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

 Change Doesn't Have To Be Scary With Marc Wolfe

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 379

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the intricate balance between AI, business, and humanity with our distinguished guest, Marc Wolfe, an esteemed author and speaker known for his insightful perspectives on the intersection of technology and leadership.

Marc Wolfe shares his pragmatic views on embracing AI as a tool rather than a replacement, underscoring the significance of maintaining authenticity and human connection in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. The conversation navigates through the challenges of staying true to oneself amidst technological advancements and stresses the importance of leveraging AI to enhance, not replace, human interaction.

Notable Quotes:

  • "What's the balance between AI and business and being a human? The core fundamentals are what we must retain to navigate these turbulent times." - [Marc Wolfe]
  • "AI is a really powerful accelerant, but as soon as you remove yourself from the equation, you're not special anymore." - [Jonathan Green]
  • "We try to get things done quickly and easily. If AI says it does something and we don't check to see if it's correct, we lose our humanness." - [Marc Wolfe]
  • "As companies, we must listen to what our clients and our people are saying, so we're not tone-deaf." - [Marc Wolfe]

Marc Wolfe touches on the concept of AI as a powerful accelerant, emphasizing the dangerous temptation of cutting corners and the critical need for maintaining one's unique voice and identity. The dialogue highlights the growing need for human interaction and trust, portraying authenticity as the cornerstone of enduring relationships in both personal and professional spheres.

Connect with Marc Wolfe:

Marc unveils his latest initiatives aimed at helping businesses utilize AI without losing sight of the human element. He emphasizes the value of in-person interactions and nurturing authentic relationships as key to thriving in the AI age.

If you're seeking to understand how to harness the power of AI while preserving the essence of human connection, this episode offers invaluable insights from a leading expert in the field!

Connect with Jonathan Green

Change doesn't have to be scary with today's amazing special guest, Marc Wolfe. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated Tech 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, mark, we're at a time right now where it's very tumultuous and. We've seen a lot of technological changes in our lifetimes. A lot of shifts. Like when I was born, computers didn't have hard drives, and it's hard for my kids to imagine that, and it's hard to, they can't even understand how computers don't have touchscreens. I was like, whoa. When I was a kid, the computer was black and orange. We didn't even have white letters yet. So it's so many ships in our lifetime in the fax machine. I remember when that plain paper fax was amazing. But it's a time now when people are very nervous. I think it's because there are so many AI announcements at such a high cycle. It's almost as though if the fax machine was a new invention, then the next day was the cell phone, then the next, or maybe the car phone, then the cell phone, and it's happening so fast. I think it's becoming this overwhelming cycle, and I think that's what I really wanna dive into is like how can people achieve a place of peace or equanimity or still maintain their identity while seeing technology as what it is, which is just a technology. I could not agree more. I think that so many people fear the unknown and then they don't want to be left behind and they're hearing all this noise. So what's the balance between AI and business and being a human? And I want to talk about the core fundamentals, the things that if we leave behind, we'll have to shift back there sooner or later. As a guy who's written books and spoken to lots of people and remember computers without hard drives, I think there's a lot of things that we have to make sure that don't get lost in all this, which is how do we accomplish what we set out to accomplish, but still keep our humanness? I think that. In my experience, my thought is that because it's so easy with AI to cut corners in the sense that you can say, write me a book, write me an email, and. This is why we see, like we see a lot of these big companies get into these trouble where they publish something they didn't mean to publish. I've seen people where they, someone got in trouble with a book recently where she accidentally left in the line where the AI said, I'm just an ai. And she hadn't caught it in the editing process and very much, and it wasn't her first book, it was like her 20th book. So she got, but she got caught and that's a devastating for her reputation. And the problem is. Not there's this, I think there's this balance between like how difficult it is to cheat and how likely you are to cheat. As it gets easier and easier, it's like more and more likely, and that's the challenge. Like it's now become so easy to cut corners that it's really hard not to. The temptation becomes so strong and I think that's when you start to lose your voice. We're already seeing a study came out last week that shows kids are now using. AI words, more and more words that we haven't used in a long time, like pondering and landscape and all these words that usually make obvious that it's a chat GPT phrase. Now kids are using them like teenagers and college students so much that it's catching up to the AI usage. So now, instead of AI following language is following ai. Yeah. This is what's dangerous is, I believe that when calculators first came out and people were using 'em in class, I heard from people who were engineers and things, they were like, you aren't supposed to use those. They want you to do longhand. And when microwaves first came out, people are like, you're gonna be nuking your food. Why would you ever do that? I think there, there's a thing where you start to go and get to a point where it's easy and anybody's ever forwarded an email and never read the article. Does things to go and just put things out there, and we all know that because you and I, Jonathan, there was a time when you would win a free trip. It said if you forwarded this to 50 of your friends, now people don't know that If they're under 30, they're like, huh? I was like, there was always an email chain that was out there. Here's the thing, we as humans try to get things done quickly and easily. We're convenience operated and if AI says it does something and we don't check to see if it's correct, and we don't go and spend time to understand how it's gonna affect the other people, like responding with an email that's so inauthentic, it doesn't sound like you anymore, that people are like, this doesn't, I know it was AI generator or LinkedIn. When I see LinkedIn comments and I watch and I think that was not the same person that I speak to. Once we lose our humanness, all of a sudden. People don't trust you anymore. And without trust, that doesn't go well. Yeah, AI is a really powerful accelerant, but as soon as you remove yourself from the equation, you're not special anymore. And I used to see all these ads like, push one button, make a million dollars. And it's if that's all you have to do, then anyone can do it. And now it's a commodity. Which means it's not special. Like grass is a commodity. Anybody can find grass in their front yard or their backyard or on the side of the road. So it's why it's not expensive unless you get a fancy grass, which is hard to find. And we are starting to make our opinions, our social media posts, like I don't engage with social media so little these days because everything is a repost of what someone else said or someone's video and it's, there's very little original thought. And what happens is. We forget the value of quality. So I once heard someone say this and I thought it was so good. He is I met someone and they were like, oh, we've met before. And he goes, then be more memorable. And I love that line, be more memorable. It's is it my fault for forgetting you or your fault for being forgetful? And I think ouch. That was one of those powerful lessons I learned because it's happened to me before where someone, I didn't remember someone, I was like, is it my fault? Maybe it's your fault. Be more memorable. And we're so busy being lukewarm and doing, and I know why corporations do that, right? They post the most sanitized things because there's so many things they're afraid of getting wrong. But the more you do that, the less you become memorable, nobody's actually looking to see. What Coke pasted on Facebook last week. Nobody cares. Nobody really cares. I think Wendy's, I think Wendy's is the one that jokes a lot, so that's why people remember them. They say things that are funny and like kind of snarky. Otherwise, yeah, you're forgetful, forgettable, and when you just use, aI to sound like everyone else. You just become forgettable. And I think that's a really dangerous thing that I'm starting to see. Like a lot of people, I can always tell when someone has started to use too much AI in their content because it's no longer interesting. And I'm certainly, I. I have to find a balance myself with the content that I create for exactly that reason, which is like, how can I still be myself while using the tools I talk about all the time and maintain that balance? And I have to over calibrate and be a little more authentic because people expect me to be less authentic. Like he's an AI guy, he's probably not even real. So there is this challenge to find and. I know for a lot of our listeners, they're at their later phases of their career. They're in the executive track, they're in C-suite and above, and thinking how can I use AI in my company in a way that doesn't damage the authenticity between me and my employees, or between my employees and our customers? So what is the path to navigate because it is a time of great transition. We've been through a lot of tech transitions before, and is it really that different to go through this particular change right now? So the critical point you brought up is it's a transition, right? But we've been through transitions before. Here's the difference. There's things where you can create videos that look like real people. You can create songs that sound like real singers. There's things where people are concerned at a level they've never been concerned before, that they're like, that fooled me. So as much as we talk about the things that are easy to pick out the fake posts, the articles written, and we look at how do you balance that as a leader, you have to know your people need to understand ai and what does that mean? Understand, does it mean understand prompts? Understand the discernment between what's real and what's not real. What's hallucinated? And now with prompting, even though I'm not an expert, what I'm doing is learning how when I want something done in research that I would normally hand off to an assistant, I can actually prompt it to be able to provide me even more detailed answers. Everyone needs to understand at least how to be able to do better true research and be able to do that when you start replacing yourself with ai. And my, I freak out a lot of my wife and my other friends when I speak to ChatGPT and she has this voice and she does the ums and ahs, and it sounds so real. She's I don't like how real that sounds. That is just the beginning. It's only gonna get better to the point where you can't even tell. So when you talk about this as a leader, what are you trying to, what's your outcome? What are you looking for? Is it just getting something done? Many people still just want to get things done. If that's your goal, you will be forgotten. If you wanna do something memorable, if you wanna stand out, you have to actually listen to what people are saying. And when I say your people, that doesn't just mean your your clients, it means your team. When they say, yeah, but I don't understand, or, yeah, but I'm afraid. You gotta understand what that fear is and you gotta understand where that comes from because without that, you're just gonna be like, we're gonna go and read AI Leader, we're gonna read these books, we're gonna do this, we're gonna implement it. It's gonna be great. And if you don't hear what your clients are saying and your people are saying about it, you're tone deaf. Yeah, I think. What I find fascinating is that we're, we all think it's about ourselves. Everyone is a narcissist without realizing, which is how is AI gonna affect me? We forget that our employees have this fear, and this is something when I was leading a large team as a CTO for a while this year was each of them is what if I leave here with. A lower skill point than I arrived because technology's moving so fast. You, when you lose your job or change shops, whatever the trend causes the transition. Now there's an expectation for you to have a higher level of skill than there was before. Now it's I got hired before AI was necessary. So now if I leave without these AI skills, I'm really in a top situation because. We're already starting to see this expectation, like just like people expect you to be able to answer an email or do an internet search, they expect you to be able to do, have a certain level of AI experience. Whether you're a code or a technical person or personal assistant, doesn't really matter. There's some, there's more and more technological components, and as a leader, we're often thinking I need to protect myself because I wanna watch off my own career. So there's this balance, and I think that from my perspective at least, there's this. Uncertainty because of a lot of the language that I think is really the fault of the AI industry, which is. Use ai, fire everyone. Replace our, your employees with ai. And those are the kind of course that creates an environment of fear and it also leads to massive amounts of sabotage. It's if I say to you, train this AI, and once you finish, then we can fire you. I'm like this AI is not gonna do very good. You know what I mean? I have a bad feeling about this project. When someone's incent, right? When someone is negatively incentivized, of course they're gonna do whatever it takes to protect their position and as they should. It's totally normal. It's human nature and it's understanding people. And it's also really not true. It's every company that's tried to replace a bunch people with AI has regretted. It's just not working out.'cause AI's not there yet. The prompt, the hype for AI is so much bigger than the reality. It's like a little bit better. Google a little bit better word processor. And when you start to look at it that way, it's not that dramatically different. If you do a search in Google or a search in ChatGPT, the results are not dramatically different, even though they say they are. It's like they both lie to you. You still have to double check everything, right? They both have misinformation, false information, or like a link to the wrong thing. And exactly like you're saying is that the tools are only gonna get better and more and more convincing. So it's how do you still stand out and still maintain your identity and. Strengthen your relationships at a time where everyone is trying to weaken their relationships. What I see right now that bothers me the most is what everyone's like I want AI to answer every email for me. I want it to answer every write, every social media post, respond to every social media post. I'm like then you're, what you'll miss is everything your customers are saying, and that's really dangerous place to be because. Maybe if 10 people see a problem, one will tell you, maybe it takes a hundred. And so you're losing so many people. Now if you don't have that kind of finger up to the wind, there's, to me, that's the most worrying thing, and I think it's the wrong use for ai. AI is so good at organizing data and. Helping you put everything together and do processes faster. The worst use of it is content creation. It's the thing that, it's literally the worst out of every task there is, but it's also the most tempting. It's I don't wanna spend all my time answering all these emails, ai, answer everything for me. The problem is you're responsible for whatever it says. And now, like you said, the real danger is it's almost becoming catfishing, right? Where someone reads these social media posts, then they meet you and they go you're completely different. You used AI generated photos, AI posts, and now you're a completely different person, right? And the person feels misled. And I think that's a really, the biggest danger I worry about with AI is deception. I've seen a lot of people are really tempted by AI phone calls, which is the ai, just sales phone calls, and they're like, only 78% of people hang up. And they're like, the other 22% haven't realized they're being deceived. And it's so your ideal customer. Is vulnerable to deception. That's literally what you're saying to me. Wow. It's such a horrible perspective, right? It's who's your ideal customer? The easily tricked, right? That's not a great business plan because one thing I know is that when you trick someone, eventually they figure it out, and when they do, they hate you. That's when you say, how do you create like a lifetime enemy or a vendetta? This is how you do, like you trick someone and the bigger the trick, the longer the vendetta. You do it right. Yeah. With a really good AI phone call. They're telling their kids about it. Their kids are telling their grandkids. You have Hatfield's in the McCoy situation and it's this, really wrong direction, I think that we're falling into, and that's the temptation I worry about. It's no, don't do that. It's very easy in the short term, but it will kill your company long term when people figure it out. Deception should never be like one of the core pillars of your business. It's it's sad but funny it that you even say that it's. Think about it this way I could have wr written my book with ai, but I chose not to. Why? Because I actually wanted it to sound like my voice. So even my editor when they edited Yeah. But. They were like, we wouldn't normally leave this in. I said I'm a guy from Jersey who's moved to the south. I want it to sound like me because it's me. And oh, by the way, Jonathan, the way to get around it just for today is because we have to be authentic, is to actually be in person. I know it's crazy, but I'll tell you, I'm doubling down on facilitation, on keynotes, on speeches because there is gonna be such a shift where things aren't believable online that people are gonna be like, unless I see somebody in person. I'm actually not gonna believe it. Now we can go back to Milli Vanilli when they were the original ai, because they were singing songs that weren't even theirs and they weren't really singing. So people go ahead and Google what Milli Vanilli is. But there was a band that actually sang other songs that they really weren't singing. It was just a trek. If you think about it, it's really important to have that human connection. And we saw that during COVID, that even people that were introverts that were like, yeah, I could see people once every so often. I'm good. We're like, wow, you know what? I really do need this human interaction. So AI is gonna become so dangerous that we lead with it. About being deceived by it, you start to believe it, and it's only gonna get better. I am not against ai. What I'm against is using the humanness that we have and diminishing it to the point where you're like I just want to get it done at what cost? Yeah. You brought up something that I think is the future, which is the increasing value of human interaction, which is that there's this idea I have that eventually social media will get so bad, people stop doing it. And it's like you never hear anyone say, I used an online dating site and it was great. You never hear that. You've, I've never heard someone say, I'm using a dating app and my life is happy. And you never hear someone say, oh, I spent two hours on Facebook and I'm feeling really good right now. You never hear that, right? You never hear any social media lead to a positive feeling, a positive emotion, right? What you find is affirmation or negative cycles, right? Whatever you're looking for, you'll find more of. If you wanna get told, it's not your fault, the world is bad, you'll hear whatever the thing is, you'll get caught in that loop, and my hope is that. We do spend more time outside because we are discovering more and more of the internet is not really people, I've never met anyone who's tweeted, right? I don't know if anyone ever, my whole life, I've never met someone who's oh, I tweet all the time. And I don't know if anyone does it. Maybe now it's more or less, I don't know. But there's all these social media platforms and I'm like, I've never met anyone who uses these and they have 50 million users. I'm like, yeah, I've never met one. So I wonder. I'm hopeful that, exactly like you said, we'll start to desire more authenticity, more in-person meetings, more reality. We've already started to see with job interviews, when we interview people for like tech jobs, we start to ask. Really weird questions because we don't want the AI to prep it. Like I found out, this is amazing. I didn't know this was happening until recently, that a lot of people would do job interviews and they're only wearing a suit from the way up and then like underwear or just pajamas. So now in interviews they make you stand up. And it's I haven't done that one, but I have done an interview where the person was obviously using chat, GPT, and so you'll ask questions that the AI doesn't know how to answer because they're weird. And you say how did it make you feel when this happened? And the person can't type it fast enough to get the fake answer. And you wanna say when you, and when you were trying to solve the problem, what were the wrong things that you tried along the way? Things that AI's not really trained for, but if it really happened to you, you can tell the story. And it's like when you're telling a memory versus making up a story of what happened on the way home it's really hard to lie about real, all the small things. And that's really the difference. And I think that. That's why I want to drive forth, through all these episodes, all the people I interview, that like AI is a tool, but authenticity is gonna become more valuable, not less. I find that my conversational quality has gone up a lot over the last year when I have one-on-one talks with people because the more you lean towards authenticity, like the more people will respond in kind, and we crave that. We crave reality like. My wife is from a different country and I never know what she's gonna say to me. Never. It's always a surprise. My wife is the same country, and I still am surprised when she says something to me and I should see it coming. I don't know, Jonathan, that might just be a spouse thing. That's, but that's the point. Can you imagine if you always knew what she was about to say, that would be so boring. Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, listen, you're in Asia. There's a lot of people who dating actually electronics and are not having kids. There's a whole, you can have a whole episode on that where people have not had marriage and, but I know you don't wanna go there, but let's go back to the job thing and hiring people. It's interesting. Let's use AI. So the difference between a 10 99, an independent contractor and a W2, right? I think it should be simple. When you post that, you figure most people that are applying for a job would know that. And if they didn't, they would, old school, Google it, right? And in the past I've had people apply and there's really clear instructions what the role is gonna be, et cetera. And on the bottom it says, email, this email address with the reason why you want the job. And these three really simple things. Of the thousand people that viewed it, and the hundreds of people that applied a small fraction actually read it. They could have used AI to read the ad and say, what do I need to do? Which would've been helpful. They could have used it. And actually, but that's the thing that hopefully, let's turn it on its head. AI can help people actually see things they would miss. And help them actually go, Hey, by the way, this is something you need to do or need to prepare for, or we can use it as an assistant. Which actually shows you how to be more human versus it replacing you and being so agentic that it actually goes and starts sending emails on your behalf. There is a way to use it in businesses where you can see where you're leaking data or you're leaking information, or you're sensing things that you're like, I need to be able to get this done. That really is where I think there's a benefit immediately. Yeah. I think. You're really onto something there. There's just this temptation to offload your decision making, and we're seeing I think it's an after all effect of some other things that have happened where people's like conversational skills are really collapsing because they have less, they talk to strangers less, and they never got to their comfort zone. Like the fact that you can now do like order food delivery with no contact. You can bring me my food, which I'll put into my body, but don't look me in the eyes. It's who are you, prince? You know what I mean? It's like it used to be only like the wildest of celebrities would say things like that. Don't look me in the eyes. We'll only play in the dark and things like that. And now it's become this. Everyone does it like, oh, I could never order a pizza on the phone. And it's I can tell you right now, the only person who wants to talk less. Is the other person answering at the pizza place? That's, you know what I mean? They're not living their dream life either. They're doing their job, they're not gonna be like, oh my gosh, this person's an idiot ordering a pizza. They're not thinking, because I have a lot of friends who've done that job. So I've been on both sides of that phone call and but we don't, we are doing less and less human interaction. And we, and I think that you're exactly right. Instead of being like, do it for me, you can say, help me to do it better, and. We have to shift towards that. I think we are gonna see a major shift because the internet is getting less and less interesting. Like you, we're older. So we were, I remember when the internet was hopeful. I remember when you got a sound when you got an email and you were excited to see what came in. And it was like everything was so positive and so happy and it was like, this is amazing. And we can share secrets because I can meet people like the same things I do. And that was what, like the hopefulness of the internet, which has certainly disappeared over time. And now it's like we have words like doom scrolling and all this negativity. And I think that, yeah. The companies that are gonna survive are the companies that kind of do two things, which is clearly solve a problem. I see a lot of startups now that like they just do something cool with AI and you'll be gone soon. This cool doesn't last. There's a lot. I've seen a lot of cool things that did not last. They're gone, but. When you solve a problem, that's when you have that endurance and that have authenticity is a core value because it's very hard to endure when people can't remember you and don't feel some type of connection with you, and that's really how you can become unique because now that everyone can find the same information and build the same tools and has all the same technological access as everyone else, then what does make you different? We all have the same information now. There's no, you don't need to be smart anymore. The AI could be smart for you. You don't need to know all of history. The AI knows it. So what is left? It seems like the only thing left is authenticity. It's authenticity and IT relationships are still built on trust. It's still getting to know somebody and people that don't look people in the eye and people that don't want to interact and want to use technology are gonna have a tough time with people who wanna build authentic long-term business and personal relationships. And if you think about it, the more you get to know somebody, the more you share. I think being curious, I call myself professionally curious, where I'm always like, Hey, Jonathan, so tell me more about this. And I really am interested because I wanna know about your podcast and I wanna know more about your show. And listening to it, you only get one side. But then getting interviewed by your assistant, you get to see another dimension. There's so much more. And guess what? I dealt with humans all the way through just to even get on this podcast. So here's this AI guy that still uses humans, and you know why? There's a role for humans in that You could have automated that. You could have made a video on the way in, like people that get interviewed on videos and you could have set all that up and been like, Marc, this is so much easier. I could do 10 times more. Here's the thing. I was more interested because I was gonna get to talk to a human about something that was interesting, and I knew if people get right, even somewhat right, they can actually change the course of their business. Most people aren't listened to in organizations. If you put AI as a layer. You're gonna have less people heard by the humans that are in leadership that matter the most, and the people that do the work that matter the most. Because when everything settles down, there's still gonna be some humans there. And if you're not listening to what they say and you're not listening to how they want to grow and go move up in the organization, it's not gonna go well. So these are things we still have to take care of. Use AI to help you do that, but if you don't understand your communication skills and understand feedback loops and understand what's going on, you're gonna be missing on the opportunity even with the people that are left. Yeah, I think that's such a strong point to end on. I really. One, encourage people to remember that the core thing, if you keep see it as a tool and you maintain authenticity, then you can really survive in this environment. For people that are interested in hearing more about your book and seeing some of the things you're doing online, what are the best places to find you, Marc, and see more of the amazing things you're doing. Organically, they can type in Marc Wolfe, M-A-R-C-W-O-L-F-E. And yeah, but that's, but with one T, if you type in two T's, you're on your own and came out with a book. And, I do a lot of facilitation, coaching a lot of stuff in person. We also do remote, but the thing is that I wanna make sure large businesses and small never lose contact with the people that have gotten them to where they are. And I wanna make sure leaders know how to communicate that, and that's why I've been doing that. Plus playing with technology since beta testing. Lots of different products that people are using today. So it's all about people, Jonathan, and I hope it always will be. That's amazing. I'll put links to everything in the show notes and below the videos for easy access. As always, thank you so much for being here, Marc 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.