[ExI] Stanford Professor teaches how to get the best use of Generative AI

[BillK]

This 13 min. video was mentioned on Brian Wang's website Next Big Future.
<
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/05/ai-powered-creativity-advice-ask-ai-how-you-should-use-ai.html
>
Quote:
How are you collaborating with AI in this new era? With so many LLM tools
emerging, are you truly leveraging them to enhance your creativity and
productivity? As an expert in creativity and AI, Jeremy shares profound
insights on how AI is transforming our creative potential.
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I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro AI to scan the video and list and explain the
insights it found.
It took Gemini about 90 seconds!
BillK

Gemini 2.5 Pro -

The video, featuring Jeremy Utley, Adjunct Professor of AI & Design
Thinking at Stanford, outlines several key insights on how to become a
better collaborator with AI:

   1.

   *AI as the Ultimate Personal Assistant (The Churchill Metaphor):*
   -

      *Insight:* Modern AI has the potential to be an incredibly powerful
      personal assistant, much like Winston Churchill's, who could dictate
      complex national addresses from his bathtub to an assistant who deeply
      understood his context, voice, and intent.
      -

      *Explanation:* Utley uses the Churchill anecdote to illustrate that
      AI can now provide a similar level of personalized, context-aware
      assistance to anyone. The key is learning how to collaborate with AI in a
      way that allows it to understand your specific needs, style, and
      objectives, making complex tasks more manageable and freeing up mental
      space for deeper thinking (like Churchill in his "bed, bus, or bathtub"
      moments of innovation).
      2.

   *Chapter 1: Don't Ask AI, Let It Ask You:*
   -

      *Insight:* Instead of simply prompting AI with a direct question or
      task, you should engage AI to help you refine your interaction with
      AI itself. Let AI guide you on how to best leverage its capabilities by
      asking you questions.
      -

      *Explanation:* Utley suggests framing your initial interaction as a
      consultation. For example, instead of just asking AI "How should I answer
      this question?", you could say, "I want to ask how I should answer this
      question. What's the best way of framing that question to an AI?" or even
      more elaborately, ask AI to act as an expert and interview you to gather
      context about your work, workflows, and objectives before providing
      tailored recommendations. This turns AI into an active partner
in defining
      the problem and the approach. He cites an example of a non-technical
      National Park ranger who, with basic training, built an AI tool in 45
      minutes to automate paperwork, saving the service thousands of labor days
      annually.
      3.

   *Chapter 2: Do not 'Use' AI, Treat It as a Teammate:*
   -

      *Insight:* To truly unlock AI's potential and avoid the "Realization
      Gap" (where most people don't achieve significant productivity
gains), you
      must shift your mindset from "using" AI as a passive tool to
"working with"
      AI as an active teammate.
      -

      *Explanation:* Research shows that while AI can increase speed and
      output quality, many don't see creative gains and some even see
a decrease.
      Utley attributes this to how people interact with AI.
Underperformers treat
      it like a tool: if it gives a mediocre result, they might
discard it or fix
      it themselves. Outperformers treat AI like a teammate: they
coach it, give
      feedback, and iterate with it to improve results, much like managing a
      human colleague. This includes using AI to role-play difficult
      conversations or to help prepare for them by providing different
      perspectives.
      4.

   *Chapter 3: How to Go Beyond 'Good Enough' Ideas:*
   -

      *Insight:* Creativity is "doing more than the first thing you think
      of." To achieve truly exceptional and creative outcomes with AI, you must
      push beyond AI's initial, often "good enough," suggestions by
prompting for
      volume and variation and by bringing your unique human inspiration and
      perspective.
      -

      *Explanation:* AI makes it very easy to get to a "good enough"
      solution, which can lead to "satisficing" (a term by Herbert Simon).
      However, if the goal is world-class or highly innovative work,
you need to
      actively prompt AI for a wide range of diverse ideas. This
requires effort
      to sort and process, but crucially, it also requires the human
collaborator
      to bring their unique experiences, perspectives, and "disciplined
      inspiration" (a concept from hip-hop artist Lecrae) to the interaction.
      Everyone has access to the same AI models; the differential output comes
      from what you bring to the collaboration.

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