Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

by Ethan Mollick

For example, the entire email database of Enron, shut down for corporate fraud, is used as part of the training material for many AIs, simply because it was made freely available to AI researchers.

tremendous amount of amateur romance novels included in training data, as the internet is full of amateur novelists.

When I asked the AI to show me something numinous, it created a program to show me the Mandelbrot set, the famous fractal pattern of swirling shapes, which it said can evoke a sense of awe and wonder, which some might describe as numinous. When

LLM, connected to lab equipment and allowed access to chemicals, could start to generate and run its own chemical synthesis experiments. This has the exciting possibility of significantly increasing scientific progress. But it also introduces new risks in many different ways.

You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you—or threaten you and your job.