In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss using generative AI for non-business, fun tasks. You’ll discover how to leverage generative AI to solve everyday challenges like creating a recipe with specific ingredients or remembering what to pack for a trip. You’ll learn how to use AI to enhance your problem-solving skills and unlock creative solutions you might not find on Google. Tune in to discover the surprising potential of generative AI in your daily life!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In Ear Insights, it is here in America, the 4th of July holiday week. So we’re taking things a little lighter, and I thought this week we’d talk about applications of generative AI that are non-business-related. Specifically, because even though these tools give us such incredible powers of productivity and stuff, more importantly, when we look at non-traditional or I guess non-business uses of them, it can help us understand how to better use them at work in business for productivity by broadening our understanding of their capabilities. So Katie, I’m going to play a very short, 30-second clip that I shot yesterday at the grocery store so that you can see this interesting application. So let’s go ahead and roll this. Today I am cooking bun, the Vietnamese noodle bowl dish. Here’s what I have in my grocery cart so far.
Christopher Penn – 00:59
What have I forgotten to buy for this recipe? So it gave me a long list of, hey, here’s all the things that this recipe requires that you don’t have in your cart, buddy.
Katie Robbert – 01:23
Well, it’s interesting because a couple of things come to mind for me. One is, what if the way that you have things in your cart doesn’t show everything? And two, why wouldn’t you just ask for a list ahead of giving your picture and say, “Hey, what do I need for this recipe? Can you give me a list?” Versus— I don’t know, it just— Using generative AI in my everyday life is just still not something I personally feel the need for. And so when I see this, I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine, but why? Why did you need to do it that way?” So that’s what I need help understanding. I need you to convince me.
Christopher Penn – 02:08
I did it this way because I wanted to entertain myself with it. I mean, if we’re perfectly honest, that’s the reason why there is no— there is, there’s no actual logical reason to do it that way. However, and yes, you’re right, if something’s not in the vision view of the camera, then it’s obviously not going to get picked up. But it’s one of those things where maybe I’ve just forgotten. So this is a way of doing this. Another example would be that would be maybe slightly more business-adjacent, is I’m about to pack for a three-day trip. I’ve got everything laid out on the bed. What have I forgotten to pack that I might need on this trip? I’m going to visit a client, or I’m going to speak at a conference and things, because very often I find myself at a location like, “Oh, I forgot pants.”
Katie Robbert – 02:43
If that happened very often, I think this would be a very different business. Let’s go ahead and let all of our clients know that Chris does not actually forget pants.
Christopher Penn – 03:08
Exactly. Here’s another example. Yesterday, we wanted to bake a chocolate cake, but we specifically want to bake a chocolate cake with fresh raspberries. We’ve got a ton of fresh raspberries in our garden, buckets worth. And my wife and I wanted to bake a cake that was a chocolate cake with raspberry, but all of the recipes say, “Don’t use fresh raspberries because the high water content of the berries is a problem.” And they say, “Use powdered, use a syrup,” et cetera, if you want that raspberry flavor. And I’m like, “But we’ve got fresh raspberries.” So I went to, in this case, Google Gemini. I said, “Here’s—” You’re a Michelin-starred chef. I went through all the—
Christopher Penn – 03:51
—the usual priming steps that we detail in the Trust Insights’ PAIR framework, which you get at TrustInsights.ai/PAIR. And I said, “Okay, I’ve got these fresh raspberries. How can I use these within the recipe? How can I use them to make this chocolate cake?” And after a decent amount of back and forth, it came up with a recipe. Now, thankfully, my wife has actual subject matter expertise in baking. So she looks at the recipe and like, “Okay, yes, this. This makes logical sense. These proportions seem correct.” She’s like, “Eh, the salt’s a little low, let’s add a bit more salt.” But for the most part, it came up with a really good recipe. So like, “Okay, let’s try it.” And we baked it, and to my surprise, because we know the dangers of hallucination, to my surprise, it worked!
Christopher Penn – 04:43
And not only did it work, it was actually a really good cake. It had some— some berries in it that you had— Toss the berries in powdered sugar to absorb some of the moisture, because powdered sugar also contains cornstarch, so it creates more of a gel, which I did not know that you could do that. And so we ended up with a really nice cake. So this is another example where I— I have this stuff. It’s almost kind of like improvising when you don’t have alternatives. “I have this, I don’t have alternatives, what can I do with this?” And the tool was able to compensate for it and come up with a working recipe.
Katie Robbert – 05:23
So I’m just going to try to pick things apart until I’m convinced. So why wouldn’t you just do a regular internet search for “chocolate cake with fresh raspberries?” Does that exist?
Christopher Penn – 05:35
I did, and we could not come up with a recipe in five minutes of Googling because all the recipe says, “Don’t do this, it’s a bad idea.”
Katie Robbert – 05:46
And so how long then did you iterate with AI?
Christopher Penn – 05:50
Probably about five minutes.
Katie Robbert – 05:52
See, I feel— And here’s the interesting thing, like you’re saying five minutes here, five minutes there, and that’s not that long of a period of time, but when you’re in it, I can imagine people like myself being like, “Well, this is dumb, this is taking way too long. I’m just going to move on and go do something else.” And so, what advice do you give for people like me who get frustrated really quickly with not getting the results they’re after?
Katie Robbert – 06:20
Not in a business sense, but if— you know— if you’re encouraging me to use generative AI on a more regular basis— I think the RACE framework and the PAIR framework are good, but I’m also realistic, and I’m like, “Well, I’m not going to stop and try to remember a framework every time I’m trying to bake a cake.” And so, what advice do you give to people like me who are just like way too impatient, feeling like you should still get that instantaneous feedback like you do with an internet search?
Christopher Penn – 06:56
It depends on how badly you want it. I mean, I think that is what it boils down to. If you really want to bake this cake, then you go through this process. And I would strongly encourage people to adhere to the RACE of the PAIR frameworks. The reason for this is that they work. They work really well. They reduce hallucination as much as you can within the use of these models, and they help you think through the questions you should be asking, not just of generative AI, but in general.
So for example, in the cake example, you start off by saying in the first part of the RACE framework, “You are a Michelin star chef. You have experience in baking, particularly desserts and things like that. What do you know about baking chocolate cake with fresh raspberries, with general best practices?” And it will dump out a bunch of stuff.
Then you go to the augment phase. You say, “Okay, what are some things that— that less experienced bakers often do wrong in this situation?” And then let it do its that thing, and then you say, “Okay, what are some— Sort of the refresh— what are some things that an actual starred chef would know? Tips and tricks that the regular folks wouldn’t know that we haven’t discussed so far.”
So you’re adding a third layer of checking, and then you do the evaluation. Say, “Okay, based on all of this, what have we forgotten to talk about?” So you go through this process. It does not take long to write these prompts.
Christopher Penn – 08:27
These are like two-sentence prompts, but we are filling the context window with all the knowledge this thing has about this. And you can, as we’ve talked about in the past on the show, you can ask questions like, “Are you sure that’s right? Check your work. I’m not sure that I feel like it should be missing— It’s missing this ingredient.”
If you have, as I did, if you have someone with domain experience on hand to look it over— if you don’t want to do that, if it’s just inconvenient— then I would say don’t. I mean, I think in this situation, the use of generative AI is a great use case, but by no means am I saying that you have to use it. If it doesn’t make sense, if it doesn’t work with the way you want to work, particularly in your personal life, where no one’s standing over your shoulder saying, “You must do this,” don’t do it.
Katie Robbert – 09:16
So let’s go back to the hallucinations and subject matter expertise. So let’s just for a second, take your wife and her baking knowledge out of the equation. You’re starting the conversation with generative AI saying, “You are a Michelin star chef.” Now, Chris, I’ve known you a long time, and one of the things I know is that you’re a good cook, but you’re not a Michelin star chef. As far as I’m aware, you could be, maybe moonlighting, who knows? Because that’s not your area of expertise. How then, even when you’re asking the generative AI to check its work, how do you know that it’s not hallucinating because yourself are not a Michelin star chef, and I know your wife is a very good baker, but she herself is also not a Michelin star chef?
Katie Robbert – 10:05
So to me, it’s an interesting example that you’re putting in this. “Okay, here’s your area of expertise,” but yourself do not have that expertise. How then, do you know that generative AI is giving you good information?
Christopher Penn – 10:22
This is a case where I have at least some familiarity with the domain, even if I am not that. And this is going to sound ridiculous, but I do watch a probably troubling amount of cooking shows, and as a result, I have seen and heard and observed a lot of these different recipes and kind of get a sense of what it is that type of expert should know and should have, should be able to talk about in terms of things like flavor affinities, for example. Can I do that? Do I have that knowledge myself? No. Can I— can I practice along those lines with the same level of skill? Also no.
But when we put that into a prompt, we are— What we are essentially doing is we are narrowing down the tokens that the prompt will retrieve in the backend. If you think of it as a— as a library, that the prompt is kind of— and the interface is the librarian going to get books out of the cat— out of the back. If you say, “I only want you to get books that were by a Michelin star chef,” then it’s obviously going to be less likely to choose “Your Drunk Uncle Fred’s July 4 Barbecue Recipes” book, because nowhere in there to specify that Uncle Fred is a Michelin star chef, he’s just a drunk uncle from your family.
So that process helps to narrow down the internal search of the model to higher quality text. It doesn’t solve hallucination. That’s part of the reason why you go through the PAIR framework is because you want to give the model the ability to retrieve more relevant tokens along those guidelines, but it does not limit.
Christopher Penn – 12:10
So one thing that— if I didn’t have my wife handy— one thing that you would do is you would then go and look for a regular chocolate cake recipe and do some fact-checking. Like, “Is this generally the correct amount of flour? Is this generally the correct amount of baking powder? Is this generally the correct amount of liquid?” And so on and so forth.
Katie Robbert – 12:30
So let’s take it to a more risky situation where you may not have as much knowledge. So baking, I can understand, like you’ve probably watched a lot of baking shows. I’ve watched a lot of baking shows. It’s very low risk. But let’s say you take it to something higher risk. Something I see a lot, especially this time of year, is people on social media saying, “Hey, I found what looks like an abandoned baby bunny,” or, “I found what looks like, some kind of injured bird, or I found some kind of animal. What do I do?” And now these are wild animals, these are not vaccinated animals, these are not trained animals, and people are trying to crowdsource on social media responses from other people who are not also experts.
Katie Robbert – 13:23
And so I’m giving you this example because I can very much see someone going to generative AI saying, “I found an injured bird in my yard. What do I do?” And so you can say, “You are an animal control officer with 30 years of experience, blah, blah, blah,” but now you’re taking bigger risks because you don’t know, you’re not an animal control expert. You’re clearly not finding that information. And so I guess my concern— and I’m always going to be more pessimistic about AI than you are, Chris— is that even if you’re giving it, “This is who you are, this is your expertise,” it could still be giving you information that is risky, or even life-threatening.
Katie Robbert – 14:12
And so I guess that’s sort of where— like, baking a cake is one thing, unless it’s telling you to put arsenic in it, you’re likely going to be fine. But in the example of actually dealing with live animals, I think that’s a bigger risk. And I guess that’s sort of my question is, so in everyday life, and in marketing, and in business, we’re asking these models, these machines, to give us guidance on things that we don’t know a lot about.
Christopher Penn – 14:43
Yes. So I see this as kind of a continuum. As risk goes up, reliance solely on AI should go down because it’s one of those things where, if you are potentially putting yourself or something else at risk, you should be looking at multiple sources of information. I would— I would honestly argue that, in the scenario you gave of asking generative AI versus asking social media for, “What to do with an injured animal?” I would take the AI over the— over social media because, holy crap, there’s a bunch of really dumb people on social media.
Katie Robbert – 15:23
Well, sure. And that was just one of many examples. But what I— What you’re saying is reliance on just one source of information increases your risk. And so I know about pharmaceutical drug trials. You have not necessarily been through a pharmaceutical drug trial, so if you’re researching, my sense is that you would look at generative AI and then be like, “Hey Katie, I found this information. Does this make sense?” And so you’re looking at more than one source. You’re actually going to the expert. So that sort of goes back to your original cake example where you’re like, “Hey, I found this thing.” You talked to your wife, who actually has knowledge of baking, and said, “Does this make sense?” And so it’s— you’re demonstrating that, yes, generative AI is a good starting point, but it shouldn’t be your sole focal point. It should be a supportive tool with other things.
Christopher Penn – 16:27
Yes. Or you use it in a very contained manner. So a tool like NotebookLM, for example, you load the data sources. It will not answer questions that it does not have the data for. So if you were doing something, for example— I did this recently with long COVID. I went out and sourced about 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers and research and studies about long COVID from reputable journals, like Nature and Cell, and stuff like that. And I loaded those into NotebookLM, and I was able to ask questions about long COVID, and it will only retrieve information that it is given. It will not pull out— if you ask it a question that’s not in the corpus knowledge that you’ve provided, it will say, “I don’t have the answer to that. It wasn’t in the data you provided.”
Christopher Penn – 17:18
And to me, that is an excellent use case as well, for something where you may not have the expertise, but you know how to find vetted information sources. You know what, for example, what a peer-reviewed paper is. You know, generally speaking, what publications are sort of top-tier research publications of what are kind of like— paper mills, and stuff like that. That’s another example where you would want to use a very limited generative AI system to only retrieve data from the data you’ve provided. And now that is then contingent upon you at least having enough data on hand to answer the questions you want to answer. We did the demo of this with the Trust Insights newsletter, where we were able to have it pull data about the columns you’ve written in it.
Christopher Penn – 18:12
And when you ask it a question like, “What does Katie think about this?” It will say, “Katie hasn’t written about that, so I don’t have that information.”
Katie Robbert – 18:21
Gotcha. Well, and so— And I think you’re anticipating my next question is you still have to be somewhat of a subject matter expert in where to get the data from. So without getting too in the weeds, or too political, you’re saying, “You know what a peer-reviewed academic paper is. You know where to get the data for information about long COVID.” What if I’m someone who says, “Yeah, but the information that I want to get about it is from Fox News, and the information I want to get about it is from my cousin Steve, who works at CVS?” I think I’m already answering my own question, and maybe I don’t even know need to go down this road, but I feel like anything generative AI is only as good as the information you provide it.
Katie Robbert – 19:19
And I— I’m just going to leave it there.
Christopher Penn – 19:22
I think that’s a good place to leave it. But I think it’s an important consideration that, with these tools, I say this all the time. I quote from Captain America: The First Avenger. These tools are amplifiers. They make the good into great, and they make the bad into worse. So if you go use these tools with wrong information, or a factually incorrect point of view, they will do their best to be helpful, including returning factually incorrect points of view, particularly for open-ended systems like ChatGPT. That’s the nature of a tool. It’s like a chainsaw. You can make a log cabin, you can make an ice sculpture, you can make a Friday the 13th movie. It’s how the tool is being used by the person.
Christopher Penn – 20:13
Now, there are some use cases where you just can’t use them because there are limits even to their flexibility in terms of safety responses. They will say, “Hey, I won’t answer that question because that is a safety question.” If you say, “How do I make a—” No, I just won’t even answer that question. But those boundaries are pretty far. You can still use these tools to— in the same way that you use any other tool to reinforce a point of view that’s already there in your head, to find justification for things that you’ve already made decisions on. It’s just like social media, it’s just like search, it’s just like Wikipedia, it’s just like everything. As you always say, Katie, new technology doesn’t solve old problems.
Katie Robbert – 21:03
It sure don’t. Well, and so the examples that we’ve been giving for using generative AI in your everyday life have had the same sort of theme of “I know what I’m looking for.” I think that’s sort of the other side of the conversation as we’re coming to our conclusions here, is there is also a place to be using generative AI when you don’t know what you’re looking for, and that is the chat component of generative AI, which is a little bit different than how you would use an internet search. If you said, “I have baskets of fresh raspberries, but I don’t know what to do.” The internet, if you put that into a search bar, you’re going to get a wide variety, but you’re not going to have any sort of interaction.
Katie Robbert – 21:54
Whereas, if you go to generative AI and say, “I have baskets of fresh raspberries from my garden, but I’m not sure what to do,” you’re likely going to get a question back that’s like, “Well, let’s try to narrow it down. What things do you like? Do you like sweet stuff, savory stuff?” Like, it’s more of an interaction. Like, you might not get that exact response, but you’re more likely to have a synthetic conversation that helps you get to the point, versus going to the internet and saying, “I have raspberries,” and it’s like, “Great, ‘Raspberry Beret’ by Prince. Raspberry Pi is a technology. Raspberry Cola is a thing in the south that sounds vile.” Like, you’re not going to get a satisfying answer because you can’t interact with it, you can’t iterate with it.
Katie Robbert – 22:41
And I think that, in terms of someone who’s not necessarily interested in using generative AI all the time in my personal life, the use case that I can see is more of that. I have this stuff, but I don’t know what to do. Can we iterate on it? Because I’m someone who does better with a brainstorm session, and I feel like that’s a really good use case, especially if there’s no one around at that time, and you’re like, “I need to sort of figure this out now. Nobody else is here. Can I talk with generative AI to try to figure it out?”
Christopher Penn – 23:14
Exactly. We often say, “Treat generative AI like the world’s smartest intern.” They’re still an intern, so that— you know, you can’t expect them to know the details of everything. You have to provide some information, but you absolutely can have a coffee at the intern and ask them what they think about a given topic. So if you’ve got some cooking tips, or other non-business uses of generative AI you would like to share, pop on by our free Slack group. Go to TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers, where you and over 3,500 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day about data, analytics, and AI. And wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on instead, go to TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast, where you can find us in all the places that great podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll talk to you on the next one.
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