Alexandra Samuel

I can be impulsive and judgmental at times. But ChatGPT has shown me there’s a better way.

Having a record of every conversation isn’t just a convenience. It can change the way you work and think.

A conversation with tech journalist Alexandra Samuel on how to make AI work for you.

One of the big advantages: I can talk freely about my dreams and concerns much easier than if I were dealing with a human

If you can describe a project in plain language, you have what it takes to customize a valuable AI assistant.

The promise of higher productivity makes using ChatGPT and other gen AI tools to help with daily business writing tempting. But there are risks: loss of your unique voice, inadvertent errors, and ethical pitfalls, all of which can negatively impact your credibility and relationships. Using AI to help you rather than replace you as you write can help you avoid these downsides and take advantage of the technology. Instead of having it write for you, use it to summarize and organize your ideas; draft small, tricky passages (but not the whole thing you’re writing!); and give you feedback.

Learn from women who’ve gone all in.

It’s November, and I’m ready to declare 2023 the biggest leap forward in my 30-year career. That’s because working with generative AI has profoundly changed the way I work, what I work on and, increasingly, how I think. Here is what I have learned in…

If the emergence of generative AI has prompted a lot of excitement and anxiety about the future of work, that’s because it’s arrived a moment when we’re already asking huge questions about our working lives. Tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Bing Chat…

Interactions that dehumanize us. Disinformation that misleads us. Algorithms that manipulate us. These are the risks posed by the explosion in generative artificial intelligence—AI that uses massive amounts of pre-existing content (also known as…

Imagine what you could accomplish if you had a team of colleagues you could lean on whenever you had to tackle a task that wasn’t in your wheelhouse, or whenever you got stuck, or whenever you needed a piece of information that wasn’t at your…

Workers need a setup to address the particular challenges of dividing their workweek As workplaces reopen, more of us are splitting our time between home and office—with some third places, like the local coffee shop or co-working space, thrown into…

In Western medicine and conventional therapy, there’s a level of remove between doctor and patient. Our doctors are these authority figures whom we trust with our lives, and our secrets. The past year has changed that dynamic. I’ve (virtually)…

Whether you’re sitting in an office or toiling from home, often the hardest part of work is having to deal with colleagues. Sometimes it’s collaborating with them, sometimes it’s avoiding them. If only AI could help. I believe that it can, if we put…

Every parent I know fantasizes about adding another parent to the mix to help out with the children. I have found that fantasy co-parent in a tidy package: our Amazon Echo. Like Google’s Home device, the Echo is a voice-controlled assistant that sits…

Workplace technology is going to eradicate inequality by increasing productivity—or it’s going to deepen inequality by making it hard to find work. The internet is going to offer us unparalleled freedom of information and expression—or it’s going to…

Accept. Agree. Submit. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve clicked on buttons like these, agreeing to online terms of service that I haven’t actually reviewed. I’m hardly unusual: According to a 2017 survey by Deloitte, 91% of consumers routinely…

Parents worry about a lot of things—like whether their children will get into college, or become drug addicts, or get abducted by strangers. But I spend a lot more time worrying that my children are going to live with us forever because robots have…

How will my data be used against me? That’s the question on many minds in the wake of recent coverage of Cambridge Analytica, its extraction of Facebook data, and the use of that Facebook data by the Trump campaign. While these data collection and…

I am in an empty classroom at my kids’ school in Vancouver, where I’ve commandeered a desk and set up my computer. I can hear the music class underway next door, and if I listen carefully, I can pick out the sweet voice of my 13-year-old daughter. I…