How to Leverage Technology Without Losing the Human Touch

Show Notes

Background

Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that AI is all around us. Have you tried it? I’m sure you have. If you’re watching the video version of this, you’ll see I have a blurred background. That was one of the first things of AI that we started using, whether it be on Zoom or Teams or any of the other platforms that do video.

The AI Era

We started to blur our backgrounds or drop in virtual backgrounds. Other examples of AI that we’ve all been using are things like spellcheck and auto-prompt, autocorrect, those kinds of things. And then sometimes in the email marketing software as well, your CRM, some of those things are also AI-generated or AI-prompted. So it has really been around for a long time, and we have been using a lot of it, but we didn’t always quite know.

But of course, with the start of the year with ChatGPT, it became so much more to the forefront. So today’s topic is how to leverage AI without losing the human touch because a lot of people are using it instead of using their brain, which is a bit sad. I was at an awards night last Friday night, and one of the judges was talking about the fact that people are doing their whole submissions, their whole awards submissions, with AI.

How did he know? Well, there’s things like “ripple” and “robust” and words like that that just kept coming up and up and up. And some of the submissions were actually very close. But the biggest takeaway and the biggest telltale was the fact that they had copied their prompts into their submissions. Please write an answer to this question. Well, it doesn’t take much to know that they were asking somebody else to do it.

The Proper Use of AI

So AI is like a junior assistant. Yes, it can be very helpful. But should it be doing everything, and should it be doing it unsupervised? Absolutely not. I’m a very big fan of AI, and I think that we should be using it, but we also need to be cautious, and we also need to make sure that what we’re training it on is us because we can ask it to write a book by Stephen Covey.

Well, that’s great for Stephen, but it’s not very good for you, and it’s not going to be accurate, is it? So getting some ideas and putting in some prompts and getting some research can be a good thing. But be careful with the research because that can be a hallucination as well. Have you heard of AI hallucinations? It’s when it literally makes things up.

So you need to check your references, you need to check what it’s doing. But having it correct some of your spelling or grammar or give you prompts for ideas like this one, I was thinking, what was I going to do for my podcast today? I had a couple of ideas, and I put them into a chat, and it said, Why don’t you talk about AI?

So okay, why not? Did it write the whole brief? Absolutely not. Did it write me a script word for word? Well, it could have, but I don’t go for scripts anyway, so definitely not. So the thing with AI is it is a tool, and it’s very useful in our coaching businesses, but it is not there to replace you, and it’s certainly not there to replace your ideas, your techniques, and your learning.

AI Capabilities

AI as a tool can be very helpful, especially for not starting on a blank page. Have you ever started trying to write a blog post and had all these ideas? Then you sit down at the computer, and poof, they’re all gone. Where have they gone? Well, sometimes those blank pages are really hard to get over, aren’t they?

So asking chat or any of the other versions to give you some ideas can spark other ideas. Sometimes it’ll say, Oh, you should be doing this, like talking about AI. And you might go, Well, I did that last week, or I’ve just done that recently. Oh, I could talk about this and that, and it starts those cogs turning.

So not starting on a blank page is a really great way to use it. As I mentioned, spellcheck, grammar check, that kind of thing is also a great way to use it, but getting it to write everything, no. Getting it to write things and forgetting to take the prompts is even worse. Use it wisely. So there’s many pitfalls about using AI, and we all like to go to the negative, so let’s have a bit of a chat about that.

AI Limitations You Should Know

It can be written in a voice that’s not yours. I have seen lots of people have written stuff in AI, and you know it’s not them because it’s not the words they use, it’s not the phrasing they use. So when you are getting it to write something, try to show it something that you have written, show it your voice style, show it exactly how you like to talk, the words you like to talk, and educate it.

One of the things AI always does is say “want completion,” don’t use that word. I don’t want “introduction.” I don’t want “top notch” or “robust.” Tell it the words that you don’t want, and then tell it the words that you do. That can be a great way to get it started, but you need it to be in your voice, and you need it to be consistent.

AI is a great way to speed things up, especially if you’re needing to write a couple of posts that are similar. So you might be doing some SEO work. You might have written something that was too long. You’ve done a LinkedIn post, for instance, and then you need it to be shortened down for an Instagram post. That kind of thing can be really good to get it to shorten your original work.

But remember, always check it because sometimes you might get the same paragraph twice, or you might get the same content twice, but it rephrases it, and that’s going to look a bit silly, isn’t it, if you’re repeating yourself over and over using different words? Remember, it is a tool, and you need to check it. The other thing you need to be aware of is making sure that it is situation-appropriate.

If you’re talking about something that’s a little sensitive, then you need to make sure that you’ve got the empathy and the correct phrasing, and you don’t want to be blunt and short. Make sure that whatever you’re writing or whatever you’re doing is situation-appropriate. AI can do videos now, probably not quite good enough to be used by themselves, but they can translate into different languages and then copy your speech patterns, so it looks like you’re speaking.

AI is definitely going to be around for a very long time, if not forever. We need to use it appropriately, and we need to learn to use it, but we also need to make sure that we’re keeping our own authentic voice and making sure that we are still getting out there. Because there’s nothing better than showing what your coach or your coaching practice can do.

Having those case studies of people that you’ve helped and the situations that you’ve dealt with, like “I helped someone just like you in this situation,” that is really important, and keeping your authentic voice, making sure that it does sound like you and it’s not sounding like somebody else. So absolutely carefully do your research and make sure that you’re giving it the best prompts and giving it the best chance, you can.

Links

Coaches Marketing Roadmap Book

Contacts

Cathy Smith Coaching
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