When you should NOT use AI

A few days back, while I was creating some content for an email chain for my audience, I found some valuable advice for myself that I thought would be useful to you, so I am sharing it here.

The irony is, I learnt about "what you should not do with AI" and the content itself was coming from Claude. So, it's AI saying when not to use AI. Interesting.

Although I had already realized these things in my own life after using AI extensively, I thought it would be nice to extrapolate and put it into writing.

Before I give you the list, let me set some context. A business, when it's launched in a market, does one or more of these 3 things:

1. Satisfy a need that's already there in the market, for eg. a car repair company

2. Introduce a problem to its audience and then claim to solve it, for eg., you don't need to visit the grocery store to get your groceries anymore, just use quick commerce.

3. Create hype, but if you think deeply, you don't actually need their product, and the claim they are making is false.

An example of the last point above would be AI companies pushing the extensive use of AI for everything. Sam Altman wants to let AI do the talking with your kids, rather than us.

Another example would be Elon Musk's claims of extending human consciousness to other planets. I mean, seriously? Are you spending billions of dollars to set up homes on Mars? What about the problems of our own planet? Wouldn't it be better to just use the money to solve the problems of our own planet first?

In any case, the point I am trying to make here is
You don't always need the products these companies are pushing you to buy through their marketing campaigns.

Care only if the product actually solves the problem you have. Otherwise, why should you even care if a model escaped its testing sandbox and hacked a site?

Having set the context now, let's answer the question: "When should you not use AI?" because everyone these days seems to be pushing AI usage for almost everything.

The work that is actually your product

If customers are paying you for your unique touch, don't try to automate it with AI. If you are a YouTuber, and people love your explainer videos and the way you talk, please don't use an AI Avatar for your videos. It'll be the fastest way to lose credibility; sooner or later, your audience will figure it out. They want to listen to you, not to a robot that looks like you and tries to mimic the way you talk. For some reason, I have a strong aversion to AI avatar videos.

Judgement calls that need knowledge, context, and experience you have

A few days back, I was planning to start an Ad campaign on Meta, and I tried to do it with Claude using the Meta MCP. I thought the AI would always be right in suggesting what decisions to make for my ad campaign, but unfortunately it wasn't. It remained too optimistic about my Ad creatives and suggested me to continue running the campaign. But my creatives weren't that good, and I should have stopped them earlier. I lost some money.

The point is, if there's a complex decision that needs your ability to judge and reason, don't hand it over to AI. Let's use AI as a tool and not a replacement for our thinking and reasoning.

Anything where a customer is on the other end and something has gone wrong

There's a reason why there are still real people handling support calls at companies like Amazon. They have not automated it with a voice agent. The reason is that when your customer is upset, he/she wants to talk to a real person. Imagine your customer getting super annoyed because your AI Agent failed to resolve their query. Most likely, they'll not buy from you again

I love using AI every day. It lets us do so much more. But we don't always need AI. The above is not an exhaustive list, of course. You can come up with your own list of places where AI hasn't worked out well for you.

I think the bottom line is: use AI like a tool. See if it works for your use case. Don't listen to the hype around AI. And most importantly, don't outsource your thinking to AI.

See you in the next one!

Shahrukh