📊 “Experts have many advantages. They are better able to see through LLM errors and hallucinations; they are better judges of AI output in their area of interest; they are better able to instruct the AI to do the required job; and they have the opportunity for more trial and error. That lets them unlock the latent expertise within LLMs in ways that others could not.” – Ethan Mollick
Hello Reader,
The next time you don’t like the results from your AI, use this Expert Feedback prompt:
Review this output as an elite-level expert. Make a SWOT analysis, identify areas for improvement, rate them by impact and difficulty, and give me a short bullet list with the best recommendations to improve the next version.
Then you can follow up all this reasoning with:
Now implement this perfectly.
I’ve been reading Co-Intelligence, published in the era of GPT-4, and I just got the sequel, Co-Existence. I’ve been reading Ethan Mollick ever since I started getting serious about AI. He’s genuinely one of the best thinkers in the field, especially in his ability to frame complicated concepts in simple terms for normies to grok.
When I first read Mollick’s quote about experts above, it immediately resonated with me. I do a lot of work with experts, and I’ve always appreciated that quote from Niel Bohr – “An expert is a person who has found out by painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.”
When I was a digital marketer, I was the back-end launch producer for a bunch of high-profile experts. I know the expert community really well – how they think, what they like, and how their businesses run.
This gave me the perspective to capture an early insight about AI, and humanity’s relationship to it. Your advantage with AI lays in the overlap with your area of expertise.
One of my areas of expertise is building websites. I’ve made thousands of web pages over my career. Many of them by hand, with copywriting exercises to discover the best subheadings, and hand-coding CSS to change all the H2s with text-shadow. I know that craft, because I can do it by hand.
This makes me uniquely well suited to making websites with AI agents – I can direct them well, because I can do it by hand.
Anybody can get anything 80% complete with AI. The last 20% to perfection relies on expertise.
Someone who can articulate the difference between good enough and great.
Your strengths and skills are clues to finding your best work with AI.
Have you tried to apply your expertise to AI augmentation?
If you’re in the expert business, I’m teaching an all-day workshop in Melbourne at the end of November called AI for Thought Leaders.
