You've got the tools. Now here's how to decide when — and why — to use AI.

Welcome to Your AI Guide — a 30-day challenge where I explore what AI can (and can't) do in everyday work. Each day, I'll introduce one AI tool or tip and break it down in simple steps to apply yourself. Subscribe to follow along, weigh in with #30DaysofAI and let's learn together.

On the windswept cliffs at the World’s End stands a lighthouse made of stone. On its roof, a long rod points up at an angle, and at its highest end there’s a basket made of steel. Once, long before this lighthouse was built, baskets of similar construction were lowered every evening to be filled with firewood and set ablaze so ships would not run ashore.

The lighthouse at the end of the world is a model of what once was, built to attract people to this spot. It is not real, in the sense of being a lighthouse. And yet, if you visit at the right time, the sun will pass behind the basket creating for the briefest moment a signal so bright it burns into your memory before it plunges into the sea and the blanket of night folds over the earth.

When I started this series 30 days ago I did not consider how I would end it. Now that I’m here, I realize just like the World’s End isn’t an end, but an end in itself, this also isn’t the end, but instead a place to stop.

For a moment.

To ground ourselves as the world rushes in and over and around us.

Before we start moving again, to stake out a path to our shared future.

When I sat down to write this, my plan was to sum up the past 29 days - to give you a list of links to follow so you could watch it all again.

That list will come, but not today. This is the 30th day, and I still owe you one last piece of tactical practical AI. So here it is, in the form of 3 tips with a bonus:

3 questions for when to use AI

When my wife and I visited World’s End on Little Christmas Eve a decade ago, we spent an hour walking in the blast chiller of a fresh breeze coming off the ocean before I brought out my camera. It took that long for the light to fall where I wanted it and me to find the spot to capture it with the lens I brought. I chose to wait, I chose my spot, I chose my technology, and I pressed the button.

When we engage with technology, we also engage with the politics, values, and future visions of its creators. How we choose to use technology determines how we implement and enable those politics, values, and future visions in the world, and what future we make possible for ourselves and the people around us.

Whenever I consider using AI, I ask myself these three questions:

Is AI useful? Does using AI help me in some way beyond what I could achieve without AI?

Is AI enhancing my abilities, or replacing them? In using AI, am I extending what I am capable of, or replacing my own work with that of a machine?

Is the energy and water use of AI worth it? Can I justify the proportionately enormous energy and water use generative AI consumes to perform my task?

These questions provide a robust framework for quick decision making about whether to use AI by acknowledging that AI has uses, those uses have impacts on how I do things, and my use of AI has impacts on the world.

They are not the only questions I ask, but they are the first because they are often sufficient.

Beyond these are a set of higher-order questions about how we implement AI as a society:

Whose work am I replacing by using AI? Generative AI is built by feeding the works of millions of people into machines to make them replicate it. This has significant impacts on those who make their living through these works, and on the creative output of all people.

Who am I harming by perpetuating the use of AI? From human AI-trainers to marginalized communities, fired workers to people whose water supplies are drained, AI use has real-world impacts on other people.

Who benefits from AI becoming ubiquitous, and who pays? While a select few become billionaires as the AI boom continues, countless people may end up worse off as a direct result. Who decides our future with AI, and how do we hold them accountable? How we build, use, and incorporate AI into our lives and societies determines what our future will be like and who gets to flourish. These are decisions we all have a stake in, and right now they are being made by a handful of very wealthy people.

I made this series of 30 AI experiments to empower people to try AI and see how it works for them so they feel qualified to talk about AI and what futures they want to build with it.

The future is not inevitable; it is something we build through our actions. To build futures where we can all flourish, we need to talk with one another; share our hopes and dreams and visions and fears, and find common ground we can all work towards together. AI has the potential to help us build better futures for more people, if we talk to one another and find out what that future is for each of us.

Let’s have that conversation, and build our future together, with AI.

And as we do, share your thoughts, ideas, hopes, fears, and dreams in a post or video using the hashtag #30DaysofAI, or in the comments below.

Thanks for being part of this journey with me. This is not the end - it’s an end in itself. 

To be continued…

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