From Creating to Evaluating

This week was about Generative AI with Lucas Wright. The most useful takeaway was his shift in how we define work: we’re moving from “searching and creating” to “generating and evaluating.”

That’s exactly how I handled my Excel project. I didn’t manually write every line of VBA code, but I had to be the one to judge if the AI’s output actually worked or if it was just “hallucinating.” Lucas showed how he builds custom GPTs for specific tasks, such as a professional email bot, to skip the “clunky” parts of writing while keeping his own voice in the final edit. He also mentioned NotebookLM, which is a tool that only looks at the sources you give it. This solves the trust problem with AI. If I upload my own research or textbooks, the bot can’t just make things up; it has to stay grounded in the data I provided.

The warning at the end of the talk was the most important part: cognitive offloading. If we let bots do all our thinking, we risk losing the skills that make us valuable in the first place and we end to working for the AI rather than the other way around. A metaphor that represents that for me is the reverse centaur. For me, digital literacy isn’t about letting AI take over; it’s about using it to handle the repetitive stuff so I can focus on the actual strategy for my career.