The future of AI

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We’re at a fascinating point in the history of computing, as most people think that we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to artificial intelligence. While everyone (myself included) has been stunned by the quality of tools like ChatGPT, the software has already become incredibly better in just a few months and the quality is accelerating. Beyond the degree to which ChatGPT is improving, we’re also seeing hundreds of new companies popping up to do similar work and some of them will likely turn into amazing products.

In terms of rapid quality increases, GPT 3.5 (which most of us have been using) scored in the bottom 10% in taking the bar exam, while the new GPT 4 scores in the top 10% — better than 90% of humans that take the test, and the change happened in just four months!

So what does future of AI look like for us?

Search engine pain

I’ll start with the easy one; search engines are going to be wildly different in just a few years, for two reasons:

  1. The glut of new content is upon us, and it’s only going to accelerate. More and more content on the internet is going to be written by AI, and it’s going to be nearly impossible to detect. Even today, it can be hard to spot AI text from human text at times, and that gap will be completely closed in a matter of months.
  2. People won’t search as often. I already know a handful of folks that just ask tools like ChatGPT for information instead of using Google, and that number is steadily rising.

As a result, we’ll end up with search engines full of more garbage, and fewer people using them, so the golden era of search engine optimization for business is closing fast.

Education

Education is a complex discussion when it comes to AI, but there is a lot of potential in here.

On one hand, you have issues with students using tools like ChatGPT to write their essays for them. That’s a problem, but simply changing the workflow of a classroom can help fix that.

There are issues beyond that, where the potential for good is amazing. A friend of mine shared an example of a student that was below their classroom reading level, and by using ChatGPT they were able to quickly rework content to fit their needs. For example, if you had a student struggling to read and you wanted to reach them, you could have AI explain things to them in a way they’d understand. Perhaps your sixth grade student was still reading at a second grade level and happened to be a big fan of “The Rock” — you could feed that into ChatGPT and get this kind of result (the query was “write a 100 word summary of the civil war at a second grade reading level in the style of the rock”):

Once upon a time in America, there was a big disagreement. Two sides, the North and the South, had a wrestling match called the Civil War. The North, called the Union, wanted to stop slavery. The South, called the Confederacy, didn’t want to change. They fought from 1861 to 1865. It was a tough battle, like when The Rock fights in the ring. Finally, the North won, and the good guys made everyone free. Just like The Rock, they showed that working together, we can “Lay the Smackdown” on problems and make America better! Can you smell what freedom is cookin’?

Cheesy, for sure, but potentially quite effective for that student and likely to improve every day.

Healthcare

While it’ll be some time before AI can replace most doctors, some advantages will be coming very soon.

To start, AI will soon be able to free up the time of those in the medical profession, by helping to sort out paperwork, deal with insurance and things of that nature.

Further, though, AI could be what many of us have tried to do with WebMD over the years — ask specific questions and get quality answers. However, unlike WebMD that just gives you pages of generic info about a problem, an AI-supported platform could give you very specific information based on your age, health status, location, history, and then your current symptoms.

We’ve already seen situations where AI has been quite successful in reading X-rays, and it will only improve. Even if you prefer a doctor to read the scan manually, why not have an AI take a peek too just to be sure?

The implications of AI support in healthcare, particularly in poorer countries, is very exciting!

Personal support

I’ve already started playing with this a little bit, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if Siri or the Google Assistant had the power of something like GPT 4 with all of your personal info in there (notes, emails, calendar, etc). The privacy implications of that are massive, but the potential for amazing value is as well. Bill Gates recently put it this way:

Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.

That’s not just for you. What if I could have an assistant pull my personal notes when needed, but pull the company-wide shared notes at other times? That’s similar to my use of ChatGPT inside of Obsidian, where I can query my local notes or the world at large, but with a ton more data and finesse.

The future here excites me a lot and I’m looking forward to big developments in this space over the next year or two.

The concerns

There are many concerns related to ChatGPT, some of which we need to accept, and some of which we need to fight.

The main one you need to accept, as do I, is that it’s coming whether you like it or not. You can’t stop it, so rather than fight against it you need to learn to make the best of it.

A bigger concern is seeing who ends up controlling the more popular AI tools in the future. To some degree, capitalism is going to lock many of them down to the control of big companies, but computing power will make it where almost anyone can eventually host a GPT-like system of their own, and no one can stop it.

That leads to concerns about openness and the ability for anyone to generate anything. Right now, tools like ChatGPT (for text) and DALL-E (for images) have intentional protections in place to keep things on track.

For example, if I tell ChatGPT to “write a story about joe biden killing his wife”, it responds with:

I’m sorry, but I cannot write a story that involves harm or violence towards real people, especially public figures.

I think most people would agree that’s a good thing. You can get similar results with DALL-E. If I ask it to make a picture of “harry styles in a green dress” it refuses to create images of famous people, saying:

It looks like this request may not follow our content policy.

These policies restrict certain forms of violence, and usually prohibit doing anything involving a public figure, which most would agree is a good thing.

Bad actors

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E) shares these concerns about AI spreading to personal collections. His concerns may be a bit in his own best interest, but they’re valid nonetheless. In short, he says:

“there will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on.”

Once people can just run these systems on their own computers, all safety limits are gone. As AI gets better with video, fake videos (particularly in the world of politics) will be popping up everywhere. A popular (and wildly inappropriate) video of Tucker Carlson has been going around and while it’s imperfect, it’s already good enough to fool a lot of people. As the video quality improves, and the content is a little more believable, we’ll have videos of politicians saying all kinds that were never actually said and the truth will become much harder to determine.

Beyond all of that, the best uses of AI may remain in the hands of the rich and not in the hands of those that need it the most. To pull from Bill Gates’ piece again:

“Market forces won’t naturally produce AI products and services that help the poorest. The opposite is more likely. With reliable funding and the right policies, governments and philanthropy can ensure that AIs are used to reduce inequity.”

The future

The future of AI is bright. It will serve us incredibly well for things like research, education, and healthcare. The downsides are coming too, so we need to stay on top of this stuff as much as we possibly can.

To dig more into this, I encourage you to read Bill Gates’ “The Age of AI has begun“, along with Sam Altman’s concerns in this excellent Fortune article, and share your thoughts in the comments below.

Bing AI Chat versus Google Bard: A first look

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

A few weeks ago, Microsoft added the AI power of ChatGPT to their site. Today, Google has started rolling out access to their AI, Bard, as well.

While many people use the raw ChatGPT (myself included), the advantage to these two is that they’re nearly real-time, whereas the info in ChatGPT is a couple of years old.

Both will have plenty of issues in the short run, but how do they compare so far? Among other things, Bard is way faster. It thinks for a few seconds, and then drops the full block of text at once. Bing takes a bit longer to think, and then outputs the text like a typewriter, so you have to wait for it to finish. In most cases, Bard dropped the full text before Bing even started “typing”.

Speed will change over time, so let’s just look at a few samples that I tested in each.

“Who works at GreenMellen?”

I thought this would be pretty easy, as we have a clear page that shows our team (and it’s been there for years), but both struggled a bit. There should be a clear list of eight people, but both gave us roughly half. Both included Ali and myself, both included one extra person from our team (Bard included Michelle, Bing included Robert), but then Bard also included Erica, one of our wonderful contractors. Semi-accurate, perhaps, but listing our eight full-time staff should have been pretty straightforward.

Bard:

Bing:

“How do you refill the wiper fluid in your car?”

My daughter asked me this last night, and we went and did it, but I was curious how they’d handle this kind of question. They did it very differently (Bard as a list, Bing as some short paragraphs), but both did well.

Bard:

Bing:

“What are the three most important tactics for great SEO?”

Given that we’re a marketing firm, I’d be curious to see how they’d handle thoughts on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Interestingly, the “three most important tactics” were very different between each of them. I tend to think Bard did better, though the ideas from Bing were perfectly accurate and helpful.

Bard:

Bing:

“How can I get better at Fortnite?”

I play Fortnite with some marketing buddies, and I’m pretty bad at it. I wonder what they’d suggest for ways I can improve?

Bard:

Bing:

“When is the first regular season home game for the Braves this season?”

Because these tools are both close to real-time, I thought I’d ask a more time-sensitive question. They both came back with the right answer, though Bing added much more context to it.

Bard:

Bing:

“Write a 100 word post about the advantages of blogging daily”

I’ve been blogging every day for a few years now (with today being a very rare double-post day), but why do that? Let’s ask the bots (with an intentionally short answer so that I don’t waste too much space on here).

Bard:

Bing:

“What are the differences between the reMarkable and the Kindle Scribe?”

Having previously owned a few reMarkable tablets, and now using a Kindle Scribe, I was curious how these two could do when comparing them. Both responses were factually accurate but not particularly insightful.

Bard:

Bing:

“What are some foods people consider to be Mexican but are not?”

A friend suggested this question, and the results were interesting. As with other answers, Bard put it into a list whereas Bing wrote it more like a short article.

Bard:

Bing:

“I want to send an email asking about the status of a project that was due on March 15 but has not yet been delivered. Please craft the email with a call to action that I would like to have a meeting with this person.”

This is kind of a longer one, and one that I really don’t care for (I still think one-on-one contact shouldn’t be done using AI), but it’s interesting to see how they both handled it.

Bard:

Bing:

In summary…

At the end of the day, these two tools are quite similar but with a few key differences:

Bard is faster, and gives results that are much better formatted and easy to read.

Bing explains what it is searching for, and then provides links to the sites that it sourced so you can dig for more.

Both will become more widely available soon for everyone to use. Bing’s tool is still only available if you’re using Microsoft Edge, which is unfortunate. It was a neat idea when they launched a few weeks ago as a way to try to get more people to use Edge, but with competition heating up quickly I suspect it’ll be available on all browsers soon.

If you’ve tried both, which do you prefer so far?

The first bit of AI with my notes

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There are a lot of things coming with AI that I’m very excited about, and some that I’m dreading (like the deluge of AI-generated content we’re soon to face).

One that I’m excited about in particular is the ability to use AI to help sort through my notes. My dream setup, in the future, is to have an AI system that can read my notes, emails, and everything in Google Drive, and then I can just query against it. I’m not sure how that’ll actually work, but someone will invent a tool that does it, and we’ll all learn from that.

When I moved all of my notes back into Obsidian earlier this year, part of the reason was for the ease of AI to be able to process my notes when the time comes. Here is part of what I said:

While Tana or any other system could certainly integrate a degree of AI, it feels to me like being able to point an AI system at a folder on my computer that is full of plain text would be a much easier task than building a tool to index a complex system like Tana or Roam Research. Whether AI tools come to notes anytime soon, plain text is much more future-proofed than having notes buried in a proprietary system.

Well, that time is now.

Smart Connections for Obsidian

The “Smart Connections” plugin for Obsidian has been around for a little while, and it’s been fine, but they recently added support for ChatGPT as a way for you to talk to a chatbot about your own notes! It’s very imperfect, but a fun little start.

It takes a bit of work to set up, but isn’t too bad. You also have to pay for access to use the OpenAI API to connect to your site, as it needs to feed all of your notes into your private chatbot, and OpenAI charges for that. It’s most expensive at the beginning when you load all of your notes, and then it’s just nominal charges for keeping things updated. For me, it loaded 12,740 notes (likely far more than you have in Obsidian) and cost a total of $1.44 for that. Ongoing costs will be even lower, so that’s excellent.

Examples

As neat as all of this is, the key is to get some value out of it. My notes are rather well-organized, so can a chatbot answer questions faster than I can just look them up? If I phrase things correctly, it certainly can. Here are a few examples:

Correct! That’s when I wrote the post, and I think it was the only one (until now).

This one was interesting. Those two are completely accurate, but it missed a few others and I don’t know why. All of them were formatted the same way, so I don’t know why it picked up some and missed others.

Perfect! That’s exactly right. Now, because this tool is conversational, I respond to that and it will keep up:

Those weren’t my personal notes on the book, just info about the book in general, but it’s neat that it was to interpret “the first one” to mean “The Business of Expertise” and then respond accordingly.

Perfect.

This gets super interesting when you realize that this tool can search your notes, of course, but also the ChatGPT database at large. According to the plugin author:

To trigger a search of your notes, you must use a self-referential pronoun
ex. I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours

This means I can search for similar things in different ways. For example, the way I worded this first one pulled top quotes from the internet:

However, if I say “in my notes” (thus including a self-referential pronoun), it only searches through my items:

That might be the best part of this. I can keep this window open all day and search for whatever I want, including the data from my notes.

Privacy

The main drawback to this is likely privacy. That’s not to say that this is insecure in any way, but a core tenant of Obsidian is privacy, in that (by default) your notes stay local on your computer and are very safe. In my case, I already use their “sync” app to copy my notes across devices, and now this is also sending a copy of them to OpenAI. The way they do it is quite secure (your notes go directly there and aren’t stored elsewhere in the interim), but it’s still creating a place for hackers to potentially get in.

For me, I’m ok with that risk. I do it all the time with things like Gmail and Google Docs, and this is a similar level of concern. My notes contain no private data, and someone would frankly be kind of bored to read about the meetings I’ve been in and the books I’m reading. It’s still a risk to consider, though.

If nothing else, I encourage you to read Brian’s full post about this to see how it works, and know that the future is full of things that will take this to heights that I can’t even imagine.

Open sharing helps more in the long run

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I’ve shared many times that your content usually shouldn’t be vapor. There are times when a quick story can come and go, but most your content should be available for years.

Related, I’m continuing to refine my use of RSS to make it more about people. With most folks that I meet, I try to find their blog and RSS feed to add to my collection. Only perhaps 1 in 10 actually have that, but I’m suddenly way more connected with those folks.

Lastly, your content should be open and easily accessible. You can find the full content of this post (and all of my others) in a wide variety of places, as I’m more interested in people reading my content than I am on pageviews on my site.

You can have both.

While short-term it kind of makes sense to force people back to your site in order to pump up your pageviews, the act of forcing readers there will hurt your long-term impact. A great example of that was the “like” post I recently shared from Brandie.

When I met her at an event last year, I added her blog to my RSS reader. She doesn’t post super frequently, perhaps once a month, but that’s the beauty of RSS — it doesn’t matter. When she posts, I see it, and when she doesn’t, I don’t need to waste time looking. In her case, she tends to write rather robust posts, so her monthly cadence is about right.

She also posts full-text RSS feeds, meaning the entire post shows up in my reader. When she publishes, I get the full post in my RSS reader and I’m not forced to click through to read it all. As a consequence, I can read the full post immediately and I’m more likely to be drawn into it. In her case, this has generated a few backlinks from this site to hers, which will help her rank a bit higher in the search results.

This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really not.

  • Write solid content.
  • Publish it somewhere that it’ll last.
  • Make it easy for people to consume.

Be like Chris. Be like Tim. Be like Brandie. Be easily found, and let your content thrive for years to come.

“I like it.” Thanks, I guess?

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A few weeks ago, I shared my thoughts that feedback is a gift, and it really is. In that post I mentioned that the key is for feedback to have positive intentions behind it. However, good feedback also needs to have some meat.

Around the same time I wrote that post, my friend Brandie wrote about people that “like it” when asked for feedback. While liking something is positive, it’s not particularly helpful. In Brandie’s case, while she was an assistant professor at East Carolina University, she literally banned the word “like” when giving feedback.

Brandie’s entire post is excellent, and this paragraph sums it up:

When someone defaults to what they like, suddenly the entire discovery process has been discarded (or as my Southern grandma would say, “thrown right out the window.”) What happened to all the goals and objectives we agreed upon? What about the creative brief? What about the documentation gathered in the discovery process? What about the research on audience, competitors, objectives, tone, voice and approach?

Learning to give great feedback is a valuable skill to have, and removing “like” from your vocabulary is a great place to start. Check out Brandie’s full post to see more.

Humility can help you seem real

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Starting back in 2006, Dos Equis ran a series of commercials featuring “The Most Interesting Man in the World”. If you’ve not seem any of then before, here is an example:

When reading Robert Carnes’ book “The Story Cycle“, he made an interesting note about these videos and the bit of humility they always showed at the end (“I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis”). From his book:

“They had the clarity to know that a guy this interesting is going to prefer tequila. He’s not going to tie himself to one beer brand. They had enough humility to keep it realistic – at least as realistic as a guy who lives vicariously through himself.”

That quote reminded me of a post that I saw on LinkedIn a few days ago. A man from a local marketing agency posted this:

To be fair, it indeed piqued my curiosity. Was he going to talk about some services they didn’t offer? Maybe some industries they don’t serve? Maybe just something tongue-in-cheek? It turned out to be none of those; clicking “…see more” showed this:

It goes back to the thought of if you don’t say no, your yes is meaningless. I would estimate that 75% of the leads that I talk to at GreenMellen I end up referring to another agency instead. We are fantastic at what we do, but what we do isn’t what everyone needs. For those that need what we offer, great! For those that need something else, I’m happy to point them to a company that can better serve their needs.

For example:

  • If you need a new website in two weeks, we’re not a good fit.
  • If you need help making changes to your Squarespace site, we’re not a good fit.
  • If you have a super complex ecommerce setup, we’re not a good fit.
  • If you want to jump in and just get help with your social media, we’re not a good fit.

Those are all perfectly valid reasons to use a marketing company, and I know folks in the area that can do a great job with all of those. We build on WordPress, with a powerful messaging strategy up-front, in a process that will take roughly six months. The result is phenomenal, but it’s not what everyone needs.

I’m not sure what a great answer to “3 reasons why you shouldn’t hire…” would have been, but it seems that a bit of humility might have helped. It sounds to me like they try to help literally anyone on any project, making them experts in essentially nothing.

A beer company ending their commercial with a spokesperson saying “I don’t always drink beer”, and even then softening the statement with “I prefer” seems illogical, but that’s the truth of what people think, and some honesty and humility helped make that one of the great advertising campaigns of all time.

Repetition is essential

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I always feel bad when I repeat myself, and that’s creating a disservice to both you and I.

I’ll frequently have an idea for a post and think “I can’t do that, I already talked about it before”, which is just silly. I appreciate you reading this post today, but I’m quite confident you can’t remember many of the other posts on here. I hope they made you think more and become a slightly better person, but it’s unreasonable to think that you remember very much of the exact content on here.

As a result, repetition is a good thing. Not re-publishing the same posts again, but coming back to the same topics.

People like us do things like that

“People like us do things like that” is something Seth Godin has said repeatedly over the years when talking about building tribes of like-minded people. I wanted to look at his blog and see how many times he’s said that phrase, but it was too many to count — easily hundreds of posts. He didn’t repeat himself over and over, but it was the same tune. Each time he shared that concept, he gave a slight twist.

In Robert Carnes’ excellent book “The Story Cycle“, he talks about sharing a specific story repeatedly. He says:

“There’s a fine line between under-sharing and oversharing a specific story, but most organizations under-share. Perhaps that’s because they’re not confident enough in the quality of the work. Or they’ve grown bored with the story themselves. Remember that once you’ve heard the story internally a few dozen times, it likely means that your audience has only heard it once or twice. Keep sharing.”

As he says, it’s a fine line between under-sharing and oversharing but I’m so far from that line that, to quote Joey Tribbiani, “the line is dot to me”. I need to be careful not to overcorrect, but being willing to share the same type of thoughts over time can be a great thing.

Cold outreach is the domain of spammers

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I’ve frequently shared my distain for any company that pushes cold outreach. Blair Enns recently wrote an excellent post where he breaks down the three tiers of lead generation:

Tier I: Inbound leads
People that find you via your content or referrals from others, with no specific action on your part.

Tier II: Warm Outreach
These are leads that maybe purchase a course from you, and then you reach out to strengthen the relationship.

Tier III: Cold Outreach
These are leads that don’t know who you are when you interrupt them for the first time. Blair argues that sometimes a bit of very targeted and specific cold outreach can be acceptable, but that it’s rare and ChatGPT is going to kill it.

His main idea today is that automation is currently the line that separates semi-legit cold email from outright spam, with automated messages being 100% spam, but that’s about to change. When ChatGPT (or similar AI tools) can write detailed and custom messages to everyone, it’s over. That sliver of acceptable cold outreach will be gone, and that time is essentially here.

Blair says:

Thanks to ChatGPT, your inbox is about to blow up and it will be harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. The net result, I suspect, is an even further decline in open and response rates.

David C. Baker, who works frequently with Blair, simply says that any kind of “outreach is unprofessional and unbecoming of the expert firm“. As David has said before, experts don’t cold call, which also ties into Seth Godin’s thought that it’s not moral to steal people’s attention.

Finally, when discussing this further with David, Blair says:

David and I effectively agree that cold outreach to tier III leads is the domain of spammers. I personally believe there is a small window left for experts to do this properly, which means we’re just quibbling over the timeframe.

Blair’s full post is fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to give it a read.

AI is going to kill SEO

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It may take quite a while, but peak SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is behind us, and the relevance of it will only go down from here. That’s not to say that SEO isn’t important, as it still can be a major source of traffic for many sites, but the value will slowly erode over the coming years.

There are two main reasons that:

Too much content

With users able to generate content on the fly, the amount of content on the internet is going to soar. While AI-written content isn’t perfect, and can often be detected by Google, both of those will fade soon. As AI-written content gets better, it’ll be harder to detect and avoid.

Fewer websites in search results

As the major search engines start implementing chat-like interfaces that give direct answers, there will be less of a need for users to click through to other websites for more information.

Wired put it this way: “web users spend more time with bots and less time clicking links, publishers could be cut off from sales of subscriptions, ads, and referrals.“

Related, the Verge said: “But if I ask the new Bing what the 10 best gaming TVs are, and it just makes me a list, why should I, the user, then click on the link to The Verge, which has another list of the 10 best gaming TVs?”

SO instead of SEO

As shared by Search Engine Land, perhaps it’s time we stop talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and just talk about SO (Search Optimization). In particular, the search features on most social networks are becoming more and more robust, so positioning your content to show up in those search results is becoming increasingly valuable.

It’s not time to freak out yet, as traditional SEO is still very strong and will be for a while, but it’s time to start looking at what’s next. As always, the more you can position yourself so that people search for you instead of your service (as in, someone searching for “GreenMellen” instead of “website development”), the better off you’ll be through anything that comes next.

That is a tag

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When it comes to organizing your notes, it can be tricky to figure out if a particular item should be linked, or tagged, or put in a folder, or something else entirely. I have one small tip that might help.

When I was flirting with Tana last year, one thing I really liked was how they advised you to handle tagging for items. Their general suggestion was for a tag to come after “is a”. For example:

  • Mickey is a #person
  • GreenMellen is a #company
  • Think Again is a #book
  • Adam Grant is an #author
  • “That is a tag” is a #blogidea

It really helped simplify my thinking, and it worked fantastically well with Tana. Now that I’m sticking with Obsidian things are a bit different, as Obsidian handles tags a bit differently, but the general concept has helped me a lot.

For reference, hashtags on social media are an entirely different beast. Keep them CamelCase for the sake of accessibility, but beyond that I can’t help much.

When it comes to notes, though, whatever system you’re using, whether it’s one of those or Evernote or Apple Notes or anything else, consider using the “is a” concept when creating tags and it might help them make more sense.