How It Started. How's It's Going. AI AI Oh...
This is EXACTLY how Judgement Day started. Probably.
How It Started. How It’s Going.
I thought I’d get on the trend, at last.
Some would say all those years ago it was the role I was born to play....
Circa 1988, primary school. A 6 year old self-proclaimed thespian prepares for his performance of a lifetime.
My teachers must have seen something in me back then to cast me in such a role for that fateful school play.
Legend has it I was actually quite good.
So good in fact that I managed to somehow learn everyone else's lines as well as my own and ended up prompting other kids with their lines when they stumbled for a few extra milliseconds than I deemed acceptable at the time.
What a swot. Seriously. There's no way in hell I'd be able to achieve that nowadays. I must have been a proper cretin.
No wonder they cast me as Dopey. I'd have done the same to me had I been the teacher!
Ah well. At least I didn't use this opportunity now to subtly remind people that I wrote a book.
Oh.
The Rise Of The Machines
In a not too dissimilar way to the plot of Terminator 2 (probably), we are now seeing the rise of the machines in the form of AI, or Artificial Intelligence.
Predominantly, in the form of AI generated art using word-to-art generators I covered in a previous edition, and most recently via a now-viral tool called ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that can perform tasks based on a text instruction being input.
You literally can’t scroll 7 pixels through LinkedIn at the moment without finding a post that talks about ChatGPT; it’s everywhere. The new toy that everyone got for Christmas.
The problem is, it’s really quite interesting.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!
Now, I’m going to caveat everything I say hereon in by declaring in the most definitive of ways, ChatGPT, or ANY AI based tool for that matter, won’t revolutionise your life. And there is ZERO excuse in stopping using actual, talented people for various tasks, favouring a ‘bot’ to do all your creative content ongoing. Everything has limits. AI especially. So don’t think for one minute that this will now do everything for you for free. It has its uses, which we’ll discuss, but it’s not a panacea for life.
AI does have its uses, however, when used properly.
If you treat it for what it is, a tool, then there are ways you can implement it to help things along in your own business - not to replace anything, or anyone, you currently use - just something to add into your arsenal.
For instance, there have been times for all of us when we don’t quite know what to write about on our blogs, or LinkedIn, or Twitter etc. Sometimes you could just do with some ideas.
When you’ve gone for that walk to prompt inspiration, drunk that coffee, petted your labradoodle for a while, screamed into the abyss, and exhausted every other avenue for generating ideas you can think of - you could, potentially, turn to a tool like ChatGPT.
How, I hear you cry?
Maybe you just need a title to prompt your creative juices. A question posed to you that you can freely answer, waxing lyrical to your hearts content about that subject - but you need the question, and a bit of a prompt to fire off your synapses into creative overload.
Here is a time where you could ask an AI tool to give you some thoughts. (I say ‘thoughts’, again, very loosely. AI can’t think like we can. Yet. That’ll come in 2024 when we all become flesh-based slaves for our sentient mechanical overlords).
So how would that work, exactly?
Well, let’s pick a phrase, for a random industry.
“Give me 5 blog titles for demonstrating the benefits of using an business networking event planner”
You type that into ChatGPT, and it’ll give you some options for you to mull over.
As we all know, demonstrating the benefits to something is better than just blindly extolling the virtues of features.
Are these blog title suggestions groundbreaking? No of course not. But what it might do is stir your creative juices into being able to adapt one of those titles to suit your own needs, and then create your blog post around it.
This website has the ability for contextual learning too, so you can ‘chat’ to it, to a degree, by having a bit of to-and-forth, where you could for instance say ‘well I like the idea of number 3, can you elaborate on that one?’:
So now we have some further thoughts for you to mull over. They seem ok.
Technically, technically, ChatGPT does have the capability of just writing blog posts, as well as anything else, for you.
But don’t.
Seriously, don’t.
It might look and sound ok, but usually you can tell when stuff is written by machine. It’s impersonal, often derivative, based on stuff it’s learned from the interwebs etc - and of course, wouldn't be just tailored to you, your business, or your industry generally. It could be giving the exact same information to countless others who are in the same field of work.
BUT, using it as a prompt for ideas, blog titles, social media post ideas, it does have its uses. Sometime all that it might require is you just seeing a few keywords it offers here and there, and that is more than likely enough for you to work on something yourself, enabling you to just use a tool like this for precisely that function - as a tool.
Let’s try something else.
Another way you could utilise platforms like this is research, treating it as an addition to Googling everything - you never know, you could get some interesting perspectives you hadn't thought of. Perspectives that may then be worth googling further.
So let’s try another prompt that could be applicable for many people around the world.
“what questions should I ask when doing research on the best home based businesses for stay at home parents?”
So if someone was looking into starting up a home based business to do in their spare time around being a full time parent, these are some useful questions you’ll need to consider when picking what sort of business you’d like to set up, or join, if it’s an existing business/platform.
So using it for research is a genuinely useful way of utilising this new technology.
Another example.
Revamping your website? Ask it for a checklist of things you need to ensure are functioning properly:
Setting up a new podcast but struggling for names?:
Again, perfect? No. But it might set you on a course to get your own creative juices flowing, that could lead you down an avenue you might not have thought about before.
So, ultimately, don’t think that using these sorts of platforms will revolutionise your life, having them there to do EVERYTHING for you. Far from it. They could just be a useful addition to your planning, research, and idea generation arsenal.
Even Ryan Reynolds has given it a try…
Or, you could just ask it how feasible it would be to build your very own Death Star.
Me being me, I wanted to take it further. JUST to check…:
AI actively discouraging me from becoming an evil overlord. See, AI’s not so bad after all! 😏
One final check……:
Sounds exactly like what SkyNet would say, if you ask me…..🧐