In today’s episode we talk all about artificial intelligence and more specifically, Chat GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer).
But before you judge the topic and skip to the next episode, let me set you straight – this isn’t a review of some futuristic, out of reach, or unrecognizable technology.
Chat GPT is (currently) a completely free website that answers questions in a human-like way. To answer the questions it receives, it scans the available information, picks out the most common and relative threads, and gives the outlined information in a conversational manner. However, just like anything else, it has its limitations.
In this episode, we discuss pros, cons and several practical use cases, including:
- What exactly Chat GPT is and what it does (00:00)
- Specific examples of it’s wide range of uses (9:10)
- How we can leverage this as a tool for efficient creativity (28:10) and to check our blindspots (41:00)
- What we should NOT be expecting tech to do for us (48:30)
The most important thing to remember is no matter how intelligent these technologies are, they will never completely replace the human elements of critical thought process, collaboration, and connection.
That’s why we created our new digital community – the Art of Coaching Mighty Network. If you’re someone who’s a lifelong learner, you value feedback, and getting around high level people, make sure to check out this group. We teamed up with mighty networks to create something that would allow people to connect, learn, grow and share at a much higher level. See you there!
Now maybe you’re someone who is ready to move beyond digital and dive deep into training your ability to navigate the dirty, messy realities of life and leadership. If that’s you, The Apprenticeship is exactly what you’re looking for. Check out the entire 2023 schedule, and find the location that best fits you! Our EARLY BIRD PRICING for our South Lake Tahoe, CA Workshop on March 25-26, 2023 ENDS JANUARY 25! It’s approaching quickly, so don’t wait! Sign up HERE today!
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. At some level, we all struggle with unexpected challenges in life. BetterHelp is an accessible, convenient, private, and affordable therapy option to help you look at your problems a little differently, feel less stressed, and gain confidence. Visit BetterHelp.com/AOC for 10% off your first month.
TRANSCRIPT
Brett Bartholomew 00:01
Everybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Coaching Podcast, today’s episode is going to be a little bit different. We’re going to be talking about artificial intelligence and No, not in some kind of futuristic way, we’re going to be talking about it in a very applicable way. Now I know what you might be thinking, well, you know, anytime I hear AI mentioned, it’s always about something that might become cool, or something that might help me how can this apply to me right now, but trust me, because you’re gonna want to stick around for this one. Today, we’re going to be talking about a tool that’s made a lot of headway in the media recently. It’s called Chat GPT. And we’ll put links below all about it. But essentially, it’s capable of understanding and generating human like text, answering questions, providing information on a wide range of topics, and even having conversations with humans. This isn’t like Siri, this isn’t like Alexa. This is something that is really defined as generative AI, and we’ll help you make sense of it. And we’ll help you understand how you can use it in your daily life. It’s a truly impressive feat of technology. And so we’re going to deep dive into some aspects of it, we’re also going to keep it pretty loose. Neither me nor my co host today, Ali Kershner, artificial intelligence experts that said, I have grounded this thing into the earth. I have tried to absolutely me and my neighbor. And I know some of my staff, we have tried to push this thing to the limits, at least well, we know how to use it. But we’re also gonna be talking about the potential future of how you guys can use this, not only now but down the road, because it does have the potential to save you hours and hours and hours. So sit back, don’t relax, but get ready to learn about some stuff that is pretty intriguing. Ali, did I miss anything in terms of setting the tone?
Ali Kershner 01:43
No, I think that was a great introduction. But somebody that might be helpful, it was helpful for me, you might be thinking, chat. GPT is probably like the worst name that they could have come up with, they might not have ran out by the marketing experts before they released it. But if it’s helpful chat GPT as I understand it. Chat, the chat, part of it refers to the fact that it’s essentially a glorified chat bot, like the one that you talk to when you have to deal with customer service on a website, that thing that pops up in the bottom corner, and is able to give you some you know, usually unhelpful responses until you you know, escalate things to talk to a real person. This is like that on steroids. And then the GPT, part of the name stands for generative, like Brett said, pre trained transformer. So if you’re not completely overwhelmed already, hopefully you’re not. But if you are, don’t worry, we’ll we’ll explain everything. But hopefully that that helps in terms of just what the name even means.
Brett Bartholomew 02:42
Yeah, thank you for that. And by the way, this is something that is gained like more than 1 million users in a week, and there’s no app, there’s no nonsense to it, you literally can go on there. And we’re going to talk about a lot of different use cases here. But you can go on there and tell you and tell it to give you a rundown of the Industrial Revolution, you can tell it to write an intro to a podcast, you can tell it to do so many different things. Now, the nice thing is, and we’ll get into this as well, it’s not going to protect or empower the lazy beyond a degree, you know, your it, you are going to be limited in terms of your effectiveness of using it, if you don’t ask thoughtful questions, if you’re not good, about, you know, coming up with a clear goal. And so this is not something despite what and we’ll mention this a little bit more later. Already schools and all kinds of other institutions are trying to ban it, they’re terrified that people are going to use it to write term papers, because it literally can just turn out, you can you can tell it to write three page prose on, you know, blank, any kind of topic that you want, and it will, you know, but the reason I don’t think people need to worry about this so much is, you know, while this is what’s called generative, generative, artificial intelligence, it’s still gonna lack a lot of things. So we’re also going to talk about why something like this, you don’t need to worry, despite all the people that are making YouTube videos about this, this is not going to replace, you know, a people’s need for creativity, basic need for conversational skills, anything like that. Now, that said, you also need to understand this isn’t something that’s like wishy washy and speculative. Microsoft and other companies have invested collectively more than a billion dollars in this a billion dollar. So what we’re going to do, we’ll do a brief overview of it beyond what we’ve touched on here. Some origins of it. More importantly, like why should you care, and mainly because it’s going to give you if you know how to use it, tremendous return on investment in terms of time. I mean, especially from an operations standpoint, my wife and I have already use it to do a lot of stuff. With customer service. We’re experimenting with it in terms of operational efficiency in Art of Coaching. Then we’re going to give you a lot of ideas of use cases. We’re also going to talk about, you know, limitations and the things you need to look out for but We just wanted to create this episode because there’s so much hype about it with YouTube bros right now and so much nonsense on the internet. And like it or not, this type of technology is going to be around. And with the emergence of this something that is so simple that even my father, I mean, and all that Ali go into this, but like, there’s no, there’s no crazy app you need to download, there’s no, the use of it is so simple. It’s ridiculous. So Ali, before we get into kind of the outline, and the structure, is there anything else you kind of wanted to add there?
Ali Kershner 05:29
No, I would just reiterate what you just said, you know, I’m somebody that’s inherently pretty cautious around this type of new technology, I’m, you know, I think we were all smart to be wary of what this could look like, in the future. And there’s definitely a lot of pitfalls and, and scary uses of it already. However, like you said, this is not going anywhere, this is our future. And I think, getting your feet wet by starting to use it and play with it and see how it can help you is the best course of action. Because, you know, just even in my small little experiments that I’ve run on it, you know, it is pretty cool. And it is pretty interesting. And I think that has allowed me to see how there’s always good with the bad. And we’re going to cover both, but um, you know, give it give it a try, even the most reticent of us, myself has has dabbled. So, you know, hopefully that can give you a little bit of, of security in that.
Brett Bartholomew 06:24
Absolutely. So we’re gonna, you know, just so we don’t bore you, we’re not gonna get into the tech underpinnings of it and anything like that, we’re just gonna talk about how you can apply it, you know, and just, it’s funny, if you even type this into Google, right now schools in New York City are banning it, because you can essentially ask this thing in a chat room like format. I mean, it’s as basic as anything to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War. And it’ll turn out a pretty persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds. Now, of course, there’s going to be a lot of loopholes in this right, like nothing is ever going to replace human intelligence. Well, at this stage, at least, you know, in terms of creativity, this is something that, you know, even Lex Friedman and folks like that talk about is, you know, artificial intelligence can do a lot of things in terms of generating information, generating copy generating ideas, but in terms of making what it generates enjoyable to a human, or, you know, making it feel like a human, that stuff’s just not there yet. So there is a big hype video, and I’m not gonna give any, you know, information about that, just because it was somebody looking for a quick buck, they put together a hype video talking about all these things. So you can only imagine all these bros out there thinking that they’re going to be able to use it to create this website and do this, this is not a replacement for creativity, this is something that can just help you kind of get a framework. And and, you know, it can help create some things, here and there. You know, so let’s get into this, right? The origins of this was basically just to try to advance what they would call capabilities of language models, what does that mean to you? It’s like, let’s think of it this way. All right. If you search something, you can get information on it, that’s great. But you know, search can get pretty overwhelming, if you search a detail like and it’s also not generative, in the sense that, let’s say you’re doing a research paper, or you’re trying to research something, and you’re like, Okay, I got a lot of information on this. But I’m trying to figure out how to best outline it, how to best interpret it how to best like, you know, make use of it, you can literally go to this website, and it’s as basic as like typing it into a search bar. And you can ask chat, GPT, you could say, hey, create an outline for information I would need to know to create a great small business model on blank. Cool, it’ll give you something general. Now you’ve got to go down the rabbit hole and ask it this. So just like in life, and human connection, the quality of connection you drive with somebody is in part based on the questions you ask, right? You’re not just going to be able to life isn’t a series of inputs, you’ve got to listen, you’ve got to think critically. And so you can go back and forth to this thing and say, Hey, Chat GPT write me an overview of and we did this with my neighbor, Matt Morrison, who works for Lockheed Martin, write me an overview of, you know, this type of fighter jet. Great. Now tell me how I could sell that in more persuasive language to the Canadian government. Add a little bit more humor to it. You can literally just continue to add here and there but you know, Ali, I’d be interested just based on you messing with it right now. What have you toyed with, whether it’s goofy low level stuff, or if you’ve tried to break the damn thing? What are some things that you’ve done?
Ali Kershner 09:37
Yeah, I think the the use is as you mentioned, range from super practical and timesaving to absolutely ludicrous, and I did have a little fun with it asking like, I literally asked it what are the most creative uses of chat GBT? And I’ve seen everything from and let me speak to the practical first. Yeah, you know, How to you can have it right, the show notes for this podcast episode, you know, transparently, we asked what it would do if we asked it to write the outline for an episode on chat GPT. And obviously, it was very bare bones. But you know, it was interesting to see what it came up with. You can have it right Instagram captions or Twitter threads for you. But I think if we want to speak to some of the more interesting, unique uses of it, I asked it to write a love song to my fiance, I asked it to come up with a dinner idea for me tonight, that was under $15. And then once it did that, I asked it to write me the grocery list that I needed to cook that. And then once I once it did that I asked it to come up with or give me the the exact macronutrient breakdown and the the exact recipe steps. So like you said, it is search without having to scroll through all the extra information it is, you know, albeit one answer, but it is just the answer.
Brett Bartholomew 11:05
Yeah, I think that’s a great way to describe it. And, you know, to give you guys context further, you open this thing up. And it’s literally like a chat. So everybody’s been on websites, where it’s like, I’m gonna chat with this or you bet on you remember, I mean, some of you might remember back in the days of AOL or anything else. But I mean, you don’t even have to worry about that if you open up the internet, and you type something in there. Except this gives you real time information. So literally while Ali was describing that I typed in there I go talk to me about how I could explain your capabilities to aspiring leaders, and how you could make their lives easier. And literally in less than 20 seconds, it said the following. As an AI language model, I’m able to understand and generate human like text, answer questions, provide info on a wide range of topics, and even have conversations with humans. This makes me a valuable resource for aspiring leaders who are looking for information need to delegate tasks or just want somebody to bounce ideas off of it goes on to say, one way I can make the lives of aspiring leaders easier is by assisting with research and gathering information on various topics, especially because these things can be time consuming and tedious. But as AI, I’m also able to quickly and efficiently gather and present relevant information. Finally, it goes on to say I can also assist with tasks such as scheduling, email management, and social media management. And I can serve as a sounding board for ideas. So you know, that’s what I liked about this is, you know, we’re a remote team Ali. And there are times where, you know, I have just felt like because of how much content you put out, I have to put out and we don’t always get to interact and bounce ideas off each other easily. You know, there’s some times where I know last year, I experienced a fair amount of just generative burnout, because I wasn’t able to do all the things I needed to do in the way that I wanted to do them. You know, like, every week, we put out a podcast, we put out new emails and newsletters, like we try to be so generative and so consistent, that there were some times I just wanted to check my blind spots, and there’s so much crap on the internet that I just kind of wanted somebody to bounce ideas off of. And this thing is still far from perfect. I mean, far from the creators of it have basically said tread carefully, you know, like anything, you know, you need to vet your ideas or whatever. But it’s nice, because if I were to say, hey, next week, I’m writing an email on how you know how we can use persuasion in an ethical way to help blank blank blank, instead of just like having to go through 8 million Google articles, which half of it is shit now. Because people just put click bait out there, I can just test my bias by interacting with this thing and see, what am I missing? You know, like, does that does that make sense in terms of one of just the practical ways people can use this thing to kind of check some blind spots? And you know, get some real time feedback and generative ideas?
Ali Kershner 13:56
Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit on the most essential benefit that this has, which is being a teammate to you, someone to collaborate with, when you don’t want to necessarily, you know, take the time of someone else on your staff or your team or you don’t have that. You know, I think it does a couple other things that you mentioned that make it particularly useful in that aspect, which are, it takes the human factor out of what you’re doing. So, you know, and that could be bad, right. But it also takes the extraneous information and wording out if you’re trying to type something. It’s really good at summarizing and shortening content. And I think generally speaking, it helps you accomplish somewhat menial tasks much more efficiently, which maybe gives you more time to be generative in the sense of your creativity. Yeah,
Brett Bartholomew 14:45
I think that’s a great point. And, and before, you know, AI was always presented in such a black box kind of way, right? Like, if people don’t use the language, it’s really accessible. You know, you talk about even to folks like you and I that we really love the nuances of language and communication, you know, when you start talking machine learning, when you start talking AI, previously, we’re just used to so many, like, there’s this huge chasm of things that are really clunky, you know, like Amazon, Alexa is still super clunky in some ways. And then there’s other things that are so complex that I’m like, you know, I would almost have to ask my neighbor Daniel, who has so many years of code and tech base knowledge, this thing was really simple. And and it goes into what we talked about was stuff at Art of Coaching. You know, when we, when we created Art of Coaching, it was like, Alright, how can we cover topics like influence and persuasion and, and all these things that people have either presented in overly kind of sexy, nuanced ways, or other people have made too simplified? How can we find this intersection of things that are science backed, but really applicable and accessible? And I think they’ve done this in this way, too. Like, if you hear terms like machine learning, and you hear terms like artificial intelligence, everything that’s kind of come prior has been like, it’s almost like tried to capitalize too much on this futurist perspective, where this created like, alright, this is something we all know you type in something like a chat, and better yet, like nobody has to have some kind of crazy membership. It’s completely free. That again, we’ll put links below we don’t get any money from those links. And it’s just Well, I think the last thing that I’d say in this context that I like is it doesn’t alleviate your your responsibility to think so all these YouTube videos I watched on it, it’s a lot of bros acting like, Oh, you’re gonna be able to create a million dollar business model, it’s going to be able to do this for you, it’s gonna be able to do this for you. No, no, no, thankfully, the creators of it made it so that like, you still have to do a tremendous amount of legwork, a lot of thinking. And by the way, people are stupid, if they think they’re going to be able to use this thing to write entire papers, or whatever, and that there’s not going to be some regulation. There’s already things now that can search and tell you if the use of it was available. What else just in terms of anything that I said there, or any other thoughts you think are interesting for the audience to know, just right off the bat?
Ali Kershner 17:09
Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I totally agree with you on you. They make it they’ve democratized it a little bit. Now, I will be, you know, I will hedge that by saying that it’s free now. But the CEO, Sam Altman has been very clear that they are eventually going to have to charge for it because it is so expensive to run. I can imagine this system, right. So that’s where I think we can start getting into the, you know, ooh, this might be this might be an interesting philosophical question in the future, because now the rich get richer, right? Because now, people who can afford to pay for a service like this can use it to optimize and become even more efficient. But for now, yes, it is free. And so anyone who wants to use it and play with it has the capability of doing it. And one of the thing I’d add is, I, as we’re speaking, I’m thinking like, no, the biggest question I had when first using it was, where is it getting this information? Right? Like, how, how is it doing this? Because I’m just a curious person. And I think it’s worth mentioning that it is drawing from millions, probably billions of data points from a limited time period. Right? So of human generated content. So it’s like, basically, and I’m sure that I’m getting this part of it wrong. But like, imagine it scanning the entire Internet, from the year of 2020, to 2022. And using all of those bits of data to get an accurate representation of what the right answer might be. So it’s looking at previously written resume, like you want to write your resume is looking at 50 million resumes and pulling out the common threads, you want to write a rap. It’s looking at all the different rap music that’s been written in the last two years. And it’s writing a rap based on those patterns and trends. So you can see right there, it’s interesting, that’s how it’s coming up with it. So inherently, there are going to be flaws, because it’s based on human generated content. However, law of large numbers, it’s probably going to be more accurate than a one off paper. But also, it’s limited in its scope. And so this is an interesting point. If we kind of want to go into the limitations part of of this is that it can’t search the internet, currently. So if you ask it a question about like, what’s the news today? It can’t tell you because it’s only trained on bits of data from a certain time period, I think it goes up to 2021. So be cautious that this is not an ever updating system that’s always knowledgeable about the current thoughts and trends and information and it is limited still in that scope. Is there anything I missed there?
Brett Bartholomew 19:43
No. I mean, I think you touched on a lot of things that it’s tricky too, because when we talk about this, there’s already so much hesitancy and barriers to entry for people to use this stuff just because, you know, we’re all used to just false promises and grandiose things so you know, I thought about even when we got on this episode, I’m like God do I want to talk about out about buyer beware stuff, when most people aren’t even going to try it, you know, and then do or, you know, obviously, we’re not the type that ever just wants to get people hyped about things. I mean, you and I, I think we by and large skew skeptics, you know, and so like, this stuff is exciting and it’s interesting like cross section or or, you know why or to walk? Have you get people hyped about it? How do you speak to it? How do you make sure that people are, you know, but it’s, I just think right now, even just listening, and looking at a lot of the debates, I mean, you guys can type and it’s all one word, chat. And then G as in Greg P, as in Peter, T, as in Tara, you know, on into the internet, and you’ll see things about, oh, my god, universities are banning it and did it at a dare but then you’re seeing some people talk about, well, you know, what is the purpose of certain kinds of academic writing, there isn’t a lot of human nuance in some of that writing, a lot of it can be pretty, you know, straightforward. And I’ll say this, as somebody that’s working on my doctorate, I mean, doing doctoral like, you know, that kind of writing and then trying to also go back to writing my next book, that has been really challenging because the book, you know, you always need to kind of simplify, you have strict, you know, instructions from the publisher, it’s got to be certain amount of pages, you can’t go down certain rabbit holes too much. You know, with academia, you can’t make any assumptions. And in any of this, and so now, there’s this huge chasm of some academics just being like, hey, you know, what, what is the function of academic writing? And what is the function of it, and you start seeing a lot of people have these arguments now. And I think it’s just, it’s too early for people that like, worried beyond a point, like, we’ve lost the ability of society to just sit and listen, you see this like Frankenstein’s monster thing, and everybody immediately, just like everything else in human nature wants you to be for it or against it, can anybody just like chill, and like, and watch and wait and see. And that’s why we decided to do this podcast on it. Because, you know, exposure is an experience, that’s something that we talk about a lot. It’s something I talked about in my first book, conscious coaching, like, good, you owe it to yourself to at least try things, you know, before you make these false judgments about them, and whatever. And so I think you touch on on a lot of important pieces,
Brett Bartholomew 22:16
I want to give somebody, I want to give people just a taste of one way it could be used, right? So and I’m going to be very simplistic in this. So you know, the other day, I was talking to somebody on the phone, about this, and I was trying to help them understand it. And I said, Listen, let’s imagine I just did a podcast on, you know, various bases of power, because a lot of my next book is about power dynamics and things like that. So I asked him a pretty simple question. I said, you know, tell me more about the research of blank and blank in terms of power dynamics, it tells me, I go great, I’ll take this original text, and I took original text that I’d come up with in my book, and I go make this into a Twitter thread. And it did it, it automatically divided made it into a Twitter thread, divided into 280 character segments, added numbers to indicate the order of the tweets. And I said, Great, now turn this into a blog post. Now turn this into something that’s highly shareable on LinkedIn. Now, now, turn this into, you know, a blog post where the average readership age wouldn’t need to be above this level. Now, again, this is what I love about it, then I’ll turn it back to you know, but there’s got to be some and I gotta be judicious about my language. Because what I want to say I can’t, there’s gonna just be some idiots and lazy people that think work will lose things gonna do it perfect. And they’re gonna copy paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, it ain’t that perfect. I mean, this thing is ridiculously good. But even if it was perfect, like, I don’t think you and I really should need to tell people to like, have some self respect. And you should have originality here. Because there’s going to be, you know, more and more in the future, they’re going to be able to parse those things out. But at the same time, I don’t think there’s anything wrong, where if you have some creative burnout, which God knows I had to a degree last year, it’s like, Alright, I know what I want to talk about the process of outlining is so tedious to me, you know, I should be able to just lock and load here until this thing to create an outline and then edit it. Like that’s the benefit. It can help so much if you’re a multi passionate person. That’s juggling a tremendous amount. You don’t have a lot of staff around you, and you’re like brain is burnout. It’s just the point is it’s generative, you still have to do the work.
Ali Kershner 24:33
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think that’s why, you know, I see these schools banning it and I think that’s, that’s maybe the wrong approach. In my view, one, you’re not going to be able to ban it in its entirety to that’s kind of a small minded way of thinking about it. Like what if instead of banning it, teachers think about ways to test their students that maybe require more creative thinking and and synthesis of information in a way that chat GPT can’t do because in reality, it can’t do a lot of things. And also, it’s not always correct. And so I think there’s certain ways where, you know, whether it’s demonstrating original thought, or it’s coming up with, you know, arguments that are, you know, cross referenced in in, you know, who knows, I’m not a teacher. So, well, I am a teacher of some things, but not in a school setting. I think this is going to force us to change in a good way in terms of our creativity, and our problem solving, and our utilization of tools, the same way that we probably had to, we probably had the same freak out, I was a lot younger, when the phone first came down, came out, but like, suddenly, oh, kids having phones in classrooms, and now they can use that as a calculator will give. Like, we all have calculators on our watches in our pockets all the time, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn math.
Brett Bartholomew 25:58
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s a great example. And, you know, like, I, I was typing something else, you just I think it’s funny. People need to explore things, because it’s you have to experience what you want to express. I typed in how could you be useful? The first responders, right, and at first does a great job of just saying, hey, obviously, I’m not able to help people physically. But whether it’s translating languages, providing information, emotional support, and it goes into this stuff, you know, it’ll give you at least an idea of like, oh, this is interesting. And then it just becomes a conversation of saying, elaborate more on this, what do you mean that you can help? In this context, give me an example of that. Okay, now that you’ve given me an example of that go deeper on these four areas. And so I think that that’s, that’s something that I get excited about more than anything, is we spend a lot of time at our at our workshops, teaching people how to ask more thoughtful questions, then how to listen. And so I liked that the barriers around this are still gonna be like, if somebody really wanted to extract it, the gold from it and say, Okay, I want to use this tool to its fullest capability, you still absolutely have to think critically, you have to have some semblance of an idea of what you want it to do. And so it doesn’t remove critical thinking, because that’s when I would get worried about tools like this, we already have people, and we talked about this at our apprenticeship leadership workshop, it’s like, we’re not going to lose so many people, they want to just be told the, you know, the what, you know, and they don’t want to, like focus on the how and get their hands dirty. And I think that, that if we’re talking about, hey, what are the most useful tools for future generations, there are going to be things that absolutely can help with, like, just general cognitive overwhelm, because life gets faster and faster and busier and busier, but at the same time, require you to, to continue to get your hands dirty, and the quality of the information that you get should always to a degree be limited by the quality of the questions that you ask, that is how you create, you know, a future where people are not just passive. Because the more passive people are in terms of the work they put in, the more easy they are to manipulate and the negative context of the word. And that’s when you start seeing just like, humans start to spiral. You know, I think about it, and I’ll turn about to you of like, I was telling my wife today, I was like, you know, what’s scary about this is, there’s already a bunch of idiots out there, you know, all over the internet, pseudo experts, I’m like, this could empower them in a lot of ways, you know, this can empower them a lot of ways. In what ways and this is just free conversation. I know, we didn’t outline this so much, and we’re kind of rolling anyway. What way do you think like, this still won’t help you know, the charlatans out there? Because that’s gonna be stuff that people are gonna everybody can seem like a subject matter expert right now, because there’s so much information, and it’s so fast, and people get duped all the time. You know, but what is some way that you still feel like, Yeah, we don’t really have to worry about that beyond a point. Is there any take on that?
Ali Kershner 28:57
I guess, where my brain goes, is that they they already do that? Like that? Like, there’s actually I would argue that they probably don’t need this tool, because they I mean, they might use it but they’re already the ones that are espousing false information and or, or information that’s not really worth its, you know, its weight. So I think that they are not the probably the people to worry about, I think it’s probably those who are using it for nefarious purposes. Or, you know, I guess Yeah, I think that it’s as simple as if you can see it as a positive and help it make your work more efficient and effective, and allow you to get more work out there, which is the good work, then it’s a great tool for you and you shouldn’t worry about the people who are already putting the work out there. That’s not good.
Brett Bartholomew 29:47
Yeah. No, and I think about in terms of, you know, something that I’ve always found odd that people say to me sometimes when I meet them is, you know, I was interested somebody just said this three months ago, I was interested to see if what you were like in real Life, because I followed you so much online. And I said, Well, you know, what do you mean by that, you know, having an inkling of understanding. And they said what you thought they would say we just a lot of people, they present themselves a certain way online, you know, and then you see them in person, and they’re just super odd conversationally, or, you know, they’re removed from having all the information at their fingertips or just kind of becomes clear that like, there’s this persona, but not much behind it. And so then I just started thinking, you know, and I’m like, Alright, we’ve talked about this a lot, consider what part of people’s jobs could be replaced by or addressed by AI. And I think this has been something that you and all of us at Art of Coaching if a spouse for a long time and something you believe in tremendously not to speak for you. But it’s one of the reasons we hired you, one of the many reasons is like, you believe that everybody should double down on the human side of things, regardless of advancements of technology, because no matter what, like the future still definitely belongs to people that can get their hands dirty. And that’s great if you could use AI to generate all this content and do this and do that. But eventually, like you still get found out like you’re invited to speak or somebody has dinner with you, or, you know, somebody’s around you. Like these things can’t protect pseudo subject matter experts. For the long term. You know, people start to suss that out. Are there any just general thoughts on that?
Ali Kershner 31:16
100 percent, you nailed it, I just like, there’s no substitute for being in person. And, you know, I think that’s why we we love our workshops and find so much value in them. And I’m so thankful that our workshops are protected from, you know, something like this, it truly will never, you know, it, you know, maybe we’ll have a robot attend one of our workshops someday, that would be pretty cool. But um, yeah, the human element is just irreplaceable. And I think that’s why, you know, the All Things come full circle eventually, right. So like, this feels like one of those moments where, okay, like, we’re continuing to double down on the AI, well, then what becomes more important, the human element?
Brett Bartholomew 31:59
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point. And you think about this, in terms of, you know, one of these videos online was talking about, oh, you know, pretty soon this is gonna lead to you won’t even see real people doing videos on YouTube, or whatever, it’ll be, you know, basically AI that, you know, is generated and looks like a human being, and it’s going to talk to you about this and whatever. But the reality is, is nothing’s ever going to fully replace, you know, human connection. And I love how some of these videos too, and they’re intriguing to watch, right? They’re like, pretty soon, and I love their, like, just pretty soon, they’re pretty liberal with that term. Pretty soon, you know, you even be able to have, like, you know, like a partner, and they’ll be able to interact with you with a real person’s like, right now, this thing is a highly sophisticated chat bot. And it can do a lot of things. I mean, I’ve outlined, you know, already, even in terms of our business, I’m like, you know, because we’re a small family owned business. So I did outline okay, how could this be helpful with our newsletter? How could this help be helpful with outlining certain podcast episodes? How could this be helpful with this, but none of it ever, it’s not helpful if you don’t have critical thinking. And so like, just giving some more ideas of what it can do, you know, my neighbor’s used it, to get recipes, summarize books that he might be interested in, explain complex topics, get relationship advice, you know, he did things with code. What did I do last night? You know, some way can
Ali Kershner 33:20
I so I was listening to, I think the daily and the NPR podcast, and they were talking about how people are using it now. In place of therapy, which I do not recommend. But you know, it’s just so funny. Humans are so creative, and the Internet has is still undefeated. When people are basically asking questions like, why am I socially awkward? And what can I do about it? Like, you know, am I a narcissist, if I do X, Y, and Z, and then like, you know, getting emotionless feedback that you might not be getting? Again, you have to know the question to ask it, but I just think that’s absolutely hysterical. And not a use that I would have thought of, but I guess, you know, people are they need they need some help with the, with the relationships, you know, yeah.
Brett Bartholomew 34:10
Well, I mean, I think about that, I think that’s a great point. And, you know, the thing that it really teases out is and we talked about this all the time, the quality of the information you get from it, the responses you get from it are completely dependent on the question the quality of the questions you ask it, you know, people need to get over the fear mongering of like, all this is gonna write, you know, term papers and all this now, no, what it does is it turns it out in the typical like four or five paragraph model, and then is like in summary, and, you know, last night I was even, I’ve been using it to check my blind spots. So I was going back through something that I had written the other day, and I’m like, you know, I’m writing about this. What are some things that I may have missed? And it’s like, Have you thought about this? And then I’m like, Nah, that’s not good. I go, give me some more suggestions based on you know, this topic, go a little deeper down that rabbit hole. And so you know, that’s the thing of like I I’m of the opinion, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. And we’re talking about it as it’s an emergent technology that it’s only going to enhance critical thinking, if people How do I phrase this? You’re only gonna get the most out of it if you apply critical thinking, you know, and that if you think of this skill that like search search today, because if somebody’s like, well, what’s the difference between this and search, and they’re myriad, but I’ll just get into one. Like, you look at what people search, like, if you just open up Google and you start typing the beginning of a question, it shows you what a ton of people search, and it’s just like, like, wait, what, you know, but you’re still gonna get access to a lot of I mean, some good but a lot of trash content. This thing like does make you work for it. Like for probably 45 minutes last night, I just kept asking it more specific, more specific, more specific, you know, questions and going down the route. And then eventually, I got to pull this up on my phone, because I got to see the response it gave me Liz laughed at this, as you can imagine, but gave me this response. Basically, it timed out on me, it basically just said, like, Nah, like, you need to give it a little bit of time, you’ve asked too many questions. And I think that’s important, because the quality of the answers you get, are by and large, dependent on the quality of questions you ask, and this thing if us right will make you work for it. Any thoughts on that?
Ali Kershner 36:25
Well, I think it’s like, I think it’s interesting, because I think we are, by nature, pretty lazy question askers. And so I think this, instead of talking to a human who’s going to be like, you know, they might either speculate or they might just brush you off. If you ask a bad question. Like, this is just not gonna give you a good information. So it like really does kind of show your blind spots as a question asker. Because then you’re like, oh, man, this whole time, I’ve been asking questions this way, I must need to be more specific, or I need to, you know, give more context. When I ask questions, and go figure that’s something that we, we talk a lot about at all of our workshops,
Brett Bartholomew 37:03
no question on on the funny side, you know, just humorous context switching a little bit. I said, please make a song about my wife, Liz and make it sound like a song by Ludacris. And it goes, I’m sorry, but I’m not programmed to create content that is inappropriate or objectifying. I think Ludacris would have issue with that not all the songs are like, it goes, Is there anything else I can help with? Like, okay, well, please make a song about my wife, Liz, and make it sound like a song by Frank Sinatra. And it’s like, yeah, I’m not I’m not programmed to create thing that’s inappropriate or objectifying, like now Frank Sinatra, you know, is objectifying. But then I asked it, I go, you know, write a blog post about the importance of communication for physical therapists, you know, and it goes, alright, well as a PT, and I’m gonna, you know, a paraphrase here. And they’re effective communications and crucial in helping your patients achieve their goals, and recover from injuries or illness, whether it’s building trust, and rapport communication is the foundation of any therapeutic relationship, you know, is setting realistic goals and expectations, it allows you to better understand your patient’s needs, goals and expectations, providing clear instructions in you know, PT involves complex treatment plans with various exercises and techniques, the more clearly you explain these techniques and provide step by step instructions, the better you’re going to be able to help your patients understand. And it goes on and on and on. And one thing that I found is like, I just want to see if it’s helped me, you know, like in terms of any blind spots, because you know, we’ve talked about this before, it can be tricky when when we talk about our focus being communication. And communication is this incredibly complex process that you and I know, and our staff knows, is everything from influence to power dynamics to this and that, but the world is still so used to hearing this described as like, verbal and nonverbal, and I want to be just a better presenter, but, you know, so I’m like, alright, well, where else? Am I missing the boat? And so it’s really interesting to see what this how this thing describes things. And I’m like, you know, tell me why certain professions might think communication is easier than it really is. And it starts going into bias and a lack of self, this stuff that we have put out for years. And so it is, I do, you know, there is some confirmation bias. But I’d also like to hope that it’s also just reflection on some point of, like, critical thinking, you know, it was nice to know, all right, like we’re trying to help people understand, you know, the VAT because as we talked about, you know, we always just say like, miscommunication can be so costly, so costly, like it can ruin your reputation again, we’re always trying to describe it. And this thing by and large is like, yeah, you’re on the right train of thought like this is what makes people uniquely human. There’s tremendous bias. Most people think they’re already good at it. Here’s how you can address it if you try to workshop based on role playing and I’m like, Yeah, chat GPT I have and it’s like, well, have you done this with video reviews? And I’m like, done that as well. So now then all of a So I have to like, unplug, because I’m like, I’m talking way too much to a computer right now. But just to turn it back to you, you know whether you want to provide an example of something Quixotic and goofy, or you know, anything else that you’ve used to try to break this thing, what are some other potential use cases that our listeners could like, get off right now? And go try and do?
Ali Kershner 40:20
Yeah, I just searched Give me your best dad joke. Because obviously, I’m a fan of the dad jokes. This was a good one. In my opinion, why was the tomato blushing? Brett? Why? Because it saw that salad dressing. So I mean, I know I think that I think we’ve we’ve covered a lot. You know, I think from the helpful to the bizarre, and everything in between. You know, I think that it’s worth noting that I asked it, some questions, some ethical consideration questions, which I found fascinating one being really who owns what is created by chat GPT. And it said, quote, any content that is generated using chat GPT, or any other language model belongs to the person or entity that created it is the responsibility of that person, or entity using the language model to ensure that they have the necessary rights and permissions to use any content generated by the language model. And then I also asked Do we need to cite when we use chat GPT. And it said, it would generally be considered plagiarism if you use the content generated by ChatGPT without proper attribution? So that’s interesting, because that, to me, those are slightly different answers. So I’d be curious how that kind of gets worked out as as the the language model continues to evolve. And the last piece is, you know, a lot of people not to end on a heavy note. But a lot of people use AI and this kind of tool for pretty bad things. And they ask it to do and for information on various nefarious concepts and topics and whatever they are interested in. And that’s part of the reason why they’re, they’re putting it out to the public as they are right now. Because they want to see, it’s a research project to see how people will try to use it in bad ways so that they can further increase the security and the moderation of the content that the chat bot gives back. So I found that super interesting and helpful to know, and hopefully, that helps anybody that’s thinking about using it.
Brett Bartholomew 42:37
Yeah, no, I think that’s a good point, I will say that I have lied to that. There are certain things that just won’t answer. And it’s like, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna answer that. I’m not going to talk to that. And that’s like, stuff that’s like, super inappropriate, you know. And also, there’s been some information and this stuff is just coming out daily, guys. So we’re trying to give you you know, we’re trying to find this sweet spot. And we’re going to end here soon. Like, what is enough for you to try it? Because we definitely believe you know, you should make up your own mind. But there’s so much coming out. You know, I put on Twitter a couple of days ago, just like, hey, all these pseudo geniuses out here that think they’re getting away with something, just watch, there is going to be something that retroactively that will tell you, if you know if you use chat GPT to generate this. And this is why schools are freaking out. But it does say that they plan on changing it, the company that created open AI, is going to use a watermark type feature, you know that they will use some kind of cryptographic watermark that can make it easier to catch chatGPT generated content. And all this I just like I get, of course those things should be done. But here’s the tricky thing, right? is, let’s say somebody uses it to write a paper or whatever, but they only use it, like 20% of it. And mainly the way that it was generative in that 20% was helping somebody outline it. But other than that the prose that they use was cited, it was them, whatever, that becomes a whole nother discussion of is that wrong? You know, like, because I don’t think as somebody that’s like, Alright, I got my undergrad degree, I got my master’s degree, I’m working on my doctorate.
Brett Bartholomew 44:13
There is some reality that like, there’s not always great guidance, when you look on the internet for something or when you even ask a professor for something or whatever. And so, you know, me personally, I don’t think it’s wrong. If somebody’s like, Hey, I’m doing a paper on the mating rituals of zebras, could you give me a possible structure for it? Right, and somebody uses that as generative. Again, to get an idea, you know, like, to me that a bat, like you’re just getting an idea for this thing, you know, and now like, it’s up to you to do the writing and all that now, it’s completely different. If it’s like, you know, give me give me an idea of what a paper on the mating rituals of zebras is and write this out and make it sound like it’s the tone of you know, this and this and this, okay, now you’re not doing the work, but then you’re gonna have to wonder this higher ed or anything else gonna have to say hey, 20% of this was generated by chat GPT, or whatever it is sticky wicket? And then you’re just going to have to wonder, well, what things do we let go of? Because I think you and I can probably agree that, you know, you’re never going to be able to police, you know, emergent technology constantly. And I think this is what’s so nice about like us having a business and the human element. People can’t fake the face to face beyond a point. You know, that’s, you know, it’s just not going to be replaced. But I think that it’s good, like, let’s let this thing break some conventions for a while, and let’s let some charlatans like think they’re not gonna get found out. And then let’s watch that crumble, you know, because I think that it’ll only be good on the long end of saying, like, All right, here, here are people that have been and this is also why we urge people like, share information, like people that have been part of our coalition and everything, right? We tell them quit sitting on your ass and get out there because like, let’s say you put out a tweet today. And five years from now, it’s like, oh, this tweet by Ali Kershner, regenerated by chat GPT. Well, sorry, Ali, but you’re given the benefit of the doubt, because you’ve got a lot of years of creating content, who cares if you use it to help structure a tweet? And by the way, that’s not bad. If that’s an extension of your original idea and the quality of the questions you asked.
Ali Kershner 46:15
Right? Yeah, like, are we even gonna care about that in the future? I don’t know. And I think that’s the last thing I wanted to say is, you know, that the time of this recording is January 2023, I am going to be fascinated to listen back on this episode a year from now, and see two years from now five years now and see where we’re at and where we were right where we were wrong. You know, how these things emerged? Because, you know, like, as technology moves this quickly, we’re bound to have made a fool of ourselves on this podcast, even in terms of the way we’re talking about it, and what we’re going to know in the future. So um, that’s, that’s the whole point of it. And that’s why I’m excited to be recording this as sort of a time capsule for the future. Yeah,
Brett Bartholomew 46:57
no doubt. And like, I’ll tell you that I’d rather I think you might be the same old enough not to speak for you, I’d much rather be like, be made a fool of in this context of exploring a new idea than just burying my head in the sand and being like, Oh, it doesn’t exist, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and I think I’m also just excited by the fact that like, you know, this should not scare anybody that thinks a bunch of subject matter experts, or sorry, non subject matter experts are just going to rise up and take over even more and whatever. Like, if anything, it’s guys, it’s still going to do the opposite. You’ve got to deliver, you’ve got to deliver even if you wanted this thing to generate a two day workshop content on this, and this and this, sorry, holograms aren’t presenting that for you. And I think that’s something that always fires us up. And why I love working with you so much as you have that adversity drive, that literally somebody let’s say somebody wants to compete with us. And they’re like, well give me content on all the things that art of coaching talks about and make it better and do this and do this. Sorry, folks, you still got to deliver it, you still got to show up for people, you we still live in a world that is uniquely very much human. And that is something you can’t reproduce, you want the final word.
Ali Kershner 48:07
Nah, I’m good. I feel like this has been a great episode. And like I said, I’m excited to see how people use it, how it grows, how it develops, how it can help us and save some time, make us more efficient. And you know, I’ve been missing a little invisible friends. So call my little friend chatty over here, ChatGPT.
Brett Bartholomew 48:31
Yo, and guys, if you want to discuss this more, we’re going to be doing this in our private community, you can go to artofcoaching.com/community, we’re going to be talking about this a lot more. It’s a way that remember, nothing ever will replace interaction with real humans sharing all their flawed ideas. But you know, you cannot replace community. You can replace chat and all these other things, but you can’t replace community. So go to artofcoaching.com/community. You can also go to artofcoaching.com/coalition. These are places where we collaborate. We’re able to connect, we’re able to discuss ideas that are big and small that can impact us now and in the future. We’d love to learn more about all of you and what you’re working on. And most importantly, we’d love to collaborate and connect. So for myself, Ali Kershner and the rest of us at Art of Coaching. Thank you for listening. We’ll talk to you soon
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