(from a Software Engineer)
TL;DR
I believe your use of Generative AI should look something like this:
Output: Do not use it to create but rather to enrich what you can create.

Input: Use it to develop your own sources of information rather than using it as a source.

Tools like ChatGPT are incredible and can significantly improve your life if you use them right. But using ChatGPT to replace your output will often cost you in the long term by making you less effective and easy to replace.
How can you use it most effectively? First, you’ll have to know how these tools work so that you can understand where they fall short.
This is the basic principle of how they work:
The model has been fed vast amounts of text from a variety of sources. From the text it is fed, it is trained to predict the next word in a sentence. Basically, the predictive text on your phone keyboard but on steroids. There’s a little more going on, but that is the basic principle. The reason it can answer your questions is in part due to the fact that it has been fed a lot of text containing questions and answers.
What does that mean?
It means that it doesn’t actually “know” anything. If you ask it a question, it will give you the text that is most likely to follow the words in that question. This means it can make stuff up and doesn’t know where it’s getting this information or why it’s true. It’s not too dissimilar to the way humans think. Most of us start off with deep-seated beliefs that are trained into us and we don’t know why we believe them.
It also means that if you use it to write anything, you end up with something that sounds incredibly generic. I’ve tried using it for email marketing content and copywriting. Everything it produced, even when specifically trained for the task, was generic and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable using it.
So how can it best help you?
- Refining sources
While I wouldn’t rely on it to give you a reliable answer to a factual question, it’s good at directing you to sources of information based on your specific question.
For example: “What role does the sun play in our metabolism? Give me the best books that explore this topic”. And it would then direct you to sources of information that are far more reliable.
Or you could say: “I really like [ book title ] and I want to know more about [ topic ], what books can you recommend?” I’ve used that one loads.
- Structuring outputs.
Anything creative often needs to be expressed within a structure. Writing follows a certain structure
Software development always begins by setting up a project environment before you can actually start coding. This is tedious and is not where you can have the most impact so by letting AI handle it, you can spend more time on the creative aspect.
You can use it to structure an essay (or a blog post). “I’m going to write about this, what structure would you recommend?”
It can help you design software systems by laying out the various components and give you a starting point for your code which you can then refine. This makes building anything much easier if you know what you’re doing.
- Create plans
If you’re trying to do something you’ve never done, a good place to start is asking ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini how it can be achieved. You’ll get a summarised list of possible solutions to a problem you’re facing, you could get it to plan an email marketing campaign for instance, create an outline for an essay you’re writing, or recommend the best tech stack for a software engineering project. Make your questions open-ended so that instead of providing you with a single solution, provide your possible solutions and explain their merits and drawbacks. Start your search as wide as possible, then use your best judgement to narrow it down.
- Speed up learning
You can ask it to explain any concept to you in a simple way and if you can’t understand it just ask it to simplify it again and again until you can. You would be surprised at how well it explains complex topics. It can also come up with a curriculum for you to learn any concept or skill, along with a resource list.
These are all ways you can use AI to make yourself more effective and less replaceable. The point is you still have to do the work, but it can help you figure out what work you should do.