How do you use AI without becoming less creative, more stupid, or deskilled? One strategy is to check whether your prompts are focused on an endpoint that you’re trying to get to, or on building the skills that will get you there — what I call “destination prompts” and “journey prompts”.

In creative work, for example, you might be looking for an idea, or aiming to produce a story or image. In journalism or learning, a ‘destination’ might be key facts, or an article or report.

But prompts that focus only on those destinations are less likely to help us learn, more likely to deskill us — and more likely to add errors to our work.

To avoid those pitfalls, it is better to focus on how we get to those destinations. What, in other words, are the journeys?

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