Let’s keep our brains

My neighbours must have wondered what I had put in my water bottle as I trimmed the hedge and swept the sidewalk.

My sides hurt. I was laughing so very hard at an episode of the Hamish and Andy podcast.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, these are two of Australia’s funniest people.

Funny though they are, I didn’t expect their ‘jingle joust’ slot to be quite so on point with one of my current AI work dilemmas.

As their co-conspirator Jack sang in his jingle …

Now that we are living in the future
Everything can be done on a computer
Say goodbye to your mind
A machine will do the thinking for ya

 

Hamish & Andy podcast, Episode 306

I’m not sure if having everything done by a computer is a dream or a nightmare!

I talk more about it in a free 30-minute Pyramid Principle 101 Lightning Learning. Watch on demand available here.

In the meantime, how do I help people when all they want to do is ‘use Copilot’?

Here’s what I told a group who decided to use Copilot rather than complete an exercise I gave them. See how it resonates with you.

Copilot sounds polished and smooth, but you must be able to evaluate the substance for it to help you deliver communication that is actually useful.

1. Copilot’s writing sounds so smooth it’s easy to miss problems in its thinking. I used it this week to summarise a video script and call out the key points. What it delivered was useful, but when I scratched the key points a bit harder, I found internal contradictions that rendered sections pretty useless.

2. Copilot lacks context, only summarising the literal words it’s given. A workshop group decided to test how AI would go rewriting their email. When I got to their group, they looked a bit bored, having had nothing to do for about 10 minutes, and I asked them to show me their draft so I could help. At first glance it looked a lot better than the original big block of text. But the thing that mattered most was buried at the bottom. Why? Because the original big block of text missed the point too.

3. Without doing the mental gymnastics of creating the doc, we humans don’t always know what to look out for. If we don’t think through something ourselves, we are not as tuned into potential thinking problems within it. When I shared the summarised video script with someone not as intimately familiar with the subject of the script, they couldn’t see the problems that I could.

This free 30-minute Pyramid Principle 101 Lightning Learning will address some of these issues.

I share techniques for evaluating the quality of your own thinking as well as what your favourite AI friend gives you.

I hope you find it useful.

Davina

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