AI Getting Boring? You’re Probably Doing It Right

Even though I expect all of us to keep using artificial intelligence (AI) a lot, I do think it might be time to stop talking about it the way we have been. Not because we're fatigued on AI (though some of us might be, totally fair) but because we might be ready to just normalize our AI experience. That's not a bad thing—normalization is what usually happens when you start to rely on something with confidence. You no longer build around the thing. The thing is just part of your life. I don't stop to think about using AI to check something. It's just open in the browser or available via plug-in or built into whatever I'm already doing.

AI will give us more data. Decisions are still up to us.

Source: Sable Flow/Unsplash

The good thing is now I am starting to use AI less, not more. I use it to improve the last 10 percent of my own ideas, instead of asking an open-ended question and getting 20 ideas I'll never use (and seven of which I don't fully understand). That was fun when I first started learning how to create a prompt. Now it's...boring. I don't want AI slop. I want curated answers built off of how I've trained it.

Using AI to expand your strengths won’t feel radical. That’s not a bad thing.

Here is why the boredom might be progress, for all of us: Now AI is following my judgment. It's narrowed down to ideas within parameters built by my actual experience and expertise. If you're old enough to remember when the internet first took off, you might recall that everyone wanted to literally just "surf the web." Now: when is the last time you just randomly checked that Google did, in fact, have the answer to that question? We no longer question the full scope of the tool; we shape it into usefulness that serves us.

In work situations in particular, ideally each team member is evolving in this way on their own. That isn't that radical. All technology has faded into this standard. Calculators don't replace mathematical thinking; they merely facilitate it. Email was revolutionary until spam made us pull back our usage. Zoom was cool until it was the only way we could communicate for over a year. None of that is bad. It rebalanced from excess to a bounded resource.

That said, while normalization is certainly common (we do it even during abnormal situations like in 2020), and almost inevitable, the pace at which you start to manage use of tools is a choice. By now, most of us have been burned by a bad AI response or fatigued by someone else's. But we also don't plan to abandon AI. In fact, we'll use it more. Those who use it to enhance good judgment will probably pull ahead. People who learned to email enough to communicate more effectively (without replying all to everything) likely were read more often. People who began relying on modeling software enough to be convincing, but not overwhelming, probably had their numbers trusted. It's not always about using something the most, but with the right precision that reveals innovation.

AI is giving us more data. But it’s not yet increasing our wisdom.

Learning to use AI to detail general understanding or analyze hard choices could help improve the inputs to human judgment. But it can help most if we keep it on the “boring” data side of the table. For now, we should be slow to rely on it as a substitute for the most complex aspects of human judgment: experience and the wisdom that comes with it, the instinct we each hold that says when to look deeper regardless of appearance, the sensitivity and empathy to recognize consequences that have to be balanced with goals. That has always been a lot to hold. But it means that we will continue to make human-sized mistakes, which are the ones we (mostly) know how to manage. And that’s probably the right kind of boring for all of us.