You’re likely already using AI to help you perform various tasks. But have you considered how your use of AI may be shaping your brain? Your interactions with AI shape your thinking in ways that go far beyond your immediate challenge and goals–with each AI interaction we are building new thinking habits (or reinforcing old ones). Fortunately, with just a little awareness and some lightweight strategy, AI can become an invaluable partner that helps us become more skillful thinkers and better leaders.
Develop a Relationship of Brutal Honesty
Your “relationship” with AI — strange as that word might seem — has one fundamental advantage over your relationship with other humans: neither party is required to “save face.”
Saving face: The act of preserving one’s reputation, dignity, or social standing, particularly in situations where it might be threatened by embarrassment, criticism, or failure.
When interacting with other humans, it’s easy to forget that we’re playing an intricate game of social expectations. We’re almost all experts in playing this game. All of us – regardless of country, class, or creed – are bound by an intricate web of expectations regarding what is “right,” “wrong,” or “normal.” Most of the time we play this game incredibly well without giving it much if any conscious thought. For example, in a traditional workplace setting, an employee might hesitate to:
- Challenge a senior executive’s perspective, and risk the repercussions of a transgressed power dynamic
- Ask “naive” questions that might expose perceived knowledge gaps
- Brainstorm wild, unconventional ideas without fear of judgment
With AI, these barriers disappear. You are socially free to:
- Probe an idea from every conceivable angle without social repercussions
- Request explanations at any level of complexity
- Explore counterintuitive approaches without worrying about professional embarrassment
The key point here is not what you can achieve with AI, but why you can achieve it: AI doesn’t judge us in the way that humans subconsciously judge themselves and each other all the time. While AI may be programmed to speak to us in an agreeable or even deferential tone, it will actually change its tone when we ask it not to. When neither party is concerned with being negatively judged by the other, and neither party feels bound to comply with social norms, both parties can relate more honestly, and can completely apply their full intelligence to a problem without holding back.
Put it into Practice
As you interact with AI on a regular basis, pay attention to how much more free you feel to say whatever is on your mind compared to when you’re interacting with a human coworker. Do you feel pressure to look smart, or in control? Kind, or authoritative? Conversely, are you afraid to use your big vocabulary and risk sounding “too smart” or “too intellectual?” Likely none of the above. You probably don’t fear any judgement whatsoever. What you’re experiencing — even if it seems strange to say it — is a relationship characterized by greater psychological safety. The benefits of psychological safety on workplace productivity are numerous and profound, and it’s worth amplifying the experience by deliberately adjusting our interactions with AI.
Here are a couple strategies to practice relating to AI with brutal honesty:
- Pause occasionally when interacting with AI to pay attention to how differently it feels when you’re not concerned about you or your conversation partner saving face.
- Are you trying to smile or impress somebody? Are your shoulders more relaxed? Remind yourself that you do not have to meet anyone’s expectations right now.
- Practice breaking social norms by adjusting your language to be deliberately uncomfortable for your personality. For example, try being abnormally blunt, intellectual, or emotional. The AI’s corresponding response may take the interaction into surprising and helpful new territory.
Think Iteratively
Free from social pressures to save face, we can relate fundamentally differently to AI. Think about a recent time that AI gave you a lackluster response. Did you accept it as the best the AI could do and move on with your day, or did you keep pushing for a more satisfying response?
AI invites – indeed excels under – iterative thinking. Iterative thinking assumes flaws (yours, the AI’s, or most likely, both) and uses the search and discovery of these flaws to improve the next iteration of output. Next time you don’t like a response, try one of the following prompts:
Notice that any of these prompts said out loud might sound unnatural; it would probably feel somewhere between uncomfortable and inappropriate to give a human such direct and critical feedback, whether friends, family, or coworkers. With AI, however, we can take iterative thinking to the extreme, scrutinizing tiny details or dismissing carefully crafted arguments wholesale – whether our own or that of the AI.
Put it into Practice
Here are a couple strategies and some corresponding prompts to practice iterative thinking with AI:
- Search for flaws in your own thinking and that of the AI, and use those flaws to keep improving the next output.
Example Prompts:- “What am I missing here?”
- “What are some possible gaps in my logic?”
- “What are some possible gaps in your logic?”
- Ask meta questions beginning with the word why to understand each of your reasoning and motivations on a deeper level. These questions can expose hidden assumptions that may be acting as unwanted design constraints for the very problem you’re seeking help on.
Example Prompts:- “Why do you believe I phrased my question the way I did?”
- “Why did you respond to my prompt that way?” (formally, informally, etc.)
- “Why am I underwhelmed with your last response? I can’t tell why, but it’s not working for me.”
Your Brain is Powerfully Plastic.
The ways in which we habitually interact with AI have significant long term impacts on our brain. We can reinforce old thinking and relational habits, or, we can introduce new ones. Because our interactions with AI benefit from a profound psychological safety and freedom to experiment, these interactions can prove the perfect playground to shift the way we think and relate to projects, underlying problems, and people. In doing so we can become more skillful thinkers, and more competent leaders.