Do you consider yourself resilient and what does that mean to you? In this podcast, Resilient Entrepreneurs with Two Four One, we chat with business owners about what resilience means to them as they share their inspiring stories and life lessons.
What we've learned running our own business, is you're never alone even when it feels like it. So tune in anytime to this podcast. We're always here for you celebrating resilient entrepreneurs just like you. We're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One - a marketing company for early stage business owners who want to launch, grow and be resilient.
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Laura, today's conversation.. I've been waiting, so excited to have this conversation with you. And here we are! We want to tuck into the whole AI conversation and acknowledge that for some of our audience, this is going to be the first time they've heard about many of these applications that we're talking about. And of course, for others, they will already be using them and navigating them like professional prompt engineers. So some people probably won't know what a prompt engineer is but you will by the end of this episode,
I think I learned that new - that phrase this week. AI is everything. It's everything that we're talking about. We talk about it a lot between us because it has such a big place in marketing and we're excited about the place in marketing but we think and we know from people we've talked to that it's quite overwhelming and quite terrifying, what AI might be what it might be capable of. But honestly, the way I look at it, and why I’m excited to talk about it today, is it's an incredible tool that is going to increase our productivity our efficiency, it’s going to buy us time back, it's going to get integrated into so many things we already use and do. So let's talk about it, let's get into it, don't be afraid of it and let's figure out how we can use it to make our lives better, faster, easier. I'm all for it.
Yeah, me too. I love that mindset. I did want to mention right up front, back.. I don't know how many decades ago, the calculator was introduced to us on the mainstream. Do you remember? We were in school and you had your special calculator for extreme maths, I just call it extreme maths. It wasn't my favourite subject. But the point is, calculators were this new thing that people were, there was chatter about it, well, once you have calculators then people will forget how to count. Right? But calculators are just such an everyday part of our life. So I think it's important to have that frame of mind where this doesn't have to, it's going to change our life, absolutely, and we don't really know exactly how. And it's also going to make life easier, faster, better and everything else morphs from it. I like that frame of reference because it's such a simple thing that we all adapted to very well.
Yeah, and that's a good point, because we adapt to technology faster now than ever before. I mean, I think it took two months for ChatGPT to go from a million users to 100 million users. Never in history has anything been adopted that fast. Even smartphones took months and months, maybe years to be adapted. To be able to just accept it and reach that level of interest is incredible in two months. So I think it's exciting, I think it says to me that people are less afraid of technology, I think we are much less afraid now than we were even just a few years ago. But it's happening so rapidly, I think that's the part that has people hesitating a little bit, like what is this thing? And of course there's already videos on the dark side of ChatGPT and people have gotten it to say weird things and, of course, there's all of that, there's always gonna be the people that are gonna take it to the extreme and figure it out. The way I look at it, it’s the most incredible brainstorming tool we have ever had. Now, the entire history of knowledge that is out there on the web is accessible via this tool, which can help you with brainstorming, ideation, coming up with all kinds of ideas for any kind of content you might ever need. And I think that as a marketer is what makes me most excited, often we look at that blank page, right? Vicki, you're a writer. So you know that blank page syndrome when you have to write something and there's a blog, say an article, a social media caption and there's just a blank page and you're not feeling particularly creative that day, that's stressful. You can sit there and waste time, you can procrastinate, you can go off and do something else just to avoid trying to get that first sentence. I know I've done it and I'm so guilty of that. Yeah, what ChatGPT does is like you can just prompt it. We got to talk about importance of like good prompts, but you can prompt it with something, the first thing they get - Write me a social media post about accounting or about whatever, or just give it the first thing and then let it start brainstorming, or Give me your Top 10 ideas for social media for whatever XYZ.
I've seen a prompt, Give me 10 different tweets about a topic and just like that. (finger click!)
The speed is what's incredible about ChatGPT. I mean, you can, I don’t recommend necessarily doing this, but you can ask it to write you a 500-word essay for your history class as a college student, right, you could do that and it will do that. There are some caveats which I've been doing a lot of research about lately, it's what most people think is, 90% of it is probably accurate and probably pretty good. There's still that 10% that could be wrong, it could have mistakes and it's gonna sound like a robot wrote it. So the human element is still needed in no matter what, like, no matter what, you still need the human in whatever you do.
Absolutely. I know a newspaper editor here in Brisbane, who said that they've been using it in the newsroom and they use it a lot. They're also reporting on current affairs and ChatGPT is only current up until 2021. The other thing it does is if you put a name of somebody in there, it will research on the web, like you would with Google, and pull all kinds of information about that name and she has had an example where it researched the wrong person and included that in the article. So clearly human management is still required. Just before we go too deep into ChatGPT, which I have a feeling is going to be the primary application that we talk about in this episode. Even though there's millions of app of AI applications, let's just back up a little bit for the people who may not yet be familiar with ChatGPT.
Yeah, absolutely. Because I actually was talking to someone the other day who had never heard of it and I was quite surprised. But I just think it's because I'm so in the wormhole of it, I can't imagine other people aren't but it's absolutely true that they're not. And I still wonder like teachers, kids, students, I mean, I have a teenage son so of course I'm very aware of the possibilities and the pros and cons of all that, but there are still a lot of people that have never heard of it. So what is it? What is it? Okay.
Hey Laura, I'm going to type in to ChatGPT, “How would you describe ChatGPT?”
And here's what it says, “Hi I am ChatGPT, a language model trained by Open AI. I've been trained using a vast corpus of text data to generate human-like responses to a wide range of prompts and questions. My purpose is to assist users in generating coherent and meaningful responses” it’s very formal, isn't it? “…providing information and engaging in conversations on a wide variety of topics. I use natural language processing techniques to understand the context and meaning of text inputs, or prompt inputs, and I generate appropriate responses. My knowledge and responses are constantly evolving as I continue to learn from new data and new user interactions.”
Did that explain it the way you think? Yeah, it's basically a robot online that can assist you with anything you want.
Yeah, the results are incredible and already over 100 million people are already using this, have already adopted this, but imagine how much faster it's going to be improving. Because it needs to improve. It's not perfect, and it'll be a while I think before it is, or if it ever gets to perfect, but it's just, it's going to take a while to adapt. But I think the really special thing is it's open AI, right, so that's the whole point. It's meant to be open, it's meant to be free. It's meant to be multi-use, multi-purpose. But that also is a bit of what holds it back because it's generalised. So where I think AI is going to take off and we're already starting to see it, is how it can be incorporated into other platforms that have a much more specific detailed purpose. So for example, we use Kajabi for our website, right? That's what we build our courses and all of our things on, is on Kajabi. Kajabi has now integrated AI so that you can build out your course using AI prompts, straight from the title of the course down to the different lesson plans, down to you know, descriptive, everything. It basically just breaks it all down for you and works within the Kajabi website, which I said we're already using, which will now make it, I don't know, 10-20-50 times easier to use. I mean, what is the exponential factor of AI? It's huge.
It is incredible. And because we were using Kajabi already for a couple of years now, several years now, to see this content production creator added as a layer over something that we were already familiar with was astounding, because now it's writing a course outline, lesson content, social media content, sales email, website landing pages, it writes all the content. Now, of course, like you said, as a human we need to direct it through the prompts of what it is we want and in what tone of voice, we can ask, it can spit out something, like what I just read was quite formal, I could ask it to write again, this is ChatGPT, I could ask him to write it again with some humour and it'll actually include a joke, it'll lighten it up, it'll change the tone of voice. It is really, it's a remarkable replication of a person. And it's not just for writing, so people who are listening thinking, Well I don't do a lot of writing, it's also a task-oriented engine. So I've heard examples of people who've said to ChatGPT, Draft me a spreadsheet and search for all the email addresses of people with these parameters. So maybe it's companies that were recently hiring engineers and you'll get a spreadsheet, just like that. This is something that would normally take a virtual assistant or yourself hours to do, and it's just pulling all this data and then providing it and again, you'll want to check the quality of it. But wow, what a fantastic base.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard uses of somebody putting in the prompt, Act as if you are a professional coach, life coach, and talk me through my problems asking me questions until you think you know how to respond and how to give me advice, and then give me advice. And literally did that, that's the type of stuff that to me is like, whoa, but that's what we've got to learn is how we can be better at prompting it to give us the responses, the quality of responses, right? So the more quality input you put in, this is where the human element is really important, right? You've got to put in really good quality prompts and you can make your prompts really long. If you're writing something ‘in the style of..’, ‘Act like a marketing expert and write this…’ or ‘Act like a consultant and give me feedback on this…’ or ‘Act like an editor and proofread this copy.’ and you can put in your own copy, you can put in hundreds and hundreds of words of your own copy. Yeah, and it will proofread it, it'll improve it, you can say add humour in this, or make this more whatever it is, or summarise it, which can be really useful as well.
If you have a 20-page document and you need to write the executive summary? Boom. I haven't tried it, but I would love to.
There are some limitations in words that you can input but you could probably do it section by section that way. But that also leads me to something else because there's so much more than ChadGPT out there right now. And that's what we're getting really excited about is all the more specialised uses that AI is finding and all the new sites, new things that are coming out.
I recently found Wordtune - phenomenal. It's like Grammarly on steroids, I like Grammarly. Probably a lot of people have heard about Grammarly, right, you can add it to Chrome and you can use it in your Google Docs or anything, your emails and it'll tell you when the grammar is off, or there's a spelling mistake and it can easily fix it for you. Someone who writes a lot of social media captions, I hate if there’s a spelling mistake and it’ll solve that problem. Wordtune now takes it to another level, you can change if you want the tone of your writing to be more formal or more casual, or it can rewrite things for you or you can just ask it to rewrite a sentence because it's just not feeling right and then it'll give you different options and you just pick the one you like. When it comes to some nice content, it helps to rewrite, it's phenomenal and will really help writers to take it to the next level. And I think that's really great for students because I think that'll help teach them how to really improve their quality of writing. So Wordtune is my new favourite writing tool.
And I'm also noticing that Canva, my favourite designing tool these days, although I'm still an Adobe purist, but I do dabble in Canva when needed, especially for social media content but now they're integrating AI. Still a little weird, the AI image generation, I'm not 100% sold on, some of these sites are getting better than others.
Yeah, it's Interesting, right? Because it has to create an image from other elements that it finds. It can't take a whole image. If you asked for a boy with a yellow duck, it can't take an image that already exists of a boy with a yellow duck, it has to create it’s own. So you see all these composite elements being squished together and really scary looking humans.
And the people are really freaky. I tried playing around with kids in a classroom smiling and some of those kids look very alien. But there's definitely others I've seen create some amazing things like especially I think fantasy related, if you really want to do something more out there, I think it does that much better, or abstract or expressionism, stuff that's not so realistic yet. But I do think that's going to improve, that's definitely going to improve. But then there's the question of copyright, there's a lot of issues about that, what's going to be really fascinating is watching the lawyers and how they handle it.
Talking about lawyers ChatGPT can be your lawyer, can offer legal opinions because it can scour all the legislation, all the precedent cases, all the other judgments and look at what the intent is, what the precedent is, and tell you a probable outcome. Wow, that's crazy.
I would like to see law firms figure out how to integrate AI into their business, I think they're gonna have to, because I think they're gonna have to specialise and people are gonna have to change how they do their job, like, generalists are gonna have a harder time than specialists. I think you got to specialise in what you do, what you're expert in now more than ever and then figure out how to integrate AI into what you do to make what you do even better. You know what I mean, I think there's going to be a little shift in how we work, what we do over the next few months, it's, I would say, years but its not even years, it's coming so rapidly, I feel like as soon as this is published, it's already obsolete!
Yeah, I'm hesitant to record anything about it for that very reason, we'll be looking back on it three months and laughing. Oh, my goodness, we were only there three months ago. But to your point about people being better at their job and tapping into the human element of what we do and why we do it. From our standpoint, we're embracing it because it's going to eliminate or certainly reduce the time spent on task-oriented work. But the strategy, and the personal touch and their vision and the brainstorming that is still inherent in us and that is what makes us unique. That's why people work with us in marketing their business because of what we bring to the table. And other people will bring similar things but in a different way. And it's that human essence that I believe this technology will never be able to replace and lawyers as well. I mean, you choose a lawyer based on who you trust. So it's not just the stuff that they're outputting and giving you legal opinions on.There's always a human element.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's why now more than ever, personal branding is going to be so key. We have to build our personal brands, all of us, be out there be who you are, be yourself raw, unfiltered imperfect because we went so far, especially when Instagram first came out, for example, they came out with a ton of filters and Snapchat too - all the filters and everyone was over filtering and trying to be this perfect, ideal, superhuman, which isn't realistic, but it looked good, right? For the gram, it looks good. But then that started to shift and people wanted to see more real, more natural humans, flawed humans, people making mistakes, the stuff that really went viral is the stuff that's the craziest, the silliest, the most raw, the most deep stuff. And I think that is what we're gonna want more and more and we're gonna want to see real people, you're gonna be able to tell, at least for a good while, what is AI-generated because there's AI-generated avatars that can speak your voice.
I love it. I am a big fan of that one - Synthesia.
That scares me so much. It's out there. It's real. It's already out there. And you can already use it. Yeah, Synthesia and there's other ones too.
You can create your own avatar with your own voice, and you can record it doing whatever you want it to do and say, yeah, I love that because it helps people have a visual presence. It helps to bring a human element to the technology and some people just don't want to be on camera, right? But they understand the power of it and I don't see it as hiding because you've put yourself into the avatar and your own voice and also just I'm sure that will cut down the time of doing live recordings. I'm just so excited to see where that goes.
What I want to see that I do and especially in the short term is just people being really honest about it being AI, so if it's you that’s one thing if it's your avatar, but if you're using an AI Avatar or virtual assistant, (one of the free ones’ that isn’t you), then say that it is. I'm Laura's AI assistant to help you today with whatever it is and that can be amazing on your website, right, you could have that on your website to talk about, how to use the product or whatever.
Onboarding a new client or if you're a business that needs to train your employees, what a great way to do it, instead of just a whole bunch of slides that they're gonna fall asleep in front of, let's get interactive and yeah!
Exactly. And I do, what I foresee in the future is we all develop our own AI that works for what we need. So we'll all have our own virtual AI assistant. They'll be able to help us with writing, content creation, whatever, video background removal, something, whatever we need. But it'll learn our style, our brand, our voice, our way of doing things, what we need, and that's going to be game-changing, like it's already game-changing right now, everything has shifted. But once we have our very own, more so than the Alexa in our house that we ask to play music and we get to know, even way beyond that it will be a very personal assistant. And that's gonna be yeah, I'm excited about that.
It takes me to that movie where the guy fell in love with the robot, the Android. And it felt so futuristic. I don't know if you know that movie.
That was 1980s Mannequin? Is that the one you’re talking about?
I think so. It feels so futuristic, and here we are, right here in the middle of it all.
Yeah. And I'm sure there's gonna be some stories of people marrying their computers and all kinds of crazy! But what I do want people to know is that technology is always going to come, it's always and it's gonna grow faster than we can ever imagine and it's taking off and understand it, learn about it, don't be afraid of it, try it out, find what you need, find what's going to work for you and improve your life, leave the rest, it's okay. Don't stress about it, but just understand it and know that our kids or grandkids are gonna be having a ball with all of this and they're gonna be able to do incredible things with it. And you just got to understand it, just know about it and don't have fear of it.
I mean, I relate it to driving a car or buying a car, you don't need to understand how the engine works, to drive a car or buy a car, you just need to know what questions to ask and what to look out for. And you just need to have an open mind that it has an engine. And there's people out there who know the ins and outs of it that you can always go to for extra help if you ever need it, or you pass it off to them to manage some aspects of it. So it doesn't need to be an overwhelming thing. And we don't need to live in fear that it's going to take our jobs or any of that. I believe that humanity is such that we've had so many innovations over the centuries, and we've always come out better for it. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Internet itself. I mean, in our own lifetime, we didn't have internet - I remember those days, but I can't imagine those days. And it's just one of those things, just being open minded and open hearted and not having fear around it.
Yeah, and it's just something we have to adapt to because that's really what it is. Because it is a new revolution. This is absolutely a new revolution right now that we're living through. And we're gonna have to adapt to it and things are going to change and shift and might be uncomfortable sometimes. But it's all going to be better for it over time. Absolutely believe it, it’s exciting. It's exciting times. So I'm glad we finally had a conversation about it. We've had plenty of between us, and it is overwhelming to even start talking about I mean, we barely even scratched the surface of what's out there. Hopefully in the show notes, we can put some of the favourites.. the ones that we've been using and tinkered with and there'll be so many more in the next couple of weeks, months, days, probably, because I'm all down this wormhole.
This may not be our last conversation about AI
May not, may not, but hey, we'd love to hear what you're thinking about it like, please reach out, tell us, send us a note and just let us know what you're thinking about AI because we'd love to hear.
Yeah, @Resilient Entrepreneurs on Instagram. Feel free. Let's open up the conversation. Let's get the chat going. Not the ChatGPT, just the chat. Oh my goodness, I'm going to stop.
Thanks partner. We'll talk again soon. Thanks, everyone.
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