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Unexpected Ways AI Can Increase Your Critical Thinking Skills
Ross Stevenson
May 7th, 2024
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Today’s Thoughts ☠️
Ahoy there 👋,
We’re back again, friend.
This week I’m putting the focus back on tactical AI use in L&D and beyond.
I see the same trends of 2-3 new AI reports every week. They never say anything that new. People are mostly using AI to create more content but at speed.
We’re expecting people to just figure out how to do better with tools.
My experience has taught me that rarely succeeds. You need to show people the enormity of the possible. There’s a controversial Steve Jobs quote I reflect on when new tech lands:
“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
Our industry (and many others) has fallen into the trap of a faster horse!
We acquire a powerful tool only to use it to 10x the very things that cripples us. Certainly not working smarter. The thing is it’s not your fault.
Too many people keep writing reports when we need to show the way. I’m bringing my own contribution to this with my weekly LinkedIn videos and YouTube tutorials.
This leads me to today’s big thought to explore together → examples of unexpected ways AI can increase your critical thinking skills.
Get your tea or beverage of choice ready, 🍵.
We've got lots to discuss!
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THE BIG THOUGHT
Unexpected Ways AI Can Increase Your Critical Thinking Skills
When AI helps me out
I hate writers block.
I can only describe it as staring at a wall with no door. You're constantly wondering "How do I get through this thing". It's a mixed bag of emotions.
Confusion leads to frustration, which leads to disenchantment.
Will I ever escape this wall?
One day, for no apparent reason, I flipped open my browser to find myself on ChatGPT. The loveable, divisive and often misunderstood digital conversationalist of our time.
I love AI, but I'm not in love with it.
Writing is so personal to me that I let nothing touch the edges of my words and thus the thoughts captured within them. Yet, I found an unexpected value from our little AI friend.
Our conversations, despite how dumb they were from time to time, were firing my neurons so much that the annoying wall was crumbling quickly.
In some way, my conversations with AI were making me think deeply, critically and more meaningfully.
How could I translate what I was trying to overcome to this digital being?
What were the right words?
Which examples would illustrate the mythical wall to a non-alive creation?
It turns out there's a lot more thinking involved when working with AI then you would first assume. I think that's a good thing.
The first conversation was simple, but it sparked curiosity
ChatGPT has no idea what writers block is.
Not in the way I experience it as a human. This is actually an advantage. It’s not overcome with the emotions of frustration and the want to bang your head off a table.
It’s far more stoic in it’s assessment, which is what you need.
This became an asset when I was ideating around the first live event I plan to host in my city in October this year. I was brainstorming how I want to position the event and what I want it to achieve.
I had two problems:
I couldn't make sense of the endless streams in my head
I was doing an awful job at trying to explain that to ChatGPT
I decided to flip the script.
Since I’d shared a bunch of context (more like ramblings) with ChatGPT already. I thought it would be better if it could ask me questions to clarify my thinking instead.
So that’s what I did.
I asked my little digital companion ”Ok, let's try a different tactic. Ask me key questions to help create a compelling offer.”
Then came this gem ↓
Pretty good, right?
I was impressed, that’s for sure.
Challenging AI's perspectives widened my own
I tend to do these kind of exercises a lot.
Often, I’ll feed a conversational AI tool a piece of my work or an idea I’m working on.
I’ll ask it to:
Poke holes in my thesis
Highlight anything I could have missed
Opportunities to view the topic from a different cultural viewpoint
These are some of my favourite ways to enhance my human skills.
I can see issues from angles I might not have considered before. That is a useful tool, imo.
AI doesn’t like one liners
Spending the last 25 years using one way to surface content online has built a strong auto-pilot in us all.
Working with generative AI is the total opposite of searching for content on Google.
One sentence questions stuffed with keywords don’t work here. You need to give conversational AI tools like ChatGPT lots of context and clear instruction. A prompt is just a instruction to a database after all.
You rob yourself to not only think critically with responses personalised to your inputs but also in how you structure instructions in the first place.
One thing that’s become more obvious to me is how I think deeply about what I ask and how I structure that. The unintended positive effect of this has spilled into my real-world life. I find myself trying to be more meaningful in how I describe topics to other humans.
It takes a lot more work to get a decent response from these tools than social media portrays.
Here’s an example of that in action with a report I was distilling ↓
Notice how I don’t just say: “Review this report”.
Don’t create, collaborate
You’ve heard me say this before - the world has enough cookie cutter content.
We don’t need to add to it with lazy copy and paste AI outputs.
While AI is not the saviour so many social gurus worship. It can amplify and enhance our most human skills.
Surely, this is something we each should explore.
🧪 Experiment to try
Feed your AI tool of choice with an example of your work.
This could be a workshop, email or a proposal. Whatever you’re working on right now. Make sure it’s not something sensitive if you’re not using enterprise AI tools.
Then ask the LLM to:
Review your work and provide an abstract on what it thinks the topic is.
Suggest points that could be improved and how.
What could be missing?
Feel free to add your own too.
👩💻 Prompt playground
A prompt for the above could look a little like this:
# Context
I'm a [insert role] creating a [thing you're building].
I've attached a document which is an outline of my work so far. I want to improve this, specifically looking at:
- [suggestion 1]
- [suggestion 2]
- [suggestion 3]
# Task
Your task is to review my work and provide the following:
- A maximum 100 word abstract on what the document is about
- Points that could be improved
- Anything I'm missing about the topic
- Analysis of the tone, style and structure
Be direct in your feedback. Challenge me when needed. Your goal is to help me uncover blindspots to improve my work.
If you're unsure of any of the above points, ask me questions to clarify your outputs.
Present these bullet points back to me with:
- a header
- Bullet point summary
- numbered suggestions (if applicable)
- examples for the suggestions you recommended. Ensure to include links to these materials
Confine your review to my [topic].
Let's begin with our first task.
Write a 100 word abstract about the topic of this document as you understand it.[Example] Unearth better insights from data
Final Thoughts
Challenge your perceptions
Think critically to win with AI and life
Keep experimenting
Till next time.
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SMART THOUGHTS
Stuff that caught my eye this week.
🤔 How to stop your data from being used to train AI
If you’re at all concerned how big tech are using your data to train AI models (and you should be) this one is for you.
This simple guide from the Wired, shows you how take control of what you share and how companies use that. Not all tools enable this but most big players, like ChatGPT, grant more privacy options than you may know.
💡 6 onboarding secrets to level up your programmes
It’s served as inspiration for many onboarding experiences I’ve crafted over the years (more like decades, I’m getting old).
I hope it can give you some fresh ideas to enhance your welcome experiences.
🔥 Have big tech companies lost their dream job status?
At one time, people would have killed to work for Apple, Google and Microsoft.
However, the recent big tech layoffs are making many of us think twice. what were once seen as anti-establishment in a capitalist world have turned out to be, well, just another typical capitalist company.
Here’s what the impact of this is doing to the dream of big tech careers.
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