Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

 The War Between Artificial Intelligence And Curiosity With Jon Bassford

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 378

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we delve into the intriguing conflict between artificial intelligence and human curiosity with our distinguished guest, Jon Bassford, a pioneering consultant specializing in enhancing curiosity-driven leadership and corporate culture.

Jon articulates a paradox within AI integration, noting how curiosity initially fuels AI adoption, yet reliance on technology can dampen that same curiosity. He addresses the challenges in customer engagement and decision-making in an era where information is instantly accessible, highlighting AI as a tool for dialogue rather than a substitute for human insight. Jon emphasizes the importance of maintaining authenticity and balancing AI usage to avoid disconnect from customers.

Notable Quotes:

  • "AI is just a tool. You need to know the right questions to ask." - [Jon Bassford]
  • "When AI becomes the barrier between me and the customer, then it's a problem." - [Jonathan Green]
  • "AI can make you smarter, but you still have to be there—mistakes happen constantly." - [Jon Bassford]
  • "We have to see how we're doing it, how can we do it better, let's master that before we add AI." - [Jonathan Green]

Jon underscores the necessity of process mastery before integrating AI, describing it as an accelerant that enhances efficiency without replacing the human element. He advocates for strategic AI implementation to intensify operational effectiveness while avoiding the risks of over-reliance and authenticity loss.

Connect with Jon Bassford:

Jon shares insights on upcoming initiatives, including the launch of curiosity assessments designed to transform leadership and organizational culture.

If you're intrigued by the dynamics of AI and human curiosity, and seek strategies for integrating technology without sacrificing authenticity, this episode is a valuable resource! 

Connect with Jonathan Green

The war between artificial intelligence and curiosity with today's amazing special guest, Jon Bassford. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated T talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by fraction aio. The trusted partner for AI Digital Transformation at fraction A IO, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non-revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most. Driving growth and results, we guide you through a smooth. Seamless transition to ai ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction aio o help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more. Get started. Fraction aio.com. Now Jon, I wanna have you on the show today. I'm so fascinated because there's this dichotomy with curiosity and ai, which is that people are super curious about ai. Then they start using it. And become less, they almost outsource decision making or outsource their curiosity. We have reached this time where there's almost no window between wondering about something and knowing the answer. Like anything you wanna know the answer to, you can look it up within a matter of seconds with ai. And so I wonder how that's affecting the business world and customer decision making, all these different changes we're seeing, which is that like you no longer have this ability to educate. Consumers 'cause they've already self-educated or they can educate on the fly using AI and how do you see that changing the world? Sure. So as we all know, a lot of the fearmongering out there is AI is gonna replace this and that and people and ideas are coming obsolete. But as someone who uses ai, in my daily life, in my business, AI is just a tool. You gotta know, you gotta have the base knowledge, right? You gotta know what you're after. You have to know what you're talking about. You have to know the right questions to ask. Working with AI is a dialogue. And back to your question about customer engagement is I. Use AI to tap into the brain of your customers. Put a profile, in, in writing, right? With AI of this is the type of customer I'm trying to reach and this is what I think their pain points are. This is where I think, the problems exist and have a dialogue with AI just as it was your customer. Yeah, your customer's gonna be able to get different ideas and strategies. From AI and the internet, just like you can, but you can really tap into AI to really practice hone in your pitch, hone in, pointing out the pain points you're solving for them and the solution you're bringing. Now we're going through this cycle where everyone's I need to use ai, but I'm not sure how to use it. And we're different levels of excitement and some people are still very much, I don't wanna use it. Some people, I wanna use it all the time. I wanna have AI talk to my customers and said to me, where do you see the balance? Because my worry is that. As we use too much ai, we start to shift and lose authenticity. There's a point where AI and I for me, it's like when I use AI to talk to the customer, become the barrier between me and the customer, then it's a problem. Then it's switched from usefulness into the da, like it's now decreasing my authenticity. Whereas like for my favorite use case is I use AI to sort my email. So it's 30 years ago when I only have 10 emails to look at a day, not 500. But I still respond to every email personally. But other people go on the other way and have AI read all your responses, and now you don't even remember what you said. And I feel like that's the danger is the loss of authenticity, which is, I feel becoming the only USP we have anymore. Because every knowledge as a commodity, marketing methods, as a commodity psychology, all the fancy sales techniques in every sales book are now inside an ai. So the only thing that's different is like truth and reality, like that's all that's left. Maybe that's a good thing. Yeah I, yeah, I think this is a problem that was existing even before AI came on board a, as much as it's now, which was just with automation, right? Having a series of texts and emails and posts and so it go out with. Even responding, right? Someone responds back, they get this message without having that, that AI factor, and again, you lost your authenticity, you lost your connection with your customer then. And then trying to go beyond that and try to out outsmart the customer by using AI to pretend that it's for me I think it's a balance of. Using ai, using tech technology, using automation for the low hanging fruit. Those first initial outreaches, maybe a little bit of vetting to see is this the right customer? Is this, are our services gonna be able to help these individuals? But the minute it gets beyond that kind of initial intake, initial discovery, it's gotta switch over to someone who knows your business, knows what you do, and knows how to help that customer. there was this, the first promise of AI was like you could replace different employees with ai. You can replace your sales team or you can replace your customer service team. And now a lot of leaders are starting to think, how far away from an AI CEO or an AI CTO, am I vulnerable to this? And as then you get to the point where suddenly everyone's, the whole company's ai, there's no real people like, I think that's a fear, and I don't know how real it is, but I understand that it exists because of the marketing type of ai.'cause everyone says it, you start to think it's true for. Leaders who are thinking about bringing AI to the company and they're like I don't wanna bring in, but I don't wanna bring it in a way that like threatens me. Nobody wants to bring it, hire their own replacement. What do you find is the right calibration or approach to bringing in new tools in a way that enhances your position or strengthens your position as opposed to makes you feel like you are at risk? Or that oh, we don't need you now that we've got your AI replacement. Yeah. The AI replacement I'll give a quick story. I, again, from even my personal life, I use ai I, I trade in stocks and that sort of thing and, I will upload SEC documents and have it analyze it for me.'cause it can read a thousand pages in 20 seconds, which I can't. But at the same time, when I'm asking, AI to analyze that document and what it says in relation to my stocks, it often gets it wrong. There's a stock I'm in that had a reverse split and AI will give me calculations based upon the pre reverse split because they didn't, analyze the latest, value of that stock right then and there. So again, i'm sure there, there's far more, intelligent systems that are out there and being built right now, but AI is not there yet. Chat, GBTI use every single day and it's constantly getting something wrong if I'm not paying attention. I think we're years, decades away from, this notion that. AI can replace our thinking, our human thinking for us. But again, it is a tool and any tool, you gotta find a way. To make that, allow that tool to help you be smarter, get things done faster, get things done more efficient, more effectively. That's to me what AI is about is us being able to play with it and learn it, but do that in a way that makes us look better and helps our job security because we're actually able to accomplish so much more in such a quicker amount of time. So what I wanna get into as well is an area of implementation, which is like a lot of people buy the tool, and this is like my biggest. Pet peeve is they buy a tool and then go, okay, now I bought it. I gotta find a way to use it. Yes. And what I find, whether I'm working with clients or talking to people, it's always the same thing, which is I got the tool, I'm not sure what to do it for. So I wanted to figure out the problem it should solve and then solve the problem. And operations or systems, or people call 'em different names, machines, but the idea of having a standardized process of some type. And it's if you have. A really well documented process. This happens, then this happens, then we do this, then this happens. Then I can automate, I can accelerate that with ai. If you don't know, like sometimes someone will say, I go, what do you want the output to look like? I'm not sure. Then it's really hard to hit a goal that's invisible. Yeah. So a lot of companies, when they're thinking about optimization, they're actually jumping past the systems or the operation step and going straight to the AI step, which is first you have to build the car and figure out where it's going. Then you can add the nitrous oxide, then you can add the accelerant, which is what AI really is. And I think that's the problem is that when we see all the advertisements in the talk about ai, the way we talk about AI versus what it can actually do is a massive gap. There's a massive gap. No matter what I'm working on. It still requires a massive amount of my input. Even with all these accelerants from ai, I can do things I couldn't do before, but I still have to be there. It still makes mistakes constantly, so I think that it's a really critical component to figure out. A system first. Almost without ai, maybe you could have AI help you design a process, but I find that, and there's so many things I'm seeing right now, like everyone transcribes every meeting I go, what to do with the transcripts? Nothing. Or you get it to make notes. You send notes to everyone on the team. Does anyone look at it? Of course not. It becomes just a newsletter. So we do all of these things that sound efficient. It's like when people buy books by the foot. It's if you're buying books by the length, you're not reading 'em and you're just buying 'em by the size to fill a library and you're not getting the usefulness like a book unread. It doesn't really do any, being near a book doesn't make you smarter, unfortunately. And in the same way I find that we have these, all these processes that we're focusing on have the lowest ROI or the lowest of mutation, and we're. What I find, and this is what I really wanna understand from you, is that like when we try to change human behavior, that's when the odds of success go way down. Like whenever I work with a client, I say, listen, how do you do things right now, I don't wanna tell you the AI way. What I wanna do is add AI to whatever you're doing, because then it's likely to succeed. But as soon as I say, oh, now for example, with some transcription software, at the beginning of a meeting, you have to push a button. To say start the transcription and you people forget that all the time, that small behavioral change, boom. Or at the end of the meeting you have to push the make notes button. If you don't push it, the notes are lost. Massive failure time. And that's the smallest behavioral change I can think of is push one extra button to start with the meeting. So if we can't get that, so that's what I want to talk about is like how can we. Design systems or have the approach to operations that's let's how, look how we're doing it and minimize the amount of change. And then we look at exactly automation first and then ai. But like we have to see how are we doing it? How can we do it better? Let's master that before we add an ai.'cause it just adds in this complexity. I think about the, I Love Lucy where she's making the chocolates and the thing goes faster and faster so they explode and go everywhere. Now I'm showing my age here, but it's it doesn't matter if you have a really good conveyor belt, if the people can't keep up with it. Yeah. A hundred percent. My, my career has been in the internal operations side of business, like the accounting, the hr, cross departmental functions, and I a hundred percent agree with you. Like you first have to have the process down. Like you gotta know what accounting is and how it works and what that process is and how it affects you, how it affects your salespeople, how it affects your customer. You have to know as a business owner, as the manager of that function, how it operates. And then yes, then you get curious, okay, this is. These are the processes of accounting. This is how it works in our business. How can we use machine learning tools, AI to shorten the amount of time we spend in doing those tasks? You're not taking the tasks away entirely. You're just tapping into, okay, I can have a system. That reads an invoice that you'll pull some of that into, fields that I need, the company name the description of the invoice, the date, all that type of stuff. Like you just saved 15, 15, 30, 45 seconds for every invoice. And you, if you're a big company, that's a lot of time, right? So you have the process, you know how it works and you utilize these tools. To enhance the productivity of your team by reducing the amount of human time in it, but you're still not removing the human right. Someone's gotta review that to make sure it's right, to make sure there's some nuances that are caught and even evaluating whether or not that's a bill that should be paid is this, some kind of crazy invoice that came in from some fraudulent company trying to get, $25,000 for free because. They think everything might just be automated and pay 'em, right? So you have to, the humans have to stay a part of the process, but you're utilizing these tools to be more efficient and effective in how you do that. Yeah. I love that you brought up that. Too much Automation can be dangerous thing, especially when it comes to like automatic payments or not paying attention. Because one of the dangers I see, and we see this all the time, which is where people, oh, the AI did a good nine times, so the 10th time, they don't check it, and that's when you, that's when the mistake happens. It's and it's the same kind of problem with employees. If you're not watching, there's this big shift now for everyone to work from home and it's here's what. The simplest way to know you have a problem, okay? When you work from home seven hours and 50 minutes, you just round it up to eight hours, right? No, you start rounding, then seven and a half hours becomes eight, then seven becomes eight. If no one's checking, eventually four becomes eight, then two becomes eight, then you take a day off and no one notices, and that's. The same thing when you take your eyes off. Yeah. And that's what happens with ai. People go, it's always right. Why would I check it this time? And that's when you get like the messed up tweet now you have to go to a whole thing. Or you publish like a paper that has like a non fact in it. And. Part of it to me as well is that like when you hire a new employee, you have to tell them, here's the process, here's the goal. Here's what I look at to see if you're doing a good job. If I'm working for you and I don't know, good versus bad job, I'm just doing stuff. I can't optimize. I can never self optimize. I can't know if I'm doing good or bad. I never, I live in a constant state of fear. Am I gonna get fired? I don't know if I'm gonna a good job because we need some type of reference. It's if you say to me, I want 40 social media posts a week. If I finish 30, I know I've underdeliver. I finished 41. I know over delivered. But if you say, just do social media. And I go what does that mean? You go whatever you think it means. Yeah. It's very hard to succeed and I think we're starting to do that with ai, which is we go, oh, AI take care of social media. We don't say what that means or how our social media's different, like your social media, very different than mine. You and I don't have the same personality. We don't have the exact same customer base, and without saying. Sometimes we even go give AI task. We don't even say who we are and not even giving it a single reference point. And I think that's where we're starting to see some of these big challenges, why companies are getting like low results. Because we don't design a process first, then we don't put in place with the ai, here's the measurement of success, here's good versus bad. And then people start to get lazy. And it's a very, we've all done it right where it goes, eh, it's probably fine, whether it's with an employee or whatever, my frustration as a boss is like when I had assistant where I had to check everyone's screenshots. I'm like, I'm not doing that. It's not, I've changed my system now to where it's all, I'm like, let's just do project based or like task-based. I don't wanna measure your hours. I don't wanna check screenshots'cause that's inconvenient to me. So I've learned from that. But when we have these things, we start to leave in and what can happen is we have all these little holes in the Swiss cheese and then they line up, which is where, how we didn't perfectly optimize the plan. And then now we've got a person who's not paying attention and there's not really measuring a goal. Suddenly that's when something bad gets all the way through quality control. Yeah, I'll, I'll use another TV reference that will date me as well. Ro romcom Food Dehydrator. We grew up on those infomercials where the slogan was set it and forget it. And that's how people use technology today. And the truth is that the more complex this gets, looking at Zapier, like I, I've done some marketing campaigns for my business that. There's four or five zaps right from this triggering all the way to the inflow. Every one of those steps is a possibility for it breaking. We, we have APIs now for every software. Every software integrates and connects, and every time you have a connection. In a process, there is the possibility of that breaking that much more. And so we, you're right we get to this complacency where we're using technology, we're using ai, we're using all these tools. And so we set it, forget it. And that's the absolute wrong thing to do, sending out a, this day and age, sending out a blast email or newsletter and it says hi, first name and bracket. Like the, like that used to be a human error thing because someone just didn't change something or, but now it's becoming, we use all these connections, we use all these tools. We don't take the time to run a quick little test to every time we're doing something major or some output's happening or check it periodically and we miss these points and when you. Call someone by the wrong name or don't have their name in it, or misdescribe their company because they pulled it from LinkedIn and they don't even work there anymore and it is not really what they do. All of these components, when you miss those, you've lost that customer. You've lost them. Probably right away if they might give you a little bit of a second chance. But being, making sure that your technology is working correctly, the data you're using is correct, is vitally important to make sure you're delivering to the end customer. So you brought up something there that I think is so critical, and this is a really good thing to focus on, which is that the more complex the system is, the more opportunities it has to break down. And AI is super complex. The thing about ai, what makes it special, is that you can ask it the same question 10 times and get 10 slightly different answers, and that means you've introduced what I call the uncontrollable variable, which is that sometimes it's gonna do what you didn't think it's gonna do. So you have the only way to control for that is have quality control. Like with my team, I was talking about having them create more social media with ai. I was like, here's the step. Everything has to be manually approved by me before it goes out the door. No matter what I, that's a critical step for me. And that's, that might slow things down sometimes, but I have to double check it because if people think it was posted by me, then it was posted by me. Like when people when celebrities get in trouble for a Twitter post, it wasn't, it was probably their high school friend. It's probably someone from the entourage, like in the morning you throw your phone to someone and you say You're in charge of Twitter today. It's so unlikely that the person's actually doing their own tweeting, right? They're acting, they're doing whatever their life is. Someone else does it, and, but it doesn't matter. You still get, but the results are still on you. You're still responsible, as we build these more complex systems, they require more oversight, not less. And I think this is a really critical element, which is that even if you're bringing AI into the C-suite, you still have to have oversight. You have to move into management of that ai, which is watching its output. Maybe it could do things faster. And I love that you brought up the reverse split 'cause that's like a notorious thing that ais don't understand. For some reason, that's a so story I've heard a couple of times. It's for some reason that really confuses ais these little things that you understand and on paper the AI should understand, and I have things all the time where I'm working with an ai, it gets it wrong and I go, what are you talking about? And it goes, oh, you're so right. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I'm like, you should have, I was fighting with an ai, I got fight with AI all the time, and I was saying, it was like, oh, your thing is really weird. I go, you wrote that? Look up in the conversation. That's your thing. Let's like, it's let's not. Start playing that game. If this is broken, you broke it, not me. And it goes, oh, you're right. I forgot to follow our system. I forgot to start our process. I often have to start a prompt with here's our set of rules that we always follow, that you, so that it doesn't forget it. And that's the thing. It's like there's a lot of benefit. But complicated systems introduced more possibilities for surprises. And so that's why exactly. I don't think that employees are in danger of losing their jobs, even in leadership. And I think that it's really important to just see it as another tool. Like every time we have this innovation oh, we have calculators. Why do we need accountants? Now we have spreadsheets. Why do we need accountants? And we have the ability for an AI to look at a contract. Why do we need a lawyer? And we have certainly. AI can help you replace the dumb questions like, what does this work mean? Great for that, or explain this phrase. I use AI with contracts all the time, but there's a huge difference between that And my dad, who's been a lawyer for 50 years writing a contract like AI's not there yet. And there's nuance and there's subtleties for every different market. And because AI, I doesn't, it knows a little bit about everything. Like a jack of all trades, so you don't, you have more possibility for these little things slipping through the cracks. You still need the expert who goes, wait a minute, and that's why I think exactly that. It's just another tool that's very exciting. But eventually we will realize that it's just a tool. It's not sentient, and it's not even close to sentient that it's very exciting and people tell all these stories about how it's gonna change your life, but it's just a little bit better word processor. It's just a little bit better than a stock photo site for generating images. Like it's not that much of a difference. It can be very useful, but still. You have to have the process in place first, you have to know what you wanna do. You have to know what the output looks like, and then you can build something. But a lot of the things that I build. Could have been built five or 10 years ago, like the technology existed then. So little of what we think is AI actually is ai. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard, talked to some tech people too what you're really describing as an AI is machine learning, which has been around for, 50 years. Yeah. You have to train ai. You can train AI and back to your question or statement about, double checking everything. I would say look at it as. The employee that you have, that's a hard worker, but bless their heart type person. They just, not the smartest but they're good to have around. You would never take something they delivered to you and just go run with it. You wouldn't go publish it, you wouldn't, you would review it, you would check it. You gotta treat AI the same way. A as that person who's a hard worker and can do a lot of tasks. But deep down, that. They're not always gonna get it. And so you have to check up on 'em. And I actually saw a video this past weekend, I think, of something that I'm gonna start implementing.'cause I have not been doing it is having A-A-P-D-F that describes my business. I. So anytime when I'm working on business development a proposal, marketing content for social media, whatever it is, I first upload this document and it gives me, as my persona. I want to have my, my, my language, how I wanna be presented, what my company does, what the value points are. Start with that and say, okay, analyze. Analyze this. Lemme know you're done. Don't do anything yet. And then go to your questions. So it helps that that, that precursor I've been working on two assessments on curiosity, curious Leader assessment and a curious culture assessment. And, before I start having them help me with formulating questions and analyzing the questions I've come up with, I say, okay, put your psychometric hat on. I want you to analyze these as a psychometric psychometrician to analyze, are these the best questions to get out these archetypes and to not overlap with other archetypes? And again, you, it's gotta be a dialogue. You gotta play with it. You gotta check it, you gotta call it out when it's, it says something completely off base. You're like, that is the exact opposite. We just told me five minutes ago. What changed, right? And have that conversation, have that dialogue. But at the end of the day, you have to be the person who's gonna own this and make sure that the output that you're trying to get to is really there. Yeah, I think that's really critical, which is that the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Like anything else, like longer prompts get longer results. Telling it who you are gets better results. And sometimes when you've got those corners, when you forget to set that baseline, and we, I think of AI like a real, a genius with Memento. Like they have that short, they keep forgetting what you were talking about. Which is very annoying. But they're an expert, but they're like, oh, I don't remember how I learned this. Like they're a master chef but they don't know how they learned how to cook. And so they're constantly forgetting like what you ordered. And so you get something really good, but it's not always what you meant for. And that's why we have to exactly add in anchoring, add in longer prompting, start to add in these training elements.'cause you can bring in a really great tool, but if you don't teach everyone how to use it. You're gonna get moderate results. I think that's part of what's happening with AI as well. Like we talked about in the middle of the process, is someone's using it, but they're not very good at it, but it's okay and that's good enough. And that's the most dangerous word in business, I think, is That's good enough. It's good enough to send out the door, but if you're buying, it would be good enough. Not really. And I think that's really critical. Now, this has really been an amazing discussion. I really appreciate so much of your time, Jon. For people who are thinking, I do wanna learn more about curiosity, I wanna learn more about what you're doing. I wanna think more about this part of my operation, some of the amazing things you're doing as a speaker and a consultant. Where can people find you and see what you're doing online? That's just so fascinating. Sure, I'll give you two websites. My consulting website is my company consulting companies Lateral Solutions. And the the website is think-lateral.com. And then my personal brand site is Jon Bassford, JON, and then bass fish ford car.com. Those are the two best ways to see what we're up to. And as I mentioned, we are, we're all gonna be rolling out some curious leader and curious cultural assessments. Probably here in the next few days here from when we're shooting this. So by the time this goes live, it should be she up and running. Amazing. I'll put the links in the show notes for everyone watching the videos. It's right below the video. Thank you so much for being here, Jon, for an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business' revenue, head over to artificial intelligence pod.com. Slash calculator, use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact AI can have on your bottom line. It's quick, easy, and might just change the way. Think about your business while you're there. Catch up on past episodes. Leave a review and check out our socials.