Reflections of a Reluctant AI Adopter

Everybody's talking about AI right now. Have been for quite some time now. When it comes to this newish technology, I must admit a fair amount of skepticism or even disdain. Skepticism because, like many emerging technologies, it is being marketed and thrust upon us as a solution to everything that ails us. Disdain because, as a creator, the way that it is being marketed as a way to shortcut the creative process is frankly offensive to me. Here's the thing: I love the fact that we live in a time where the tools of creation are more accessible to more people than ever in the history of humankind. However, I am keenly aware that many people, as evidenced by some of the questions that I see on quora, have absolutely nothing to say that is original, helpful, insightful by any stress of the imagination. I see questions like “How do I make a viral video?" The question itself lacks anything remotely resembling any self-awareness or having anything unique to offer to the world. Embedded in the question is the implicit question, “How do I get people to like me?” Nnothing to see here. Move along.

Having said all that, I am a huge technology geek. I love tech when it helps me to be more creative and efficient or when it helps me to be more entertained or engaged in the world. The promise of AI in all three of these dimensions is very high. The trick, in my opinion, is understanding the limitations of this new tech and cutting through the hype of the marketers of the current suite of AI-enabled tools to the realization that they are just that, tools. They are not magic. They are not the secret to unlocking creativity. And, contrary to dystopian sci-fi narratives, AI is not poised to take over the world… unless we let it. More on that some other time, if the Super Brain overlords allow it. Sso, without further ado, here's how I have been using Ai and the past couple of months.

Ideation

I have found through webinars and research that crafting the right prompts for generative AI like ChatGPT and Gemini can help me to develop ideas for further exploration and research fairly quickly. Example: I want to get into the habit of writing useful blog posts for One Tiny Problem every month and sometimes I get stuck on generating ideas that I think will resonate with my target audiences. Enter generative AI. By prompting one of these language learning models with some baseline context such as my target audience’s demographics/psychographics, my unique skill set, and what is trending in terms of what problems I can solve with my specific set of storytelling skills I can generate a list of 5 to 10 themes that I could explore in blog form. I have certainly fallen into the pitfall of writing about the things that I think are important and, to be fair, those posts do find an audience. That audience, however, is people like me and not necessarily people I would consider my target audience. In the past, in order to generate ideas that are relevant to my target audience I might need to actually survey that target audience and ask them what problems they are encountering when it comes to video production or content creation in general. That can be very time consuming and may or may not generate ideas that are useful to a broad segment of my target audience since those ideas are coming from people whom I already know. Generative AI does help to give me a broader range of ideas to begin working from. I have tried following up on some of the responses from the AI to generate entire blog posts based on the themes that were identified in the initial prompt response but have not met with anything resembling success at this stage. 

Hyper efficient task management 

In late 2024 I moved from my previous project management tool to a new platform that utilizes machine learning to auto-schedule tasks for me and even generate templates for recurring project types, breaking them down into stages and individual tasks, and the results have been pretty freaking amazing. If you know even a little bit about me you know that I am practically obsessed with time management and this tool allows me to externalize a lot of the scheduling of tasks in a way that is dynamic, meaning it automatically adjusts the position of tasks in my calendar based on moment-to-moment updates including, but not limited to, booking meetings with clients and prospects. That does not mean, however, that I am now on full autopilot. Life, as they say, is lifey. And so there are currently about two dozen tasks that are behind schedule according to the deadlines that I set when I created the project or task. C'est la vie. The important thing is that I am able to very quickly get these ideas out of my mind into my organizational system and the software finds what it deems to be the optimal time for me to work on the individual tasks, whether they be stand-alone or part of a larger project, and saves me hours every month that used to be spent manually reorganizing tasks in my calendar. I still have a way to go in learning how to get the most out of the platform but in the past 3 months of using it I have really enjoyed and benefited from the automation it provides.

Summarizing meetings and reading material

I will often view YouTube tutorials or on 1.2x to 2X speed in order to get the information that they contain more quickly. Side note: this drives my wife and son crazy because they are not able to absorb information at that speed. I found long ago that skimming through written material was not an effective method for essentially doing the same thing with books, magazine articles, etc. Enter generative AI once again. I can feed the AI a URL or copy and paste an article or essay into the prompt window and get a reasonable distillation of the salient points contained therein. Also, with the AI assistant built into some of the virtual meeting platforms that I use I am able to stay engaged in the conversation and get a decent summation of the key points and action items that emerge from the discussion. I think the models still have a way to go before I would feel 100% comfortable completely replacing handwritten or typed notes with this type of assistive technology. However, as a supplement to these more traditional types of notes I think I will be able to circle back to conversations and meetings and more quickly come back up to speed when a project or relationship has gone dormant for one reason or another.

I'm still very much on the fence about using generative AI for image and video creation although I have seen some pretty amazing work by folks who have devoted much more time and attention to prompt engineering than I have had the opportunity to do thus far. Since art and design for me are, dare I say it, sacred in that they provide a form of therapy for me I am reluctant to delegate image generation and video storytelling to AI at this time. I still prefer doing it the old fashioned way. That said, as the tools continue to rapidly evolve and improve I can foresee using them to augment the creative process at least to the extent that I am able to get to proof of concept for projects a lot more quickly. As I mentioned, I will need to devote a lot more time to prompt engineering before I will feel confident that what I am able to create with image generation and video generation tools as the final product. 

So, on the whole, I am excited about the possibilities that generative AI presents for me personally and for society as a whole with the caveat that with the ease of use of the tools allowing more people to generate content quickly there is inevitably going to be a raising of the noise floor in creative spaces with a lot of people with nothing interesting or original to say being able to create a lot of things that are not interesting or engaging and, in turn, that will make it much more difficult for people who are seriously dedicated to developing their voice and creating original art to be heard and seen.

What's your relationship with generative AI these days? are you on the fence,? Are you actively using the tools? What are the pros and cons that you've discovered in your exploration of this crazy new field? Drop a comment or question below and stay tuned for more reflections as I dig more deeply into the realm of generative AI.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash