If You Don't Use AI At All, I Will Poke Fun at You
We have a site for folks who refuse to Google: LMGTFY.
Maybe we need one for ChatGPT.
I've realized the amount of sheer stubbornness people have when it comes to simply ignoring the changing world with AI.
I'm not speaking about the moon shot projects like fully autonomous robots or completely automated white collar jobs with AI Agents.
I'm talking about basic utilization of a fantastic new tool. There's a whole subset of the population that looks at basic LLM tools like ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini and simply refuses to use them at all. I'd imagine this is the same way people who first encountered power tools reacted.
"But, the old ways are better, aren't you encouraging slop?"
I'm not talking about replacing whole processes. But, ChatGPT has been out almost three years. Get with the program, people.
Simple things:
- Grab complicated free form text from an image and organize it
- Summarize this document
- Give me T1/T2 support on a technical problem
- Talk me through approaches to a problem and existing solutions in tools
- Write me a super simple Python script and explain it to me
These aren't insanely boggling AI workflows, but these are painful tasks most people run into consistently that can be solved by literally a free tool in your browser and speed up what you need to do by 2-5x consistently.
We cannot change the adoption overnight, but here's some things I've tried to help implementation:
- Put together a guide for people
- When people ask me to do a slop task, I share my screen and show them I'm just going to feed that to an AI and send it right back
- Conduct tutorials of common tasks
- Integrate API calls for tools into existing workflows
But, perhaps the most effective has been simply poking fun at people (in a light-hearted and good spirited way) done in the same way when mobile apps and the internet were skyrocketing, you might ask someone why they were driving to Blockbuster to rent a movie when I could grab it from iTunes. People's habits are slow to change and a bit of positive social pressure can be helpful.