Beyond The Algorithms: Exploring AI’s Impact On Our Lives

Jason Bittner: Hello everyone. I’m Jason Bittner from Triple Helix Corporation and welcome to our Helix Insider Podcast. Today I’m joined in studio with my Developer Pedro Lopes and my Director of Marketing Lauren Gulli. Hello everybody.

Pedro Lopes: Hi.

Jason Bittner: Today, we wanted to talk about AI. It’s a very hot topic on everyone’s plate. And my team here has been doing quite a bit of work in the AI space. And I want to give a chance for them to talk a little bit more about AI. And hopefully, we can share some of our insights with you. So, what I’d like to do, Pedro, let’s start with you. Let’s understand AI. What are some of the tools and the platforms that are popular in the AI space right now?

Pedro Lopes: So right now, you have all the LLMs, the language models, like ChatGPT, Bard from Google. And those are the most popular ones right now, but there is a plethora of different LLMs and things that are popping up all the time. There’s Yama as well from Facebook.

They’re having a huge impact in the open-source community right now. And obviously after ChatGPT opened their API, it allowed for a lot of developers to create apps that improve and automate things in all sorts of ways as well.

Jason Bittner: Yeah, let’s talk about that because I mean, these tools are not that, you know, great if they don’t do something for us. So, like, how do they improve productivity, Lauren? How does that work for you?

Lauren Gulli: Yeah, absolutely. So, kind of just touching back on what Pedro said for a minute, you know, ChatGPT was kind of the main powerhouse that emerged in the AI space initially. And when they launched, it kind of opened the door for all these other developers to go in and start producing different applications, kind of to mimic chat GPT, but also to really streamline that AI process and make it useful across a variety of different industries and with different tool sets to streamline multiple tasks.

So, me in my role, I am the Director of Marketing here at Triple Helix and I do a lot of content creation across multiple channels for us, from social media management to email marketing to copywriting for our website. And using AI has really been a great tool for me to kind of boost creativity and get some new and fresh ideas for some of the content that we’re producing.

So, I know me and a lot of marketing professionals are using it to kind of brainstorm ideas for blog topics, for podcasts. You know, in an industry such as ours, where we’re selling software solutions, there’s only so many ways that you can naturally phrase the products and services that we’re offering our clients. So ChatGPT and similar tools like it really provide us the insight to kind of fine tune some of the dialogue we’re putting out there and rephrase it in different ways that resonate with our audience. So, it gives us new and fresh ideas. So, the content that we’re creating is not repetitive. It’s always new and exciting and really encouraging our audience to engage with us. And I utilize some of the tools, like Pedro said, you know, ChatGPT is something I use day to day. Some of the other ones that are emerging, you know, we have a platform called getimage.ai. And that’s a text to image platform. So, what that means is you kind of have to fine tune the prompt that you’re giving this AI bot. And you enter a text description, such as, for example, I want to see a white horse among a field of sunflowers, just for a crazy off the wall example. And this chat bot, this image AI platform, will take that description, and it’ll produce an image based on whatever text prompt I give it. So, if I’m looking for a very specific image and I’m having a problem, you know, sourcing stock imagery or custom content that we have to create what the visual I want to capture is, I can use platforms such as that to take my text and really bring that to life in an image form.

Pedro Lopes: And Lauren brought up a good point too. You know, another thing that is starting to, it’s just beginning now is the apps, right? ChatGPT just launched the plugins, which is sort of like an Apple marketplace for all sorts of, you know, software developer driven applications for ChatGPT, which expands the power of ChatGPT.

Expedia is even in there now. It probably connects to the Expedia API, so you can search for flights, and it can create the whole trip itinerary for you and things of that sort. And the API for ChatGPT and the underlying technology that allows developers to have that sort of communication with APIs and develop applications keeps evolving. I think in the future we’re going to have a situation much like the App Store nowadays, but for AI. Not only for ChatGPT, but also for Bard and all the other large language models out there as well.

Jason Bittner: That’s a good point. Wanted to ask you about automation and efficiency. As you’re talking about apps, what are we seeing out there as far as these apps creating automated tools for us and basically helping improve our lives?

Pedro Lopes: ChatGPT is making integrations with Zapier, for example, that allows you to automate emails, social media postings, you know, all sorts of things. I’m sure Lauren can attest to that. I’m not sure if we are using that already, but, you know, like I said, you know, travel, you know, news, you can, you know, ping news APIs and get the latest news and run summaries. Even Riverside, which is the platform that we currently use to run our podcasts, they use artificial intelligence to caption all the videos as well. So, I mean, there’s a whole array of things as far as that goes.

Lauren Gulli: One of the things too, you asked, you know, how it improves your life personally too. So, there’s a lot of cool things that ChatGPT does outside of just a work productivity standpoint. My brother is very into fitness and health and constantly looking for ways to kind of eat healthier and have a healthier lifestyle, but they’re constantly looking for a way to afford that. It’s very expensive nowadays to afford healthy food. So, something he does with ChatGPT that I think is really cool is, you know, he’ll say, I have a hundred-dollar budget for the week. These are the ingredients I want to use in the meals that I’m creating. And he will go ahead and take, you know, those prompts, put it into chapter GPT, tell it, you know, I have $100, here are the ingredients I want included in these meals, can you make me a meal plan for the next seven days? And I know a lot of people that are using it for things like that, where it’s pretty cool, it’s pretty intuitive, it actually will give you within your budget, a healthy choice of options that you can cook that you know if you want to make it you’re not a great cook and you want it to be easy you can ask it for easier simple recipes and it’ll give you a lot of really cool ideas to kind of make you know decisions like that in your personal life a whole lot easier and take a lot of work off your plate of having to do that research yourself.

Pedro Lopes: Yeah, I myself, instead of hiring a personal trainer, I know that ChatGPT’s trained on the Arnold Schwarzenegger book for fitness. And so I just asked it to give me every day workout that I can do at the gym based on that book. And it gives me perfectly the workout every day. So that’s pretty much what I follow every day to exercise. So instead of buying the book, I have that for free. So… Hahaha!

Jason Bittner: Oh, wow, that’s awesome. How about communication, collaboration? I mean, that’s something that, you know, Chair at Triple Helix, we’re a remote company. And so we spent a lot of our time on Slack, instant messaging, Zoom, of course, but how is AI evolving the collaboration communication space?

Lauren Gulli: So yeah, I think one of the cool AI tools that came out recently is something called Fireflies.ai. So on a work stance, I mean, we’re constantly in Zoom meetings, whether it’s internally or it’s with a client. And Fireflies.ai is a platform that’s utilized to streamline the process of taking notes. And it’s something that would like to incorporate more into Triple Helix. When we’re on a call with a client, it can be very challenging for us to really make sure we’re giving 100% of our attention to that client and hearing their needs and concerns. while we’re simultaneously trying to record everything that they’re saying manually into a document or however we record it currently. And Fireflies.ai is a new platform that a lot of companies are starting to utilize that listens into those Zoom calls, or I believe you can even integrate it with other platforms such as Microsoft Teams, and it will take a lot of those notes for you. And I’ve seen a lot of companies do case studies on it where it is, it’s a pretty… effective transcription service to make sure you’re getting accurate notes while you’re still able to give a hundred percent of your attention to the client or to the internal meeting that you’re having.

Pedro Lopes: Yeah, another great tool right now that did a very good implementation of Chai GPT into their platform was Notion. Notion is typically used so you can organize yourself and sort of tries to replace Excel and some of the other tools for the office. But once they integrated Chai GPT, man, it became like a whole new platform. people are really getting a lot of benefits from having that type of integration into their workflow. From getting organized to just like Lauren said, spring up ideas about your content creation. And there’s tools out there they even manage via AI, even manage your calendar for you. So, it finds the spaces in your calendar and restructures your calendar in a way that as you complete tasks, It keeps shifting things to make sure that you get everything done for the week. So, it’s just amazing, like the explosion of tools that are out there.

Jason Bittner: Yeah, let’s talk about that for a minute. So, I’m interested in hearing a little bit more about integration and adoption. So, you know, we’ve talked a lot about how the AI tools are really changing the world, but, you know, for our listeners who want to get started, what would you recommend? What’s sort of like the first steps they can take to start dipping their toe in the water of this technology?

Pedro Lopes: Well, obviously going to ChatGPT, which is free or Bard or any of the language models out there and, you know, starting to interact with it and see how they can implement, you know, their day to day, whether that be, you know, to just reply to a very complicated email or get, you know, blog post ideas or, you know, ideas about, you know, company strategy or anything really. I mean, I had, when I first started using Chai GPT, I used to receive this email from this one company every day. And I send them multiple emails asking them to stop sending the email. They added me to their list by mistake, you know? And I was like, I don’t want to receive those emails anymore. And they didn’t have an unsubscribe button. They refused to take me off their list. So instead of hiring an attorney, I finally… I had chat GPT write a system, the CIS letter, I put it on a nice piece of paper, and I sent it to them and the emails stopped. So, I mean, you know, you just got to get creative at some point, you know.

Lauren Gulli: Yeah, I mean, when it comes to a lot of those platforms, like Pedro said, you know, it’s about dipping your toes into a variety of different platforms. There are so many AI platforms emerging every day. It’s impossible to keep up. So, start with some of the big ones like chat GPT, really kind of learn about it and play around with it for your work life and your personal life. See how you can utilize it best with your current workflow to kind of optimize things. And another tool that I like doing, you know, if I write a blog post myself, and I write the copy, I’ll take that copy and I’ll plug it into chat GPT. And them to go ahead and rewrite it for me and I can kind of compare and see you know what my original my original copy looks like compared to ChatGPT and kind of fine-tune things that way it gives you a good idea as to how ChatGPT or another similar platform would phrase content that’s already written so that gets you more familiar with the platform the way it talks and allows you to really make sure you’re more informed when you’re utilizing a platform like

Pedro Lopes: Well, not only that, I also see a shift happening right now that instead of, you know, cause people sort of know that like some of these blog posts or content that is being generated by AI, sometimes there’s a, there’s incentive not to promote those within the platform, right? And so, there’s, I see products springing up out there that essentially collaborate with a human, with you to write. a unique piece of content in a way there’s not fully AI, but it saves you time. So, I think that that’s going to be a trend, you know, more so in the short future because you know, at some point, you know, ChatGPT is trained all the way up to 2021, I believe. And obviously keeps getting information every day. But at some point, people, you know, are going to keep getting like sort of like the same standard information. I think a while back somebody asked ChatGPT how many jokes he knew, and he kept, you know, variating between 21 jokes. And so, it probably is the same way in a lot of other subjects. So, it’s very important to keep ChatGPT in check or the language models in check, not only for accuracy, but also for data privacy. Right. And that’s a very important topic nowadays as well, because all this information lives in those big corporate company servers. And so, I think there’s a real trend, you know, coming up where people are going to want to host those things themselves. Right.

Jason Bittner: Right, right. So, you know, as you’re talking, I mean, there’s a lot of differing technologies. It’s kind of like the Wild West right now, but you know, where’s the future of AI? What comes next? What do you guys think about, you know, what we’re going to start seeing here on our nearer and maybe, you know, distant future of AI?

Lauren Gulli: So, one of the things that I hear a lot being in the marketing realm is that a lot of marketing professionals are afraid that chat GPT and similar AI platforms are going to replace them and their need for marketing within companies. And I really encourage people not to look at AI as their enemy. I’ve seen a lot of marketing professionals go as extreme as to completely boycott it because they don’t… believe they want to show companies the value of AI. And I just don’t, in my position, see that as a threat. I see AI as a great collaboration tool. Like Pedro touched on previously, it’s not intended to replace a person. It takes a lot of training and fine-tuning the prompts that you give it to get the output that you want from it. It’s not designed to really replace somebody. It’s designed to work alongside you. You must really, it’s almost an art. You must really take time to learn the prompts and learn the information that you’re giving it in order to get the content back that you want. So, I encourage people, don’t look at it as a replacement. Look at it as how you can collaborate with it and how you can really enhance the role that you’re in by using AI. I think as far as the future goes; we’re going to… continue to see a lot of development as far as the strength of these AI platforms. I think they’re going to continue to get stronger right now, like Pedro touched on, a lot of the output that they give you can be kind of redundant over time, and it has a very specific tone that it kind of feeds back. So, kind of getting away from that redundancy, some more smart integration to get it more kind of talking in a more natural tone. I think it’s going to continue the… quality of the content that it produces, I think will continue to improve over time as people really learn more about these AI platforms and develop them accordingly. So, I think they’re here to stay. I’m really excited about them and excited to see where they go. But that’s my big takeaway is I really want people to think of it as how it can enhance their life and improve the quality of their work, not replace them.

Pedro Lopes: Yeah, I think long term, I agree with Lauren, and I think long term, essentially what this is going to do is increase the skill level of everyone, right? People are going to be able to learn faster, learn better, much like the internet provided to the modern world, right? In short term, the people that adopt this early, that understand that this is here to stay. they’re going to be a little better off than everybody else, you know, and it’s going to come down to the individual to, you know, learn how to deal with this new technology and how to implement this on their day to day so that they’re not left behind.

Lauren Gulli: That’s a good point Pedro too, about making people more efficient in their roles. I mean, as a marketing director, I have so much stuff on my plate that I’m bouncing back and forth. with day to day. So, it helps me to streamline some of the simpler tasks such as writing copy for social media or writing copy for a blog post and helps to streamline that so we can look at the big picture stuff, right? Especially when you’re working in an in-house marketing role such as the role I have with Triple Helix, you know, we really want to spend a lot of time planning how we can, you know, do big picture stuff, how we can improve our ad campaigns, how we can improve, you know, engagement on social media. So, by taking some of those smaller… tasks such as writing copy and being able to kind of help curate those with AI allows us to really have more time to allocate to some of that big picture stuff.

Pedro Lopes: Yeah, and I also think that what we’re seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg, right? And so, I think what’s ahead, it’s going to completely change the way that we work, that we interact day to day with people. And that’s not to say it’s going to be all bad that we’re going to be replaced, but there’s going to be a lot of change, right? And there’s going to be a lot of learning as well on our end to be able to adapt to this technology. So, people are going to have to be very flexible with it as well.

Jason Bittner: Good feedback. Yep. So, we’ve had a lot of interesting comments this podcast and learned a lot and talked a lot about how this technology is changing us and our world. Before we wrap up, just want to give the two of you final thoughts, comments before we give back this to our audience.

Lauren Gulli: So just some final thoughts for me. I feel like AI is very new. A lot of people are very intimidated by it. I would encourage everybody, even if it’s on a small scale. There is a new chat GPT app, so you can use it on your mobile phone. Snapchat even has an AI bot now. You know, pick up one of the easier tools like that are easy to understand and see, you know, start in your personal life. See how you can do things like come up with a fitness plan or come up with a meal plan and start using it on topics that you’re very comfortable with. Segway into your work life. Just start playing around with it and familiarizing yourself with the platforms. Like we’ve already said, technology is here to stay. AI is here to stay. The best thing that we can do is educate ourselves on it, become well-versed in it and see how we can utilize it in our personal and our professional life to really streamline our productivity and our operations.

Pedro Lopes: Yeah, I mean, I agree with Lauren and on top of that, I think if you have a job, you should be looking at ways that you can implement that in your job and use it to increase your productivity but always keeping in mind your privacy as well and the data integrity and your client information as well. So, work with it. try to implement but be cautious and just keep moving forward and learning.

Jason Bittner: Sounds good. Well, this is all the time we have for today. So, this has been the Helix Insider podcast. I want to thank my guests, Lauren Gulli, my Director of Marketing, and Pedro Lopes, one of my developers. And we’ll see you next time. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.

Pedro Lopes: Thank you.