We All Use AI. Here’s How to Use It Well
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The question isn’t whether to use AI; every serious person in every serious field will. The question is how to use it in a way that keeps the human element alive.
KEY POINTS
- AI is embedded in how we work—and that’s a good thing.
- But AI’s fluency can lull us into deferring to it rather than directing it.
- Using AI well means staying in the driver’s seat, and that takes deliberate practice.
I came to America from Bangladesh at the age of 17, with very little money in my pocket and even less of an idea of what I was walking into. What I did have —and what I’ve leaned on for every decision I’ve made ever since—was a capacity I had developed early in life: the ability to work out what I actually thought, and then to act on it even when no one else agreed with me.
There’s a word for that capacity. Judgment. And it’s the thing I’m most worried about losing right now.
The reason I am worried about it is because I use AI every day. I use it to build applications, develop frameworks, design visual assets, and research what’s happening at the edges of the fields I need to understand. I use it to stress-test arguments before I bring them to my team or to a client. I use it to think through how a message will land before I send it. In raw output, I’m more productive today than a team of 10 would have been five years ago. And it isn’t just speed; the work is objectively better.
Right now, I’m still one of the early adopters. But pretty soon, this will be the reality in every job. Very few people will have a choice about whether or not they use AI, just as few people get to choose whether they use computers or email or the internet today.
So this isn’t an article about whether to use AI. It’s about how to hold onto your judgment while you do.
The Core Skill Behind Using AI Well
AI is extraordinarily powerful, but it’s powerful in what we might call a generic way. While a generative AI model will be trained on all the insights of all the sciences, all the works of the great artists and the brightest business thinkers, it generally does not and cannot know what matters in your particular situation. It does not know what trade-offs you’d accept, what your experience tells you about how something will actually land, or what the right call is given everything you know that the machine doesn’t. That knowledge is yours, and using it is what turns AI’s general capability into something that works for you.
Without your judgment, AI gives you fluent but generic output. With it, you get something that couldn’t have come from anyone else. And the combination of AI’s general power and your judgment is far greater than either alone—but only if you’re actively in the conversation, thinking alongside the tool rather than deferring to it.
This means that using AI well is not fundamentally about writing better prompts or knowing which model to use. Rather, it’s about staying actively engaged with what comes back. It’s that simple.
The principle might be simple; the practice is not quite so straightforward. The sheer ease with which AI models respond to requests and create outputs leads to a phenomenon known as cognitive offloading. Offloading our mental load is precisely the attraction and the promise of AI: By delegating some tasks we are freed to think more deeply and effectively about other things. The risk, though, is that we offload the wrong things—that we outsource our higher judgment about what matters, the ultimate meaning of a piece of work or the creative design. If this happens, we stop using AI to support our own thinking and instead begin deferring to the machine.
How to Use AI Well
These aren’t rules for avoiding using AI. They’re practices for getting the most out of it—by making sure you’re always the one in the driving seat.
- Develop the idea before you write the prompt. You can’t delegate effectively to an AI model if you aren’t fully in control of the task. If you start with a topic you’re interested in and ask the machine what to think about it, you begin by deferring to it. Instead, come to it with a developed position you’re willing to defend. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask the AI to challenge your view or help you strengthen it. But the strategic intent must be yours before you type the first word. That’s what makes you the architect of the output rather than turning you into an agent of the AI.
- Define the destination before you delegate the execution. Don’t hand an AI model a blank canvas. Give it a defined problem that includes a sketch of your destination and then use it to help fill in the details. That way, the architecture—the requirements, the dimensions, the logic—remain yours. If you can’t explain what you’re asking for before you ask, you’re not ready to use the tool. The result will be an output that looks finished but that isn’t really yours.
- Use AI to find the research. Interpret it yourself. AI is extraordinarilly good at surfacing studies, mapping out a field, and pointing you toward evidence that can confirm or challenge a view. Use it for all of that. But don’t accept its summary of what the results it digs up mean. The interpretation—where the evidence leads, what it confirms, where it falls short—has to be your own.
- Notice when you’re reaching for AI to avoid the uncomfortable. Sometimes we prompt AI because we want help with the processing burden of a task. Other times, we reach for it because it offers an easy way around something uncomfortable. The discipline is to identify and lean in to the type of difficult that creates friction and to follow where it leads. This is as true when you are crafting a business strategy, working on an article, or building a product.
The Human Edge
The practices above are not rules for limiting how or whether you use AI. They are the tools I use to ensure I stay in the driver’s seat while I use it, rather than becoming a passenger being moved about by a very capable machine.
The central skill of the AI age, then, is the willingness to do the driving yourself. To be the architect or orchestrator of the process rather than a storm-tossed ship on a sea of machine reasoning. It means knowing where you’re going before you start out and never letting go of your vision.
The most powerful technology ever built will not save anyone who has stopped thinking for themselves. The discipline required for the AI age has two parts: learning to use the systems effectively while refusing to let them use you.
[Feature Photo Source: JKLoma/Adobe Stock]
Original article @ Psychology Today.
