alt Hacker NewsHeh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is:
Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)
Replies
I'd love the link to all those Principles
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. One of the best frameworks I have encountered, and one I point people to whenever I can, is the AI Fluency framework by Anthropic, Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), and Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College):
https://www.anthropic.com/learn/claude-for-you
This framework provides a more abstract way of thinking when working with AI systems. Especially valuable to me is the pattern of the 4 D's: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, which I have now internalized whenever I use AI systems. It helps me understand my own and others' (mis)use of AI systems a bit better.
Nice. This is exactly how I mostly use AI. Doesn't matter if it's code or an e-mail. I have the AI do the tedious work of ... well, uh, "working", and then ideally learn from it and then transform it into my own work, as I would have done it without AI, but just being much faster now. It also establishes a natural threshold of time/work ratio for me that keeps me from using AI for every little thing. Also it feels like I am learning something new with every prompt/response.
Good luck with that, I hope you are in a better org that I am in that regard. I wanted to do that, proposed it in a directors' meeting and got push back from directors already using the Slack MCP to post normal conversations on their behalf (90% of time, pure slop).
What you wrote just seems common sense to me, and I'm hopeful it will emerge as such given enough time.
The problem with AI is deeper than this, though. The anchoring effect[1] is stronger than most people realize. It's hubris to think that you can read AI output and then come up with your own ideas. The human brain simply doesn't work that way. We anchor to the first idea we come across, and it immediately becomes difficult to change our minds.
The effect of this over time is cumulative. Cervantes said (in translation), "Show me who you spend time with, and I'll show you who you are." I realized as a teenager that the books I was reading and people I was listening to were shaping my ideologies in ways that were outside my control. It's prohibitively difficult to pause when presented with every idea and analyze it to see whether it makes sense. If you're cautious you'll catch some ideas and analyze them, but a lot of the time, you won't even consciously recognize that you've been presented with a new idea, and you'll simply integrate it unconsciously. Time passes and it becomes difficult to remember where our ideas came from or why we thought they were true.
This was a problem before AI: if you surrounded yourself with people who thought poorly, you thought poorly. Now with AI, millions of people have let a "thinker" into their lives which has massive information and no wisdom.
Frankly, when I find out someone uses AI in any way, I lose respect for them. The best case scenario is they use it similarly to the post I'm responding to, filtering the ideas they get from AI through their own intelligence. But that doesn't really work==original thought it harder than that. And that's the best case scenario--most AI users don't have anywhere near the discipline for that, and just regurgitate what AI tells them.
Rewording it doesn't help--it's still not your idea, from your experience and logic. And once you use AI at all, it's very hard not to be just rewording.
Why write all that when just: we do not use AI in client or intercompany communications?
Like is your insight that copying and pasting something is not understanding it? Do people seriously not known this?
There is no need to Socrates when writing policy docs. Maybe this is why people ignore reading your actual voice messages that you feel a need to also justify this basic request. Sometimes the human voice thinks too highly of itself also.
> You’re being paid for your expertise and insights.
For purposes of training the AI (enablement firm)?
It's sad that there is a chance people put your guide into AI and ask it to "summarize"
Am I the only one suspicious of your comment?
> Write as yourself.
Unless it's your first day on HN (it's not 2008 account), most people use paragraphs and sentences longer than 2-5 words. Something like "You, directly." in the middle of all that has a certain vibe to it.
> Copying and pasting Claude responses... directly shifts the burden of comprehension
Most definitely.
The problem is we live in a world where people try to pass off copy pastes as their own all the time, many even smart enough to remove the em-dashes now. So I don't think that's going away soon. Your first sentence seems human, the rest doesn't match the tone at all.
Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.