It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. The original premise of this September Success with AI initiative was that would help me streamline my processes and generate a steady stream of quality content that I can leverage across multiple projects.
As it turns out, the real power of generative AI is not quantity, it’s quality. Because with the tools that are readily available, which are also free, you can really go deep on your undertakings. I can get so much more detail, and so much more insight About the topics I’m approaching, then I realized.
The thing is, a lot of what generative AI is showing me is information I already have. But I just wasn’t connecting the dots.
Because AI can surface so much detail and make so many connections and organize the information so quickly, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the opportunity was not in doing more with less effort, but doing things differently, with more focus.
And so, rather than getting myself on a day-to-day schedule where I just execute on the tasks that ChatGPT gave me on August 31, I found myself getting deeper into understanding the inner workings of what I planned to do.
In fact, I went from thinking about planning to really focusing on intention. Getting a better understanding of markets, getting better understandings of customers, getting better and deeper appreciations of the very real problems that very real people face, that I could think about more thoroughly with AI.
It’s been fantastic. Granted, I haven’t cranked out a gazillion social media posts. I haven’t blanketed the world with AI generated content. (You’re welcome lol). And I haven’t been top of mind with everyone on my email list. But I actually feel like I have a better connection with my work now, thanks to really taking my time with AI, versus crushing through everything.
I know it’s incredibly popular right now too say that AI can streamline everything… can help you crank out massive amounts of content with minimal effort… and it can do so much for you that you could never do on your own. I’ve lost track of how many AI–powered “solutions” are out there promising to do it all for us.
But while I set out to prove that I could keep up with the best of them, even without buying a bunch of tools, after only two weeks, I’ve landed on a completely different realization.
Namely, when we hand over the reins of our ideation and content creation to the machine, 100%, we can actually lose the very thing that makes our work meaningful. We can lose the connection to our work, our understanding of not only what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it.
In letting something else do it all for us, we can forget why we’re doing it, in the first place.
And that’s not the sort of AI – powered future I want.
Ironically, that’s not the kind of future that my AI – powered activities are creating. If anything, they’re creating the exact opposite. They’re bringing things to my attention that never occurred to me… like different types of people and their different types of needs, interests, personalities, fears, hopes. They’re connecting the dots between what people do, why they do it, and what they hope comes out of it.
Just asking ChatGPT for insights on a certain type of person trying to solve a certain type of problem in a certain type of situation brings up all sorts of fascinating info and considerations that never have occurred to me on my own.
And if anything, that slows down my process. But it also depends it, and ultimately it makes it a lot more rewarding for me. And, I hope it’s more rewarding for the people I hope to serve.
So after almost 2 weeks of embarking on my September Success with AI project, I actually feel much more successful now than I thought I would be, and in completely different ways than I expected.
ChatGPT and many other large language models are trained on bodies of knowledge And experience that come from people. Human experience. Human thoughts, lives, biases, hopes and fears and vast amounts of experience.
When people say that AI is not human, I have to differ. Maybe it’s not human in itself, but it can show us an entirely different, if not more comprehensive, view of humanity than we have probably ever had before.
September is turning out to be incredibly successful. Just not the way I expected.