Are You Passing or Piggybacking Off AI?

An ongoing conversation that will not soon be resolved is: what is the acceptable limit of work you can outsource to AI? This week, I saw a LinkedIn post condemning anyone who dared to use AI for writing. It argued that AI-assisted writing would inevitably influence the output, making it disingenuous.

The very next day, I saw an opposing view on Facebook saying executive leaders and even thought leaders have passed off their writing to ghostwriters for years so people should come down off their high horses and start embracing AI more.

So, which perspective is right?

One way I try to frame this for my audiences is by asking the question, “Are you passing or are you piggybacking?”

Are you using tools to augment your own ability in a way that is better for you and for the people you serve? Or are you shifting all the effort and weight to AI for something you're actually incapable of doing on your own?

Passing vs. Piggybacking is not an infallible framework, nor a guaranteed rubric to know exactly when to start and stop using AI. Instead, it is a personal gut check that you can ask yourself.

Piggybacking is the idea that you can't do a task without AI.

It's like a kid on a parent's back getting a piggyback ride. The kid is on the back because they likely can't hike that far, climb that high, or maybe they can’t even walk yet. When talking about piggybacking on AI, we see it manifest itself in two ways:

First, you're unable to do the task yourself. Second, you have no desire to learn. Let's look at each one of those.

You’re unable right now. You can’t do the task yet because you lack the skill set or experience, so you hitch a ride on AI. There is nothing inherently wrong with piggybacking for a season. We all have to learn. But when piggybacking on AI becomes the norm, you are inevitably trading an opportunity to learn and grow.

You have no desire to learn. The next idea is that you can’t do a task, and you don’t want to. This means there is no motive or drive to learn or even try. Back to the child on the shoulders example, this is where the kid would stop growing. If they always ride, they may never gain the strength they need to function.

We see the idea of piggybacking playing out right now with Gen Z, and it’s not with AI. For most of their life, parents of Gen Zers have done just about everything for them, from homework to laundry to even sitting outside a job interview and waiting—or worse yet, coming into the interview. So when they get thrown out into the real world, everything is all new, and it's overwhelming. In many cases, Gen Z didn’t spend a lifetime developing those small and necessary skills. And I'm not even talking about with AI. I'm talking about with helicopter parents and lawnmower parents. The question is, how much worse is it going to be for culture and society when we do the same thing with our minds and artificial intelligence?

Passing is saying you’ve earned your spot in this game. To pass, you’re already on the field or on the court. You’re passing to a player who’s also in the same game, going towards the same goal, and you can get the ball back at any point in time. Passing is AI doing what you’ve already learned to do.

I wanted to start a lawn mowing business when I was young. And of course, I wanted to build an enterprise and enlist my friends and my brother as employees. I shared the idea with my parents, and my dad told me I had to first show I could take care of his yard well before mowing someone else’s. It was a training ground. If I couldn’t make our house front yard look like a Scott’s Fertilizer advertisement, then I probably wasn’t ready to work on somebody else’s.

The lesson wasn’t about the grass being pristine. Instead, I had to learn to make sure I had the skills before expanding.

My dad wasn’t being difficult or saving my lawnmowing skills for his own gain, he was teaching me that I needed to learn a skill and earn the right for a hand off by learning what “good” looks like. Handing off is what I wanted employees for. That’s passing.

Sometimes we toss the ball back and forth so much to AI that we sub ourselves out and put another AI player in the game. Passing can very quickly turn into piggybacking. I think the exact moment someone stops passing is when they go beyond the capability they would have interfaced with another human being for.

When you’re passing back and forth with someone else, someone that can call out to you and ask for the ball, or they can holler at you when you’re not pulling your own weight, you’re accountable to them. Having to perform for someone else ups the ante and creates so much pressure, not in a negative way. Now someone else depends on you. AI removes that.

Unfortunately, when you pass too much to AI, you eliminate the friction of teamwork. We watch games or reality TV shows or even dramas because of the friction between two humans learning to better interface with one another. Life becomes quite dull if we remove that.

Think about it this way for a minute. If you had a robot or two robots playing basketball, they would always beat the human because they would know the exact trajectory from their arms to the basket, the weight of the ball, and all other factors better than a human. But who watches that game? No one. It would be boring. There’s something that’s gained in the friction of poor instructions.

My dad’s rule still holds. Could you take care of your own yard before you start on somebody else’s?

Could you take back over? Do you understand exactly how it works? I think not knowing what to ask for does belong in the line between passing and piggybacking.

What are you giving up? Are you passing or are you piggybacking off AI?

Inspire Forward,