Generative AI applications like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are incredibly useful tools that can help us with many everyday tasks. Many of us have already discovered that when used effectively, they can make us more efficient, productive and creative.

However, what is also becoming increasingly apparent is that there are both right and wrong ways to use them. If we’re not careful, it’s easy to develop bad habits that could quickly turn into problems.

So here’s a short list of five pitfalls that can be easily overlooked. Being aware of these dangers should make them fairly easy to avoid and ensure that we always use these powerful new tools in a way that helps us, rather than sets us up for embarrassment or failure.

You believe everything he tells you

Unfortunately, it only takes a short time to play around with ChatGPT to realize that far from being an all-knowing robot master, it can be prone to being a little shady at times. It tends to to hallucinate – a term borrowed from human psychology to make his mistakes more relatable to us. It really just means that he makes things up, gets things wrong, and sometimes does so with an air of confidence that can seem comical.

Of course, it is constantly updated and we can expect it to be even better. But as of now, he has a particular penchant for inventing non-existent quotes or citing research and papers that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

The key lesson is to fact-check and double-check everything it tells you. The internet (and the world) is already full of enough misinformation, and we certainly don’t need to add to it. Especially if you’re using it to create business content, it’s important to have strict editing and review processes for everything you post. Of course, this is also important for human-generated content. But overconfidence in AI capabilities can easily lead to mistakes that can make you look silly and can even damage your reputation.

Using it to replace original thinking

It’s important to remember that, in some ways, AI—especially language-based generative AI like ChatGPT—is similar to a search engine. Specifically, it relies entirely on the data it can access, which in this case is the data it was trained on. One consequence of this is that they will only regurgitate or reformulate existing ideas; it won’t create anything truly innovative or original like the human can.

If you’re creating content for an audience, then it’s likely that they’ll come to you to learn about your unique experiences, or to benefit from your expertise in your field, or because there’s something about your personality or the way you communicate that appeals to them. You cannot replace this with AI-generated general knowledge. Emotions, feelings, random thoughts and lived experiences feed into our ideas, and artificial intelligence does not replicate any of that. AI can certainly be a very useful tool for research and to help us organize our thoughts and work processes, but it will not generate the “spark” that allows successful businesses (and people) to excel and excel at what they do.

I forget about privacy

When we work with cloud-based AI engines like ChatGPT or Dall-E 2, we don’t expect any privacy. OpenAI – the creator of these specific tools – is open about this in its terms of use (you’ve read them, right?). It is also worth noting that its privacy policy has is invited “flimsy.”

All of our interactions, including the data we input and the output it generates, are considered fair game for our own input, storage, and learning systems. For example, Microsoft he admitted to monitor and read conversations between Bing and its users. This means that we must be careful when entering personal and sensitive information. This can also be applied to content such as business strategies, customer communications or internal company documents. There’s simply no guarantee that they won’t be exposed in some way. An early public version of Microsoft’s Bing powered by ChatGPT was briefly shut down when it was discovered that it occasionally shared details of private conversations with other users.

Many companies (and at least one country – Italy) banned the use of ChatGPT due to privacy concerns. If you are using it in a professional capacity, it is important that you have safeguards in place, as well as keeping up to date with the legal obligations arising from handling such data. There are solutions for running local instances of applications, enabling data processing without leaving your jurisdiction. They could soon become crucial for businesses in fields such as healthcare or finance, where handling private data is routine.

You are relying too much

Developing an over-reliance on AI could easily become a problem for a number of reasons. For example, there are numerous situations in which services may become unavailable, such as when users or service providers are affected by technical problems. Tools and applications may also be taken offline for security or administrative reasons, such as applying updates. Or they could be targeted by hackers with denial-of-service attacks, leaving them offline.

Equally important, over-reliance on artificial intelligence can prevent us from developing and perfecting certain skills of our own that AI tools fulfill. This may include research, writing and communication, summarizing, translating content for different audiences or structuring information. These are skills that are important for professional growth and development, and neglecting to practice them could leave us at a disadvantage when we need them at a time when AI assistance is unavailable.

The human touch is lost

U recent episode in South Park, kids use ChatGPT to automate the “boring” aspects of their lives – like interacting with their loved ones (as well as cheating on schoolwork). Obviously, this is played for laughs, but like any good comedy, it’s also a commentary on life. Generative AI tools make it easy to automate email, social messaging, content creation, and many other aspects of business and communication. At the same time, it can make it difficult to convey nuances and be an obstacle to empathy and building relationships.

It’s important to remember that the idea is to use artificial intelligence to augment our humanity—by freeing up time spent on mundane and repetitive tasks so we can concentrate on what makes us human. It means interpersonal relationships, creativity, innovative thinking and fun. If we start trying to automate these parts of our lives, we will be building a future for ourselves that is just as harmful as the worst AI doomsday prophesies.

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