Don't Ask AI to Do More Than You're Willing to Care About

AI can be startlingly productive. With the right prompt, it can generate paragraphs, code, outlines, and summaries in seconds. It's fast, tireless, and always available—which makes it tempting to offload work without much thought. The friction is low. The surface-level results often look polished. But the ease of delegation can hide a deeper cost.

The Burden Doesn't Disappear

When we treat AI as a way to get things off our plate, rather than a tool to help us think better, we risk creating messes for others to clean up. A teammate receives a vague doc and has to decipher the intent. A customer gets a message that sounds subtly off. An editor ends up reshaping not just the phrasing, but the underlying thought. The burden doesn't disappear—it just moves.

There's nothing wrong with using AI to accelerate or augment our work. I use it often. But I've learned a simple rule: if I don't have time to review the output, I don't have time to use the tool. AI can help me move faster, but only if I stay engaged—curating, clarifying, and taking responsibility for what's ultimately mine to deliver.

It's About More Than Accuracy

This isn't just about avoiding errors. Even when AI gets the facts right, it can still miss the mark. What's often missing is care—an understanding of tone, context, nuance, and the human beings on the other side. And when we send that work along anyway, we're not just outsourcing labor. We're outsourcing attention. That erodes trust more quickly than we realize.

Responsible use of AI is less about drawing hard boundaries and more about maintaining integrity. It means using the tool to serve others, not to bypass our role in the work. It means remembering that quality, clarity, and connection still require us to show up.

This kind of attentiveness is deeply connected to curiosity—the same kind I wrote about in Curiosity Matters More Than Ever. Staying curious means staying present. It means asking not just "what can this tool do?" but also "what am I trying to say, build, or make clearer?" AI can help answer questions, but it can't care for the people you're answering them for.

A Principle Worth Keeping

Don't ask AI to do more than you're willing to care about.
That line has become my north star. Not because I'm against AI, but because I want to be for people—for my team, my customers, my collaborators. If I care enough to put something into the world, I want to care enough to stand behind it.