TUESDAY TUTORIAL
One useful thing you can do with AI today.

Good morning.
I use AI to brainstorm more than almost anything else, from new post ideas for this newsletter, house decor ideas, and where to go while on our next trip. None of it works if I just ask for ideas and take the first list I get. The process below is the one that actually gets me somewhere.

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Ask AI to help you brainstorm and it hands you ideas fast. Ask enough people to do the same thing on the same topic, and you start noticing something. The ideas sound the same.

That is not your imagination. Research out of the University of Exeter and UCL found that AI-assisted writing gets rated as more creative and better written. It also found the ideas start to converge. Different people, same starting point, oddly similar answers.

The fix is not a better AI tool. It is a better way of asking.

I use this same fix for a lot of unrelated things: post ideas, product ideas, even where to go while on our next trip. These three moves help me the most.

Most people ask AI for five ideas and stop there. That is exactly where the generic ones live. The interesting options tend to show up after the obvious ones are used up.

Skim the list. Cross out anything you could have thought of yourself in the shower. What is left is usually where the real ideas start.

An idea with no limits is easy to generate and easy to forget. AI does its best work when you box it in the way real life would.

Change one number and ask again. A tighter budget or a shorter timeline usually sharpens an idea instead of weakening it.

AI tends to agree with whatever you put in front of it, which is the opposite of useful when you are trying to think clearly. This is also the step most people using AI regularly skip entirely, even after they have gotten comfortable with the basics of giving AI a role and some context.

This is the question that catches the idea that sounds great until someone pushes back on it.

Try This With AI

This move has a name: forced connections, a creativity technique that predates AI by decades. Put two unrelated things together and neither you nor AI can coast to the obvious answer.

What it does: Forces AI to combine two unrelated ideas into something you would not have landed on by circling the same topic alone.

Customize it: Swap in your own topic and pick the most mismatched partner you can think of. Gardening plus travel. Grandkids plus budgeting. The stranger the pairing, the better the results tend to be.

Try it now: ChatGPT · Claude

Then ask this: "Of these 10, which one could I actually start this weekend?"

None of this replaces your judgment. AI can widen the field, sort the mess, and pressure test a weak spot faster than you can alone. It cannot tell whether an idea fits your life, your budget, or your taste. That part is still yours.

You do not need a special app for any of this. Open the AI tool you already use and try one of these moves on a real problem, not a hypothetical one.

This week: pick something you have been stuck on and ask for 30 ideas. Do not rank them. Just scroll down to number 25 and see what is still sitting there. Five minutes, nothing to install.

AI will tell you your first idea was great before you even finish typing the second one. That is not a compliment. It is a default setting.

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