Interactive

Should I use AI for this?

Six questions about the job in front of you, and a straight answer — including no. Where the answer is no, you get the name of somebody free who deals with that exact thing for a living.

Nothing on this page is sent anywhere. No model behind it, nothing to sign in for. Your answers stay in your browser, which matters, because some of these questions are about how bad your week is.

1If the answer were wrong and you acted on it, what would happen?

This is the question that decides most of it. Everything these tools do well, they do well only when being wrong is survivable.

2Would you recognise a wrong answer if you saw one?

These tools are fluent whether or not they are right, so the reader is the only check there is. Somebody who cannot tell is not being helped, they are being reassured.

3Could you check the answer against something else before acting on it?

Checking afterwards is the safety net under everything else. Where there is no net, the first two answers have to carry the whole weight.

4Does the answer turn on something that changes?

Prices, rules, deadlines, who owns what, whether a scheme is still running. This is the single most common way these tools are confidently out of date.

5To get a useful answer, would you have to type in details about a real person?

Whatever you type leaves your control. That is a decision you are allowed to make about yourself, and not one you can make for somebody else.

6What is it about?

So that if the answer is to talk to a person, we can tell you which person, free, rather than leaving you with advice you cannot act on.

0 of 6 answered. All six, because any one of them on its own would give you a confident answer for the wrong reason.

DOT / THE TRANSLATOR

Half the value of these tools is knowing when to shut the laptop. Nothing here is trying to talk you into anything, because there is nothing here to sell you.

How this works

Nothing here calls an AI model. Asking one whether you should use AI is like asking a barber whether you need a haircut, except the barber would at least give you the same answer twice.

Every rule below is ours, written down, and the same every time. We show you which ones applied to your answers and which did not, so you can argue with a specific rule rather than with a verdict.

No score. A number out of ten sticks in your head and the reasons fall straight out of it, which is exactly the wrong way round.

Why it can say no

A decision tool that always finds a way to say yes is a sales funnel with a quiz on the front. This one says no outright on some answers. The one it refuses hardest is the combination nobody thinks applies to them: you would not spot a wrong answer, and you could not check it.

That is not a rare case. It is the ordinary case for anybody asking about something they do not already know, which is most of the reasons people ask anything.

If the answer is yes

The explainers cover what goes wrong and why, the Flight Simulator lets you practise on a question where being wrong costs nothing, and the Jury will tell you whether several models even agree.