How to use the robots to be more human

In 2016, I built a pitch deck for an AI chatbot company.

I was not the founder. The founder was my client.

I was a Creative Director for an ad agency. The founder’s company was changing how people looked at finance with a robust artificial intelligence chatbot.

This was some really cool stuff—imagine being able to just ask your phone how much you need to save every month to pay off your student loans in three years, and it just tells you instead of you having to figure that out.

I remember these guys telling me how much work it took to make the bot feel human, but to also give accurate answers in real time. The layers of logic was more than I could digest. Still, it wasn’t truly capable of conversations—the bot had lanes to steer the conversations and thousands of predetermined answers.

This week, a new service launched in beta that is truly conversational, and it’s open to the world. What used to take a very dedicated team hundreds of hours to refine is packaged and ready to be applied quickly to any industry. Heck, you can try it for free right now. While techies are excited (this has to be the first time artificial intelligence has been interviewed by a major magazine), the rest of the world seems to be freaking out.

I get it. The question for many isn’t what can it do? It’s:

Whatever it is, it just changed the world.

You can either lean in, or get left behind.

Innovation always inspires fear

I think this technology could be dangerous if misused, and I’m not talking about kids using it for schoolwork. The United States has battled bot misinformation with just plain-ol’ dumb bots in the last few major elections.* Those bots just spewed content one direction by posting, but what would happen if these accounts were able to have real-time conversations? OpenAI currently has safe guards for its tools like DALL-E (image creation) and ChatGPT (chat bot), which I hope to see maintained.

This always happens with innovation.

When the printing press was created, some protested the device because it was going to put the monks transcribing literature out of work and would create information overload.

When radio came about, it was predicted that it would make men lazy, as they wouldn’t have to read. (Funny enough, I’m now able to read more with the help of audiobooks.)

It was feared that televisions would disrupt wholesome family time (OK, that part may have been accurate.)

The same goes on and on for the Internet, Google, smart phones, etc.

The thing we should all remember is while the concerns may even be valid, the technological evolution always wins. Mankind will choose convenience and speed every time.

And we should.

There will certainly be a wave of lazy adoption of this technology. We’re already seeing content creators writing LinkedIn posts and drafting blogs with OpenAI’s tools. I say let them—they’re watering down their own content and the gap between those who can create and those who can’t will widen. We are already so oversaturated with content, that it’s unlikely that artificial intelligence is going to craft something incredibly nuanced—the system is after all literally combing what’s already been done to answer your queries.

The value of this technology is more similar to the invention of the calculator. Who needs a sheet of paper and long division anymore? Sure, it may be nice to know in the weird instance you don’t have a phone, computer, tablet or some other chat bot within arms reach, I guess? But at the end of the day, the calculator is a tool that helped us get to the right answer faster.

That is how we should look at AI tools.

It’s not stealing humanity, it’s streamlining it

I started using OpenAI’s ChatGPT a week ago. I have cut my Google searches down by 90%, because Google just takes longer. This technology helps me get the answer faster, without having to search through page after page of ads and various links. I can expedite research with OpenAI. Likewise, the tool is amazing at condensing down longform copy. I can feed it an entire Substack post and ask it for a tweet to share it—and it does, magnificently.

The smartest creators and companies will find ways to streamline monotonous tasks and yes, it may end up nearly wiping out entire departments within the next few years. This tool could replace most of what a customer service rep does with emails, social media replies and I’m sure soon, phone calls. The conversational aspect of the tech is so good, we’ll see it start popping up in other useful fashions. In fact, my company is launching a product with AI. It’s likely already live at the time of publishing this (you’ll have to download the GoWild app and see if you can find it in action—I’m not ready to announce it).

If you’re smart, you will harness the power of this new tool to remove your redundant work (research, customer service, or code checks, for example). This frees you to use your time and brainpower for challenges and tasks that have higher return on investment and, quite frankly, more job joy. This is my hopes for education, too. Hopefully this is the time we decided to stop forcing our children to memorize random dates and facts, and bolstered our efforts to teach real critical thinking.

And finally, I want to reinforce that whenever you become tempted to tell your story or your company’s story with AI content, remember, the best content is always interesting because it’s different. AI content is literally built on what’s already been done. For a while more, standing out will still take a human touch.

Could AI have thought of Liquid Death Mountain Water as a brand? No—that took human creativity. I think creative AI will come. You can see elements of that coming about in the photo apps that are going viral right now, or OpenAI’s DALL-E.

Don’t resist our generation’s printing press. But also, make sure you’re not just copying what’s already been done.

Will you become more robotic by simply copy and pasting this mindless AI content, or will you use it to free up your time to be more human?

3 ways I’m utilizing AI for myself and my company

1) Instant research and ideation

When I used to ghost write for companies, the research was where most of the work was because writing isn’t hard, thinking is. If you can use AI to quickly source your content topics, you can spend more time making the piece creative and of good quality. Try using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to ask for “5 weird facts about [YOUR PRODUCT]” or asking the chatbot for things people don’t realize about your audience. Do this until you find something that piques your interest, then expand on it with a human touch.

2) Condensing dense subjects

People have often asked me how I can write such punchy hooks for my LinkedIn posts. The truth? I’ve written for Twitter since 2009 for dozens of brands and have a lot of practice at chopping content fast. Most people don’t, though, and this task is hard. As the saying goes, “I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn’t have the time.” You don’t need time now—you need OpenAI. Use it.

3) Aggregating answers fast

GoWild is introducing this technology into our platform, first simply using the API as it stands, but we’ll be training it on our own content soon to help answer FAQs. This is where this technology is going to eat the world, and it will be for good. We all hate waiting on customer service to get back to us, for example. This bot is your team’s magic bullet for expediting brand interactions. Act now to be a first mover and to make an impact with your customer base.

Who I’m listening to: Casper Allen

What I’m reading: “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson

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*For a well-documented read on how bots have impacted our elections, read Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy