How To Use AI Without Losing Your Mind

The AI Era: AI does nearly everything. It automates tasks, makes forecasts and projections, generates photos, writes poems, generates voices, analyzes data, detects and communicates patterns, and so much more. It makes many tasks quicker and more efficient, but as it turns out, saving yourself time could come at the expense of brain function. That doesn’t mean you need to stop using AI — you just need to learn to do it responsibly.

The Benefits: Using AI wisely can allow you to spend more time on the things that are most important to you. You can automate repetitive but necessary tasks, freeing up valuable minutes and brainpower for creative work like writing or strategic planning. 

How to Do It: The No. 1 rule from AI researcher Nick Kabrél? Always start without AI. “If you follow only one rule, make it this: for any task where thinking matters, always try on your own first, and only then use chatbots,” Kabrél writes. Other tips: be skeptical, use chatbots to critique your work, not create it, and avoid generic prompts like “summarize this article.”