One-Pager for 9th Grade

What is AI and how does it work?

At the root of the word INNOVATE is the Latin novus, or new. Innovation happens when the improbable becomes possible.  

What are some ways I can use AI responsibly as part of my creative process?

• Giving the AI guidance about how to help you. Example: “You are not a co-writer. You cannot perceive. Your role is to help me write like the best version of myself. I don’t want to be de-skilled. I don’t want you to write for me. I want you to push me to write and think like myself.” Additional suggestion: “Ramp up the level of cognitive friction that your outputs produce for me. Challenge me. Disagree with me.” (source: Jasmine Sun, “The Human Skill that Eludes AI”)

• “Chatting” with AI to brainstorm, and then building on or extending or disagreeing with the AI output so thoroughly that the original output would be unrecognizable. Examples are here.

• Using AI as a thesaurus.

• Using AI to find sources. (But then you must vet the sources yourself by reading them and making judgments about them yourself, and of course, you must cite your sources)

• Asking AI for feedback but reminding it not to rewrite your sentences for you. (Otherwise your piece will lose your distinctive voice, and you will introduce into your writing the stylistic tics that you see everywhere in AI slop that make readers distrustful, and you will forget how to think. Really. It’s called de-skilling.)

• Writing a three-to-four sentence AI-Use Acknowledgement at the end of your work.