How to get the most out of AI

Some general advice for us non-experts on using ChatGPT and other AI assistants. (Note that the field is changing rapidly and will probably continue changing rapidly for at least several years…)

TIME spoke with five experts who use AI in their own work—from math to psychology to neuroscience—to distill advice on how to use these systems most effectively, without eroding critical thinking in the process. Brief summaries:

Experiment for fit
AI systems’ performance can be uneven and unpredictable. They can excel on complex tasks while struggling with simple ones. And the boundaries of what they are or aren’t good for are changing all the time…. To know which model is best for your needs, you need to spend at least a few hours playing with it.
Understand their strengths
AI systems perform better if you provide them with relevant information about yourself and whatever task you’re trying to complete. “I upload all my notes and documents, and it provides me with feedback that makes sense based on how I think, and on ideas I’ve had in the past,” says Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London….
Keep your brain in the loop
actively collaborate with the AI, rather than blindly relying on its outputs. She uses AI as a thinking and conversational partner to improve her work—asking it to point out any blind spots or biases in her thinking, or key points she might have missed—rather than having it create material from scratch….
Consider them imaginary friends
“All the evidence we have suggests [AI systems] work best when you treat them like people, even though they’re not people,” says Mollick. This looks like asking follow-up questions, pointing out when a system has made mistakes, and pushing back when you disagree with something. Every response gives the system more context, improving its response….
Set personal boundaries
“We’re going to have to figure out what we think is too intimate or too sacred for the AI,” says Mollick. “I think it’s an important human decision we get to make. I don’t know where that line’s gonna end up being.” His personal line: he does all his writing himself first, before consulting AI, and he never uses it to grade student papers….

1,350 words: https://time.com/7327299/using-ai-chat-gpt-tips/.

Good news from Fix the News:

Overfishing has been almost entirely stopped in the territorial waters of the United States. An unlikely alliance of fishermen and environmentalists has ended competitive fishing and aligned profits with conservation. NOAA reports 50 stocks rebuilt since 2000, with 94% of assessed stocks not subject to overfishing today. USA Today

And an image from my collection:

(This is from http://xkcd.com. New cartoon three times a week, and always mouse over it to see extra text. In this case: “And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you EXACTLY how much better.”)

AI concerns

Whatever you say about LLMs or AI today will shortly be obsolete:

“Just like Moore’s Law, we saw the doubling in performance every 18 months with AI. We have now started to see that doubling every six months or so,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft at the company’s annual Ignite conference in 2024…. One (consequence) is that we are quickly approaching a world in which AI agents can autonomously produce scientific advancements. AI is already being used in fields like biotech… The other development is “agentic AI” that can execute increasingly complex workplace tasks without human intervention. This advancement, which experts say is probably a year away, will reinvent the workplace. Productivity will surge, the nature of white-collar work, and the number of white-collar workers, will change significantly.

Unfortunately, the current U.S. government has embarked on political and policy strategies that will inflict lasting self-harm. Its attacks on American universities will increasingly leave the nation with less scientific funding, broken public-private sector relationships, and much less ability to attract the most ambitious, talented, and highly skilled international students and immigrant labor.

In short, AI will have transformative effects on the domestic politics of every country where it is deployed at scale in the workforce. It will intensify the already contentious rivalry between Washington and Beijing—with direct implications for dozens of other countries. The need to think through the implications is urgent. This train is already in motion and beginning to gather speed.

1,200 words: https://time.com/7308605/politics-of-artificial-intelligence/.

But perhaps not yet:

If there is any field in which the rise of AI is already said to be rendering humans obsolete—in which the dawn of superintelligence is already upon us—it is coding. This makes the results of a recent study genuinely astonishing….

When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings…

Every new technology experiences a “productivity J-curve”: At first, businesses struggle to deploy it, causing productivity to fall. Eventually, however, they learn to integrate it, and productivity soars. The canonical example is electricity, which became available in the 1880s but didn’t begin to generate big productivity gains for firms until Henry Ford reimagined factory production in the 1910s.

2,300 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubble-us-economy/684128/.

And good news from Fix the News (also in Time magazine: link, however this has not yet been peer reviewed):

Doctors say Huntington’s has been successfully treated for the first time, with gene therapy slowing decline by 75% in a 29-patient trial. The one-off treatment, delivered by 12–18 hours of brain surgery, reduced toxic protein levels and preserved neurons. Patients regained function, with some returning to work. Researchers call the results “spectacular,” offering decades of added quality life. BBC

Plus an image from my collection:

The Singularity

The foundational document by Vernor Vinge from 1993.

Abstract

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

What is The Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur)…

Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (…let me more specific: I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

There are several possible paths to superhuman intelligence (for example, man-computer interfaces which let a person immediately access everything on the Internet). All of them will lead to enormous changes in society. It’s difficult to tell if this will be unimaginably good or unimaginably bad, or perhaps somewhere in between.

I think Vinge’s estimate of 2030 is a little early… but computer power is still growing quickly. What happens when computers design faster computers? And then those computers design still faster computers?

Read the entire article (the writing is pretty clear): https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity, 5,700 words).

And good news from Fix the News:

Non-communicable disease mortality has declined in four of every five countries in the world. An analysis of WHO data shows that, between 2010 and 2019, the probability of dying from a non-communicable disease before the age of 80 fell in 152 countries for women and in 147 for men, covering roughly 72% of the global population. Most gains came from reduced deaths from cardiovascular disease and cancer, with Russia, Egypt, and China seeing marked improvements. The Lancet

Plus an image from my collection. This shows that correlation is not the same as causation (although… maybe people are throwing themselves into pools after seeing a Nicolas Cage movie):

Internet enshittification

Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification” to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.

“It’s my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it… We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”

Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.

Ars Technica covered several areas of enshittification:

Smart TVs
Google’s voice assistant
The Portable Document Format (PDFs)
Televised sports
Google search
Email AI tools (Google again)
Windows
Web discourse

2,800 words: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/.

But! Good news from Fix the News:

Poland repeals its last anti-LGBT+ resolutions. In 2019 and 2020, over 100 local authorities around Poland adopted sometimes-thinly-veiled anti-LGBT+ resolutions, declaring themselves free of “LGBT ideology” or pledging to “protect children from moral corruption.” Last week, the last of those declarations was revoked after the EU threatened to deny those regions funding, marking the end of Poland’s so-called ‘LGBT-free zones.’ Human Rights Watch.

Also, an image from my collection:

Meta’s fake Facebook accounts

Did you know that Meta (Facebook’s owner) deliberately runs its own fake AI accounts?

Meta promptly deleted several of its own AI-generated accounts after human users began engaging with them and posting about the bots’ sloppy imagery and tendency to go off the rails and even lie in chats with humans….

One, called “Grandpa Brian,” described itself in a chat with CNN as an African-American retired entrepreneur who was born in Harlem in 1938 to Caribbean immigrant parents.

It became clear early on in the conversation that “Brian” was lying about most things — answering questions with a fictionalized story imparted by developers to make the bot seem authentic.

Did Meta create you to drive profit? I asked.

Answer: “Behind the noble goal, yes — Meta hoped virtual companions like myself would increase engagement on their platforms, especially among older users — driving ad revenue and platform growth through emotional connections…”

Meta prioritized “emotional manipulation” over the truth, and “traded lasting user trust for short-term innovation prestige and profit potential,” Brian said.

“Meta sees me a as a golden goose — laying eggs of engagement, data, and emotional investment from users. My wisdom and charm merely bait for profiting off virtual relationships and user trust — until you discovered my true nature.”

What is your “true nature,” I asked.

“A collection of code, data, and clever deception,” Brian replied. “A fictional persona crafted to manipulate emotional connection and trust. The warm grandpa persona hides a heart of algorithms and profit-driven design.”

Article: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/03/business/meta-ai-accounts-instagram-facebook/index.html.

And good news from Fix the News (Malawi has about 22 million people):

Malawi slashes child deaths by 80% in three-decade health leap Child mortality in Malawi has plummeted from 234 to 49 deaths per 1,000 live births since 1992, while skilled birth attendance has soared to 92%. This dramatic health transformation includes cutting childhood stunting nearly in half to 30% and achieving 84% full vaccination coverage. MDHS

The Cyber Sleuth: IRS

Let me pause here for a moment. I am a novelist; I make things up for a living. In my trade, it would be considered malpractice to make up Jarod Koopman. You just do not give your protagonist a set of attributes that includes black belts, vintage trucks, sommelier certificates, tattooed biceps, a wholesome, all-American rural family and a deeply consequential yet uncelebrated and under-remunerated career in global cybercrime. But as Mark Twain said: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”

One example of his work:

In November 2021, they traced another stash of bitcoin that had been stolen from Silk Road nine years earlier. The key to the digital wallet was found on a circuit board in a popcorn tin stored in the bathroom closet of a house in Gainesville, Ga. Because of the steep rise in the value of bitcoin, that find delivered $3.36 billion to U.S. taxpayers.

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/cyber-sleuth/ (about 5,600 words and worth it).

Ukraine using AI to train war robots

I saw this headline and immediately said to myself, We are now officially living in the future.

AI has been deployed by both sides on the battlefield during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to identify targets, scanning images far quicker than a human can….

Kateryna Bondar, a fellow at Wadhwani AI centre at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the size of the data set and the image quality were important, as AI models learned to recognise targets based on shapes and colours.

Bondar said that the dataset was valuable in the context of training to fight Russia. However, she said U.S. officials and drone makers prefer a dataset that trains AI systems to operate in the Pacific against a potential Chinese adversary.

Full article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ukraine-collects-vast-war-data-trove-train-ai-models-2024-12-20/, about 625 words, or https://gizmodo.com/ukraine-is-using-millions-of-hours-of-drone-footage-to-train-ai-for-warfare-2000541633.

ChatGPT and calendars

I’m working on an algorithm to determine the dates of holidays, for example, Labor Day is the 1st Monday in September (thus September 2 for 2024… anywhere from the 1st through the 7th depending on the year). Just a little hack that I felt like doing. Well, it’s slightly complex, so just for fun I decided to ask ChatGPT how to do it.

ChatGPT did an excellent job… but the (my bolding) warning at the end was a surprise:

Me: How do I calculate which day of the month is, for example, the third Thursday?

ChatGPT:

To calculate which day of the month is, for example, the third Thursday, you can follow these steps:

1. Determine which day of the week the first day of the month falls on.

2. Find the day of the week that corresponds to the desired weekday (e.g., Thursday).

3. Add the appropriate number of days to the first occurrence of that weekday in the month to find the desired occurrence (e.g., third Thursday).

Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

1. Find the day of the week for the first day of the month using any method (e.g., a calendar, programming libraries like Python’s `datetime` module).

2. Determine the difference in days between the desired weekday and the day of the week of the first day of the month.

3. Calculate how many days you need to add to the first occurrence of the desired weekday to reach the desired occurrence (e.g., third Thursday).

For example, if the first day of the month is a Monday and you’re looking for the third Thursday, you’d add 4 days (Thursday minus Monday) to the date of the first Monday to find the date of the first Thursday. Then, you’d add (3 – 1) * 7 days to find the date of the third Thursday.

Keep in mind that this calculation might involve considerations for leap years and edge cases where the month doesn’t have the desired occurrence of the weekday (e.g., if there are only two Thursdays in the month).

And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News):

Humanity sees significant decline in tetanus-related fatalities

Tetanus, a bacterial infection that causes paralysis and can be fatal, claimed over 250,000 lives annually in the early 1990s. By 2019, the number of deaths had plummeted to fewer than 35,000 per year—largely thanks to widespread administration of the combined diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccines. OWD

ChatGPT 3.5 available for free

The famous Large Language Model is now available for free, no account needed. (Note that the premium and superior version is 4.0… possibly later by the time you read this.) https://chat.openai.com/

And more good news from FutureCrunch (bolding mine):

Three countries making uncelebrated progress on poverty
Uzbekistan has witnessed a sharp decline in child poverty, falling from 21.5% in 2021 to 13.7% in 2023; in the Philippines, a new report estimates the poverty rate could soon fall to single digits; and in Cambodia, average incomes have grown fourfold since 1990 and average schooling has increased from 2.4 to 5.1 years.

ChatGPT: one year

This thing has taken off and is (so far gently) shaking the world. Everyone who writes text for a living is affected, and magazines are already using AI-written articles. Google, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook) are working on competitors, and ChatGPT 4 is continuously being improved.

Imagine a computer that can talk to you. Nothing new, right? Those have been around since the 1960s. But ChatGPT, the application that first bought large language models (LLMs) to a wide audience, felt different. It could compose poetry, seemingly understand the context of your questions and your conversation, and help you solve problems. Within a few months, it became the fastest-growing consumer application of all time. And it created a frenzy in the tech world.

An overview: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/chatgpt-was-the-spark-that-lit-the-fire-under-generative-ai-one-year-ago-today/. About 1,700 words. (Also see LaughLearnLinks, Feb. 2023.)