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This edition covers the 5 rules that help me decide when to use (or not) AI and why, based on scientific research. This doesn’t mean that you should do exactly the same because each person and situation is different. It’s just how I’m approaching it, and I hope this list gives you some inspiration for your own AI use!

Even though AI is now everywhere and can save you a lot of time and effort, there are people (like myself) who still do a lot of tasks manually. For example, I still write this newsletter myself.

I use AI to brainstorm topics, find studies on those topics, or edit the language once my draft is ready, but the writing itself? That’s still my task.

I have three major reasons for this:

1. Emotional: I’m a writer, and I love to write. Why would I outsource one of the tasks I most enjoy?

2. Cognitive: I want to keep my brain active and my writing skills alive, so I need to practice the craft myself.

3. Ownership: If AI produces something, I feel it’s not mine, even if I invest a lot of work in the prompt. I also tend to forget AI-generated content quickly.

So here are the 5 rules I currently use when deciding whether or not to outsource a task to AI:

In a study of high school math students learning a new mathematical concept, those who used a ChatGPT-like interface to solve tasks performed better than those without access to AI, but once the AI was removed, their test scores were 17% lower than those of the group that had only used their brains.

This result suggests that they didn't acquire the concept in the same way the "brain-only" group did.

If AI does too much of the cognitive work for you, it can interfere with the practice you need to acquire the skill yourself.

AI can both help and hinder skill acquisition!

In the same math students study mentioned above, there were actually 3 groups:

This third group, like the AI-assisted group, performed better than the brain-only group while using the AI tool, achieving 127% higher practice grades. But unlike the AI-assisted group, the AI-tutored group's performance didn't differ significantly from that of the brain-only group once AI was removed. They had acquired the skill despite using AI.

That means AI can be a great teacher and help you with skill acquisition as long as it doesn’t do the thinking for you.

This relates to my writing example from above. Many skills that you acquired through a lot of practice and repetition can fade if you stop practicing them.

A study on endoscopists who conducted colonoscopies found that before an AI detection tool was introduced at work, their detection rate for precancerous lesions (adenomas) was 28.4%. After 3 months of performing AI-assisted colonoscopies, their detection rate without the AI tool dropped to 22.4%.

While the study's methodology doesn't allow for a causal interpretation, the result is still alarming. It seems that the pattern recognition these endoscopists had acquired over many years suffered after 3 months of using the AI tool.

This case is more complicated, though, because if AI can help detect potential cancer risks better than the human eye (and as a consequence, save lives), then it’s a good AI use case. But in general, the study shows that skills can fade when you rely on AI to replace them.

So coming back to my writing example, where no lives are at risk, I’d rather keep writing myself to preserve the skill!

To me, this is one of the coolest things about AI: it can help me with basic tasks like extracting text from pictures, extracting and combining data from different sources, finding scientific studies more quickly, etc. Without AI, it would require a lot of tedious typing, searching, and copy-pasting. I happily outsource tasks like this.

There’s no skill to lose here (well, maybe the speed with which I press CTRL+C and CTRL+V? But that’s OK. 😉)

At the beginning of this newsletter, I wrote about how AI helps me polish my writing. As a non-native speaker, the language check is super important, and I also ask AI to point out redundancies or problems with the flow. It doesn’t write for me, but it helps me improve my writing.

A few years ago, I sometimes sent my scientific manuscripts to a proofreader who did this for me. Now I have my proofreader sitting directly in my Notion workspace!

Another example is business advice. I also have human business mentors, but my AI assistant has a lot of context about my business and can quickly process and integrate huge amounts of information, which is super helpful. It has become common practice for me to use AI assistance for business decisions.

So in this case, AI does some of the thinking for me, but only in areas where it’s like a professional with a different background advising me, and where, before AI, I would rely on other humans with the relevant expertise.

AI has revolutionized the way we work, and in a good way. In my case, it saves me a lot of time and improves my work output.

But if you want to preserve or even improve your thinking skills, you shouldn’t outsource everything to AI, so I hope that my 5 rules can help you decide which tasks you’ll outsource and which you won’t.

My 5 rules boil down to this takeaway:

I use AI to reduce the busywork and expand my thinking, but not to replace it.

I’ve also covered this topic in a recent article on Medium: “Make This AI Switch If You Don’t Want to Lose Your Thinking Skills.”

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What else I’ve been up to:

This new story is going viral on Medium, and the Medium staff even selected it for a Boost:

My friend link is included at the beginning of the article, so you can read it even if you’re not a Medium member!

That’s it for today!

And now?

Until next time!

Best wishes,

Patricia (Dr. Patricia Schmidt) from creatorschmidt.com

P.S.:

Disclaimer:
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