Beyond Average: Crafting the Future of AI With Your Experience
AI is changing everything as you wait to see how it will affect you. From finances to workflow automation, from creative work to data analysis, from the benign to the life-saving, AI is changing everything.
And you are obliged to get involved.
We are in a rare moment. We can get involved in a technological revolution that we’ve never seen before. This moment is one where we can engage with the revolution and help shape its outcome. We can help shape the tools that are shaping our now and will shape our future.
But only if we bring everything we know and everything we understand to the work that we are doing. Being involved matters because our participation helps shape the direction of human knowledge and how it will be used. We are shaping the large language models now that will be used tomorrow.
And we have to start now. There’s already a glut of terrible work in the real world. It fills our LinkedIn feeds, Instagram feeds, and news content that restates the same thing repeatedly and does not provide any real value or help create solutions.
To go quickly, create a solution, and show how clever we are, we end up making more shit that is just going to be ignored. Worse, this work will continue to be a part of a large language model that will learn from what we’re creating a year from now.
Early in 2023, it was suggested that ChatGPT was getting dumber. The corollary was that the content being pulled out of ChatGPT was being influenced by people doing the dumbest work and not thinking critically about the result. I would hate to think that this powerful technology would only be a mirror that would reflect how mediocre we can be.
In the beginning, I rushed to get new content out. Here was this amazing tool that would make my life easier! But I quickly realized this wouldn’t work as I had hoped. Instead of spending less time working on problems, it took more time, mostly because I hated what was created. At the end of the day, I couldn’t get this magical tool to do what I wanted: write for me.
And that is right when it hit me, this wasn’t going to make my work easier; it was going to improve my work. The research was way more manageable. Iteration was way easier. Content generation took a lot of work. What If I used the tools, as a friend says, “as a really bright MBA graduate with no experience?” Could I have a collaborator who helped me build better things? That knew more but needed to have my experience?
Participating means that you are helping to influence the outcome. If you create something amazing with AI and are actively engaged in making great things, then you are helping stop regression to the mean. You are personally responsible for changing the direction of the wind and what the butterfly wing does to future civilizations.
Consider the custom GPT tools that OpenAI launched. Brilliant. Let’s engage with the LLM by using our experiences to refine what the model is doing. OpenAI explicitly states they will not use our inputs to train the LLM via the custom GPTs. But the fine-tuning that happens along the way as they see what we come up with to refine the current LLM is an incredible asset to future LLM refinement projects.
The best way to get involved is to pick up a project and push that project as far as you can with AI so that you know you’re creating something worth doing. If you don’t have your own problem to solve, pick a nonprofit in your community that could benefit from some help with AI and agree to work with them to help them understand how AI could be helpful.
For example, you could work with that nonprofit to develop a content calendar, a strategic plan, data analysis, or Instagram assets to raise money. Of course, that requires understanding the organization’s needs and standards, but that’s part of the process. There’s a great deal of value in contributing to an organization’s existing work that way.
If you’re already using AI, please push your work even further. Your expectations and the quality of work you execute should be as good as you can make it — as good as you understand how to do it. Avoid platitudes at all costs in any creative writing you’re doing and instead focus on providing real value and insight based on your experience.
If you write code, you should look for the cleanest, most beautiful way to solve a problem. Instead of accepting whatever answer is the most expedient, continue to iterate on solutions until you have something that reflects excellent work. With the time we gain via AI, we would instead look for the best possible work, not just the things that happen quickly.
Many innovative and exciting ideas are being deployed, but in the end, it’s going to take our involvement and engagement to ensure that these solutions are worth pursuing. Avoid the temptation to crank stuff out and make more noise.
Consider whatever you’re doing now and whatever you’ve got coming up so that you can take a step back and think about the best possible solution. You should design it and work backward from there. If you accept the first solutions, you are short-circuiting your own creative work and the work of others to come. You’re setting a standard the LLM will continue to learn once you put it into the world.
I’m an idealist. An optimist. I know one reason we have a bunch of terrible solutions to problems is because we have made conscious decisions to pump out more shit. Wouldn’t it be great to take this moment now to build things of value? To create things that change the possibilities for generations to come?
I sure as hell hope so. Let’s get to work.
