This Simple Rule Can Keep AI From Doing All Your Thinking
Time · Angela Haupt ·
Use your brain before you prompt.
Neuroscientist Adam Green still remembers a college student telling him about a new addition to the home she shared with her roommates: a basil plant. Naturally, it needed a name, and she thought coming up with one together would be part of the fun. One roommate, however, promptly recruited some outside help, pulling out her phone to ask ChatGPT for suggestions.
To Green, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University who studies creativity, the roommate had missed the point. “Who the hell cares what the name of the basil plant is?” he says. “We’re supposed to have fun together.” Coming up with something themselves would have given the roommates more than a name: They’d have a shared memory and a story to tell whenever they referred to their leafy housemate. Instead, he says, “we just lost this experience.”
You don’t have to be naming a houseplant to recognize the temptation. A birthday gift, a tricky email, a problem at work: Why wrestle with it yourself when a chatbot is happy to get you started? Yet before you hand over the task, experts suggest one small change: Write down three ideas of your own. They can be rough, impractical, or destined for the recycling bin. The point is to give yourself a chance to think before someone—or something—else supplies the answer.