Prompt Basics · Lesson 3 of 3
When AI is the wrong tool
AI is good at structure and language. It is bad at facts, recent events, and your specific reality.
The skill of using AI is partly knowing when not to. Four situations come up again and again where another tool is faster, safer, or more honest. Knowing them saves you from confidently wrong answers.
AI is everywhere right now. Every problem looks like a prompt. Most days that is fine — AI handles drafts, explanations, practice, brainstorms, summaries with ease. But there is a class of problem where AI is the wrong shape entirely. Reaching for it out of habit costs you time and sometimes accuracy.
The lesson is not to use AI less. It is to use it well — which includes knowing when something else is the right tool.
The four situations
- 1
Live facts
Train times, flight schedules, share prices, today's news. AI does not have a live connection to the world. It has read text up to a point in the past, and it stops there. For anything that changes by the hour, use the source — the airline app, the railway site, the bank, a news website.
Use instead:
The official source. Or Perplexity, which searches the web and shows you where the answer came from.
- 2
Medical, legal, financial decisions
AI can explain options. It can help you understand a letter from a hospital or a contract from an employer. It cannot make the call. The call is yours, and it should be made with a person who is qualified — a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant — who knows your specific situation.
Use instead:
A qualified professional, in person. Use AI to prepare the questions you want to ask them.
- 3
Recent events
AI knows what was true up to its training cut-off, often a year or more ago. Anything since then is invisible to it. New laws, new product launches, new prices, recent news — AI will either guess or refuse. Either way, the answer is not reliable.
Use instead:
A search engine for the date-sensitive part, then bring the answer back to AI for help thinking it through.
- 4
Your specific reality
AI does not know your boss, your patient, your mother, your colleague, your customer. It does not know what was said in the meeting yesterday. It only knows what you tell it. The deeper the situation, the more AI's general answer drifts from what you actually need.
Use instead:
The people who were there. Or paste in the specific facts, line by line, and let AI structure how to think about them.
AI is a tool. You are the one with the situation, the stakes, and the responsibility. Use what helps. Discard the rest.
A short habit to build
Before you paste a question into AI, ask yourself one thing.
Is this about facts, recent events, or my specific reality? If yes, go to the source first. If no, AI is probably a great place to start.