How to Suck at AI

The best way to genuinely suck at AI is to bring nothing to the party

To expect your LLM to replace you and your creativity and effort. Yes, AI is a force multiplier. What nobody puts on the poster is that a zero multiplier yields a very fast, very confident zero.

Here are seven ways to bring a zero.

One. Withhold the fact that mattered.

Somebody had the model draft a reply to an angry email. Firm, professional, didn't give an inch. Exactly right ... if you're writing to a vendor who screwed up.

They were writing to their biggest customer.

Nobody told it the name on the other end was the account that makes payroll. It answered the email in front of it.

Two. Let it do someone else's job.

Four days producing a contract when the expectation was six bullets. The model handed back something that read like a contract, so they kept going. Four days feeling productive in a lane that was never theirs, while the deal cooled.

AI will happily let you do a job that isn't yours. It has no idea whose it was.

Three. Use it where you can't tell if it's wrong.

You can only use this safely inside the ring where you'd catch it lying. Step outside that ring and you're not working anymore. You're trusting, and you won't know the difference until it burns.

Four. Ask it whether you're right.

You bring bias to the party. You type your hunch, the model agrees, and now the hunch has a citation. But agreement from something that struggles to disagree carries no information at all. Tell it to take the other side.

Half my prompts are literally "don't be nice," "be brutal," "you cannot offend me." A yes that costs nothing is worth nothing.

Five. Ship it unread.

Spelling isn't hygiene, it's a signature. And the tell isn't a typo. A letter off, Milliport for Milleport, is a slip. Everyone slips.

The tell is "Mill Report." That's not a misspelling of the partner you've worked with for three years, that's an entirely different company.

The reader who knows Milleport — and you have a Milleport — doesn't see a typo. They see someone who is not engaged. The small stuff gives you away precisely because it's small.

Six. Outsource your judgment, postage due.

Don't send five pages when half a page of notes would do. It's plainly rude. The recipient will paste your five pages into the same model that generated it and ask for a summary. Two people, two rounds of inference, and not one sentence owned.

Five pages isn't generosity. It's a decision you declined to make, mailed to someone else.

Seven. Bring nothing.

You saw this coming three items ago. Seven isn't a new way to fail. It's the other six with the label peeled off. Same move every time: you had judgment to apply and you didn't. Into the model, onto the reader, into a lane that wasn't yours.

One failure. Six coats.

The multiplier is the easy part. It'll take whatever you give it and make more of it, faster. That's the danger and the promise in one sentence.

So bring something.