Is AI “Cheating” or Just Another Tool?

Lots of people have strong opinions about the use of AI. Problem is, most of them have never used it, have not learned what it can and cannot do, and don’t want to. To them, somehow, it’s cheating, or worse “doing your job for you.”

Now, while there are college students outsourcing their papers to it, most people use it as a tool to save time. And they understand that it can be wrong, a lot, so they check its responses. As for those students, they’re easy to catch, mostly because they’re lazy (as illustrated by using AI to do their work in the first place). They just feed in the prompt and hand in whatever pops up. At CU Denver, my department chair had students handing in bibliographies with journals that did not exist!

We’re lucky enough to have L3 presenting educational programs that address a myriad of topics we all need to know more about (like the pitch program I wrote about last month) but don’t have the time or money to find and attend courses on.

This month, the course was Actionable AI: Tools to Transform Your Personal and Professional Journey, presented by Andrea Hemming, BPW Sweden.

CRISP

Context: Who are you? What do you do? This allows the AI to know where to begin thinking about the question.

Role: position, are you asking as the marketing director, the CFO, a student? This gives it more information about what approach to take.

Instruction: Tell it what to do as specifically as possible, use strong action verbs—max two.

Structure: Format, how do you want the output to look – bullets, chart, graph, table, email, article, cartoon, realistic image, etc. It doesn’t know if you don’t tell it.

Polish: Iterate, a lot. Have it refine its answer multiple times with tweaks from you, ask it to critique itself, then refine it yourself.

We started by talking about how those who use it regularly use it: initial research, summarizing long documents, translating legalese or other jargon into plain English, triaging email, synthesizing lots of information, drafting initial content, and more.

It did seem odd to me when Andrea and others talked about “building a relationship with it,” after all, it’s a artificial (it’s right in the name), what kind of relationship can I have with a bunch of pixels on a screen?

But, upon further explanation, it makes perfect sense. If you want it to triage your email so some senders or topics show up on top no matter when they arrive, it needs to know what you think is important. It can only do what we teach it to do and, while companies around the world are feeding the sum of human knowledge into it every day, it knows nothing about what you need unless you tell it.

Andrea gave us a useful acronym to help us formulate more effective questions: CRISP (See explanation on previous page.)

Those last four words are the most important, and the ones knee-jerk critics assume are missing. Readers can tell when something has been written by a human or is “AI slop” (yes, that is the industry term). And no one wants to read the latter.

That’s where its utility meshes with your creativity, knowledge, and humanness.

It’s a tool, like a calculator to tell me how much to tip, a browser to search for the answer to a question or find a nearby restaurant, or an elevator to help people get up and down the stairs more easily (its invention, btw, led to the creation of the skyscraper).

It takes over some of the more routine, rote, time-consuming elements, but it cannot replace people – not now, not ever.

And, you can connect it to other apps such as email, word, excel, whatever you use often enough that you want something drafted in that format so you can do the thinking rather than the formatting.

You can also ask it to tell you how to do whatever you want it to do with it, or anything else. I would not recommend using it to contemplate brain surgery or advanced rocketry, but it can tell you how to change the chain on your bike in more detail than a YouTube video, or how to create a pie chart in word.

So, next time someone says they used AI to help them with a project, instead of automatically assuming AI did the work for them, ask them how they used it:

Did it collect information from a bunch of experts they would have spent hours searching for?

• Did it pull together a bunch of disparate facts into a coherent whole they could use to create a complex article?
• Did it break something complex into a series of easy-to-follow steps they reviewed and edited to help you do or learn something or put the steps into the best order to use to teach it to someone else?

Then ask them how they think it could take some of the menial work off your plate so you can concentrate on the creative aspects of whatever you’re doing.

Nicole Mpouli
Chair Lifelong Leadership & Learning (L3)
L3Chair@nfbpwc.org