1. It's a conversation, not a search engine. The biggest mistake newbies make is treating AI like Google - one question, one answer, done. The magic happens in the back-and-forth. Ask a question. Read the answer. Then push: "Make it shorter ... Give me three alternatives ... That's too formal ... What am I missing?" The best outputs come from the fifth or sixth exchange.
To work around those rules, the Humanizer skill tells Claude to replace inflated language with plain facts and offers this example transformation: Before: "The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was officially established in 1989, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of regional statistics in Spain." After: "The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was established in 1989 to collect and publish regional statistics." Claude will read that and do its best as a pattern-matching machine to create an output that matches the context of the conversation or task at hand.
"I recently saw a CBS Sunday video of actor Ethan Hawke saying he's "so bored" by AI, and that one thing he loves about theater is that AI can't do it. "I feel I couldn't be less interested in computers and fake things," he said. "I like people. I like the way they smell. I like the way they talk, and I like the way they think. I like to think of AI as a plagiarizing mechanism. You know, that's all it is."
What would you call an assistant who invented answers if they didn't know something? Most people would call them "Fired." Despite that, we don't mind when AI does it. We expect it to always have an answer, but we need AI that says, "I don't know." That helps you trust the results, use the tool more effectively and avoid wasting time on hallucinations or overconfident guesses.
Before artificial intelligence had its big breakout, chatbots were those weird messaging tools that sat in the bottom corner of websites, rarely solving your problems and likely causing you more stress by blocking you from talking to a real person. But now, AI chatbots like have created a whole new category: It's search, but with conversation. You can use an AI chatbot as a thought partner, a research aid or a Google alternative for anything you want to know.