AI Proves You Don't Know What You Want
Most people aren’t getting the most out of AI because they don’t know what they want. At best they can describe some vague half baked requirement, but when the AI is done working on their half-prompt, it doesn’t produce what they expected and leaves them disappointed.
This isn’t a problem with AI. It’s a problem with people.
I’ve been working in engineering delivery for years now. And the pattern I just described isn’t new. It’s business as usual. Just replace “AI” with “Engineering team” and the problem is identical.
The root cause of the problem is a lack of self awareness. Everyone’s ideas (mine included) are mostly vapourware most of the time. They are snapshots and glimpses of a larger whole. In our own heads they seem complete, but this is an illusion. Whole ideas, ones that can be executed successfully, are complex constructions which are simply too large for us to comprehend all at once.
This is obvious when you take a moment.
A new website design might need a “Bold, mobile first experience”. But what does that actually mean? There are thousands of words of detailed specification under that sentence that do not exist until they are created. Images and designs too. Transitions. Animations. Data.
All of that is implied in that sentence. None of it is included.
The solution is a dose of humility. Expect that your thoughts are under-developed. Don’t expect the AI to understand you on the first pass. Only trust it to deliver for you when you’re sure it understands what you want, and recognise that you’re responsible when it goes off on a tangent. It’s more than likely that the most disappointing parts of its creation are the things you didn’t specify in the first place.
Most of the time I’ve been disappointed with an AI’s output, it’s been because I was too ambitious and lazy. I tried to move too fast and asked it to do too much. It had to fill in too many gaps on its own and I hadn’t taken the time myself to form my own opinions and apply my own taste to what it produced.