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A Powerful Tutor
One of the greatest powers of the AI is the ability to make connections between things, which is what good tutoring is about. My students have stopped raising their hands as much in class, and part of it is they ask the AI to explain something like they’re ten. I don’t actually think explaining like you’re ten uses the full power of the AI. I think if you wanna learn something, ask it to explain things to you in a context you understand.
But don’t just ask for explanations. Ask for examples. Ask for analogies. Ask for scenarios. Ask where this could be useful. Ask it to quiz you to make sure you actually know something. Ask it to remove jargon. All of these kind of things are very useful. Upload an academic paper and ask for an explanation of what is important. There’ll still be hallucinations and errors. So it’s not gonna make you a true expert in a topic, but it’s a really good starting point.
Four Ways to Get Feedback
I think asking the AI to take on different personas and give you feedback is incredibly useful. I do it all the time. If I tell it it is a marketer, it knows a lot then about what kind of writing it might want to produce. If I tell it it’s a marketer for a tech company, even more so. If I say it is a marketer for a technology company that builds enterprise software products for international markets, I’m gonna get even different kinds of answers. You can’t just sort of assume any persona is gonna work. There is some statistical evidence that telling it it’s really great at some things makes it better. Sometimes it actually makes it worse. So if you tell it’s a great writer, you actually get often worse writing than if you don’t tell it’s a great writer because its view of a great writer is very complicated words that are very, very elaborate writing. And so you’re gonna have to experiment with what persona works for you.
So let’s say you wanted to use AI to get you help with giving feedback as your manager to a report of yours where there’s some sort of issue. We know that the AI often has higher empathy levels when people judge their responses than empathy levels from humans. That doesn’t mean the AI is actually empathetic, but it feels empathetic to humans. A good thing to ask AI for is to get help explaining something in a better way that might be more sensitive or more useful. AI is also pretty good at giving advice. You might say, give me a sample script that I could talk through that would help me understand how this conversation can go. You can even ask it to be a simulation. Pretend you are this other person and I am the boss. Let’s walk through this. You give me feedback on how to improve what I’m doing. All of those techniques are different ways to use AI to help you be a better boss without necessarily having a written document you read where the AI produced this and I have to read it out loud to my employee.