The Most Powerful Lesson About How To Use AI Without Losing the Ability to Think

If you work in any sort of role that requires creative thinking, chances are you have already started to use AI as a brainstorming partner. Whether you consider it a guilty indulgence or a necessary productivity hack, there is some emerging science that this may actually be one of the most common and powerful ways to use AI tools to challenge your thinking and take it in new directions:

Artificial intelligence can develop solutions that humans would be unlikely to discover on their own. But what happens when machines do more than solve individual problems and actually discover entirely new solution strategies? And can such discoveries become part of human knowledge? If machine discoveries are comprehensible, they can empower people to develop new skills, preserve them over time, and expand our cultural repertoire.

The study not only looked at whether AI could provide these sorts of “novel solutions,” but more importantly it considered what would need to happen in order for those solutions to become part of shared human knowledge instead of just a situation where AI does the work on our behalf but we never really increase our own capability as a result. The key, it seems, is that the output needs to be “comprehensible.” In other words, if we don’t understand what AI has done or what it suggested, then we risk becoming overly reliant on it. It’s hard to imagine a more critical lesson about AI usage that we should all remember and also integrate into every classroom or workplace situation. It’s not enough to use AI to come up with the right answer. We have to continually have the discipline and curiosity to ask the question of how it did that and understand the thinking behind the answer. AI doesn’t have to make us dumber, but we have to remember to ask the right questions instead just asking detailed questions and blindly copying and pasting the answers.