Why do some people seem to be getting a lot out of AI, while others—maybe you—still feel like they’re spinning their wheels trying to squeeze anything remotely useful out of these platforms? The answer is multifaceted, of course.
Some workflows are better suited to the strengths of large language models, while others are more vulnerable to their weaknesses. Some users pay for upgraded plans, which can improve how well the models work.
But a big part of the difference comes down to how you use artificial intelligence. Like any tool, there are ways to make it perform better for you. In other words, the technology is often what you make of it.
If you offload your thinking to AI platforms, you risk dulling your ability to approach problems creatively and becoming dependent on a flawed technological crutch. But if you use AI to challenge yourself, stress-test your work, and outsource routine tasks, you might feel, at least in some sense, like you’ve gotten a significant upgrade.
Consider the calculator: Some people have become so reliant on it that their mental math skills suffer, while others use the technology to tackle more advanced math because they’re not spending their time on simpler problems.
Like all new technologies, what you choose to outsource to AI is up to you. Still, if you do decide to use it, it’s worth considering how to get the most out of the technology—and make sure chatbots serve you, rather than the other way around. Here are a few tips to make these platforms work better for you.
Be smart about your prompts
What you type into your AI actually matters. Take traditional search engines. You may not realize it, but over time, you might have developed an implicit sense of how using certain Boolean operators or more specific proper nouns can yield better, more relevant results to your queries.
The same is true for AI. Being more specific with a chatbot about what information you want can make a big difference, particularly when you’re using the technology as a search tool. It might be easy to slip into thinking that AI should already know what you want, but it doesn’t. Instead, treat a chatbot as an earnest research assistant with the capacity to make a lot of mistakes. There’s an old adage: “The more you know, the more they know.” The same logic applies to AI.
Here’s an example: If I’m shopping for a bookshelf, I no longer sift through countless listings searching for something that feels right. Instead, I take a picture of the spot where I need it to go, give the AI the dimensions (or range of dimensions) I’m looking for, and ask the chatbot to find the best options given those constraints. This saves me a lot of time and allows me to work smarter when using AI for shopping.
Encourage humility
One of the big problems with AI—or any work you don’t do yourself and instead outsource to someone (or something) else—is that it will make mistakes. Fear of an AI oopsie is anxiety-inducing and absolutely real, and one of the best reasons not to completely offload all your tasks to ChatGPT or Claude. Really, don’t do this!
The best approach is to check any work produced by a chatbot yourself. But there are also ways to help these tools work better. If you have the ability to adjust your AI’s settings, tell it to be more humble—and more cautious—when sharing information or making claims. Tell your AI to consider multiple ways of thinking about a question or problem, and to present divergent viewpoints. For kicks, tell it to admit when it’s unsure.
Also, always ask for direct citations and check them off the platform. When you send a prompt to your chatbot, tell it to avoid simply summarizing information and instead to provide direct links to sources so you can verify the claims yourself. Once you do this, you might be shocked by how often AI claims to be consulting a source or generates a fake web page only to apologize when you discover it doesn’t actually exist.
A polite reminder: Just because Claude says it’s “double-checking” something doesn’t mean it actually is. You need to double-check it, too! AI can cite unreliable sources and even hallucinate citations entirely. AI is powerful, but also unpredictable, and should never be treated as an objective source of information. Think of it as a sieve that helps you sift through information and find what you want faster, rather than something you can trust to identify the best results on its own.
Understand memory
Your AI is remembering what you ask it and what you tell it, even if you’re not always aware. This isn’t necessarily unique to AI systems; many tech platforms collect all sorts of data about you and then use that information to tailor content to you (usually, ads). It’s possible you don’t want AI to remember anything about you at all, in which case, check your privacy settings—or perhaps avoid AI entirely.
But if you are comfortable with a chatbot retaining information about you, consider that its memory can actually be a useful tool. For instance, if you’re using AI to draft emails, tell your chatbot to always introduce you in the way you prefer. If you tend to offer to jump on a call or Zoom, tell the AI that you like doing so—and ask it to remember that preference for when you draft emails in the future. If you prefer a more casual tone, tell it that. If you prefer to remain formal, tell it that instead.
Here’s another example: If you’d like your AI to avoid sending you links from Amazon when you’re online shopping—perhaps you don’t have an Amazon account—tell it to remember that preference so you don’t have to keep sifting through those links. Or maybe you’d prefer your AI to prioritize links to The New York Times because you already have a subscription. Tell your AI that, too.
Also, remember that you don’t need to give AI your personal information at all. For kicks, try asking it to erase things from its memory that you don’t want it to retain. There’s absolutely no guarantee that a request alone will erase the information completely, so check your privacy and memory settings, too. But why not give it a stab?
Customize how AI communicates
You spend a lot of time on Google, but you might now be pivoting to AI to surface information instead. One advantage of this is that you can have AI produce results in all sorts of formats and styles, since you dictate the terms in which it expresses itself. For instance, you might prefer to receive information in simple bullet points rather than a long, essay-like string of text. You can share that preference with your chatbot.
Maybe you prefer visuals and graphics? AI is great at whipping those up. For the nerds: Maybe you prefer receiving information in code that you can then copy and paste into a development environment, like Python, so you can run a script to check whatever work the AI did in a more deterministic way.
There are even simpler changes you could make. You might prefer that AI respond in two languages, perhaps because you already know one but are working on developing your skills in the other. Seeing the text side by side as you interact with the platform throughout the day might help boost your fluency.
Another example: I’ve instructed my AI to regularly incorporate more unusual, niche vocabulary. There’s a somewhat well-founded fear that AI is homogenizing our language and making us less creative in how we express ourselves. I told AI to reverse that trend and gave it a list of common AI crutch words to avoid.
Know your way around tokens
AI operates on tokens. You spend input tokens on the information you give a model, including your prompts and relevant context, and output tokens on what it produces in response. You may not always know how many tokens you’ve used, but writing long prompts generally means using more input tokens, while receiving long responses means using more output tokens.
As you employ chatbots and run up against usage limits, consider that you can guide your AI on how much detail to provide for a particular task. Tell it to be brief when you want a short response or just one link, and tell it when you want a really detailed answer.