I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy1. On this occasion, I discovered a new use for ChatGPT and LLMs. ChatGPT and I chatted about the themes, especially the correlations and connections between the three short novels that comprise the volume. It was an alienating and revealing experience. For the first time, I am reasoning about a book with a machine, not a person. Because it knows everything about the text and draws on the shared global knowledge, it can give more satisfaction than most people do (also, it’s not easy to find someone around with whom I can talk about all the books I read!) Yes, it is wordy and repetitive, but it can stimulate and enrich my analysis2.
I’ve been using LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude) more and more lately, especially for work. The more I use them, the more I understand how to leverage their capabilities. I would have never thought about sharing my reading experiences with ChatGPT before. Ethan Mollick has it right; we should all put at least 10 hours into LLMs before judging them.
Your goal is simple: spend 10 hours using AI on tasks that actually matter to you. After that, you’ll have a natural sense of how AI fits into your work and life. You’ll develop an intuition for effective prompting, and you’ll better understand AI’s potential. Don’t aim for perfection - just start somewhere and learn as you go.