Here’s the latest update! Instead of just updating the same post over and over I decided to copy the post and add my updates, for a little transparency as I work on this. So here’s version 2.1!
A while back I made a preliminary version of my rules for using AI safely. I’ve let it sit for a long time, so it’s time to revisit it!
Here’s the rules as they currently stand:
- Understand what AI is
- Keep your understanding up-to-date
- Double check AI outputs
- Treat AI as the world’s most confident intern
- Don’t use AI for something you need or want to be good at
- Pay attention to how your life changes
And two bonus rules that tackle much bigger questions (that I may or may not get into in this draft): - How to use AI morally (AKA Don’t use AI in a way that destroys what originally enabled the creation of AI)
- How to not get bamboozled by AI (AKA Don’t trust a black box)
As a reminder, these are rules for an individual — not an organization or society or government or world or anything. These are just how you, an individual person, can more safely use AI. In the paragraphs below I will write a (relatively, for me) brief introduction to each rule. Later I’ll create a more in-depth post for every one and link to them.
1. Understand what AI is
AI is one of the few technologies where there’s basically zero learning curve — if you know how to converse you can sit down, chat with an LLM, and get something out of it that looks like a good response.
This means a lot of people use AI without having any idea what’s going on under the hood. This can lead to some unintended consequences — it can make people assume AI always tells the truth. They can assume AI “understands” them (they can assume AI “understands” anything).
I’m not saying you need to become a computer scientist, what I’m saying is that you should understand AI about as well as you understand a car.
See, you drive a car, and there are some things about it you understand that help you drive. You know the gas goes in the gas tank. You know the engine makes that gas explode (in very small quantities) and that makes something go around. You likely know that the transmission takes that thing that’s turning around and connects it to the wheels so that they start turning, causing you to move forward.
You might know that there are discs attached to the wheels and when you step on the brakes some things squeeze the discs and that slows you down. You know that when the brake pedal goes “dugadugadugaduga” that’s the antilock brakes and your car is trying to keep you from sliding. If you don’t drive a BMW you know that the little stick by the steering wheel makes the blinkers light up.
You don’t know everything — you’re not a mechanic — but you know enough to safely use the car to get from point A to point B, and part of “enough” means a basic understanding of what goes on under the hood.
You don’t need to know everything about LLMs to use them, but you should have a basic idea of what is going on under the hood. That will save you from some very serious mistakes.
2. Keep your understanding up-to-date
Let’s expand on that idea just a little bit. Knowing the basics of how an AI works “under the hood” will avoid some of the biggest pitfalls (like assuming it’s sentient, as a Google researcher famously did before ChatGPT was a thing, or assuming you’re the center of a major conspiracy, as one investor did), but it won’t knock out the most common pitfalls — to avoid those you need to know how to use an AI on a day to day basis.
That’s more akin to understanding the controls of a car — what the pedals do, what the steering wheel does, how you turn on adaptive cruise control, and when that cruise control won’t work.
The hard part is that AI changes frequently. Imagine if every month they changed the shape of the steering wheel, added new buttons to it, removed others, and completely changed the entire dashboard.
Now, new stuff DOES come out every day in the world of AI, but for most people you will choose one provider and stick with that most of the time — and that means you’re looking at a major model update or other change a lot less often, maybe between one and four times a year.
So when they update the tools you use, read the manual! Some updates feel like just rearranging some of the buttons, but other updates feel like going from a manual transmission to an automatic. Take the time to make sure you know how to use your tool.
3. Double check AI outputs
There are two main reasons to double check AI outputs:
- AIs can hallucinate — that is, they can just make stuff up. This happens more than you realize and sometimes it’s harmless, but other times it can be incredibly harmful and if you’re not paying attention it’ll slip right past you.
- AIs can misconstrue true information — AIs don’t “understand” as we do, so it can take something out of context, repeat it to you confidently free of context, and you’ll never know
In either case the end result is the same — you are given some information that appears confidently correct, but is not. If you base decisions on it you will be wrong. If you pass it to someone else they will believe you are wrong. If you base important decisions on it you could cause serious harms.
A corollary to this is that in order to double check AI you must be capable of double checking it.
What I mean is that if you ask AI something you know nothing about, and something where you can’t read the sources with any confidence, then you have to accept whatever the AI says at face value — you’re incapable of knowing if it is outputting truth or not.
If you’re incapable of double checking AI then the AI can’t be double checked, and you are putting yourself in danger. Don’t use AI for things you are incapable of double checking it!
For example, if you ask AI to review a long, complicated legal document because you don’t understand the legal jargon, are you going to know if the AI is answering your questions correctly? Since you already don’t understand the source document the answer is no, you have no way of knowing if it’s doing a good job. And that could get you in serious legal trouble!
This is one area where people get in deep trouble with AI. Multiple users have proudly proclaimed that they have created whole new branches of physics or mathematics with their AI. Were they mathematicians or physicists before? No! So AI told them some stuff that sounded amazing to them, and then told them it was groundbreaking, and they just went with it — only to discover later when people who WERE capable of double checking AI work told them it was garbage that they were being led along by an algorithm. Always double check, and if you can’t double check, don’t do it.
4. Treat AI like the world’s most confident intern
Let’s expand on the idea of double checking with a mental model that goes even farther — treating AI like an intern.
Obviously you would double check an intern’s work, and the more important the closer you’d read it.
But you also need to be careful about what information you give that intern. For example, you might not want to give the intern the ability to add, remove or change appointments in your calendar at will. You might not want them reading all of your emails, or responding on your behalf without double checking.
More importantly, you don’t know what an intern is going to post about online or share with strangers. If someone particularly persuasive gets in touch with an intern they could bluff them into revealing your banking details or your secrets or anything else.
This is especially troubling because many AI assistants encourage you to give them LOTS of access — basically all the access. And on the one hand, the more access you give them the more they can help. The more they can do proactively.
BUT, the more access you give them the more damage they can do, too.
I work in cybersecurity and I know a lot of people who work in the field and we experiment with AIs all the time. But most of the time we isolate them, or give them very specific read-only privileges to subsets of our information. We take pains to reduce the blast radius.
If you’re not familiar with how to restrict permissions or isolate an AI agent then you’re putting your data at risk when you give an AI access to it. So don’t do that! Treat it like an intern. Give it only the information and instruction it needs to do a job, then make sure you double check the work it produces.
5. Don’t use AI for something you need or want to be good at
What was the heaviest thing you lifted today? And how much did it weigh?
If you have children, it was probably one of them. Maybe you brought in the groceries. Maybe you were doing some yardwork.
For most people, the heaviest thing they lift in any given day is, well, weights. They work out, they do strength training, whatever.
They do this because our bodies need that kind of activity to stay healthy, but we created a world full of machines that lift and move things for us, so that we don’t really need to do any heavy lifting on a given day.
So, we created machines that lifted heavy stuff for us, and that leads to us being less healthy, so we created machines that allow us to lift heavy stuff.
It’s the CIIIIIIRRRRRRCCCCCLLLLEEE OF LIIIIIIFFFFEEEEEEE
What we’re talking about is “biomechanical offloading” (there’s actually several terms, but that’s what we’re using). It’s the act of using something else so we don’t have to do a physical activity. When we experience biomechanical offloading our body will do less activity and will thus start to atrophy — it will become weaker.
To fix that, we lift weights. I guess that’s biomechanical onloading.
When you use AI to do something you are performing cognitive offloading. That is, you’re taking something you typically did with your mind, and you’re having something else do it.
This isn’t something AI introduced. In fact, you can probably think of a few ways you’ve already experienced cognitive offloading (depending on your age):
- You might have learned how to do math in your head at school, but once you got a calculator on your smartphone those skills probably disappeared
- When you were younger you may have gotten around with a map, or just by listening to someone tell you directions. But since the advent of GPS in cars you probably use it anywhere you’re going somewhere new — and maybe even when you’re doing a trip you are already familiar with
- Using search engines has probably caused you to remember fewer facts (this is the “google effect”) — can you remember when the Nicene Creed was written? Probably not, but you immediately thought “Well, I could just google it” — even if you memorized that date in school
(I did memorize that date in school, and forgot it, and googled it — it was 325 CE)
Not all cognitive offloading is bad, but any cognitive offloading does reduce the associated skill. For some things that’s not the end of the world (nobody is going to quiz you on the Nicene Creed unless you’re on Jeopardy), but for other things it can be a serious problem. And AI is especially dangerous because it can do SO MUCH, and it’s so easy.
One example I like to use is chatting with whatever gender you’re interested in. If you’re single, and you want to mingle, you might be tempted to chat with someone and ask AI to sharpen up your wit or just help you come across as more educated than you are. This could work via text, but what about when you end up across from them on a date? What will you do then?
YOU WILL CRASH AND BURN AND NEVER FIND LOVE!!!! I’M SORRY!
But that is the truth. If you are relying on ChatGPT to communicate with people then when the time comes to communicate in person you will not be the same person they have been communicating with, and that is REALLY off-putting.
The only way to get good at conversation is to converse. The only way to get good at professional communication at work is to communicate professionally at work. If you have AI write your rough draft you will never gain the skills you need, or you will slowly lose them. Either way, your ability to communicate will atrophy.
The same holds true for dozens of other cognitive skills. If you want to be creative, but you’re always asking AI to brainstorm for you, you will lose what creativity you have. If you want to be a great leader, but ask AI to punch up your team meetings, you will never be able to rally the troops in a crisis.
I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. If you want or need a skill, DO NOT hand it over to AI. You will experience cognitive offloading, but there’s no Gym for the brain (yet) — no way to artificially build the cognitive muscles that are atrophying.
If you want or need to be good at something, don’t use AI.
6. Pay attention to how your life changes
It’s a common misconception that Amish people don’t use any technology. Amish people actually do! They talk on the telephone. They will drive in cars sometimes (like when taking someone to the hospital). They can use battery powered flashlights at times.
The Amish relationship to technology is actually incredibly interesting. An article by Cal Newport introduced me to it, and he summarizes how the Amish evaluate a technology:
… they start with the things they value most, then work backwards to ask whether a given technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.
An example he cites is the car, quoted from the Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”
When cars first appeared at the turn of the last century, the Amish noticed that drivers would leave the community to go picnicking or sightseeing in other towns, instead of visiting family or the sick on Sundays, or patronizing local shops on Saturday. Therefore the ban on unbridled mobility was intended to make it hard to travel far and to keep energy focused in the local community. Some parishes did this with more strictness than others.
In other words, the Amish have certain values. Before they adopt a new technology, they try to determine if it will help promote those values, or if it will erode them. They often will have one person begin using the technology while the rest of the community watches them like a hawk. If the technology has a net negative effect on that person then they don’t adopt it — or they might adopt a different version of the tool that can address the problems, or they put restrictions or limits on the technology (as they did with cars).
(you can see the whole process, and how to apply it in your life, here)
AI is an incredibly powerful tool. It is also incredibly new, and changing incredibly fast. We already know that AI can cause harm, some of which are quite significant. And, unfortunately, there’s no Amish community to watch you as you start using it.
Instead you have to police yourself, which can be incredibly difficult. I mean, think about Social Media, or short-form video. Have those been a net positive in your life? Odds are good they are either neutral on balance, or a net negative. And yet you likely still use them (or have gone through an arduous process of eliminating them from your life).
It took us years to really realize that Social Media is meh for most people, bad for some, and really bad for others. We need to try and get ahead of that with AI — so do as the Amish do. Write down what matters to you, then track how that changes as you introduce AI. While you’re at it, track how everything else changes.
And although you don’t have an Amish community to lean on, you can recruit your own Amish Buddy (that’s a thing, right?) — someone close to you that you trust to tell you if things are changing for the worse.
How much time do you spend using AI? What is it taking the place of? What kind of conversations do you have? Has it changed the kind of conversation you have with other people? Where do you get your information? Am I talking to AI instead of people? Whatever is important to you, write it down, and don’t let AI damage it.
Make like the Amish.
That’s all for now
So there is the basic introduction to the first six rules. I’m feeling pretty good about it! There is a lot of stuff I will include in the longer versions of these rules (for example, the whole “less but better vs more but average” which will likely come up as part of Rule 6), but for now you get the basics.
The last two rules are much different — they touch on how we as individuals should collectively use AI to stop it from causing damage to society as a whole. So they involve individual action, but also indicate that we should try and influence others to use AI in certain ways if we want to head off some of the bigger problems. I still haven’t decided if they make sense in this group, but I think they’re important subjects to cover either way.
So let me know what you think of the six rules! Did I miss anything? Should I change the rules? The order? The catch phrases? Let me know!
