When to Use AI to Create (and When Not To)

Using AI is incredible.
It brings an enormous boost to productivity, efficiency, and even quality when it's used correctly.
But there are many situations where you're better off doing things yourself.

In this newsletter, I want to share with you the different use cases where I think AI is highly relevant, where it's less so, and what limit to set yourself in order to get the most benefits without it replacing your uniqueness and your authenticity, and even making you dumber, because as they say, "what you don't use, atrophies."

AI is exceptional at saving time on formatting, layout, and structuring tasks.
Personally, my biggest use is creating my daily newsletters, youtube script & course script. (any type of content basically)
The way I create them today, which I find extremely fluid and easy while still preserving my authenticity, is voice notes.

I use the app Wispr Flow for this.
I send the voice notes to AI, and the AI transcribes them into an email format, cleaning up the language glitches, the repetitions, and laying it out following my formatting.
And it automatically gives me five email subjects, five email previews, the blog description, all of it done automatically from a simple voice note.

What's great about the voice note method is that you can create a lot of content very easily, whether it's training modules or YouTube video scripts, simply by talking and sending voice notes to AI.
That's one of my favorite uses.

Now, one use of AI I really don't recommend is taking notes on subjects you want to learn and assimilate.
This is extremely important.
In the science of learning...
(those of you who are clients of Meta-Learning Mastery know what I'm talking about)

One of the principles that improves learning is the principle of desirable difficulty.
The fact of taking the time to write your notes yourself, to work the idea, to reformulate it, exercises the brain and allows you to benefit from enormous neurological learning advantages that truly allow us to assimilate knowledge.

So if you're taking notes on subjects and concepts, I really recommend doing them yourself.
I saw something just recently on Twitter: a guy who said "I'm learning while I sleep," and he had built a system where his Claude scraped YouTube videos and created notes on each video while he slept.
And I'll be honest, I respect the intention, but it's completely stupid.
Because what you'll do is just accumulate a library of dead notes that you'll never reread, never learn from, that will pollute your second brain with context and information that isn't yours.
So it creates noise.

And that's exactly what we don't want for permanent notes, for concept notes.
Take the time to write them yourself, not optimizing for quantity but truly for quality, because these same permanent notes are the ones that will feed your content later.
And when they're written in your own words, your second brain becomes a place that belongs to you, a place where you feel at home and familiar with what's inside.

If you start having AI write notes on all the books you read and all the advice you want to learn, in the end, yes, you have a list of notes, you know where they are, but you've memorized nothing, learned nothing, and it can't really feed your content or your thinking.

So that's the limit I draw.
For content creation, I start from my voice, because speaking is still a process of thinking out loud.
It lets me materialize my thought, crystallize it, structure it, and preserve in my content my authenticity, my voice and my way of constructing sentences.
Because if AI writes for you, yes, you can set up style guides to try to make it write like you.
But there will always be something that betrays it, and that creates a loss of connection, of authenticity with the creator.

Having extensively tested all the workflows over the last few years:

Voice notes are the perfect sweet spot between authenticity and speed, because we speak much faster than we can write.

But for everything related to learning, all the concepts you want to memorize, really don't use AI.
Take the time to write your notes yourself.
Block 20 minutes in your calendar every day to write new notes, work on the ones you already have, make connections.
This is one of those tasks where it's extremely important to slow down and not fall into the quantity optimization trap.

Yes, it's tempting, because in a weekend, you can create an interconnected second brain on Obsidian with 400 notes and have a beautiful graph view.
But if in the end they're not your notes, if it's not you who created them or made the connections, then it's not your thinking, it's not your own reflection.

I know there are people who push this further, who recommend having one Obsidian vault for AI notes and one for notes written by yourself.
I don't go that far, because in my vault there are reference guides written with AI and transcripts from other creators clipped with Obsidian Web Clipper.
With my category system, the distinction happens automatically:

When I go to my permanent notes category, those are notes I mostly wrote myself.

There was a period where I tried to write permanent notes with AI, but when I revisited them, I had no connection to them, didn't even remember them, and they didn't make sense.
That's why I stopped.
And now, even if I sometimes go a while without writing a permanent note, I know that the next time there's a concept I really want to memorize and crystallize in my second brain, I can add it.
I've kind of lost that need for quantity, that feeling of having to take notes on everything, because that's exactly what pushes us to misuse AI in the first place.

It's really important, as we use AI more, to keep this distinction in mind.
It's one of those new work principles that's extremely important to take into account when using this tool, which is extraordinarily powerful but can also very quickly make us completely dumb in the process.
And because my mission with Noah's Ark is to help you become a sovereign creator who uses AI to develop their second brain, create, share their message, and build a business that is aligned, profitable, and purposeful...
These kinds of distinctions are extremely important for me to share.

Thanks for reading...
And welcome back to the Ark.
Noah.