A common sentiment that AI evangelists have expressed to me is their eagerness to outsource their day-to-day communications to it. I am not about to state that this is always a mistake. Certain missives are so rote and return so little for the invested effort that it’s hard to justify composing them from scratch. We’ve all sunk time into sending formulaic emails, which could have been better spent doing almost anything else.
But here’s the catch: if you want AI to do its best work, you have to stay sharp yourself. These tools are only as strong as the thinking and language you bring to them.
What I suspect yields the best long-term utility is to do some portion of your language composition completely unassisted. I don’t advance this out of some metaphysical concern for preserving the human soul (though it can double as that in a pinch), but as an appeal to the practical pursuit of conjuring the best AI output possible.
Just as Formula 1 drivers physically condition to better handle their finely tuned machines, practicing language skills without AI augmentation hones your ability to wield AI deftly. In this article, I offer three activities — really, two warm-ups and a high-intensity workout — that help extend what you can elicit from AI and cultivate your self-expression.
