You can't expect people to understand how to use AI without holding their hands. A lot of my work involves using AI to enhance my productivity. AI has helped me save lots of time, such as brainstorming ideas, preparing call scripts in advance of an important meeting, formatting data, transcribing text from an image, etc. I work with a lot of young people (aka "the iPhone generation") who are just starting to use AI.
At work, we encourage everyone to use AI as much as possible. But without specific direction on how to use AI, it seems that these young people have no idea what to do with AI. For example, we are preparing a year-end review post for the general public. My team member has for the past year written a weekly newsletter sharing the latest updates in a specific industry. When asked to prepare an outline on the key milestones that occurred this year, he was completely stumped on how to do it. He showed me a YTD stock price performance chart that ends in June and thought it might be relevant; hello, we're now in December!
So I simply asked him to copy and paste the financial and key highlights from each newsletter into a Google Doc, then we'd discuss it together in the afternoon. My plan is to show him that once you have all the data collected in a central document, you can then provide AI with specific guidance to create a blog post. Otherwise if you simply ask AI to generate a post without clear directions, all you'll get is AI slop. I need to show him step-by-step on what to do.
Although AI is extremely capable, technology without critical thinking is useless. If I gave you a computer but you don't know how to use a keyboard and mouse, what good is that computer to you? That's how I think about AI: you need to know how to use AI in order to really get value out of it. Otherwise it's just a fancy piece of technology that sits idle, much like my home gym equipment.
