In the past couple of weeks, I have come across two distinct stories that both point us towards something interesting. First lets go through the stories.

Story 1: Collecting Tax

The Taiwanese government was struggling to collect taxes from small businesses, whose primary transactions were done with cash and were for small amounts.

The customers had no incentive to ask for a tax invoice. The small business had no incentive to declare the sale, so they can avoid paying taxes. This made it difficult for the government to bring these transactions into the ambit of the formal economy allowing them to collect the relevant taxes on the transactions.

The team trying to solve this problem came up with a novel solution. They looked at the problem and thought about the best lever they had to make an impact and settled on finding a way to get the customers to ask for a tax invoice everytime they transacted. The solution they came up with was novel and creative.

They instituted a government funded lottery. The invoice number that the customers got for any of their purchases became the lottery number. They started announcing the winners of the lottery on live TV.

This meant that getting these tax invoices created a genuine opportunity for these consumers to win the lottery. Winning this lottery had the potential to transform their lives. The taxes that these invoices generated covered the winnings that were given away and some more.

Then the Indian Railway, inspired by this solution, ran a similar campaign to reduce ticket-less travel on their trains, giving a random traveller a significant prize, every day.

Second Story: The Ghost Army of World War II

There is a lot that has been written about the Ghost Army, officially the U.S. Army’s 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. It was a real World War II deception unit.

They were trying to solve a differnet kind of problem – how do you infiltrate and spread misinformation without raising doubts among the intelligence community of the Germans.

They ended up going with a fairly simple and straightforward idea, they ended up using inflatable tanks, fake radio traffic, loudspeakers and other visual tricks to make German forces believe that much larger Allied formations were present, when there was none.

The idea was easy to execute, costed less than any other idea would have and helped the Germans see what they wanted to see, rather than the reality. So, they succeeded in solving the problem that they set out to do.

What’s common:

The thing that is common in both these stories and many more instances when genuine out of the box thinking has enabled us to come up with some very creative solutions to very complex problems. I had this habit of looking at complex problems and try to come up with simple, creative and out of the box solutions. Just for fun and keep the creative juices flowing. Some of the ideas even made it to this blog.

Since the start of last year, I started to explore the limits of the AI model and quickly realized that the abilities of  these models were getting better at a pace that was both surprising and excited with the possibilities that this created.

So, I started experimenting with the models more.  At first using the models for research, then to do quick brainstorm and then to start creating outlines, then to start reviewing my ideas, then to come up with ideas. It was getting more convenient to use the models for every stage of the creative process.

I have been thinking and writing about the impact the AI models are having on us, our leaders and the businesses.

During the reflections, I realized that I had started to depend on the models a bit too much, going to them too early in my thinking process, relying on their judgement on the quality of my arguments and asking them about missing perspectives. All to make my writing appear to be more detailed and covering as many perspectives as possible. Asking it to judge if my writing would be of the same quality as the pieces published on HBR or MIT Sloan.

While all that convenience of having a thinking partner 24×7 has helped me publish some interesting work, I have come to realize that it has become more difficult for me to get my creative juices flowing as easily as I could before I started using the AI models. I have written about the cost of convenience and how it makes us and in this case, our thinking, lazier.

What comes next

I have been thinking about the next steps. About what comes next. Do I stay on the path and benefit from the convenience of having a thinking partner, available on my phone, whenever I need it or find an alternate way to engage these models.

And the decision that I’ve made is to walk a middle path. To create a workflow that helps me retain my ability to think creatively, solving problems the old way and use the tool for very specific, narrow use, like to do deep research on a topic or to use it to learn something new or at times, use it for brainstorm. Always after I have done my individual work first. This way, I don’t lose my ability to be creative on-demand and at the same time can amplify the creativity with the tools at hand if needed or use it to do something that I am terrible at – creating slides.

You have a decision to make as well.

I would like to invite you to reflect on your usage of the AI models, what you use it for, how you use it and how the usage has evolved over time.

Then reflect on how it has impacted you and your skills. Are you happy with the results? Do you feel the need to make adjustments to how you work with them? What needs to change? How do you plan to make the change?

As with everything else in life, we need to be intentional about what we use the powerful AI models for and how we engage with them to ensure that they don’t move us closer to average.

As James Victore said, what makes us weird is what gives us our unique super-power. Let’s not lose it over convenience.