Mailbag Monday: ChatGPT skills to avoid job loss?

Katie and Chris answer your marketing, data, and AI questions every Monday.

This week, Melanie asked, “I lost my content job two weeks ago; my employer wants to save money and use ChatGPT exclusively for marketing messaging. What ChatGPT skills to avoid job loss do you recommend I develop (or certifications I should attain) to help prevent this from happening again?”

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AI-generated transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:00
Welcome back to another episode of mailbag Monday where Chris and I are answering all of your questions about marketing, data, AI, whatever comes up this week ChatGPT skills to avoid job loss. So Chris this week, Melanie asked, I lost my content job two weeks ago, my employer wants to save money and use ChatGPT exclusively for marketing messaging, what ChatGPT skills to avoid job loss do you recommend I develop or certifications I should attain to help prevent this from happening again?

Christopher Penn 0:36
Okay, so I’m sorry, this, this person lost their job, but that employer is doomed, right? For a couple of reasons. One, ChatGPT tends to create relatively generic content, even with really good prompting, because it’s always a mathematical average of the words you use the prompt, we won’t get into the technical side of things. And to remember, folks, if you’re using AI generated content, it cannot be copyrighted, which means that if your marketing messaging is all AI generated, anyone else if it works, anyone else could just pick it up and take it, you know, and you can’t do anything about it, because you can’t copyright it. So beware of that for the person themselves. You gotta, there’s a couple of things to do. One is sign up for the free tools. So the two that I recommend people start with are ChatGPT. Right, unless you’re working with sensitive information, and beings image creator, those are the two tools that are free. And they’re, they’re the the base foundational tools. And then from there, you start learning prompt engineering. There are not any, as of today, there are not any good courses or certifications for this stuff, because the field is changing very fast. There’s new models and new technology all the time. And in a lot of cases, the the stuff that I have seen being promoted, you know, because there are courses, they’re just not very good, are by people who don’t understand the technology. They’re just sort of copy pasting stuff that they see from around the Internet into into a hodgepodge. So it is the source of truth is learning the stuff yourself.

Katie Robbert 2:22
I would amend that. And so if you’re looking for education, don’t look strictly at how to use ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT is just the you know, the interface the engine, but really what you’re talking about, are requirements gathering and logic. And so if there are, you know, I haven’t looked into this, and so I apologize if I’m Miss speaking. But if you look into business analyst certifications, look into Logic courses, because that’s really what it comes down to is this, this than that. So if if I ask this, then that will happen. And so how do you start to pick apart those prompts to signal ChatGPT, or any other generative AI system to do what it is you want it to do? And so if you don’t feel like you have a good grasp on logic statements, that’s where I might start, you know, so maybe look at some of the software development, you know, lightweight overview, because that’s going to give you the basis of things like user stories and logic, because really, software development, I mean, Chris, correct me if I’m wrong, when you’re programming in our, it’s just a series of commands, tell the system to do this, tell the system to do that. ChatGPT, while more user friendly isn’t drastically different in the terms of how you interact with it, like you can talk to it a little bit more conversationally versus very strict command lines. But it’s very much the same idea. So if you’re looking to skill up, I personally might start there, looking at more of the business analyst and software development side of things because ChatGPT really blends the two together, you have to know how to construct the command but you also have to know to ask for what you want.

Christopher Penn 4:13
I would add if you have not already gotten a copy, go to the Trust Insights website, go to TrustInsights.ai AI slash prompt sheet that is our totally free no forms to fill out nothing just grab the PDF that will walk you through the structure of a good four part prompt right which contains to summarize it is roll action background. execution, you tell the machine who it is and what it should know because you’re basically giving key words you are you will act as a world class Pulitzer Prize winning writer you and you know how to write good journalistic stories in a professional tone of voice. You cover you know corporate greed stories. Here’s some background information about where you’re going to do it. Have pointless write a 750 word article on whatever the thing is that that four part structure which you can get in the prompt sheet will really help accelerate your, your prompting. The other thing to realize is that, and I have a blog post in a previous video about this, there’s four categories, it’s a two by two matrix of what to share when you should use AI. And when you should not write, there’s there’s commodity content versus I would call creative content. commodity content is like the painting on your hotel room wall, right? We’ve all seen it’s either sailboat, a vase of flowers, or something abstract. And no one cares if a machine generated it, or a person shared it, because it’s just there to not have a big blank wall, right versus something that’s truly creative. Yeah. want that to be human led commodity content, you’re writing an email summary to your boss. You should be using AI for that. And then the other thing is, what kind of task? Is it a writing as a creating task when editing task? Editing tasks should absolutely be done by machines. Right? So summarize this, this conference call machine is great use for that. Write a 5000 word white paper? Not so much. Right? We Katie, we had that experience relatively recently, you want to talk to what happened? Oh, it

Katie Robbert 6:21
was terrible. And so we didn’t just go ahead and say, you know, hey, ChatGPT, go ahead and write this paper for us on this. But what we actually did was Chris, and I sat down and had a conversation and outlined all the different pieces of the paper recorded it had it transcribed by otter, and gave it to ChatGPT to clean up and turn it into a white paper. And what it ended up doing, I don’t know if it was the prompt, or we just weren’t clear in what we were talking about. But it basically turned it into the same six repetitive paragraphs for 18 pages. That had nothing to do with what Chris and I had talked about. And basically, we had to start completely over again, it was it gave me writer’s paralysis, because I looked at it. And I said, I don’t know what to do with this, because now my brain can’t put together the pieces of what this was supposed to look like. And so it did the exact opposite of what we were asking it to do. So Chris, to your point about editing, AI isn’t always the right thing to do the editing. And so, you know, for Melanie who lost her content job, there’s going to be plenty of jobs out there. For people who recognize that AI is just a piece of the process. It’s not the entire process. You know, I think we’re gonna see this a lot is like ChatGPT is still a bit of a shiny object companies are trying to save money. But longer term, that’s not going to work, especially since, believe it or not, consumers can tell when something is AI generated. And we I know, I personally tend to, you know, bypass anything that looks like it’s not written by a human. And I think that a lot of people feel that way as well. And so companies that are letting go of their teams, to save money and just use AI are going to be basically up a creek without a paddle.

Christopher Penn 8:21
Exactly. So for Melanie number one gets scaled up on things like requirements gathering, understand the software development lifecycle number two, sign up for the free resources like ChatGPT, like Bing, image creator, and there’s many many other apps you can try. But those are the two I would start with the three get good at doing prompt engineering those three steps will get you to a position where you can advise a company Yes, this is a task you shouldn’t use AI for No, this is a task you shouldn’t use AI for. There’s tons of resources on the Trust Insights blog on the Trust Insights YouTube channel, which you can find over TrustInsights.ai AI slash YouTube, so please go check those out. If you’ve got any questions, let us know. And we’re more than happy to answer follow ups. Thanks for watching today’s show. If you liked it, please hit the subscribe button and bell to be notified when we publish new shows. If you want to catch all our content, including back episodes, subscribe to our free inbox insights newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter. Want to talk about what you’ve enjoyed? Join our free Slack community analytics for marketers at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers need help with your marketing data analytics or AI. Drop us a line at trust insights.ai/contact Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.