Are you an AI cat or dog?

I am meeting a lot of AI cats on my travels. People who distrust AI but truthfully haven’t used it. They have often banned it in their offices (and believe that younger colleagues are not using it secretly 💭), have commissioned long strategic plans for its use in the future and say that it cannot be trusted because it hallucinates. Which it does. Sometimes.

On the other hand there are AI dogs, who are enthusiastically lapping it up. They’ve stopped using Google and use AI as their go-to for everything. There are fewer dogs at the office than you might imagine though, according to research from Gallup only one in ten of us are using it weekly or more at work.

My advice on this is consider being an AI fox…

Explore it, use it, know what it does (if only because you will then be able to spot other people using it). Find out what it can reliably do for you. So you can talk about it without obfuscating and be realistic about where it adds value and doesn’t.

This week’s video is for anyone who is secretly feline (sorry!), left behind on this and doesn’t know where to start.

  1. Set aside an hour.

  2. Download ChatGPT4 (do pay for it, if only in the short term).

  3. Switch off “improve the model for everyone” so your data is only used by you.

  4. Play with what it can do for you that’s useful and reliable.

As you do so, start to spot how you know that AI has been at work:

  • ✍️ Answers that are too long, too formal or too fast,

  • 📅 Impersonal invites,

  • 📝 Lacking detail or nuance,

  • 🤖 Repetitive phrasing,

  • ⚠️ American spelling and punctuation (eg Capitals in Headlines. American—hyphens, rocket emojis).

Enjoy! Share with anyone you know who is an AI cat so they can get started. Or an AI dog (so they don’t get caught).

With love to all my foxes out there.

Christine