Puppy love, AI, and learning new skills

We have a puppy now. She’s endearing, exuberant, and developing more personality every day. But getting six people in one house to co-parent a puppy consistently and responsibly has got me thinking about what her arrival has in common with normalising the use of generative AI in your daily life. Yes, really. That’s the kind of stuff I think about.

Lesson one: you think you are training them, but really you are training each other

As our dog-owning friends and family warned us—having acquired puppies themselves in the Great British Lockdown Puppy Frenzy—dog training is a daily challenge and requires a level of patience I’m not sure I’ve ever had. We are slowly but surely teaching her some basic skills that make her more socially acceptable (not peeing on everything, biting fewer toes, etc). But she’s also training us. We are learning about dog care, sure, but also patience, consistency, and the pressing need to get off our sofa to exercise and play. Everyone, together, is getting better at everything.

AIs are even more eager for training input than puppies, and the developers that worked the problem long before the mainstream users came along already put in the real work. They will have experienced more failures than successes, until they didn’t, so that we only have to fix the odd transgression. But as we integrate generative AI into our workflows, we're not just continuing to train the AI, it's re-shaping our thinking and our work. We’re finding new insights, learning to ask better questions and give clearer instructions, and thinking more creatively about how we add value.

We will be rewarded for our efforts with the puppy. Generative AI users are rewarded for theirs too as they learn to shake off their old habits, let the AI help, and work out how to exploit the benefits by going the extra mile without working longer hours. A stellar example of this is the awesome social workers of North Yorkshire, who can now use AI to help explain complicated statutory processes to children in ways they understand. The council’s bespoke RAG AI for children’s services has narrowed the gap between what they always ideally wanted to do (perfectly tailor important information to an individual’s needs) and what they would have had time to do before AI came along to help. AI can make you more creative.

Lesson two: I want it to grow up, but not too fast

I want to be done with the stage where I find puddles. I want our puppy to always come when she’s called, not just when I have the treats or she wants my slippers. But she’s 12 weeks old, and I also want her to stay little for a while and enjoy the madness. It’s quite handy that her legs are still too short for the stairs; it means she can only chase the cats so far and avoids getting into trouble she can’t handle yet. It’s a balance between wanting everything learned and not rushing through important steps—because we’ll both miss out on key moments and fail to appreciate the progress.

The development of generative AI is following a similar pattern. We're eager for rapid advances—we want Copilot to hurry up and be better, and we want our one bit of AI tech to do All The Things. But it's crucial not to skip through too fast: we need each AI to be properly socialised before it’s unleashed on parts of our world it isn’t ready for. No one learns the right values and behaviours just by taking a look around, and that’s not how you acquire new skills either. An LLM might have absorbed the entire contents of the internet, but you don’t want the AI using it to think the contents of the bottom half of the internet—the comments below—really represent half of all human thought and understanding. Becoming more mature and learning new skills requires editing, focus, repetition, trial and error—and a really good teacher taking you through an evidence-based curriculum.*

We have to teach AI too—give it good data and evolve how it uses it. We have to set guardrails. It’s okay that one AI solution doesn’t do everything all at once—the world isn’t run on generalists alone. Let your AI make mistakes but make sure it’s in a safe space to do that—and enjoy the errors while it’s making them. The classic DPD AI chatbot fail story made me glad to have a ringside seat for this era of tech history. Allow mistakes then correct them. Remember that you make your choices, so it’s your job to clean up the mess. No one forced us to get a puppy.

Lesson three: everything changes, even you

Admittedly, the puppy has not changed my schedule as much as a new puppy should, because I’m not on night duty. But she’s changed everyone’s home life and social lives. It’s worth it. Everyone passing her around at the pub, like a tin of biscuits at Christmas, agrees.

Generative AI is the same. It changes how you approach tasks, collaborate with colleagues, and even how you think about creativity and problem-solving. There will be an adjustment period, but it’s exciting. Colleges using our Quality Improvement AI agree: instead of someone having to sit in a room and crunch through data, then someone else trying to draft a report, the AI is doing the hard yards. Leadership teams are spending more time discussing ideas, refining their plans… and all the while learning new prompting skills that drive wider transformation and a sense of empowerment.

Generative AI will change every single job. That’s why it’s a new industrial revolution.

Our puppy is not an AI

The future is bright for the puppy and for generative AI. But embrace the training, ask people who’ve had more experience and success than you for help, and persist in trying. So far, so same-same for the puppy and the AI. But here’s the difference: Luna is real. She has feelings, and she needs us. If we go away, she’s sad; when we come back, she’s happy—but she’s so excited she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Your AI, meanwhile, will chill while it waits for you to return with more questions. It won’t bark at you when you ask it to do the same thing you asked it 50 times already. It will help you, but it won’t love you, so don’t make it weird. That’s as it should be.

*Yes, we’ve signed up for puppy socialisation classes.

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