How to Become an Expert at Anything With AI

This week we’re bringing you some of our best writing on practical applications of AI by Michael Taylor, whose new column, Also True for Humans, examines how we manage AI tools like we would human coworkers. (He’s also the co-author of a new book, Prompt Engineering for Generative AI.) Up today is this tactical piece about how AI is helping us redefine expertise.—Kate Lee

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What separates a beginner from an expert? They’ve “seen it all before.” When they encounter a problem, they intuitively know what to do. When an expert is faced with a specific challenge, they quickly and subconsciously sift through relevant experiences to match past situations with current ones until they find what feels “right.”

Beginners come at problems from a very different place. They have to. Without the benefit of experience, they can’t rely on intuition, and must make decisions slowly and deliberately in order to arrive at the correct one.

The Dreyfus model for skill development says that the first step to go from novice to expert is to identify and apply many recipes or templates for accomplishing a task. Eventually, through research and analysis, they can build intuition about what recipe will help solve a problem, and how to improvise or combine recipes to create their own. They can develop expertise.

But that takes time—or at least it used to before AI. ChatGPT’s ability to help you summarize and analyze is like a superpower to beginners, who haven’t had time to build expertise in an area. I’ll help you learn how to use this superpower, from figuring out what people care about when you’re pitching them to finding best-selling titles for your article or book.

Become an expert overnight

There’s a brute-force hack for any novice who wants to rapidly gain experience and break into a field: Collect as many data points as possible, then look for attributes that are associated with success or failure. My favorite example of this is from the author James Clear, who told Tim Ferriss how he settled on the name for his bestselling book Atomic Habits.

Clear made a list of 150 nonfiction books that sold more than 1 million copies each, and identified naming patterns. One of those templates he discovered was “the blank of blank”:

The War of Art
The Psychology of Money
The Power of Habit
The Power of Now
The Power of Positive Thinking
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

The template he came up with works like this: Take your topic and pair it with a word that it’s not normally combined with, then fill in the blanks. For example, “tidying up” is not normally described as “life-changing,” and “not giving a fuck” isn’t associated with being “subtle.” Clear ultimately settled on another closely related template, pairing the topic of the book solely with an unexpected descriptor—like Atomic Habits or Extreme Ownership. His book sold 15 million copies worldwide.

This technique, known as “memetic analysis,” is something that even authors with less time and patience can do today. Memetic analysis finds recurring patterns in popular culture, like templates for book titles. “Meme,” in its original meaning, isn’t “funny viral images,” but any idea, behavior, or style that spreads through imitation. You can think of it as the base unit of culture. Some book titles are just stickier than others, so why not replicate what you know works? Clear used the same method to determine the book’s structure, decide on its cover, and even structure its content.

Many creators copy portions of their best work from sources they don’t disclose—sometimes the copying is even subconscious. Thankfully, Clear was studious in providing references. Kirby Ferguson of "Everything Is a Remix" fame traced the lineage of the ideas in Atomic Habits to six other successful books on habit formation, from which Clear borrowed liberally, even redrawing their in-book illustrations:

Nir Eyal, Hooked:

James Clear, Atomic Habits:

Source: Kirby Ferguson/LinkedIn.

Memetic analysis with ChatGPT

Memetics cannot guarantee that your book will be a bestseller, but generative AI has made it easier to spot patterns that might help.

To demonstrate just how easy it’s becoming, I scraped a list of the top-performing AI-related articles on Every and fed them into ChatGPT. I asked it to identify different templates I could use to decide what to call this article. My final choice, “How to feel like an expert with ChatGPT,” is based on a template ChatGPT called “How to & Technology,” consisting of titles that give practical guides related to a specific technology. All it took was a couple minutes.

All screenshots courtesy of the author.

Step 1: Scrape data from a source

To get my scraped list of titles, I visited Every’s AI category page. You could copy these by hand, but I right-clicked and chose “Inspect” to view the website source code. From there, I hovered over an article, copied the HTML, and inserted it in the following ChatGPT prompt: