Ep 53 - AI Playground: Discovering Creative and Strategic Uses
Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!
Episode 53 - AI Playground: Discovering Creative and Strategic Uses Podcast and Video Transcript
[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]
Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to episode 53 of Enterprising Minds Podcast. We have Alex, Dave here today and coming off of one of our last episodes where since on the show. We figured we would do a little episode on what we're calling AI playground. Show title would be different by the time you're listening to this.
But you know, there are a number of things with AI that I've experienced, you know, talking at a local university here getting some context around where other people are with their AI journeys and, and how they're using it. And then. Alex, you know, I know you've been playing around with different use cases, you know, certain things that I wouldn't even think of doing and a podcast that you shared.
So I'll kick it over to you and you can pick one of the three, and we will, we'll go from there. So, all right,
Alex Pokorny: let's start with something a little bit different.
Exploring AI for Fun and Recreation
Alex Pokorny: Let's start with using AI for fun. Something more recreational. I mean, we talk about AI for work all the time, but there's really good points that were brought up.
One by Ethan Nik, if you know the, the Warren professor. Mm-hmm. Very prevalent on LinkedIn about AI use cases. Dumbs it down really well. He's a great guy to follow. But he was talking about basically is like, you know, to really understand it. Try using it for 10 hours with your day-to-day work. Right.
And you'll start to see what the limitations are, where it works and where it really doesn't work and stuff like that. So I think that that's kind of fun. The other piece about it, I think is when you play around with these tools, you start to get a feel for, I. Oh, it has the tendency to do that, you know, or it's, yeah, it's good here, but it forgets this, like, its memory is definitely questionable.
You know, stuff like that. Mm-hmm.
Text-Based RPG Games with AI
Alex Pokorny: So for fun, I've, over the last, actually, I don't know, six, eight months now been doing different text-based RPG games with chat GBT. I've got a a plus license, but you can do it with a free version as well. There's a ton of gpt out there. Search for Harry Potter, search for Cyberpunk.
2077 das X. Borderlands, Pokemon, whatever, you know, theme show you or whatever you can think of, right? Star Wars, star Trek there's a GBT out there where you can say, okay, you're the next captain on a star ship and here's the scenario and it will come up with a story and craft it. And then you make decisions on that and it kind of goes back and forth.
Realism and Challenges in AI RPGs
Alex Pokorny: Or you can make it, and this is actually a point of problem I actually have with it. You could make it do more of an RPG element of like. In a way of like a dice roll kind of randomization aspect to it of, you know, did, did the shot land? You know, did you hit the enemy or did the enemy hit you? Or how critical of a hit did you take?
It really struggles with not letting you win all the time. I had it once it was supposed to be outta 20 and 11 or higher on a roll would, would be a success. One through 10 would be a fail, and it's supposed to be randomized here, kind of on that. There's a couple small things, but I did 30 in a row and apparently I won every single time.
So I called it out. I was like, Hey, I'm winning too much. And it was like, oh, we'll be realistic now. No, kept, kept doing it. Even set up like different GPTs trying to ask it about like, you know, how do I make this thing more real? Right. It really likes to allow you to, but it can be super fun descriptive.
You can take it in weird random ways. I mean, like a cyberpunk version of Harry Potter wants, just because it's like, let's, let's throw some like robots in this. And it worked. You know, it, it was really fun actually. It was really fun to play around with and it was cool to see the different tools.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I have to admit, this is an entire genre of things that I did not know existed until I started talking with you and Ruthie.
There's tons, man. Oh yeah. Like, no, I, I've played around with what, what you guys do, but it it, it's funny 'cause I look at it and it's like. Oh man, I have to read like,
Alex Pokorny: no, that, that, that is a big element of it. And I, I, I read fairly quickly and I, I don't mind that I enjoy it. Right. Coming up with like, you know, descriptive replies and stuff like that is I, I find fun coming up with novel approaches, like it gives you three options and you're like, nah, option or four, which actually, this is a funny one.
I've always wondered this with the Star Wars movies and why they don't do it. And I had a character do it and it was just like absolutely dominating the story because of it. You have an enemy with a dual-sided lightsaber and you have ability to press buttons, you know, in the air telekinesis. So why don't you just turn on the lights saber when it's facing their head
and then like four texts in a row of that. It was just like, and done and done and done. Alright, moving on. Just like, come on, just hit their start button and. Story's done.
Dave Dougherty: That is a good point actually. I mean, well, 'cause you wouldn't have any movies if you
Alex Pokorny: Oh, I know. It'd be Insta Kill because basically it's like every once in a while they're flipping around this dual-sided lights saber, and they're like, how did you not take out your own hips by doing that?
That little spin move. Oh, you had it turned off. Let's turn it back out.
Dave Dougherty: Right. Or if you're like in the shadows, you just turn it on while they're walking and you take out their legs. Right, like
Alex Pokorny: based on their leg. Right, exactly. They're stumbling on the ground. What,
okay. There was one other interesting one. And I know you, you, you had a chance to play around with it too as a prompt.
World War II Strategy Game with AI
Alex Pokorny: They created and I think it was kind of an interesting self-realization, actually aspect out of it, out of a, a game which was this World War II prompt. Mm-hmm. So I ask it of saying I wanna be a World War II Sergeant, and knowing or is realistic that even if you have successful tactics, you still have losses, like right, it.
It's not easy, actually, that's true of today. Even like give 50, 50% casualty rate for fire events. Like, it's, it's really, really bad. Mm-hmm. Anybody start shooting, you know, just doesn't go well of like, and then I'll, I'll attempt different tactics give me a scenario and then, you know, review my actic and show me alternatives that I should be using and stuff like that.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: And I, I dunno, you had a chance to play around with it too, but what was your, what was your quick impression of it? Like.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So I think, you know, as it relates to a, a business and marketing podcast, I found the strategy piece of it really interesting and a good reminder of, if you know the subject well, it can go a lot easier.
Mm-hmm. So being a history person, it gave me. It gave me the scenario of trying to clear out the hedge rows on D-Day. Yep. Right. So it was like, okay, that, that particular thing was, I, I know, I know what the Army did 'cause you know, I like history stuff. That's for both. Sure. So I said, Hey, flank 'em in the hedgerows.
Stay quiet until so and so throws a grenade at the machine gun nest. Sure. And then once the grenade goes off, open fire. Smart. And to your point EV what was interesting to me is it was like, Hey, somebody started firing early and because of that they got wounded. Mm-hmm. You know, you have one KIA, but you took out.
All eight of the, the enemy or whatever. So yeah, the having the costs of your decisions be readily apparent is very interesting because, you know, in real life Yeah, of course the obvious that, that's just sort of an obvious thing. I have to send these people into danger if you're, you know, a military advisor or whatever.
Right? Yep. That is in stark different it compared to my normal day-to-day that is very different where I don't know that many people are thinking of, you know, what are the immediate impacts if I choose to do a TikTok strategy or, you know, what could be the negative brand impacts of this particular campaign.
It's just, well, let's just try it and go. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, it's lower stakes obviously, obviously, but
yeah, having both the good and, and the bad to have to try to deal with straight away was, was an interesting thing to have to deal with. So I enjoyed it. I don't know that I could do it for, for very long, but it did get my, my mind going where it was. Okay, if you. If you had multiple scenarios like Black Hawk Down or Sure.
You bet. The, one of the, what was it? It was recently like the 75th anniversary or something. I have the, the, the timing wrong probably, but of like the Vietnam extraction. And that really famous photo of the helicopter taking off from the, the embassy. So it would be interesting to, if you're interested in strategy to play around with those types of things.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Well, one realization I had, speaking of like the consequences aspect was
Dave Dougherty: mm-hmm.
Alex Pokorny: I played numerous, you know, world War II video games, call of Duty was, you know, in that right? I mean, a lot of those early video games were. And then there's actually a, a stat out there now that there is more hours of movie hours of D-Day.
Than there were hours, you know, more than 24. Like there's so many hours footage now because it's been portrayed so many different ways. Right? But with a movie, you're along for the ride. It's an extremely linear path that you don't make any decisions on. You're sitting and you're watching. In a video game, it's actually pretty similar because there's a tutorial, there's like one route you can go.
You run down the one route, you encounter the same enemies in the same spot. If you play the game 10 times in a row. Same scenario, right? The second time you play through, you know exactly where they are. So it, there's this feeling of like, you can always restart or you can always, you know, fail, but fail isn't such a bad deal.
You can, it's just a game given a blank scenario and just told to go. Yeah. Is so radically different than these very linear path or along for the ride kind of experiences.
Leadership and Decision Making in AI
Alex Pokorny: And again, if we actually wanna talk about like more of a business leadership aspect, it does actually get you more in the mindset of this is leadership, this isn't following.
This is leading. You have to, it's an open field and you gotta figure out how on earth you're gonna deal with it. And I, I just thought that was kind of fascinating because it, it was such a mind blowing like little like moment to understand like, my gosh, all these other experiences were just, you know, I was led along in straight line, you know?
Mm-hmm. And this one was, you're probably gonna fail. And this is the rough scenario and things aren't good. Right, go.
Dave Dougherty: Well, and you can see how, if you're really, if you're uncomfortable with this idea of, oh my God, I don't know what the best decision to make is. Right? Yeah. Yep. I was having a number of conversations with people around you know, we're data led decision making and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, okay, but here's, here's the problem with that. Right. That only ever tells you what worked in the past. Yep, that's true. And if you actually wanna do something cool, you wanna do something interesting and unique, you have to take a chance. Yeah. And I have. Met so many people that are so afraid of making a decision like that because for their entire career they've been told, look at Google Analytics, or look at Adobe Analytics, or whatever other analytics that you have to make, you know, de-risk your decision making so much that everybody feels comfortable.
Whereas true leadership is, I'm gonna make the best decision with the information I have right now. We'll move forward. Yep. Right, and I think we mentioned this in a different podcast. It's the, it's the differentiation between a leader and a manager, right? Yeah. At least in my mind.
Alex Pokorny: No, that's
Dave Dougherty: absolutely
Alex Pokorny: it.
There's actually, I mean, two real world examples of that. I know the guy at A A RP who did it, but Wall Street Journal is the second example of organizations who are in a very, very different track who decided to suddenly get into online games and it saved basically the business or took the business in a whole different direction.
If you think of all the different newspapers and news outlets that have gone down over the years, wall Street Journal stands out as one who's actually profiting and why. Is because of their games, the world and all the other ones that they have. Yeah. New York Times like that. Yeah. Yeah. Such high revenue that it, it has allowed them to exist and to.
Build a RP did the same thing because they realized that basically a lot of retirees were looking for free online games 'cause they're bored at home on a computer and that's what they're looking for. And there were so many searches for it that this guy decided from an SES thing. He pitched it hard and he decided to pivot and they became ranking number one for free.
It was like free online games or something like that. So, massive term, tons of volume and not surprisingly, huge effect on membership signups. Basically turn the company a whole different direction. Right. But the thing is, in both of those stories, those are organizations that had nothing to do with those pivots, and those pivots were massive for their future.
Yeah. The data of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, doesn't matter what the publication was about, their articles and whatever the hot article was, right. Nothing to do with video games and suddenly they decided to go in a different direction and allowed them to weather the storm that was, you know, basically online membership, paywalls and all the rest of that.
That has crushed so many others. Right. It's, yeah, it is that open scenario and coming over the novel approach and saying, okay, that's our past doesn't mean it's gotta be a future.
Dave Dougherty: Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So.
AI in Business and Marketing
Dave Dougherty: Around decision making, right? Yeah. And, and around the context of decision making. I know for me, one of the more invigorating things that I've done recently over April was I gave two different lectures at the University of St. Thomas here in town in St. Paul. Full disclosure, Alex and I are both alumni.
Different programs, but you know, so I was there and one of the talks was around AI and they had three different people do TED Talk style talks. And then there was a panel at the, at the end so that it was really interesting to see not only what the other speakers were doing for their organizations, but then also to hear the crowd, you know, ask their questions and it was a mix of students and alumni and then some other, you know, professors and stuff that were, that were there. So it was interesting to see how some of 'em are. Some people were asking questions along the lines of, you know, well here's what I do for this, and is it good enough to, you know, do this work?
It's like, don't wait, don't wait until it's, it's good enough. Because honestly, I think you can do 80% of what you, I think is hard or really mundane and gross with the AI that's available now, you know, and that was kind of my main message was, you know, the use cases for AI is, right in front of you.
It is, there's a, there's an old, you know, agile methodology thing that has come up in every workshop for agile project management that I've been a part of, right? Where it's the take your day, list out all of the activities that you do in that day, starting from wake up, get out of bed, do a time estimation, you know, around those things.
And then for all of those. You know, you can do the same exercise for what, what could be handled by ai? Is it writing the email to your boss? Is it you know, performance review stuff where you're uncomfortable talking to you about yourself, but you know what you did that year? You know what I mean? All of those things are, are readily available with whatever AI you have access to in, you know, your company, your organization. Now, if you're on your own and you can play around with it like, like we do, 'cause through, you know, personal subscriptions or whatever, great. You can be ahead of the game then, because then you can, you know, discover things.
But I found that context really interesting just to see where everybody else was. And I think you, you shared with me you had a similar experience listening to a podcast you frequent. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: Er Manliness, who's a it's a random name, but fantastic interviewer for basically different authors and kinda subject matter experts.
He had Ethan Monik who I had mentioned before from mm-hmm. Warden. I know he also did some stuff with Harvard. He's got a lot of videos out there too. Yeah, so if you're looking for, yeah, Ethan M-O-L-L-I-C-K, Molik, I guess his last name. Yeah, he, he was great because the, the podcast was talking about like getting into AI of how do I start, I.
Why, like is it scary? Is it not? And then talking about also about like education. They're both writers. Mm-hmm. They both are authors and how you got a thing that's really good at writing, like do you feel threatened by that or how do you use it? Right. And it really does get to the point of you are augmenting in a, enhancing an individual.
You're not replacing an individual. Right. Right. You may have the, the basics, which he had a really good point because he teaches an entrepreneurship class. Actually, I. Of, let's say you're a small business owner. I mean, going back to some of our, like the recent freelance episodes too, covers this, but it's true in any job really.
You have so many different things that are being asked of you. Maybe it's managing people, putting together a budgets, forecasting, reporting. I mean, just writing emails, writing meeting agendas, coming up with summaries and synopsis. I mean, there's tons of different things that you're asked to do every day of every week, and you're only good at some of them.
And it would be really nice if you could get some help with those other ones too. So that, that was one of their main points was like, you know, there's always parts to every person's job that they enjoy and other parts where they don't or they're good at. And.
Reassurance in AI Knowledge
Alex Pokorny: They're not so good at. And either you want some help to kind of help boost yourself up or even help in a way almost replace in that area.
It doesn't replace you overall, but it, it's an augmenting thing. But yeah, to your point about like knowledge status, that sort of thing, it, it was. It was oddly reassuring. I mean, definitely learned a few things in the podcast, but it was oddly reassuring of how many different topics that we've talked about of how AI is created, where it comes from, how it thinks, the limitations to it, all those different things was something I was familiar with already, and it, it was very nice to be in at least feeling like I'm in an area of, at least I'm slightly above average.
You know, I'm, I can't say I'm an expert by any chance or any stretch, but at least. I'm on the ball at least. Right. And I think that's important too, of like trying to keep on top of it.
AI's Rapid Improvement
Alex Pokorny: There is a different podcast we're talking about. It was the product owner chief product owner of O of OpenAI, and he had mentioned this quote.
I just love that the idea of it is the AI model that you're using today is the worst one that you will ever use. Mm. So if it can't do something right now, that's actually good. Because that means you're a little bit ahead of where it's at, and you'll eventually be ready for when it is now able to help you with that task and Right.
You know, you'll be able to turn that into, so maybe you had a business idea or creative idea and it wasn't able to help you and had a bunch of errors. I forgot a whole bunch of stuff. The memory was bad, you know, you kept having to repeat yourself and it made up stuff. Try it again today and try it again in a couple months and it'll be better and better.
I just had that experience actually today. I was doing some light programming development Google ads scripts, and I had so many struggles three months ago with the latest model of GBT. Of doing debugging and it was awful. I mean, I spent like eight hours and it kept just mm-hmm. Coming up with stuff that didn't exist.
I tried it today doing this model. It was fantastic. I made this thing so complex. I. And I was able to tweak it, customize it. Customize it again, debug it properly. Right. It, it was so, so much smoother of an experience than what I had three months ago. That three months ago I said I kind of wrote off CBT being able to help me do programming today.
I changed my mind because just the latest model.
Dave Dougherty: Right? Right. Yeah. And that goes to show you have to continually. Test these things and, and keep coming back to 'em. Like, you definitely want to be familiar. Like pick one, like if you haven't started yet and you, and you're unfamiliar, pick one and get familiar with it.
Learn that because then what you learn there will then go to, you know, other things.
Practical Uses of AI Tools
Dave Dougherty: So I know for me, I've been using Notebook LM with Google a lot lately just to get a whole bunch of sources together. You know, it, it allows you to, it's basically a study tool. And so like I have all, I have 51 episodes from, from this in one notebook to ask questions about the different episodes.
Like where did we talk about these topics? Or sure. You know, who brings up analytical stuff more than anybody else? I can query those things and instead of having to go through all 51 episodes again, right, and spend that what. Over two days of listening to us talk about stuff. Oh, you know, I can pick that stuff.
I can pick that stuff up and get a generally good idea.
AI in Public Speaking and Business
Dave Dougherty: Another thing that I did with it recently was I have a number of thought leaders and YouTube presentations, you know, TED talks or talks at universities that I like continually go back to. And so I put all of those in a notebook LM as the sources, and then I said, Hey, I want to get better as a public speaker, but I also, I want to incorporate different elements of these, you know, thought leaders into how I present myself.
Like what are the things that make them unique? Where do they overlap? What are the topics, you know, in these things that go, 'cause I'm just trying to figure out like, why, why do these guys resonate with me so much? Right? What is it about each of them that, that stands out to me? So that I can either learn from that or leverage that in my own presentations.
And that was actually really fascinating as a, as a help because I, I'm really familiar with these presentations. But to then play around with the ideas or the way in which they present, you know, get a kind of style guide from that, right? Because there's so much of that that you kind of intuit as a human being.
You don't really think about it, right? So-and-so's more disheveled, this person's really upfront and like, kind of aggressive or, you know you feel those things, but then when you have to actually explain 'em, it's a little harder, right? I know from my own, like work side one of the things that I struggle with is creating a business case around a good idea for, to convince other people that my idea is a good idea.
I could, as like a creative person, I'm just like, well, yeah, it's a good idea. We should just go do it. Sure. And that doesn't necessarily fly right? Like this. So I went and I just said, Hey, you know what? Help me, help me think through the business case for you know, sending me to this country to do these things.
And it was great. Within the afternoon, not only did I have a draft business case for it, I also had a tentative schedule for a workshop, you know, for the whole trip. Like and then I was able to say, Hey, okay. Based on the decision makers push back on this presentation on why they shouldn't agree to this.
Sure. And then I was able to work through those things as well. So that was, that was really helpful. 'cause otherwise I was sitting there going, man. I've maybe done this once and it was a long time ago, and I don't have that document and I don't, you know, like Sure. You can just spin so quick with that instead of just going, alright, help me, help me do this.
Yeah. You know?
Alex Pokorny: And getting those other perspectives. I mean, that really helps. Yeah. I mean, just the, there's always the practicalities of things that you kind of, it's easy to get focused on the vision and lost in it and ignore all the other little things that reality, I'm totally guilty of that as a human being.
It's also, it's a mix to a team that's required. Right. Right. You can't have all pragmatic people and you can't have all optimistic people. You can't have all, I mean, you need that mix to actually have a team move forward. So, and that's why this podcast works so
Dave Dougherty: well. Different personalities, man. It helps.
Yeah. So I think the, the kind of, the takeaway, at least with this for me was, well it was, there's a quote from Professor Galloway, who I'm a fan of and his work and stuff, but this isn't necessarily his line. But he says it a lot, so that's why I'm attributing to him. But you know, nothing is really ever as good or as bad as you think it is.
Right. And that was definitely kind of my takeaway of, with, with the AI stuff, it's moving so quickly. Mm-hmm. That it's really hard to wrap your head around all the changes, you know? Yeah. But if you stop and think about it, it's like, well, okay, I am not at a frontier, you know, research organization, a frontier model research organization, so I don't necessarily need to know all of the updates.
Yeah. True. Right. And the models that are out there. Are good enough for what I am trying to do. Mm-hmm. Right? That if it gets better, it gets better and that's fantastic, but I can use it right now, so great. I'm gonna use it right now. But then also because of everybody's, I. Different perspectives or, or things that they're good at.
Every single person is using it slightly differently because it's an enhancement to what they're doing. Right? That was the big takeaway with that presentation is every single organization or you know, people who are representing other organizations, listening to them, it was totally an enhancement.
To their jobs on an individual level. Right? It wasn't necessarily a replacement of the jobs. It was I can do this so I can, you know, I can leverage it this way so that I can do these important things better. Right? Which, you know, is a definitely a positive note. 'cause it's just so easy to spin into, I'm a writer, it's gonna replace me, you know?
And I thought one of the, the best sort of questions to reframe things was from the moderator and he asked, you know, what are the things that you don't use AI for? And, and I thought, well, that's, that's good. My immediate response was anything I want to be known for. Right is what I'm not gonna be using AI for.
Or I'll use it like, you know, I enjoy creative writing, so what do I use it for? I use it as an aid for writing. Right? Sure. But it's not doing the writing for me. Right. It's not, it might, you know, I might use a spell checker or you know, something like that to do some of the grammar, some of the editing.
But I know my style. I know when I want to use a semicolon instead of, you know, two sentences. 'Cause I have a writing degree. I know I, you know, I know those preferences. So I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna do that. Sure. But yeah, anything that I wanna be known for, I want to do, I wanna be able to say, yeah, I designed this or I wrote this, or I'm presenting these ideas.
Does any of that resonate with you? I think they've had enough. Oh, absolutely. Listening to my voice does,
Alex Pokorny: no, it was kind of weird realization I had, I dunno if I mentioned a few episodes back, but it was realizing how to get a project done. And how you get a project done at any company is you talk to people and they are all different personalities.
It takes, to your point about business cases, I mean, you can say you're leading with a certain type of energy, or you prefer data analysis or you prefer visionary statements. I mean all the other things. But everybody else that you're talking to also has those preferences and you have to modify your message constantly.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: To kind of. Work in their priorities to get your project, to be prioritized, to get the resources toward it. And I mean, even the issues that you run into and hear about, they may be, you know, maybe everybody's working from home and everything's being done with text. So there is something that an AI could work off of, but it's not solutioning for you either because it doesn't know all the other complexities of things going on.
Either or what direction you want to go in versus what you've written down so far in a PowerPoint. I mean, I've got a handful of PowerPoints in three months of a new job, and I. That does not even contain like a percent of what I feel about this company. Product line, future growth, market problems, right?
Research competitor set. None of that's in those couple PowerPoints. It's in me. It's just through conversations to what I've learned and all the other things. So it's like there's so much that it can. Yeah, it's, it can augment. It can totally, and it has written some of those, or edited some of those sentences in those PowerPoints.
It absolutely has, and it's made it easier to read, more, easier clarity, more concise, punchier. Totally makes sense. It was great use of it. Did it come up with a concept of, Hey, you know what I think would work for this person is a PowerPoint slide versus an email? Right. No, I didn't know that. Like, didn't know how to write that slide in a way that was actually like really fitting for that particular audience and what I was trying to, you know, educate on No, absolutely not.
Like it has limitations all over the place, so it's not like, I mean this, I think the idea of like it replacing all of our jobs no. No, it,
Dave Dougherty: it,
Alex Pokorny: it replaced just quite few of them. That was actually, it was funny. It is a piece also from the, the podcast, the Ethan Nik one where he had mentioned that, I mean, it, it, it has changed jobs in some aspects where there was, in particular country, there was over 40,000 people employed writing papers.
For American students,
Dave Dougherty: there
Alex Pokorny: was
Dave Dougherty: a just, right. Yeah. Wasn't that like a, it was some African country, right? It was
Alex Pokorny: Kenya, I believe, but but did it change things for those people? Absolutely. Is it going to make life potentially even better or easier? Yes, actually they're just easier creation of content, better, you know, competition edge kind of, versus other competitors.
I mean, if you've got 40,000 other people who are doing the same stuff as you, you wanna have a competitive edge against them. I mean, produce more, do more, be an expert in more different areas. That's a, that's a beautiful tool to be able to kinda start doing those different things. Right. Is there gonna be the same kind of demand.
Maybe, maybe not, I don't know. But there would probably be some pivots and shifts.
AI's Role in Education
Alex Pokorny: But already students are using, you know, AI to a great degree. His response to that was from an educator standpoint, it actually doesn't change a whole lot. We used to have Cal, you know, no calculators. Now we have calculators.
They were still the same thing of what's useful to teach today, right? How do I change my teaching style More in-person exams, blue book exams, that sort of stuff. Pop quizzes, all that stuff that, nope, you don't have access to that tool. What do you know in your mind? And then using those tools as better tutors where you still have to do the work.
It doesn't just. Give you the answer. So you're still being educated with these tutors and there's been some great results shown that it's helpful in that direction. So I don't gotta go in a bunch of different directions here, but it, it's an augmenting tool that Yes has shifts depending on your occupation, however.
I don't fear it.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: And I think that's a big shift from where people were at maybe two years ago when it was ai. Oh no. And now it's, yeah, of course I use chat GBT like that, that came up in a meeting. I was saying it was like 30 or 40 kind upper level people. And they're all admitted that they're using chat GBT every single day.
Yeah. And that, yeah man, we, we need to put together some policies, so, so be good idea. But that's, that, that, that's the prevalence of augmenting,
Dave Dougherty: right? Not replacing. Yeah. And I think for me, I've been able to use it for like the optional extras a lot, right? Where it's like, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we had these things?
Like, well, yeah, okay, hold on, let me go, let me go talk. So you know, for example, putting together just, I mean, we've talked about it. Off camera about like, Hey, what should the logo for this podcast be? What should the colors be? How should we do, you know, whatever. So we have those general things, but we didn't necessarily have brand guidelines or like content repurposing guidelines.
Do we need them? Not really. 'cause it, it's me that does it, you know? Yeah. But just to have it documented so that we can you know, reference it or I have a cheat sheet as I'm going about things to make sure that we have a consistent voice, consistent style, you know, those sorts of things. It was fairly easy to, you know, click the voice mode, start talking, start chatting.
And then say, Hey, of all the things that you know, right, because of the recent memory updates with chat t of all the conversations I've had with you about this podcast help me create these brand guidelines using what you already know and then leveraging this context that I'm adding to this, right?
Mm-hmm. And so it was, because I've written those documents before, I knew generally what I needed in there. Just to be sure though, I went ahead and used Gemini Deep Research and said, Hey, give me an updated sort of guideline for what should be included in a modern content repurposing, brand standards, brand guidelines, kind of things, right?
And so it went and looked at 300 something websites and here's what should be included in all of these things, and. Being able to put together all of those things really quickly, I was able to knock it out in like, you know, an afternoon. But honestly, making it to your point with, you know, do I know if it should be a PowerPoint or a Word Doc or whatever else, like, okay, I got all of the things that I needed using the ai, fine tuning it.
You know, with, no, it's not actually blue. It's a, it's a green, you know, like that kind of stuff. But then it took me more time to actually put together the document to say, here are the colors. Here's, you know, a formatting, here's the actual PDF version, you know, that I shared. You know, listing out all of the information that took me longer to make it look good than to just have 'em written somewhere.
Right. So yeah, I think it's, yeah. But then also to your point about the teachers. It was the learning through doing. Right? Because now, okay, I'm better at using that online design tool because I formatted everything at least in my mind, you, you take the standards a little more seriously if they're in an official looking document instead of just, here's a word document that you know.
With text describes everything, but doesn't actually, you know, say anything. Yeah. So anyway, I'm rambling, but that's, that's just my own experience so far.
Concluding Thoughts and Audience Engagement
Dave Dougherty: So thank you everybody for listening to this episode. We are. Putting together some ideas on other ways to, you know, reach out to everybody that, that listens or aggregate ideas from the show.
So, drop a comment, let us know, you know, episode ideas, comments, how are you using these things? You know, use cases. We would love to know, we'd love to interact with you. And with that, we'll see you in episode 54 coming in two weeks. So.
