the most critical AI skill nobody is talking about

You want to learn the skills required to survive and thrive in an AI-enabled world.

We have a lot of readers. (26,275!) Everyone is here for a slightly different reason, but we’re all making sense of what AI means for us. We’re all asking “what do I really need to know?”

This is my 190th article. If you’re new here, there’s a lot to catch up on.

But you probably don’t have the time to read 190 articles. So, what do you really need to know if you’re trying to survive and thrive with AI?

I’d start with these three paid subscriber posts, my basic AI skills survival stack:

AI SIMPLIFIED

hey ChatGPT, how do I become an AI genius?

hey ChatGPT, what human skills will be most valuable in a world where AI does everything?

They cover meta-prompting, structure, iteration, context engineering, judgment, validation, and all those key skills required to get the most from AI. And you get access to Spark, a personalized GPT coach.

But there’s something missing. Something really big, that nobody seems to be writing about.

Here’s the thing:

• AI is already better than us at purely rational thinking. That gap is only going to grow wider.

• But our society does not function based on purely rational thinking. Not even close.

• AI does not understand the internal world of human beings. It doesn’t get what we feel, or how our feelings influence our behavior. It’s actually terrible at this.

• And that means: when working with AI, it’s your responsibility to provide the human emotional nuance. If you don’t, the output will be heartless, lacking human texture, ineffective in the real world.

How do you do that?

Let’s call it emotional articulation

To be successful with AI, you need to bleed, just a little, into the machine. You need to describe how you (and other people) feel.

In today’s paid subscriber post, we’ll cover:

• What emotional articulation means, and why it’s so important

• Two prompting case studies (personal and professional) focused on describing human emotional states to AI in order to get better output.

• A plug-and-play prompt framework you can use to improve your own emotional articulation with AI, driving deeper output optimized to be effective in the messy and emotional human world.

• A brief argument that consuming literary fiction is critical to AI skill development, and my own recommended reading list.

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AI IS BRILLIANT. AI IS HEARTLESS.