Most of the questions people ask about AI are asked at the scale of the zeitgeist. Will it replace what I do? What is the future of my field? Which tools should I be using? They are reasonable questions, and they rarely lead anywhere, because the answers arrive in the same general register as the questions. Someone else’s forecast about marketing, design, or education tells you very little about your Tuesday.
AI Literacy, the way I teach it, lives on the line between the zeitgeist and self-authorship. The work is learning how you work, so that new tools have somewhere to land. You can’t integrate a tool into work you haven’t described.
Sort your work into general and specific
The first question is usually some version of whether AI will replace what you do. A more useful one is which parts of what you do are general, and which parts are yours.
List a week of tasks. Mark each one general if it is repeatable and could be handed to someone with a template. Mark it specific if it depends on your judgment, your relationships, or your taste. Most people are surprised by how long the general column gets, and relieved by it.
The general column is a shopping list of things to be built: automations, templates, and small digital products you make for yourself. The specific column is harder.
Describe your human skills with more specificity
Instead of asking about the future of your general field, I would rather ask about your personal, specific future of work.
Look at how people describe their human skills. Empathy, creativity, communication, strategic thinking. These words are the easiest thing for a model to reproduce, because they are general and reductive. A skill described generally has been automated in language, whether or not anyone has built the tool.
Early in a career, you get paid for discrete (general) utility. As you become more senior, you are asked to be economically articulate, specific in your ideas, and explain the meaning behind your decisions, enough that someone will pay for it.
Write prompts for yourself first
Some people are in a race for the shiniest tools, using the best prompts. But a prompt can’t be useful if it comes from a general place. The most useful prompts are grounded in the specificity of your thinking in order to produce a thing worth paying for, in attention and money.
As an exercise, pick a prompt from Creative Surplus, have your favorite LLM write an essay from your answer, and reflect on the process. Or send it over and comment below.
Map how you already work
Finally, which tools should you be using? That depends on how you already take in information, make decisions, and dispatch action.
I have never seen anyone disorganized become more organized by AI.
All systems are designed to do what they are already doing, and you, we all are, systems of information. As a system of attention, of moments of deep work, you hope to pay those moments to the right things, and that those moments will yield enough value. It is okay to want to be industrious and efficient, as long as you don’t relinquish your specific aesthetic.
Remember that value, hard economic value, that moves and invites people, is the combination of utility, the general kind that everyone provides and needs, and aesthetics, the specific form that utility is delivered in.
If you’re curious about this line of thinking, get in touch ot learn more about AI literacy, or follow along on Luma.