I recently gave a keynote at a conference that addressed the intersection of humanity and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).
A question from the audience ~
At what point do I say, “Yes, I used A.I. to help with this? Often I use it as an assistant. I come up with an idea, develop something, and put it into A.I. to make it better; not to provide content. To make it flow better. Do I label it as assisted by A.I.? Or do I just walk away?
– Conference Participant
Dear Conference Participant,
Great question! While I addressed your question live during the keynote, I’m going to re-share part of my response here with some follow-up concepts to consider. Here are three tips for helping you to navigate using A.I.:
1. Identify what you are both really good at and what you love to do. I believe that we can’t be good at everything. I also believe that every single person on this planet is really good at something; each of us has a gift. We may not be aware of our gift, or we may be aware of it and afraid to let it shine, or we may deliberately hide it for a whole range of reasons. During those times that we are using our gifts, we experience resonance: time falls away, we feel joy, and we feel an abundance of energy. Author/Coach Tara Mohr calls it your “calling,” Author/Teacher Gay Hendricks calls it your “Zone of Genius,” and Creator Cristi Cooke calls it your “Pillars of Genius.” Becoming aware of your gift will help you with working through the next tip…
2. If you want to use A.I., use it for the things that you are okay at or that you are very good at; don’t use it all by yourself for the things that you know nothing about. You won’t need it for the things that are your gifts, and probably wouldn’t want to, since using your gifts bring you joy. If you want to use A.I. for something that you know nothing about, make sure that you use it in tandem with human help/support/advice. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” and just like humans, A.I. makes mistakes. A.I. mistakes have the potential to escalate at a beyond-headache scale. Just as you would not hand over your car keys to an adolescent who doesn’t know how to drive yet, make sure that you are training A.I. with your rules, your way; don’t let it run untrained and unchecked.
3. When you use it, name it. Do not represent something that you are not. Do not have your company use A.I. without naming it. I have heard from and about incredibly frustrated people who lost trust in a company because they realized, after fifteen minutes, that they had been speaking to an A.I. agent and not a human. Instead of having an A.I. agent pretend to be human, have it tell us up front, “Hi, I’m the Company A.I. agent. How can I help you today?” Pretending messes with people’s ability to use their intuition. It doesn’t feel good on either side – the user or the recipient. To cite that you used A.I., you could include a statement. Here are some ideas from me to help get you started – you could say something like:
Co-developed with A.I.
Co-designed with A.I.
Thanks for the enhancements, A.I.!
You could take the scientific approach – for example, cite it and discuss the considerations of how it may have influenced your work. See this example of “Use of AI in Publication and Research” from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/instructions-for-authors#SecUseofAIinPublicationandResearch
Continue to practice identifying who or what was involved in creating a work. Whether your working partnership is with a human or with technology, my hope for you is that you are able to spend most of your time working with your innate gifts. It will help you to remove any reservations about acknowledging and naming who or what was involved in creating a work, including a collaboration with A.I.
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Disclaimer: These tips are meant to be a helpful starting point of ideas. Proceed at your own risk. Each person and organization is different, and this information may or may not help you. Try what resonates with you, keeping in mind common sense and circumstances. Seek professional advice that is tailored to your specific situation.
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