There are levels of abstraction everywhere in modern life. But the abstraction layer of “this will do it for you so you don’t have to” for AI tools is especially amorphous, opaque, and comes with real risks.
Furthermore, AI chatbots are designed to make you feel good, not challenge you to think on your own. Every time a chatbot tells me “That’s a great question!” and “Now you’re thinking!” I cringe. Your AI chatbot might as well be a fawning junior intern trying desperately to impress you. You can prompt a bot to challenge you but sycophancy is the default.
Personally, I use Claude to draft code for me, including the code that builds this website, and I don’t use AI assistance to write prose. That decision is about what skills I want to keep sharp. I’m fine with not being about to compose code off the top of my head, but I will not outsource my ability to write to an LLM. Skills are like muscles: use ’em or lose ’em.
While I don’t ask for or take medical advice from an LLM, I do use ChatGPT to arrive at my own doctors’ appointments with a list of better questions to ask my doctor. Assume AI chatbots are not designed to handle health information appropriately; I’m angry and heartbroken about young people who have committed suicide after confiding in a chatbot.
Overall, a slightly-edited version of Andrej Karpathy’s approach to coding with AI nicely sums up my own approach to AI usage across the board:
Keep a very tight leash on this new over-eager junior intern savant with encyclopedic knowledge but who also bullshits you all the time, has an over-abundance of courage and shows little to no taste for what’s good. Keep an emphasis on being slow, defensive, careful, paranoid, and on always taking the inline learning opportunity, not delegating.
— Read on notetoself.studio/post/measured-ai/
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