How to use AI without losing your edge
For workers trying to strike that balance, the takeaway isn’t to avoid AI—it’s to use it more deliberately.
The key, Mollick says, is being intentional about which tasks you actually want to do yourself—and resisting the reflex to hand everything off just because you can. Sometimes it’s worth the extra effort. “It might be worth being less efficient for practice,” he says, comparing it to exercise: “There are a lot easier ways to move weights up and down than with your own hands, but we do it because we want to maintain muscle.”
Baldeo offers a similar approach. She encourages users to build what she calls “cognitive scaffolding”—a baseline understanding of a task before outsourcing it—and to actively engage with AI by questioning and refining its responses.
It’s also essential to learn how to argue with AI. Rather than accepting the first response it produces, Baldeo recommends going back and forth with the tool at least two or three times—pushing back, asking for more specificity, or simply telling it you disagree. “You can speak to it as if you were speaking to a human,” she says. If an AI returns a project plan you’re not satisfied with, for instance, you might respond: “I don’t think you’re taking into account X—please be more specific.” That back-and-forth, she says, keeps your own thinking in the loop rather than on the sidelines.
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