Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

by Ethan Mollick

I am only human, and in writing this book, I often found myself stuck. In previous books, that could mean a single sentence or paragraph would block hours of writing, as I used my frustration as an excuse to take a break and walk away until inspiration struck. With AI, that was no longer a problem. I would become a Cyborg and tell the AI: I am stuck on a paragraph in a section of a book about how AI can help get you unstuck. Can you help me rewrite the paragraph and finish it by giving me 10 options for the entire paragraph in various professional styles? Make the styles and approaches different from each other, making them extremely well written. In an instant, I had the paragraph written in a persuasive style, an informative style, a narrative style, and more. While I rarely used any of the text the AI produced, it gave me options and pathways forward. Similarly, when I felt a paragraph was clunky and bad, I would ask the AI: Make this better, in the style of a bestselling popular book about AI, or add more vivid examples. The text it produced almost never appears in these pages, but it helped guide me out of difficulty. And, interestingly, it was some of these paragraphs that my editor seemed to like best.