To A.I. or not to A.I.

“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”

– Booker T. Washington

That is the question.

I’ve been training and learning with a number of AI programs for the past number of years and utilizing them (or not) along the way. There is a lot to say about it. Here’s what I’ve learned so far… When ChatGPT came out, I signed up for their Playground model, it was an early access iteration of the Large Language Model so people could see what it could do. There was no direction, just a prompt box to start writing, and it would respond. The one thing OpenAI did say was that you, as the user, were free to take whatever came out and not have to reference ChatGPT. Just use it as your work. I thought that was interesting.  

While I dilly-dallied in the program, it didn’t amount to anything productive. Later, when better models came out, we played in the office with it by asking it to write stories about some of us, including a Vocational story of how one of the ladies found her spouse. It was funny, we laughed. But it wrote fast.. and better than I.

So I thought I’d try an experiment. Could Chat make my short stories better? So I took one of mine off the blog (this good one), and I simply asked it to make it better. Well, it did. Much better.

Then I asked it to write it in the style of J.R.R Tolkien and then James Fenimore Cooper. It did. Wow. My story looked reallly good. But something was missing there. Me.

It took something that I did and made it better. A lot better. And I could pull it off that it was me. But it wasn’t. And I felt that.

So did away with the edits and kept the original.

As a writer, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t outsource my originals. I would later embrace and even embellish mistakes. Because everything is looking and feeling less human in content these days.

That being said, AI is definitely a powerful tool for the leader if used right. It can be such an important tool in your workbench. I’m going to share how I utilize AI to magnify the productivity of my company-of-one in the next Climb.

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Adam Jarosz is the founder of Righteous Co. and author of “Iron Ore: Journal of a Man” – a company built on faith, formation, and adventure. With over twenty years of experience in ministry and business, Adam leads retreats, coaches men to be the leaders they were called to be, and writes from the trenches of entrepreneurship.

He’s a husband, father of four, and believer in Christ and His Church, the power of grit and grace, and good bourbon. Follow along for insights that challenge, encourage, and call you higher with his newsletter, sign up to get it right in your email box here: The Climb.