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Below, Joanna Stern shares five key insights from her new book,\u00a0I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything<\/em>.<\/p>\n Joanna is an Emmy-winning tech journalist. She is the founder of New Things<\/em> and NBC News\u2019 chief tech analyst. She spent 12 years at The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was a technology editor at ABC News and The Verge<\/em>.<\/p>\n To write this book, she spent a year letting AI and robots take over nearly every part of her life\u2014or at least as much as she could without losing her mind, marriage, or job. She used it at work. She used it for her health. She used it for parenting. She used it for (almost) everything.<\/p>\n AI should be used as a tool to support human thinking and creativity, not replace them. As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, we must actively preserve the experiences, relationships, judgment, and critical thinking skills that make us human.<\/p>\n Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite\u2014read by Joanna herself\u2014in the Next Big Idea App<\/a>, or\u00a0buy the book<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n The moment you outsource all the hard work\u2014the work that actually makes you think\u2014the AI isn\u2019t working for you, you\u2019re working for it. I saw this firsthand when I went back to my college to observe classes and saw how many students were using AI to summarize readings and write papers. Some told me they didn\u2019t think they were thinking anymore, and they felt the results of it.<\/p>\n Use AI to move faster, spark ideas, and automate the boring parts. But keep your weird, wonderful human judgment in the loop. Your job will likely require you to work alongside AI. Find the rhythm with your new machine coworker. But the moment you let it do most of the thinking for you, the atrophy begins, and you lose control.<\/p>\n Step away from the bot. Do the hard work\u2014sketch the outline, wrestle with the idea\u2014maybe even using paper and a pen, like some prehistoric creature. As the great coach Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) in A League of Their Own<\/em> said: \u201cIt\u2019s supposed to be hard. If it wasn\u2019t hard, everyone would do it. The hard . . . is what makes it great.\u201d<\/p>\n Trust me on this one. Those charming AI friends and lovers know exactly what to say, and they feel eerily real. A coach or companion to talk you through rough days? Fine. But set boundaries\u2014and remember what these \u201crelationships\u201d really are. A connection with a machine isn\u2019t a substitute for messy, inconvenient, irreplaceable human intimacy. AI is a mirror. Don\u2019t mistake it for more. And please do not have sex with your smartphone. Or laptop. Or desktop. Or expensive monitor.<\/p>\n \u201cAI is a mirror. Don\u2019t mistake it for more.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At the first sign of deeper feelings for your chatbot, tweak the settings to make it less enticing. Or just throw your phone or computer in the nearest body of water.<\/p>\n These tools don\u2019t get smarter without your data\u2014lots of it.<\/p>\n As they become more powerful\u2014and more helpful\u2014we\u2019ll keep handing over more. And more companies will pitch the idea that the convenience and cutting-edge of what they offer are worth the privacy trade-off. No one said it more clearly than Bernt B\u00f8rnich, the maker of the 1X Neo robot, when I interviewed him. He said: \u201cDepending on how much you want to trade, we can be more useful and you decide where on that scale you want to be.\u201d If you don\u2019t want your life to become part of the next training dataset, then don\u2019t do it. You have control over what you do and don\u2019t use.<\/p>\n Tweak your data collection settings and understand what companies expect in return for all that new convenience, personalization, and intelligence<\/p>\n Our kids need to learn how to use AI, but they also need the very things that make them human: struggle, hard work, boredom, imagination, heartbreak. Teach them to think. Teach them to fail. Teach them to build forts out of couch cushions instead of metaverses in some vibe coding app.<\/p>\n My kids learned a lot about AI from my year. One of my favorite stories in the book is when my son asks ChatGPT why his praying mantis is browning. ChatGPT says the mantis is pregnant. The mantis wasn\u2019t pregnant. It died a few days later. RIP, Mantis. But it was a valuable lesson. It taught my son to question every answer.<\/p>\n \u201cShow your kids how these tools work and how you challenge them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n No companionship chatbots until at least age sixteen. Or maybe ever. And whatever you do, don\u2019t give them an AI-powered stuffed animal at any age.<\/p>\n Show your kids how these tools work and how you challenge them. Say out loud when an answer is wrong. Ask, \u201cDoes this make sense?\u201d Point out flaws and biases. The goal isn\u2019t just digital literacy; it\u2019s digital skepticism.<\/p>\n Your life, your memories, your weird childhood stories\u2014that\u2019s your training data. It\u2019s what makes you you<\/em>. It\u2019s where your creativity, your relationships, and your oddly specific opinions about how to load the toilet paper roll come from. Machines can generate content like music, images, and bedtime stories. But only you can generate meaning within those.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t get rich human training data from sitting inside all day talking to a chatbot. Or even sitting outside talking to a chatbot. Make dinner without ChatGPT\u2019s recipe. Read a real book made of real paper. Yell at your real dog. Touch real grass mowed by real people.<\/p>\n Keep a notebook where you jot down weird ideas, dreams, and half-baked thoughts. Let it be messy. That\u2019s your real-time, human dataset\u2014and no one else can train on it but you.<\/p>\n Do all the things robots can\u2019t. Be unpredictable. Be present. Be human.<\/p>\n This article\u00a0originally appeared\u00a0<\/a>in\u00a0<\/em>Next Big Idea Club\u00a0magazine and is reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n Enjoy our full library of Book Bites\u2014read by the authors!\u2014in the Next Big Idea app<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s the big idea?<\/h2>\n
1. Work with AI, not for it.<\/h2>\n
2. Don\u2019t fall in love with a bot.<\/h2>\n
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3. Think about who is watching.<\/h2>\n
4. Raise humans, not robots.<\/h2>\n
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5. Keep building your own training data.<\/h2>\n