The Cogito Brief

Good morning,

The closer AI gets to your real life, the more important trust becomes.

AI is becoming a lot more personal. It’s no longer just helping you write emails, brainstorm ideas, or answer quick questions. Now it’s moving into money, decision-making, and entertainment, which makes the technology more useful, but also a lot harder to blindly trust.

Before we get into this week’s news and analysis, let’s quickly review last week’s poll. It looked like many of you haven’t created a PowerPoint in a while. And that’s okay. Not everyone will need that skill, but it’s something that I will break down in a video series later this summer.

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Recently, OpenAI unveiled a new finance feature inside ChatGPT. It’s a tool that allows users to connect financial accounts, transactions, and spending data to ChatGPT for help managing their finances.

A big thing that I’ve preached here is to always be wary about sharing personal information with ChatGPT, and this raises a ton of red flags. The thing that makes me feel slightly better is that OpenAI is working with Plaid, which is a popular financial technology company used by many apps to help securely connect financial accounts.

Even with this feature, I still don’t fully trust putting this sort of information into an LLM. It doesn’t pass my sniff test.

Just because I don’t feel comfortable with this tool, that doesn’t mean everyone has to feel the same way. It could help you spot unnecessary expenses, review spending habits, and get a better idea of where their money is going.

What are your thoughts? Would you try out this new feature? Respond back to this email and let me know!

Personally, I’m not rushing to connect my financial accounts, but of course, whenever it comes to financial decisions, I 100% recommend doing your own research and consulting a professional. Still, the idea of this is really cool, and I had to share it with you all.

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Here I am, writing a newsletter about AI, while also saying that relying too much on ChatGPT and AI may impact the way you think. I read through a paper by Michael Gerlich titled “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.”

Here’s the link if you’re interested in checking it out. If you think I read this entire article cover to cover, you’re wrong. Have a friend subscribe to my email using the “Share The Cogito Brief” widget below for access to the Bonus VIP Email, where I break down how to handle large articles and documents with AI.

The gist of the article is that the more you rely on AI for everyday situations, the more likely you may be to offload your thinking instead of working through problems themselves. That’s not to say ChatGPT or AI in general is bad, but you don’t want to over-rely on this technology for your decision-making skills.

The biggest piece of information I gathered from this was that 17- to 25-year-olds had some of the highest AI usage and scored lower on critical-thinking measures in the study. This directly ties back to my email on May 8th. If you missed that one, here’s the link to bring you back.

You should always continue to:

ChatGPT is great to use for various reasons, but I always recommend against asking it to make decisions for you or take over your day-to-day responsibilities. And this raises a great question: are you using AI to become sharper, or are you using it to avoid thinking?

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Have you ever heard of “The Office” and “South Park”? They’re two popular comedy shows, and now individuals are creating AI-generated content that can mimic the feel of shows like these.

I watched an AI-generated example for each, and sure, I can still notice some quirks here and there, but to the naked eye, this AI-generated content looks extremely well done.

My guess is that within five years, you’re going to be able to prompt your own episodes of your favorite TV shows, whether they are still on air or were canceled years ago. It’s going to raise a lot of questions about creativity, copyright, and what entertainment will look like in the future, but we will cross that bridge when we get there.

This may be one of the first places regular people actually feel how powerful generative AI has become.

The main theme of today’s email is trust.

Personally, I think AI is amazing, but I also think we need to be careful about how much responsibility we hand over to it. Use it to help you, but don’t let it replace your judgment.

We will discuss Michael Gerlich’s paper in greater detail in tomorrow’s email.

Zack Wright