Before You Ask AI, Tell It About Yourself First

At the most stressful point in his life, a young man in Japan asked an AI: should I quit my job? The AI gave an encouraging answer, he quit, and his new job paid forty percent less. Later he figured out what went wrong. What he'd handed the AI was an "ordinary person's dilemma," with nothing about his age, his skills, or the cards he was actually holding. So the AI could only work from the most generic assumptions and give him the most generic answer. That answer might be reasonable for a 25-year-old engineer, but for someone who's 52, with limited savings and skills that aren't in high demand, it's a completely different story. This is one of the most common pitfalls in using AI, and also one of the easiest to fix: we're used to throwing the question at the AI, but we rarely lay out who we are first. Without that context, it starts filling in the blanks from the most generic assumptions. Those assumptions usually aren't wrong, they're just not yours. So next time you want AI's advice, spend a sentence or two on your situation: how old you are, what you care about, what you've got to work with, what you can't accept. The same question, with a place to stand versus without one, gives very different answers. A lot of the time, it's not that AI isn't smart enough. It just doesn't know you yet.