Some people are surprised when AI tools like ChatGPT fabricate facts and information. But the problem isn’t that AI can “make up” stuff; it’s that people don’t realise that’s possible. When you understand this, you can blend human intelligence and machine creativity to get better results.
I was running an AI workshop last week with a business, demonstrating how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Some people in the room were surprised (shocked, even!) to discover that ChatGPT sometimes completely makes up information. I explained that’s why you always need to double-check and triple-check its facts.
But some people think that’s a fault in the AI. Surely (they said) if it doesn’t know the answer, it’s better to say that rather than giving a false answer!
That might be true, but there are some times when you want AI to “make things up”. For example, if you’re:
- an author asking AI to help you continue the action in a chapter
- a screenwriter writing a screenplay asking AI to help with stage directions
- an artist asking AI to crete an image that’s never been created before
But it’s not only in the creative industries.
In any organisation, sometimes you want to be more creative, and AI can help. For example:
- You’re sending an email newsletter to your clients, and you want a creative subject line that encourages people to open the email.
- You’re creating a new product, and you want a creative name for the product.
- You’re doing your strategic planning, and you ask AI to act like a time traveller from 2040 looking back at now and describing the future.
The problem isn’t that AI “makes things up”. The problem is that people don’t realise it!
Sometimes you want it to be completely fact-based, sometimes you want it to be creative, and sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle.
These AI tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity are just tools. And like other tools, we use them for a particular purpose, but always with our human intelligence.
That’s why education is such an important part of building your AI capability.
It’s about humans and machines working together, which means people need a basic understanding of what AI tools can do. Again, just like any other tool, if you don’t know how to use it, you’ll use it badly!
If you’re a leader or a manager, come along to my next online presentation, which is all about putting AI into action. I’ll talk about the three levels of building your AI capability – and the first of these is giving your people this basic understanding of the potential of AI.