Webinar
30-Minute Tech Talk:
Exploring AI Opportunities for Your Business
There are numerous benefits and challenges of using AI in your business. Join us as we focus on just one of the many AI tools... ChatGPT. Discover:
- Inside look into ChatGPT
- Real examples of how companies are using ChatGPT
- Ideas of how you can apply ChatGPT to your business
Watch our recorded webinar below to learn about the real AI opportunities that are available right now for your business.
Watch the replay here:
Complete transcript below:
Thank you for joining us today. Today we’re going to talk about how you might be able to use some AI in your business, specifically ChatGPT, which is actually hard for me to spit out, so if I say it wrong, you’ll have to give me a little lenience throughout this. If you have any questions, you can ask via the chat or you can raise your hand. If you want to ask it interactively, just let us know that and we can unmute you. So, what are we going to accomplish today? We want to cover what is ChatGPT and how it works, what are some of the limitations, how you might be able to use it in your business and hopefully we’ll have a little fun along the way.
What are AI and ChatGPT?
I think most people know AI is Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT is just one form of AI. There is machine learning, there is robotics, and ChatGPT falls in the language processing piece of it. We at IT Radix, we’ve actually been using AI for years. If you think about what we do with an antivirus, it’s looking for particular types of files and particular types of behavior and the AI is what alerts us and tells us that bad things are going on. Today we’re going to focus on ChatGPT. Doug loves his acronyms—Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer—and what that means is it takes input that’s been fed to it over time and it learns from that and then it generates NEW content. So, it is not the same thing as a search engine. With a search engine, you type in what you’re searching for and it goes out and finds all the hits. It’s essentially been indexed from the Internet. In the case of ChatGPT, it’s going to take all the information that’s been fed to it and generate a response to whatever question you ask of it.
It is the fastest growing app of all time. The adoption rate for ChatGPT surpassed the TikTok adoption rate. I think TikTok was, I don’t remember the number, but if you were to compare where TikTok was in nine months’ time, ChatGPT got there in two. It has exploded in terms of how it is being adopted and what they did is not only did they feed all the information in, they used human feedback loops to go in and make it even smarter, make it more like a human and have more of an actual human conversation. However, there are some limitations. It’s relatively young. It was officially launched back in the fall. It only knows up to I think it was September of 2021, so anything that’s happened, current events from that time forward, it’s not there. It does not have context about you.
Check Your Sources: ChatGPT May Not Be Accurate
So, it is not fully replacing the human element. People are thinking… it could be my marketing consultant, or my developer, or my doctor. It does not have any context about your specific business, your specific personal situation, or anything like that. It is basically just generating answers based on what’s been fed to it up until the 2021 timeframe. One of the things that’s concerning about it is sometimes the information it puts back is not necessarily accurate, or it has instructions that might be harmful or contain inherent biases. So, when you’re using this tool you need to keep all of that stuff in place, so that you take what you get and you’re going to want to test and verify it. It does not actually provide you with sources as to where it got the information that it’s feeding back to you so, unlike when you used to write a term paper at school and you had to document your sources; ChatGPT does not do that.
Using ChatGPT in Your Business
Things that people are using it for in their business… we write things called PowerShell scripts, so it can actually write PowerShell. It can write other types of code. It can write articles back onto the language side of things. It can do marketing copy, emails, essays, things like that. What I find it really good for is generating ideas or templates. You can actually have it generate, for example, a multiple-choice question, or an outline, or do some market research, and then give you a summary. These are all different ways that you can potentially use this in your business. Many businesses are starting to use it for things like employee training or explaining things that are fairly complex and simple layman’s terms or at the level of a fifth grader if you ask it to do that.
Tips for Using ChatGPT
Here are some tips. When you’re using ChatGPT, the more specific you are the better the results you’re going to get. There is a button in there that’s called a Regenerate Response or you can type in some more information and hit enter and ask it to do more… to make it shorter, make it longer, make it easier or more difficult, use bigger words. You can ask it to modify for a particular type of tone. So, if you wanted to tone it down, or like we did one yesterday and we said make it a little more spicy and it was kind of humorous, some of the results we got back.
So, a few more tips. Generally, what I like to say is that I like to use it as a template that can be customized. So, for example, if you wanted to do a job description or maybe a standard letter that’s used in your business, you can use it to generate the template. What I would discourage you from doing is typing in anything that’s proprietary: client names, personal information, anything like that, even your own company name or certainly any kind of company information that is confidential. You do not want to be typing it into ChatGPT because even though the output of what’s created, you have the right to use that, they are using what you type in there to help better train ChatGPT. So, they can see it and they will have it. So, in my case I always want to emphasize security over some of that stuff, so make sure you’re being careful about how you use it. And you might want to actually put up some guardrails up in terms of how it can be used within your organization so that not just you, but all the folks in your company understand you should not put a client’s name in there. You should not put a person’s full name or a client’s company name any kind of confidential client information.
ChatGPT Demo
When I get into the ChatGPT interface, they have this concept of you create a chat. I would encourage you to make a new chat for each subject that you’re working on so that if you do use more and more it’ll be easier to reference and find them and get back to them. The other thing I would again mention is it’s not always right—don’t assume that what it gives you is facts. So, you should go back and double check depending on how you’re using the information to make sure that if it’s stating things that look factual, you’re going to want to double check. If it’s a marketing copy and it doesn’t have statistics for example, you’re probably fine.
What I really like it for is that it helps you get started. It gets you over that blank paper syndrome which is what we’re trying to indicate there at the bottom. So, with that, I am going to minimize the slideshow and I’m going to jump into ChatGPT. When you log in, there’s two types of accounts, there’s a free and a paid account. You do have limitations on the free, the paid acountI believe is about $20 bucks a month now. You’ll get more responses and faster responses if you’re on the paid. You’ll notice I mentioned, you might want to keep track of them. I called them all testing here because we were just doing some little tests with what ChatGPT can do. But if you want to start a new chat, you can type in here. You can type in a query and then it will give a default title. If you don’t like the title, you can just come over here and you notice when you click on one of these you can just hit the little pencil button and it’ll let you rename it.
The first thing I wanted to do is show you the difference between indexing and search, how it’s actually generating a result. So, let’s say you wanted to create a healthy dessert. You know Father’s Day is coming up and you want to create a healthy dessert for Father’s Day. If you went to Google and you typed in “healthy recipe dessert for Father’s Day,” it’s going to give you a bunch of websites with healthy desserts. In this case, they actually give you the recipe. And now if you wanted to say it had gluten in it, you could say, “make it gluten-free.” You could say changes like that. The other thing is that this is a little different than a search engine. With a search engine, you would have to click into each website and look at the recipe. In this case they specifically give you a recipe.
The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is to show you what it does if you ask for something that is no longer there, that is after 2021. I think a lot of you maybe know that Tina Turner recently passed away, so if you type in “cause of Tina Turner’s death,” it will let you know that, hey, my knowledge cut off is September 2021 and as of September 2021, Tina Turner was still with us. So, keep that in mind if you’re trying to use this and write content or develop answers that’s based on something that’s happened after 2021.
Now back to this renaming… You notice here I just stacked up multiple questions inside of the same chat. So, the Healthy Berry Yogurt chat also has the answer to the cause of Tina Turner’s death. If I was following my own best practice I would have clicked on New Chat and typed down here, “cause of Tina Turner’s death.”
Some of the other things you could do is…I’m going to just do it for ourselves. Let’s have it write a blog post as to why people should use IT Radix as their managed services provider. It’s amazing to me, look how quickly it writes this out. And then, once it does that, let’s say I want to make it a little more interesting or humorous, I could make it, rewrite it and have it compare us to Marvel superheroes and it will go out and it will write pretty darn quick a blog post about IT Radix and how we’re like a superhero.
The other thing you can do with it is maybe you want to convert this to a poem, and you say, “convert it to a poem” and boom, it’s putting a poem out there. So, it’s pretty amazing how quickly it can do things and the results that you get. Now it’s pretty formal and it is polite. You may find that the language doesn’t necessarily suit you. So, one of my colleagues is a Texas Hold’em player. So, it can give you tips, but then what it can do is go out and do some research on common traits among professional players. It will go out and give you the answers to things like that. Almost any question that you could think of, you could pop it in here and see what kind of a result you will get.
ChatGPT Helps You Get Started
If I were to do another new chat, let’s just do a different one. Let’s say I wanted to write a job description for a mid-level accountant at a CPA firm. Boom! It creates a job description just like that. Now again this is a template. You might want to go in and put in a more specific skillset. One of the examples that one of my clients used it for is, they were an engineering firm, and they wanted a job description of a middle-level person, and they wanted them to have SOLIDWORKS experience, which is a piece of software that they use in the design world. Just as quick as you see what I did here, it spits out that job description. They did modify it again. It’s the template, it’s the starting point, it’s getting you over the blank paper scenario but that’s what this is about. If you do things like a social media post, it will actually write a social media post. You can see all of the cute little characters and all of the hashtags that you need in order to put that up in a social media environment. That’s pretty long, so if I just say “make it shorter” it will take that content that it did right there and shorten it up for you. So, nice short, little posts that you could use depending on how you want to use this.
You can put a lot of different things in here. It can write PowerShell code. It can help you write Excel formulas. I have seen folks use it for Excel formulas. There are a lot of things that people could use it for. Again, the idea here is that it’s getting you over the blank paper syndrome so that you don’t have to necessarily start from scratch.
Your Questions Answered
Does ChatGPT, remember an interaction that you had a couple of weeks ago?
The answer is yes because you can see that they’re over here. I think if you had the paid version, it keeps them longer. If you have a free version, it only keeps them for 30 days I believe. But you could always come back to this Healthy Berry Yogurt and say, hey, “make the recipe low fat or no fat.” I have those two things in there so it will then tweak what you had so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Why wouldn’t you just write a job description?
That’s easy for some people to do but others really do struggle with where to start. So, it’s very good at giving you a starting point which then you can refine and hone to your business. For example, I said “develop an outline or a presentation” on ChatGPT. So, if I do this, it will give me this nice little outline which then I could use to go back and sort of bounce it against what I did. I could have started with this and created my presentation. In this case I created my presentation and now I’m comparing it against this to say, hey did I miss anything? So, there’s a lot of different ways you can approach this.
How do you know it’s not plagiarizing?
That is a good question. Because it is generative, it is supposed to be creating new content. It is not supposed to just plagiarize. It is going to use the concept or the words that another person might have used but it is going to generate new words, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t necessarily double check to make sure that you’re not plagiarizing. Again, it doesn’t always list the sources, so you don’t know if you’re taking somebody else’s content. There are content analyzers out there that are out there that are available to help you do that. I know we’ve used it on our website to make sure we’re not plagiarizing content. I also know my son, for example, they use it in the schools to make sure that the kids aren’t just ripping things off that they found on the Internet. So that is definitely something that can be done.
How can you use it in your business?
This is just ChatGPT. There are some other applications out there that will work from an AI standpoint: images, music. It’s amazing how this whole AI area has completely exploded. These are just some of the other generative IT AI Technologies and sites that are out there. There’s a boatload more, I just didn’t put them all on the slide. These are the ones that are kind of considered generative where they’re creating new content and they were organized a bit by category—chatting and searching, artwork generators, these are just a few. Dolly happens to be by the same company as ChatGPT OpenAI. You’ll notice I have ChatGPT here twice because they sort of consider themselves a searching and writing tool, but there’s a boatload of these out there and this, as I said, is just the beginning.
One of the things that you may have noticed is that Microsoft is integrating ChatGPT into their platform, so for example, in Bing, if you use Edge and Bing is your search engine it will, instead of doing the indexing, it will give you a result that is more of the AI where instead of giving you the list of websites, it will give you the ANSWER, not just the web links like it used to do. They’re also integrating it into PowerPoint where all of these various things to help you be a better writer. Autopilot is another one that summarizes content. I don’t know if any of you have noticed this, but I have been on a few meetings recently and the autopilot, what it does is it attends the meaning and thit summarizes the meaning at the end and sends it all to you in a written form.
How good is Google Bard and the Apple versus Google?
I don’t actually have a lot of experience with all of these because they’re so new. So, I’m not really comfortable commenting on the quality of these at this point. Again, they’re all new and what I would say is it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sort of test yourself—test each one and see what kind of response you get. Depending on what you’re looking for, you may find that one of them is better than the other. For example, in the writing category, you see Copy.AI. I have a colleague who thinks that Copy.AI is better than ChatGPT, so they got a paid account over on that platform instead. All of these are somewhat personal preference and also depend on what you’re trying to do with them, but I would encourage you to give them all a little test spin to see if there are some that really work well for you.
It's a Wrap!
With that, I will wrap it up. If you have any questions, we’d love to talk to you about this. How you’re using it and concerns. Frankly, we do have some clients that have come to us and said I don’t want this stuff being used in my business and they want us to block these websites. In my opinion you need to set up a corporate policy, a written policy that you have employees acknowledge because asking us to block these AI websites is a little bit of a losing battle. New ones are springing up every day. It’s like whack-a-mole. Okay, so we can certainly block the major ones but I’m not sure that’s in your best interest. I think what you ought to do is set up some guide rules and some policies around how you want your folks to use this technology in your business and tackle it head on. So, with that, I will say that’s a wrap. Thank you.
