Did you read the terms and conditions?
Everyone talks about AI making us produce more. Nobody talks about what we consume, or where it came from.
Did you read the terms and conditions before AI?
I think a lot of professional anxiety comes with using AI. The pressure to produce more is all anyone talks about. But what about the consumption?
Reading has been outsourced too
I considered myself a pretty verbose person before AI, so now I have to work on it consciously. And the more I talk to people, the more I find we’re using AI just to read content, and usually that content was written by AI in the first place.
Half-truths, built on
Used inconsistently, AI tends to give you half-truths, and sometimes it builds on data that isn’t accurate. There are ways round this, though, and ways to use an LLM as intended. Building up that ecosystem, and that muscle, matters.
The big one is training and awareness. Around it sit the supporting pieces:
- consistent standards, skills and plugins
- defined workflows with a human in the loop
- a policy on citations
- even rubric grading systems
All of that supports a technology that sometimes feels like magic.
The question I keep asking
The bottom line, and a question I ask constantly: do you know where your data is coming from?
Oh, and the answer about the T&Cs? No, I never read them. But I have AI now, so today I do. It’s amazing what’s in there.