Remember the big marketing push about the Digital Transformation? Well, it’s really a data center and cloud services marketing pitch. yes, we’re all transforming how and where we work, but we didn’t brand the pandemic’s remote work moment, the Never-Cube Migration. Or did we?
People Are Slightly Afraid of AI
What you don’t understand may frighten you. As we saw ten years ago, with the rapid adoption and push of social media as the new killer marketing platform, people resist change. AI is the same. Sure, we’re all playing mess around and find out with ChatGPT and trying to build useful GPTs, but… If you look at LinkedIn for any amount of time, AI is the answer for everything, the job killer, and the reason our planet will be uninhabitable in less than 100 years.
Adopting a new technology, or new workflow is a challenge. I was fortunate to be inside a large organization that supported AI when ChatGPT opened to the public. Every Single Standup Meeting started with “ChatGPT this…” We were enthusiasts, technologists, and our entire team was encouraged to jump in. We did. There was no fear on our team about technology or job security. We knew our roles, and ChatGPT became part of our process.
The AI tools must be embraced.
“Is AI going to take my job?”
The real answer is this.
“The person who knows how to use AI is going to take your job.”
So let’s get started learning how transformative AI and generative AI and all the enhanced-ai tools are going to be useful. Some will not. 80% of the AI startups firing off new .AI domains will fail within a few years. The gold rush is on, business is afraid, and companies and laid-off tech workers are flooding into the market with AI Consulting and AI Training practices. That’s great. The IBMs and Salesforce’s of the world can educate the larger market, that AI is an important thing. While we, the workers, need to understand how to harness these new tools, and fast.
ChatGPT Is Fantastic At Summaries
There is not much “creativity” in AI today, but the Openai’s tool, can summarize better than I can. It can take mundane tasks and do them 100 times (regenerate the answer) and never complain. A great example of what AI is good as it graphic illustration. Give Dall-e a good prompt and it will steal, beg, and borrow from the greatest art in the world and swizzle together an image of some sort. Is there art in the result? I don’t think so. But it’s very easy to create a graphic for an article. (As seen above.) And for my purposes, attraction to the writing, it sufficient.
One of the tasks in my role on this team was to write 300+ descriptions of facilities around the globe. Now, many of these buildings were similar, with no unique capacity or function. In fact, in Chicago, for example, there was a ring of these buildings, that were identical. So, how does a writer with self-worth go about writing 300+ building descriptions? Oh, and make it snappy and smart. Make it original. Make each building description unique, even if there’s nothing unique about them. Answer: ChatGPT.
You learn, after your first 30 hours prodding ChatGPT into motion, that it begins to use the same phrases, syntax, and adjectives. [Wanna see a great example of this, get ChatGPT to rewrite the bullets of your last three jobs, for your new resume.] But, as a writer, the edits are easy. Get crappy copy from a stakeholder? No problem. Transform, edit, publish.
In about six months one other writer and myself wrote an entire global website [2,000+ pages] using ChatGPT as a resource. Of course, the main pages, the HERO pages, were crafted a bit more carefully. But the 300+ building site descriptions, boom, thanks GPT! As writers, we were fascinated by the ideas that ChatGPT offered. If you were struggling with a pithy description of a technical process, just copy and paste into ChatGPT and say, “refresh and revise for clarity.” Boom. A few tweaks here and there. Done. So, for writing, ChatGPT really is like a co-pilot. I don’t think a single set of bullets or facility description was published directly as ChatGPT produced it, but as we continued working alongside our AI transformer, we got better at editing it’s words, and better at being really specific about how we wanted the output to look.
AI Is Also A Powerful JobHunt Robot
The resume polish and submit tools using AI are unreal. Some are really good. Some are really bad. But, make no mistake, the HR industry is recoiling under the weight of 10,000 applicants for a good job. And I bet, 80% of those applications were done by robots. Here’s how it works.
You add your resume to the bot. You give it an industry and job title. You specify a location (remote for me, thanks) and a salary range. Then you release the hounds. You can apply for 300 jobs in an hour. Now, the quality of those jobs and more importantly the applications may vary. When the bot applies for 10 jobs within the same organization, you know that’s not a good look. So, be careful.
And rewrite your resume using AI for specific jobs. ChatGPT is great for this. Here are some sample prompts to help you.
- Write a cover letter, no formatting, using this job description. “copy paste job requirements”
- Rewrite these summary bullets using industry keywords
- Rewrite this resume for this job description “copy paste job requirements and add your current resume.”
The HR guy who responded to one of my applications, said, “Dude, you’re not even close for this role, what gives?” “Oh, sorry, my AI did it.” “Damn, I’m drowning in applications. You guys need to stop.” I didn’t say the last part, but I wanted to. “Yeah, HR, how does it feel to be put into a machine process and dehumanized on your side of the process?”
Where AI Plays Well
If you can think of a question, AI is going to give you an answer. It make hallucinate and make up a wrong answer, but AI will give you an answer. There are GPTs now that write prompts for GPTs. My son, wrote a GPT to do his homework for an AI class at college. GPTs will clean up your code. If you can think of it, an AI is already working on doing it better.
Don’t be afraid of AI, embrace it. Try ChatGPT for free. Have a conversation. Rewrite your resume. Heck, when your manager says, “Can you write up a job description for your writer?” get ChatGPT to do it for you. He will never know. And if he did, he’d probably congratulate you for doing it so quickly.
Know AI’s limits. Learn to be a great writer. Then AI will come in handy. If you use AI to generate content and you’re not a good writer, it’s going to fail. AI get’s close. AI proposes great ideas. AI even has novel ways of expressing simple things. Just keep “regenerating” until you have something to work with.
AI for Images
The last example I’ll give, is for generative art. “Not Art,” in my opinion, but visual design. One of the fun things, about writing, is when you’re done, if you’re a one-person-publishing-house, is finding an image that will represent what you just finished writing about. Let me do this in real-time.
Dall-e prompt: “Give me a black and white hand drawing of a writer struggling over a desk full of post-it note requests, make the postit notes in orange, green, and neon yellow.” GO
Version one.
First variation.
Second variation.
Final, I decided to go with the more illustrative version for the actual article.
And my “artist” didn’t complain about the redos. And this took about 5 minutes. So, if you’re a graphic illustrator, you’d better get your chops up with AI. AI is completing graphic design tasks, even layouts, faster than any human can even get one option, AI gives you 100. That’s going to cause some disruption in the workplace. And, for the most part, that’s the kind of disruption people are worried about. AI isn’t coming for your job unless you ignore it, then your job is going to be serving lattes at Starbucks for the insurance.
What are your experiences with AI? Have you seen changes in your workflow? What are your fears about AI? I’d love to hear about your AI journey so far.
John McElhenney — let’s connect online
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Not one bit of AI in this book about finding your creative life.
