“If you came here today for answers, I’m sorry, you will probably leave with more questions.”
That’s how Bucky Dodd, Ph.D., a long-time educator and CEO of an educational technology startup called ClearKinetic, launched his presentation on Artificial Intelligence last week to a group of association executives at the OKC Convention Center.
Dodd obviously follows author Stephen Covey and his 7 habits of a highly effective person.
Begin with the end in mind.
But Dodd’s presentation was more of a show-and-tell to his audience from the Oklahoma Society of Association Executives. He prompted a Chatbot to actually generate some amazing content for us.
I happened to be there at the invitation of a friend who knew I had an interest in AI and had previously written about it.
Questions from the audience began even before the presentation. What about AI’s impact on jobs? What about plagiarism?
Those are certainly legitimate concerns, but Dodd explained that AI, more specifically the Open AI ChatGPT that he demonstrated, are tools built on large language models. It is taught to respond and create content from information humans have created in the real world.
Then he got down to the real purpose of the presentation.
Demonstration.
And it was impressive.
With an audience of association executives, Dodd commanded Chat GPT to write copy geared especially to association professionals. First, he told it to write web content promoting an association convention.
Chatbot wrote the content at an amazing speed, maybe 90 words a minute like that showoff in my high school typing class. The copy was appropriate and engaging.
Then he had Chatbot write an email invitation to prospective convention goers, as well as an email to potential convention sponsors. Next, Chatbot wrote three social media posts for a LinkedIn audience.
But the real eye opener for me was when Dodd told Chatbot to write code for a convention landing page. He wrote a prompt to Chatbot that said “create code for a one-page landing page to promote the conference using HTML, in line CSS, which is cascading style sheet, and include a call to action button in the top right of the website.”
Boom! The computer started writing code like it had been coding for years.
When it was done, Dodd clicked on a button and the code instantly turned into a complete webpage with placeholders for the association’s logo.
Someone asked how did the Chatbot know he was asking for an association webpage.
“Because it’s in a chat window, it’s using the context of the things that came above it to generate it’s next response,” Dodd said.
Then he commanded Chatbot to write an exciting announcement about the conference in the style of Shakespeare.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” Chatbot started out as the audience laughed.
Dodd also showcased another AI called Adobe Firefly that generates images and graphics. An audience member suggested a picture of a penguin holding an umbrella in the snow, and it took maybe 15 seconds for Firefly to draw four separate images of penguins holding red umbrellas. In the snow.
As the presentation concluded, there were more questions, of course. Can Chatbot create logos? Add photos to a webpage? Copyrights? Who owns the content? Chatbot accuracy?
“Because they are machine driven, (Chatbot) can sometimes what they call ‘hallucinate,’ ” he said. “It will generate with a high-degree of confidence very inaccurate information.”
We were impressed, but we still had questions about AI’s future — and our own.
“AI should be used in ways to enhance human creativity and not get in its way,” Dodd said. “We have to recognize that it’s here, but use it in a very intentional and appropriate way.”
Good luck with that.
BONUS — I wrote another blog post back in January that featured Tulsa software developer John Hassell and his experience of implementing AI into his daily workflow. Read it here.
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