“Libertà va cercando, ch’è sì cara, come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta.” “He goes seeking freedom, which is so precious, as anyone who gives his life for it knows.” Purgatorio, Canto I
Sorry for the long gap in posts, as life has caught up with me and required me to dedicate more effort to my job, as well as other writing, which you can catch up on at yakovshkolnikov.com.
During these several months, I have tremendously benefited from the use of AI to scale up the amount of work that I can do, both in my job as a CIO and as the founder of a research lab.
At the same time, I think the critical realization for me was that I have lost too much by relying on AI to do my writing, to communicate my thoughts, and to solidify my understanding of concepts.
While AI is a very good research partner, I need to write down the conclusions, the process, and the details of the information AI returns myself to make it stick, to make sense of it, and to extend the abilities I am trying to achieve through using AI. And over the last few months, my reliance on AI for writing has been mostly delegated to just checking the text.
Therefore, this post’s experiment will be to measure the influence of AI on your writing.
Experiment
Pick two topics you care about.
For the first topic, think about it and create a prompt you would give to AI. Then, yourself, without the help of AI, write a paragraph on it. Then have AI generate content from this prompt.
For the second experiment, do a “crossover.” Generate a prompt, then have AI write the text, and then, after seeing its output, write it in your own words.
Come back a day later. Start by checking whether you even remember what was written down. Then review the results of both experiments.
See if you find that both the AI writing and your writing after seeing the AI results are different from—or even worse than—your writing without seeing its outputs. If you do, it is an indicator of a need to change how you use AI.
This gives you a nice template to repeat this experiment across other areas in which your reliance on AI has increased over the last year.