A listener asked where using AI to sharpen your thinking turns into letting it think for you. Taylor says you still own the output. Her theory of the tell: the negative instructions you give the model while prompting leak into the document as disclaimers the reader never needed.
Maybe we just like have such a shared context that's so dumb that it's too smart to understand it. Talk only in memes.
…AI slop? So yeah, so I guess that this kind of ties into the work slop conversation from earlier, but kind of from the opposite angle of like, you know, where are the places that we should be using AI in the workplace to help ourselves out? How can we use AI to challenge and sharpen our thinking?
…of you prompting an AI and telling, you know, using like Claude's concise setting and telling it how your voice comes across, there's no issue with that because people aren't going to read it and think it's slop. I think the point of slop is that you can tell that it is unnecessarily full of jargon. It is unnecessarily long and it makes unnecessary points. I'll give you a really good example. A lot of what I see in what I would consider slop is that someone's making three really good points and then there will be a section in the document called what this isn't. When in the history of anyone anywhere have we ever felt in our writing that we needed to preemptively state what we are not doing? I've worked in tech for a very long time. It is very, very recent that I have started to notice everything I read comes with a disclaimer of what this isn't. And I find that so strange because I've never felt like I need to say in an email, hey, but what this isn't is that it isn't a hot dog. You know, like there's a lot of things that this isn't. From my own writing, it should be clear what…
Great advice there, and yeah, the what it isn't thing is definitely that's a pattern that I hadn't thought of before, but definitely makes a lot of sense. All right, and one last audience question here for you. This is from Anna Ford, whom I actually met serendipitously at uh Dreamforce in San…
that's right up my alley. I love that. Yeah,
check it out. Um, so Anna is a consulting leader at a it sounds like kind of a uh a data solutions company, and um, she has a strong background in math and status. She used to actually teach math and statistics to kids for years before becoming uh you know, before leaving that and joining industry.…