What AI taught me about conversations
When it comes to technology, I would call myself a dabbler. Or a browser. I’m the one who circles around at a distance, peering a little closer now and then, maybe picking something up, but mostly letting others get close and do the testing. I like to wait until the kinks are worked out and it’s smooth sailing.
So it’s no surprise that Chat GPT and I have a very casual relationship. Oh sure, I’ve put in a few prompts, seen what it spits out and thought, OK, cool, interesting. Then I back away slowly and get back to my books and paper calendar and abacus and feel right at home.
But in those brief forays into the world of AI, one thing was immediately so clear to me: What you get out of it is entirely dependent upon the quality of what you put in.
And I realized how directly this translates to our conversations – and the subsequent quality of those conversations.
From friends and clients alike, I hear stories constantly of hard conversations that devolve into fights or frustrations. They share all the context and backstory with me and I can’t help but think…what if you had shared all that with the other person? Helped them know everything that’s influencing your words and feelings? What would the conversation have been like then?
But so many times we don’t. We don’t share that extra knowledge, that extra information. We hold it to ourselves – maybe because we’re embarrassed, or don’t know how to say it, or don’t think it matters.
And yet in the parallel universe of Chat GPT, I’ve learned that every single little additional input of information or specificity makes the output ten times better.
What would happen if we put the same care, the same intentionality, the same focus into our conversations as we do with our very best Chat GPT prompts?
