AI as Taste Multiplier

Here's another mental model I found helpful when engaging with AI: You use your taste and discernment to guide its generation while letting the AI do the grunt work of filling in the blanks.

The AI can churn out lots of content far quicker than you can type. But, if left to its own devices, that content will be bland, generic, and useless. This is most painfully obvious with jokes:

Oh, ChatGPT. You tried.

Come on, ChatGPT. What does that even mean? Instead, let's lean into our sentiment and taste. Without getting too political, the situation is somewhat absurd. I'm thinking John Oliver would probably have some good lines about it:

That's better.

In further iterations, we could tell it to make it even snarkier, and that it's not about giving away free stuff, really. What matters though is that we have a human in the loop guiding the general direction with their good taste.

What's great about this way of working is that it lets you, as the driver, stay at a higher level of thinking without getting distracted by the lower-level task of typing it all out. And in the case of image generation, you might not even have that underlying skill in the first place.

AI is levelling the playing field in terms of creation, and so the importance of knowing what "good" looks like has skyrocketed.