You may have seen clips of Ronny Chieng’s Harvard commencement speech where he encouraged graduates to “Destroy AI”. Or, like me, been asked by people in your personal life how you navigate the fact that many Americans have a negative view of AI.
Personally, I've tried to start capturing my core philosophies I have around using AI. This is a mutable object and will continue to change (especially as AI continues to change!). I’m sharing here as inspiration to build your own philosophy, not as the framework anyone reading this has to use:
“Writing is thinking” - There’s a large push to use AI to write or produce content. I’ve been resistant to this. I believe that the purpose of writing is first-and-foremost to solidify my own thinking. Whenever I’ve offloaded my writing to AI, I’ve found that it’s resulted in me entering conversations without the level of thoughtfulness that I want.
“Humans are the heroes” - The story of AI to me is “look at what YOU can do with these tools”, not “look at what these tools can do”. I get increasingly uncomfortable with stories where AI is the hero. As an avid user of these tools, I’ve seen first-hand how even though the tools are magical, that the people who really accomplish meaningful things with them do it because of the person – their creativity, their resilience.
“AI as a smarter rubber duck” - In software engineering, there’s an idea of rubberducking; which is when you’re facing an issue with your code, you explain it to a rubber duck and oftentimes you realize what’s wrong. AI is a way smarter rubber duck. On most things I write, I’ll have Gemini role play different personalities and react.
“Use AI for what I hate” - I heard this from someone else recently "If I love something, I don’t use AI. If I hate something, I use AI for it”. Personally, I use AI for a lot of things I love (like coding, or music, or family games) so I can’t embrace the first part. But I do think viewing AI as a way to take things I don’t enjoy (or am bad at) off my plate is something I’ve embraced.
“Don’t believe the hype, try everything” - This is not going to be a compelling argument for people who are anti-AI, but personally I really try to get hands on with as much as possible. Kind of a “don’t knock it until you try it” attitude, but also in the reverse, people say a lot about AI but I “don’t believe it until I try it” too. People can tell me a model is good (and they will), but how does it work on my tasks? People can tell me a product is good (and they will), but how does it help me accomplish my goals
Ultimately, I’m not sure these ideas would convince anyone who wants to hate AI that it’s a good thing but I feel like I can at least personally use some of these points in refining my own stance on applying AI to my work and life.
