There are a ton of great uses for AI, and more coming out every day. However, there are places that you can use AI that are likely not a smart move.
I’m not talking about using AI to cheat on your homework or for other nefarious purposes (though those are clearly bad too), but places where AI can cheat you out of your own efforts.
For me personally, I can think of three areas where AI could likely “help” me but I’m intentionally not using it.
Moving highlights
When I finish a book, the highlights are automatically available via Kindle. There are tools that can take your highlights and automatically move them into systems like Evernote or Obsidian. I choose not to.
For me, the act of copying each highlight and moving it over gives me a chance to reassess if I want to keep it, a chance to group similar highlights together, and a chance to link highlights in my notes to related topics. AI could do much of that work for me, but if I highlighted something with the intent to learn from it, doesn’t it make sense to touch it more often?
Adding content to Anki
Similar is adding new cards into Anki. There are tools to automate that, but why? I use Anki specifically to try to learn and remember new ideas, and the effort to create those cards is a great first step toward learning.
Lots of stuff on this blog
Generally speaking, AI can be a great help for bloggers. You can come up with ideas, write outlines, and even publish fully AI-written posts. In my case, though, those are all bad ideas.
I want to read more to find more ideas, which I often find by linking notes together. For the post itself, my time and effort to write and edit is precisely why I’m doing this at all. Using AI for any of that could be counter to my goals.
AI is awesome, and it’s becoming a bigger part of my life every day, but intentionally excluding it in certain areas seems like a smart thing to do.
