In this solo episode of The Creative Tension, host Mark Jørgensen Chaudhry takes listeners on a reflective journey into the world of augmented intelligence. Framed around “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Mark shares his personal story of recovering from eye surgery and how it pushed him to experiment with AI tools in real, practical ways.
Augmented intelligence proves to be good when it boosts creativity, captures fleeting thoughts, and makes advanced tools accessible to everyone. It turns bad when outputs are imperfect, workflows get fragmented, or users fall into freemium traps. And it gets ugly when ethical concerns, data privacy, authenticity, and digital addiction—especially for children—come into play.
By the end of the episode, Mark circles back to the good and shares a simple but powerful tip for making AI-powered transcripts far more useful in both work and collaboration.
Key Topics & Tensions
- The Good: Productivity gains through tools like Otter.ai, creativity boosts with ChatGPT, and the democratization of advanced capabilities for individuals and small teams.
- The Bad: Inaccurate transcriptions, fragmented toolchains, and reliance on freemium models that eventually create friction.
- The Ugly: Deep concerns around data privacy, ethics, loss of authenticity, and AI-driven digital addiction in children and adults alike.
- How Mark used Otter.ai, Roam Research, ChatGPT, Audacity, and Descript to create this very episode within tight constraints.
- Why balance is key: using augmented intelligence as a partner, not a master.
Gifts & Key Takeaways
- Practical Tip – The “Third Brain” Idea:
Extend the concept of a “second brain” (from Tiago Forte’s book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential) by combining AI tools with transcripts.
→ Insert verbal markers like “Time-out start” and “Time-out stop” in conversations. These markers make transcripts instantly searchable and highlight golden insights without hours of scanning. - AI tools can be allies for creativity and efficiency, but only if we remain conscious of their flaws and ethical implications.
- Protecting children from AI-driven digital addiction is one of the most urgent “ugly” tensions.
- Download the prompt that generated these show notes using ChatGPT5 (as a PDF, Portable Document File)
Mentioned Concepts, Resources & People
- Tools: Roam Research, Otter.ai, ChatGPT, Audacity, Descript
- Concepts: Second Brain, Third Brain, productivity through augmented intelligence, ethical use of AI
- Book: Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte
About the Host
This is a solo reflection episode featuring The Creative Tension co-host Mark Jørgensen Chaudhry, who explores ways to bring greater value into the world of work through meaningful conversations on trust, value, capability, and just work.
Full Episode Transcript
Augmented intelligence is good when it sparks creativity and captures thoughts I’d otherwise lose.
It’s bad when the results are shallow, generic, or fragmented across tools.
And it’s ugly when it feeds addiction and raises questions about trust. Who might use my words spoken into the cloud?
By the end of this episode, I’ll share a small but powerful tip you can use to bring the balance back to the good.
Hello and welcome to the Creative Tension, a space to explore ways to bring greater value into the world of work for individuals, teams, organizations, and their customers. I’m Smilla Mark’s daughter.
I’m Mark Jørgensen Chaudhry, and today, you’re only getting me – no guests, no co-host – just a solo reflection about AI – and what I prefer to think of and call augmented intelligence – not artificial intelligence.
In my view augmented intelligence can be considered a set of tools which can help me in areas such as clarifying my thinking, capturing ideas and being creative – even co-creative – whereas artificial intelligence can be viewed as holding the risk of displacing me, replacing me, making me redundant or even enslaving me – and other human beings.
A few months back, I suffered a retinal detachment. Surgery saved my eyesight, but the recovery meant I was not allowed to read or look at digital screens for months, and I was only allowed to go for walks – not do other forms of exercise or be physically active.
For someone who works with ideas and people – oftentimes with the support of digital tools, and who likes exercising – this was a huge challenge. But it also pushed me to experiment: How could I keep on being creative and keep working without being able to read – and use computer screens? Now – quite a lot of people do this every day – but this was new to me.
If the general theme is “Using Augmented Intelligence in Practice” – then this solo episode is about walking you through my journey using AI – so augmented intelligence – to support me, framed through three lenses: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
At the very end, I’ll circle back to “the good” and leave you with a simple, practical tip you can try out and use starting today. It worked quite well for me – so maybe you will also find it useful.
Now, let me set the scene.
Setting my retinal detachment aside – I decided to treat this episode as an experiment in which I would utilize augmented intelligence to my benefit to create this episode.
Why not call it “Trying out Using Augmented Intelligence in Practice: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.”
My goal? Try out different tools, assess their usefulness, and share the results. Not as some abstract thought piece, but as real experiments with assumed practical applications.
The tools I used to create this episode – other than my own brain – were:
- Roam Research for text based note taking. A center piece of my so-called “second brain”.
- Otter.ai for transcribing my thoughts. So that is speech to text.
- ChatGPT for ideating and iterating texts – including the episode transcript.
- Audacity for audio recording and editing.
- Descript for audio transcription and text based audio editing.
I even gave myself some constraints:
- One: Invest no more than 10 hours in total for creating and publishing this episode.
- Two: No use of new hardware or software beyond what I already have.
Why? Because I want to prove to myself – and maybe to you – that this can be done producing a satisfying result, as well as efficiently, without overcomplicating things.
Let’s start with “the good”.
The first obvious good is productivity gains. At least assumed productivity or efficiency gains.
In my situation – where I could not look at computer screens other than very briefly – I decided to try out using Otter.ai, which I had dabbled with before.
I went for long, daily walks – to get some exercise, sun and fresh air.
What I did was “think out loud”, while Otter.ai transcribed my thoughts.
That was a game changer for me. Normally, if I had an idea on a walk, I’d either forget it or scramble to jot it down as a text based note in Roam Research. While it was doable – it was not optimal. With Otter, my stream of thought became a transcript with a summary I could get back to later.
More tools than Otter.ai have somewhat similar functional capabilities and this can also be helpful during meetings. Probably the majority of human beings cannot remember everything from a one-hour conversation. Having an automatic transcript and a decent summary is enormously helpful while it is not perfect.
The second good thing was a creativity boost.
I tried out using the voice functionality in ChatGPT – not for decision-making, but as a “thinking partner”. I gave it voice prompts – and with my eyesight back – I gave it text prompts.
My experience was that this was helpful on the back of the Otter.ai notes to iterate multiple times.
And the third good is accessibility.
These tools are no longer the privilege of big corporations. With nothing more than a mobile device with internet connectivity, a laptop with Wi-Fi, and curiosity, I can stitch together things that rival larger setups.
That is, to me, good. It means individuals and small teams have one more means of punching far above their weight.
But of course, it’s not all good. Let me talk about the bad.
First, imperfect outputs.
The transcriptions – so speech to text – I get from Otter.ai or other tools such as Zoom, Teams, ChatGPT, Descript or equivalent are decent, but not perfect. Roughly every twentieth word or so is wrong. That is a ball park figure. And if that wrong word is something important – say, a project name – it makes searching the transcript later quite difficult and time-consuming, so less productive.
Summaries are similar. They capture the gist, but often miss the nuance. So you still need human judgment to go through and polish them.
Second, fragmented workflows.
To create this very episode, I moved ideas from my brain → into Otter.ai and into Roam Research and from there → into ChatGPT → into Google Docs and from Audacity into Descript. That’s a lot of tool-switching. And each switch is a little friction point. Context-switching. These tools don’t really integrate well yet. So again – that is not optimal for productivity.
Third, the freemium trap.
Most of these tools are free at first. That’s generous – but it’s also a business model. Once you start relying on them, you can hit limits fast. And then you have to pay. It is fair enough of course – if it is of value to you. It however reminds me of what pushers of illegal drugs do: The first fix is free, then you’re hooked. That’s not inherently bad – as it relates to augmented intelligence. Companies need to make money – to make a profit. It is just something to be aware of.
And then we have the ugly.
The ugliest part, in my view, is “what is my data being used for”?
This is about ethics, data use and trust.
The second my words are transcribed, they go to the cloud. I don’t know for certain who has access, how they’ll be used or how long they’ll stay there. Even if you read the fifty-something-page “Terms and Conditions” – which, let’s be honest, almost nobody does – you can’t really know.
If I were running a startup, brainstorming a business model in Otter.ai or ChatGPT, how could I be sure those ideas wouldn’t leak, or be used to train future models? The answer is: I can’t.
Another ugly side is loss of authenticity and maybe even the loss of the ability to think for yourself.
If you lean too heavily on AI, your voice can become generic. Your writing or speaking risks sounding like everyone else’s, polished but soulless. That’s a danger I think all of us will have to navigate. What I am saying here are my own words – while I did use ChatGPT in my “thinking process”. So to some degree my words are tainted or influenced by the large language model.
And finally, something very personal and important to me: Children and digital addiction.
I worry about my own kids, and kids in general. AI-driven feeds, games, and social media platforms are designed to catch our attention and hook us and make us addicted. The free fixes, the infinite scrolls, the autoplay videos – these are not neutral. They create dependency.
And children can’t protect themselves. I as a parent am fighting a losing battle to protect my children. In my view, kids should not have unsupervised access to the internet including access to AI-powered platforms. It’s simply not a fair fight. So as a parent I think about both the contents that my children are exposed to – as well as the amount of time they spend consuming – not engaging in the physical world.
Even current legislation is de facto not protecting children.
That, to me, is ugly.
So where does that leave us?
For me, augmented intelligence is a powerful enabler when used ethically, consciously and deliberately. It can save time, inspire ideas, and give access to advanced capabilities we couldn’t dream of before.
But it’s not magic. It comes with flaws, with risks, and with ethical concerns we can’t ignore.
The challenge is balance. Using AI – that is augmented intelligence – as a partner, not a master. Enhancing your intelligence, not outsourcing it. Keeping human judgment, creativity, and authenticity at the center – and remembering to protect our children – who are not able to protect themselves – and can easily be deceived or become addicted – which is also true for adults – in my view.
Returning to “the good” I promised you a gift – a little tip I came up with along the way.
Maybe you have heard about the idea of a “second brain”. In one sentence this is a digital tool outside your own brain where you can capture and organize notes and distill and express your thoughts and ideas. If you have not heard about this I highly recommend you pick up a copy of the book or audio book “Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential” by Tiago Forte.
At some point I expanded this idea to the idea of a “Third Brain” – which I have been playing around with. This is not novel as such, while augmented intelligence makes it much easier. So while having many conversations with a business partner of mine – we audio record and transcribe our conversations – using a specific “recall” phrase.
So if you’re using tools with audio to text transcription capabilities like Otter.ai, Zoom or something else – you can make your transcripts far more useful by inserting verbal markers. For example, agree with your colleague or colleagues that whenever something is important, you’ll say: “Time-out start” and a bit later “Time-out stop.”
Then later, when you search the transcript, those markers jump right out. No need to hunt a long time for that one golden insight hidden in an hour-long conversation. Recalling it is easy and fast.
It’s simple, a little clunky maybe – but it works.
And that, to me, is the perfect way to end: by circling back to the good. Because despite the bad and the ugly, there is real good here. Tools that, if we use them wisely, can help us iterate our thinking, create faster, and share more generously. On the sharing part – check out the show notes where I have shared examples of specific prompts used while creating this episode.
My co-host Angus Grundy and I – previously had conversations with guests related to themes such as trust, value, and capability, as well as creating meaning and happiness at work – as a positive effect of work – and envisioning and moving towards a just work environment. In each episode, we always strive to provide potentially useful concepts: That is advice and practical tools that each guest has shared with us.
All of these are accessible from the Creative Tension website. That’s the creative tension all in one word, THE creative tension.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please do like us on whichever platform you’re listening on. Thank you very much for listening. Until next time.
