Artificial Intelligence: 5 Do’s and Don’ts
It shouldn’t take this recent study from Stanford and M.I.T researchers to know that AI tools enhance productivity. By now you’ve probably all taken Chat GPT or Midjourney out for a whirl and started to incorporate AI tools into your workflow. It’s pretty safe to say that, if you use AI right, you can transform your efficiency. But, it’s important to do this with the right end goal in mind.
As AI continues to develop, Spirit-Led founders and secular thinkers alike are asking big questions about the morality and societal impact of these tools on our culture.
While we’ll leave the in-depth philosophical discussions to the experts, we want to take a moment to give you some practical pointers for how to best leverage AI while keeping the human end in mind.
In his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, Pope Francis wrote:
“We were created with a vocation to work. The goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replace human work, for this would be detrimental to humanity. Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfillment.”
Robotic, routine and mechanical tasks can be sanctifying, but they also often take up time that can be used to express our true creative potential as co-creators made in God’s image. In these cases, automating and otherwise leveraging technology to unlock our creativity can work for the common good.
So we suggest not asking “How do I replace positions on my team with AI?” but rather, “How can I leverage technology to give my team more time for creative thinking, learning, innovating, and collaborating?”
Do’s and Don’ts of AI for Humanizing Your Work
Here are 5 Do’s and Don’ts of AI to ensure that these tools are helping, not hurting, your efforts to be salt and light.
Don’t underestimate the power of quality over quantity when it comes to content. If you’re using artificial intelligence to produce relevant content for your brand, remember that there are other things to consider than just quantity. All content should meet the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) standard of Google. AI-generated content is unlikely to meet this without human guidance.
Do use it to stay informed (with less effort). AI tools like the 1-Click Summarizer Chrome extension and similar tools can help you get the key takeaways from various news articles and industry updates. You can get article summaries that save you from going down useless rabbit holes.
Don’t use it as a way to save time if you’re not investing that time in better ways. Here’s a hot take: if you’re not using the time you save summarizing news articles with AI to read more thought-provoking pieces…you’re being efficient but not intentional. Did you save time on that proposal you’re writing? Then take some of that time you saved to more clearly outline the value you’re offering. Did you save time on last week's post? Spend more time developing original ideas. You get the idea.
Do use AI for supporting or enhancing organizational processes or workflows. Technology that saves humans from manually moving data from one place to another can be humanizing. Sometimes we just get too overwhelmed with tech to leverage it for what it's best at. At SENT, we love Zapier and have used it to automate repetitive work processes and streamline our workflows so that we can invest our time in serving YOU, our members and audience.
Do keep a watchful eye. Maybe every email doesn’t need to be personally crafted, but as AI continues to develop, the trend is that it will increasingly creep into interpersonal situations. Keeping work human is the core of Catholic Social teaching. Don’t be afraid to put limits on how tech is used in your venture. Bottom line? Pray about it.
Ultimately, these decisions come down to the basic principle that the mere fact that an activity is possible doesn’t make it right, especially not in every circumstance.
As Spirit-led founders, business executives, and entrepreneurs, we know that being rooted in prayer gives us a certain tenacity to lean into the good decisions we make, no matter the consequences.
Sometimes that means holding back, and other times it means taking confident steps forward, even when we can’t see far ahead. But it always means approaching each decision with the wisdom of principles grounded in the dignity of the human person and the dignity of work.
