Letting an AI Assistant Act for You: Safety Basics
Use assistants that can browse, send or book on your behalf without handing over more than you meant to
A taste of a lesson
An assistant offered to manage my inbox and reply for me. Should I let it?
You can get real help here, with sensible limits. Start by letting it sort and summarise emails and draft replies, but keep sending in your hands, at least at first. Emails can contain misleading instructions, and a reply sent to the wrong person cannot be unsent. Check what access the connection asks for, and look for a setting that requires your confirmation before anything is sent. After a couple of weeks, you will know which drafts you approve without changes. Which kinds of emails would you be comfortable letting it answer?
Written by the teacher as an example. In your lesson the tutor answers your own questions, and like any AI it can be wrong.
What you will be able to do
- Explain what permissions you grant when connecting accounts to an assistant
- Describe how content an assistant reads can mislead it
- Decide which tasks to delegate fully, which to confirm and which to keep
- Use a personal checklist to review what an assistant did
Lesson plan
- 1 What acting for you really means Understand the difference between an assistant that chats and one that takes actions. Start
- 2 Permissions and connected accounts Grant only the access a task needs and review it regularly. Start
- 3 When content misleads the assistant Understand that web pages and emails can contain instructions an assistant might follow. Start
- 4 What to delegate and what to keep Sort your tasks into delegate, confirm first and keep for yourself. Start
- 5 Reviewing and your personal checklist Build simple review habits and a checklist you can reuse with any assistant. Start
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About this tutor
For everyday users and non technical professionals trying assistants that can do things, not just chat: browse sites, fill forms, send emails, manage calendars or connect to your accounts. These features can save time, and they also introduce new risks. This free tutor explains, in plain words, what permissions you are granting, why assistants can be tricked by content they read, which tasks are fine to delegate and which to keep, and how to review what was done. You will leave with a short personal checklist you can use with any assistant.
Reviews
4.5
2 ratingsSample
- Tariq Z.Sample
Short and practical. My checklist is on my fridge. I wanted a little more about privacy policies, but it pointed me in the right direction.
- Margaret H.Sample
I am seventy and nervous about this stuff. The house key comparison made sense, and I now know which settings to look for. Kind and clear.
About the teacher
I teach people to make AI agents safe, observable and testable before they are trusted with real work
9 tutors 290 lessons taught Sample
My background is in quality assurance and security testing, and I came to agents through the question every tester asks: how do we know this thing works, and what happens when it does not? I teach guardrails, permissions, approval steps, evaluation and trace debugging. My lessons are concrete. We look at a failure, name it, and design the check that...
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