Most People Are Using AI Backwards

Most people use AI to get to the answer faster.

What if you used it to see your own thinking better?

Most People Are Using AI Backwards is a short, practical field guide to using AI as a metacognitive partner—not a replacement for your judgment, creativity, curiosity, or wonderfully human weirdness.

Instead of treating AI like a vending machine for finished answers, you’ll learn how to use it to make your thinking more visible, expansive, and explainable.

Inside, you’ll explore how to:

• Notice the thinking you’re accidentally outsourcing
• Turn half-formed ideas, observations, and questions into something you can examine
• Rotate a problem and explore it from unexpected perspectives
• Use continuity to build an ongoing thinking practice
• Experiment with metaphor, movement, images, objects, and other ways of knowing
• Ask AI to challenge your assumptions instead of simply agreeing with you
• Preserve human judgment while taking advantage of AI’s extraordinary speed and range
• Build your own playful, evidence-seeking approach to human-AI collaboration

This isn’t a guide to becoming better at prompting a machine.

It’s an invitation to become more curious about your own mind.

Short enough to read today. Practical enough to try immediately. Weirdness encouraged.

Rio Solara

Writer • Educator • Distributor of Curiosity