Technology has trained us in very bad ways.

 For example, the Google search box.

 Anytime our brains see a box that looks like that, we go, "Oh, I know what to do here.

" And when you open an LLM and you treat it like a Google search, you are not even scratching the surface of its capabilities.

 Your familiarity with the Google search is actually undermining your ability to be a good collaborator to AI.

 And that's not just a semantic difference.

 It's actually a tremendous difference in the processing power it unlocks when I'm no longer responsible to synthesize my thoughts, but I can instead rely on an another intelligence to do it.

 Everything changes because the moment you go to your fingers, you go, "What do I say first?" Whereas with your voice, you can just babble and ramble.

 And there's something there about offloading the need to be smart that unlocks intelligence.

 Use your voice, not your fingers.

 And the moment you start really getting comfortable leaning on your voice, it changes your productivity [Music] dramatically.

 I'm Jeremy Utley.

 I am an adjunct professor of creativity and AI at Stanford University.

 I've been teaching at Stamford for the last 15 years at the intersection of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and now increasingly artificial intelligence.

 The topic that I'm most focused on right now is helping non-technical professionals learn to be good collaborators to or with generative AI.

 And then two years ago, myself and my partner at the time, Perry Claybond, wrote a book called Idea Flow, which was the canonical book on idea generation and prototyping.

 So super proud of that.

 It was the culmination of a dozen years of leading executive programs and the leadership program and the entrepreneurship program at Stanford.

 And one month after our book came out, Chad GBT came out.

 To me, the fact that I wrote the canonical book on idea generation, just prior to AI is like writing the best book on retail just before the internet.

 AI is a tool to dramatically augment and amplify our creativity.

 And the truth is, I didn't know a lot about it when the book came out.

 So, one month after my book came out, instead of going on a world book tour, I strapped myself back into the front row as a student and said, I need to be learning about this transformative new technology.

 So, I started taking classes.

 I started conducting research.

 which I started work working with and studying teams inside of organizations using the tool to understand the simple question how does generative AI impact the individual and the team and the organization's ability to solve problems you can give an AI a prompt for example how should I answer this question or you could give an AI the question I want to ask how I should answer this question What's the best way of framing that question to an AI? So, you see what I did there? I asked AI for how to ask AI my question.

 But you can use AI to use AI, which is you couldn't use Excel to use Excel.

 PowerPoint can't teach you how to use PowerPoint.

 Email can't teach you how to use email.

 AI strangely can teach you how to use itself.

 If you think to ask, go to your language model of choice and just say the following.

 Hey, you're an AI expert.

 I would love your help and a consultation with you to help me figure out where I can best leverage AI in my life.

 As an AI expert, would you please ask me questions, one question at a time, until you have enough context about my workflows and responsibilities and KPIs and objectives that you could make to obvious recommendations and two nonobvious recommendations for how I could leverage AI in my work.

 you will have one of the most enlightening and illuminating conversations you've ever had.

 And it's all because of AI's ability to evaluate its own work.

 What I've seen is non-technical employees are able to do incredible things.

 Here's one example.

 The National Park Service called me and asked me if I would conduct a training program for a bunch of backcountry rangers.

 So, they gathered a group of about 60 backcountry rangers and facilities managers into a training session.

 And I spent a couple of hours over Zoom teaching folks the basics of collaborating with AI.

 One of the people in that session was a gentleman named Adam Rymer who works at Glen Canyon National Park.

 And one of the things I say is you should focus on parts of your work that you dread, parts of your work that you don't enjoy, that you think, h I have to do this again.

 And Adam said, if I have to replace the carpet tiles in the lodge, I have to fill out all of this paperwork.

 And so to replace a carpet tile will sometimes take 2 or 3 days of paperwork.

 Then he thought, could AI help me write that paperwork? And in 45 minutes, he built a tool with natural language that saves him two days of work every day he makes a statement of work.

 And then listen to this.

 Someone got access to that tool and shared it across the other parks.

 There's about 430 parks in the service.

 The National Park Service is estimating that the tool that Adam built in 45 minutes is going to save the service 7,000 days of human labor this year.

 That's the kind of impact that normal professionals can have even without any technical ability if only they're given very basic foundational training.

 People are wanting to learn AI and how it can be transformative for their business but they don't have the basic language and so while lots of organizations are asking me how can we work with AI to transform our business where I have to start with them is how do you work with AI the research I'm familiar with suggests that while on the one hand AI makes people 25% faster and 12% more work and 40% better quality it's also true that less than 10% of working professionals are driving meaningful productivity gains from collaboration with AI.

 To me, there's this enormous gap.

 I call it the realization gap.

 We conducted studies both in Europe and in the United States.

 And what we found is surprisingly AI didn't help most people be more creative.

 In fact, in many cases, the people that we studied, AI made them less creative.

 And as we started digging into the research, we were surprised and looked at the data.

 We were confused because you think AI should make people more creative, not less.

 And we studied the underperformers and then we studied the outperformers.

 And what we found is the outperformers had a fundamentally different orientation towards AI than the underperformers did.

 Whereas the underperformers treated AI like a tool, the outperformers treated AI like a teammate.

 And shifting your orientation from tool to teammate changes everything about the kinds of outcomes that you can achieve working with generative AI.

 A simple example is what do you do when it gives you mediocre results? If it's a tool, you get a mediocre result and then maybe you improve it or maybe you say, "Ah, it's no good at doing that.

" If it's a teammate who's given you a mediocre result, think about the last teammate who gave you work product that wasn't sufficient.

 You gave them feedback, you gave them coaching, you gave them mentorship, you helped them improve it.

 And so what we found is the people who treat AI like a teammate, coach it and give it feedback and importantly get it to ask them questions.

 The fundamental orientation a lot of people take towards AI is I'm the question asker.

 AI is the answer giver.

 But if you think about AI like a teammate, you say, "Hey, what are 10 questions I should ask about this?" Or, "What do you need to know from me in order to get the best response?" So things for example like you have a difficult conversation coming up with a co-orker.

 Did you know you could leverage a large language model to roleplay that conversation? You can get an AI to interview you about your conversation partner and then construct a psychological profile of your conversation partner and then play the role of your conversation partner in a role play and then give you feedback from the perspective of your conversation partner on how you approach the conversation.

 That's something you can do today.

 And there are many things like that.

 I call them drills, but there are many things like that where if someone will just shift their consideration set of what are the things I can do with AI, they end up discovering applications that I've never even dreamed of.

 I've been doing this stuff for 2 years and my students are regularly coming to me with use cases I've never imagined that landed them in a destination I could have never predicted and they could never have predicted.

 My favorite tips are very straightforward.

 Use your voice, not your fingers.

 For example, the Google search box.

 Anytime our brains see a box that looks like that, we go, "Oh, I know what to do here.

" And when you open an LLM and you treat it like a Google search, you are not even scratching the surface of its capabilities.

 And so, your familiarity with the Google search is actually undermining your ability to be a good collaborator to AI.

 And that's not just a semantic difference.

 It's actually a tremendous difference in the processing power it unlocks when I'm no longer responsible to synthesize my thoughts.

 But I can instead rely on an another intelligence to do it.

 Everything changes.

 I'll give you an example.

 I was working with a collaborator on a new article for a magazine and she and I had this really vibrant discussion and at the end of the discussion I agreed I'll take a first pass based on our discussion.

 I took the conversation to voice with Chad GPT in this case and I said, "Hey, I had this amazing conversation with this collaborator.

 We explored all of these different angles.

 Would you interview me to make sure you get all of that information out of my head and then convert it into a memo of an outline of the article by the time we're done?" And I can say to the AI, would you quickly now outline all that we've discussed and maybe give me three suggestions for different ways that we could frame the content of this discussion? And I just start riffing in 40 minutes.

 It does all of that work, right? It's our work, but it's augmented and enabled through a collaboration with AI.

 None of that's possible without voice because the moment you go to your fingers, you go, what do I say first? Whereas with your voice, you can just babble and ramble.

 And there's something there about offloading the need to be smart.

 That unlocks intelligence.

 For me, I never thought about myself as a creative individual.

 Now, I fully and fundamentally believe every single human being has innate creative capacity.

 Every single one of us.

 What the dchool has helped me do is unlock others.

 Everyone has this latent creative capacity.

 And so even in regards to AI, I push people.

 What is the inspiration you're bringing to the model? Everybody has the same access to the same Chad GPT.

 How do I get a different output than you do? It's because of what I bring to the model.

 And what do I bring to the model? Certainly, I bring technique, but I also bring my experience.

 I bring my perspective.

 I bring all the inspiration I've gleaned from the world.

 That's what gets a user a differential output from a model.

 a seventh grader in Ohio who I don't even know what her name is, but her teacher asked, "What is creativity?" And she put a post-it note up on the board that says, "Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.

" And that's my favorite definition because it speaks to a profound cognitive bias that we hold.

 It's been called functional fixedness.

 It's been called the Einsteining effect.

 But the basic premise is humans tend to fixate on an early solution and be satisfied.

 Herbert Simon called it satisficing.

 But it's the idea that if we get to good enough, it's enough.

 And that's why I love that seventh graders definition.

 Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.

 It's pushing past good enough.

 Is the definition of creativity changing in the age of AI? I don't think so.

 The reality is with AI, it's now easier than ever to get good enough.

 If your goal is world class, if your goal is exceptional, then what you want to be prompting for is actually volume and variation.

 And that takes time.

 It takes time to not only read through it, but to sort it and to process it.

 But fundamentally, the definition of creativity doesn't change in the age of AI.

 It's just that the human's ability or inability to arrive at a creative state is affected not only by the technology but also by their stated or unstated objectives in collaborating with it.

 Creators don't need to be afraid of AI.

 Creators need to dive in.

 They need to lean in.

 Creators are about to be unleashed in a way they've never been unleashed before.

 The only correct answer to the question, how do you use AI is I don't I don't use AI, I work with it.

 When you start working with AI, it will change everything.

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