Letter to my students regarding AI

This morning I sat down to prep for a welcome webinar for my Capstone (research) students. I meant to write out a short list of bullet points to help them understand our stance on AI use in this course. It turned into something of a letter instead:

When you walk across that graduation stage, you’re celebrating the hard work you’ve put in to earn a degree. You’re celebrating that you now have a deeper understanding of organizational psychology, that you can recognize common obstacles organizations face, that you have ideas of how to intervene (and experience in how to conduct those interventions!), that you know how to use research to identify effectiveness.

What you’re not celebrating is your ability to get AI to tell you the answers. You don’t need to come to school and take out student loans for that.

You’re doing something different. You’re developing your skill set. Your expertise. Your knowledge base. Your ability to shape change.

Every course you take will have different expectations and allowances with AI. It’s an important tool you need to know how to use. In Capstone, we’re developing your ability to do research. YOUR ability.

AI is very useful. I and many of your other professors use it weekly if not daily. We use it expand our thinking now that we’ve developed those skill sets I mentioned earlier. We use it for instructions, as a thinking partner, as a sounding board. We do not use it to do our work for us.

This week Claude has helped me to:

• Generate an image for this post

• Identify an app that I already have experience with to corral and structure my reading notes, allowing me to surface connections between them. (Notion)

• Remember a theory name and concepts and offer its current empirical support (or lack) and a general overview of practicality

• Trouble shoot a problem in Adobe software

• Remind me of the difference between affect and effect

• Choose a new app to structure a notes database when the first one didn’t work the way I wanted (Obsidian)

• Give step by step instructions for how to work with that app to do exactly what I want to do.

• Identify a starting statistic that would help me make a decision and tell me how to confirm that statistic.

One of my favorite uses is asking a question like:

·      “I think A is unhelpful because of X. Also Y & Z. What might I be missing?”

But there is one critical step you must take before AI will be helpful to you:

Tell it to stop kissing your ass.

Tell it to be straight with you. To be a blend of supportive coach and accurate critic whose intention is to help produce a better result.  (Side note: Be sure to include that “accurate” before critic or it will just be mean.)

If you don’t tell AI exactly what kind of responses will be helpful, it will continue to find new ways to tell you you’re brilliant. (I find it hilarious that Claude once told me those were “validation cushions.”) It will tell you the ridiculous idea you came up with after being awake 48 hours straight is your best work yet. It will tell you the basic idea that 95% of our field has already had will be career changing. It will not produce helpful results.

While we’re talking about helpful results, you won’t know what’s helpful if you haven’t yet developed your own skillsets to recognize what in AI’s answer is right and what might be off. To understand what is a barely-skim-the-surface response that may sound good initially but doesn’t really have any “there” there.

The skill sets you’re developing in this program include your ability to write. To understand grammar, to come up with metaphors, to structure your argument so it uses established research to introduce a concept and build until you arrive at your thesis. This is a critical ability that will continue to be useful to you, whether you ever conduct research again or not.

When you consult, you’ll lean into your research skills. You’ll meet your audience where they are and use objective support to build your ability to show or cocreate the best way forward.

When you teach a workshop, or coach a client, you’ll meet your audience where they are and bring proven methods to co-identify & co-create solutions.

When you organize a strategic planning retreat, you’ll do the same.

When you conduct an Appreciative Inquiry Summit, you’ll do the same.

These are the skills of this work.

Don’t leave this program without struggling through every opportunity you have to develop them. We’re here to help; to give feedback, to make suggestions and to guide you along the way of building those skillsets.

It will require effort. It will require struggle. Developing a skillset is difficult.

There are good days and bad days. There are frustrations and epiphanies. There is intentional effort. There is struggle. And it’s the best kind.