When to use AI...and when to avoid it

AI is mid…literally

To understand when Creators should use generative AI, you need to understand what it actually is. 

It's not AI. 

Generative AI is not actually an “intelligence” (yet). Currently, every AI is an extremely sophisticated statistical model that makes decisions on what to output based on what the most likely outcome of its potential choices are. 

In the case of ChatGPT, for example, it generates each word by looking at the previous word and then deciding what the most likely next word would be. It does this by sampling all potential next words from the content it’s trained on, assigning those words probabilities, mapping them to a bell curve, and then making a selection.

In any bell curve, the most likely outcome is the average. While AI can be set to generate outcomes further from the average, over many decisions, they all trend towards the average.

Which makes the overall output of generative AI…average.

Generative AI doesn't generate things that are outliers. AI generates things that are averages. There may be times that the averages that are output feel like outliers, but that’s because the prompts that generated them are outliers. 

Someone who gives a highly detailed, outlier-quality prompt will get the average output of a bunch of choices based on that outlier-quality prompt, but that doesn’t mean the AI is producing an outlier. You have to be realllllly good at prompting to get a great output, and AI prompt engineering is now an actual job that companies pay six-figure salaries for, so it's a fairly rare skill. 

Unless you're a fantastic prompt engineer, you're probably going to use fairly average prompts, and if you use average prompts, you will get average outputs. 

Use AI to be average

So…when should you use AI? 

Well, if AI's output is average, then you should use AI when you are making something where your skill-level is below average. 

Here’s the framework:

For example, I believe that I am an above average writer (hopefully you agree….) If that is true, then asking AI to write a post for me would mean that I am asking something (someone??? Nah, not yet…) who is less good at writing to produce an output in my name. 

That’s not going to reflect well on me. 

On the other hand, I’m a terrible video editor. If I try to edit a short video myself, it will turn out awful.

In that case, using an AI video editing tool makes sense, because it will improve the quality of my video editing output from Awful to Average.