Will There Be Timeless Rules for Using AI Effectively?
How we searched the internet changed over the decades but certain principles stood the test of time. Will AI be the same?
Using AI is hard, weird, and takes time to learn. This is what I tell all the non-technical people in my life picking up ChatGPT. With time, each of us will learn how we like to interact with it and get the most out of it.
Thinking back, web search engines had a funny evolution. When it launched in 1996, Ask Jeeves stood out because it let users ask a question using natural language. A few years later, Google took us back to sparse queries, like “cat in hat author”. Then over the years, Google transitioned to a question-style query, à la Ask Jeeves. Users would prompt, “who wrote the cat in the hat” in order to find the Wikipedia Page for Dr. Seuss.
It’s not clear to me why this happened. Did Google start parsing its queries differently? Optimizing for questions over keyword-based queries? Maybe it didn’t. Whatever the true explanation may be, we collectively started searching Google with questions.
What occurred over those two decades was a dance between technology, innovation, and human understanding. The humans would adjust to what they thought worked best with the technology, and the technology would adjust to be more natural and easier to use for humans.
We’re certainly in the process of seeing the same thing for AI, but the dance is just getting started. That means that the rules that you learned last year might not apply to the same products this year. Last year in tech circles, there was a trend of complimenting the AI and then it would do more, better work. As far as I understand, that no longer works (or at least it’s no longer in vogue).
Throughout the search engine evolution, there were timeless rules about how to search that rose above: search with good keywords, check the sources, understand which links are ads, clickbait, or legitimate links, and so on.
Are there such evergreen, timeless rules for AI, and if so what are they?