🧠4 Ways I Use AI to Think Better
How AI helps me learn, decide, and create
Bland AI outputs grow stale quickly. Instead of just speeding up routine tasks, what if we used AI to slow down, challenge our thinking, and build new tools, dashboards, and experiments? Read on for creative approaches that are changing how I think about AI.
1. Create your own devil's advocate assistant 👿
Get thoughtful pushback on decisions. Challenge ideas.
The tactic: Use AI as an intellectual sparring partner to stress-test your thinking, explore alternative perspectives, and identify potential blind spots before making important decisions.
Try this: Present a plan, idea, or decision to an AI assistant with instructions to challenge your thinking constructively. Identify risks you haven't considered, consider secondary impacts, and add nuance to your analysis.
Prompt template
"I'm planning to [decision/plan] because [reasoning] and with a goal of [objective]. Play devil's advocate, give me multiple perspectives on this, be bold, surprising, creative, and thoughtful in your reply, and address these questions:
What are the strongest arguments against this approach?
What alternatives should I consider?
What risks might I be overlooking?
What questions should I be asking myself?
What challenges should I expect to face?
What could I do to gain more insight?
What could I do to increase the chances of success?
Pro tip: Try asking your AI assistant to role-play. It can respond as a financial advisor, family member, or competitor, for varied viewpoints. Or ask it to act like a person you admire, living or dead, real or fictional.
Limitation: Your AI devil’s assistant will be generic if you don’t provide detailed context. And you may get a predictable response if you don’t instruct it to be bold.
Suggested model
