing it forward from there, you can pull at one
of the innumerable threads lying all around us.
Writing is the documentation of this cognitive exercise —
it’s like taking photographs as you follow your thoughts. The same sequential
progression of reasoning at the heart of good writing is what organizes your
instructions to the AI. As much as AI hype-chasers glorify what I just
described as “prompt engineering”, it’s actually good, old-fashioned
articulateness.
A Penny for Thoughts Is a Sound Investment
Once you’ve checked that box, start talking to people about
things they understand but you don’t. Learning about something by discussing it
with an expert is a kind of language puzzle, because you have to figure out how
to figure out what to ask. You are prodding into the unknown. Without subject
matter knowledge, you don’t know what rocks to look under.
But this is a conversation: you get the chance to iterate. If
you hit a dead end, you change tack. When you find one breadcrumb, you’re
closer to finding a loaf. Practice formulating the right diagnostic questions,
and you get faster at discovering the tailored questions that unlock more
arcane knowledge. Those opening questions are the trickiest, but once you get
familiar with them, you will open doors you didn’t even realize were there.
Gaming the System
Now that you’ve gotten the hang of those, you’re ready to sit
down and play an old-school tabletop role-playing game (RPG). It was only a
matter of time until I worked this pastime of mine into one of my articles, but
I can’t imagine a more fitting pretext.
For those unfamiliar with the genre, a tabletop RPG is a game
in which one player, usually referred to as the “game master” or similar
appellation, creates and administers an imaginary game world, and the other
players each have a character that they use to interact with everything in that
game world.