AI Bias, Bots & Better Content Workflows with Simon Kriss
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Ask AI to help you with AI. So I've asked ChatGPT to write me a great prompt for mid-journey so I can get an image that looks like blah, blah. It writes me a beautiful prompt. I put it in mid-journey and get the image I want. The people that kind of laugh at AI, and I'm with you on this, I jump on, every time I hear it, I jump on them.

and say if you had a brand new intern start and you asked them to write something and they wrote it and it was cute but horribly wrong, would you just stand back and point at them in the middle of the office and laugh out loud and say, hey, everybody, come and look at this crappy work that this intern did? You would never do that to another human. Right.

But that's exactly what they're doing. They're taking a single, isolated, early thing out of context, predominantly where they've screwed up the prompt anyway, and publishing it and saying, oh, look, AI doesn't. I call it bias in adoption or adoption bias. And people are biased against AI. It's how can I prove it wrong?

Welcome to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, the podcast that shows you how to leverage the power of AI technology without wasting your time or selling your soul. Let's embrace making AI work for you. Hey, hey, my human friend, and welcome back to the Authentic AI podcast. I'm your host, Kinsey. And today I'm joined by Simon Chris, an AI advisor, author, and host of the AI in 5 podcast. And

And we are diving into the real side of using AI in business. We talk about chatbots that actually work, what most people get wrong when they try new AI tools, and some brilliant ways that Simon uses AI in his everyday solopreneur workflow, from content to customer experience to data analysis.

This one is smart, super actionable, and full of those, wait, you can do that with AI moments? So I know you're going to love this as much as I did. If you do, make sure that you share this with a business friend who could also use to listen to it. And why not leave us five stars or make sure that you're following us on your favorite podcast platform because that really will help us to continue growing our authentic AI audience. All right, let's get into it.

Hi, Simon. Thank you so much for coming on Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs. I'm so excited to have you on the show. Hey, Kinsey. Thanks for the invite. Yes. And I did already introduce you just a little bit in the intro. I'd love to hear from you. Who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah. Look, to use one of your words, I'm a solopreneur. I am an AI advisory here in Australia.

predominantly work are tier two banks and insurance companies, but also a broad cross section of others, companies in transport, in education, local government, right across the board. And I try to be a bit of a LinkedIn influencer. And I use that word try really hard. As many solopreneurs would know, sometimes it's a little bit publish or perish.

So yeah, I stayed pretty active. Okay. I love that publish or perish. I mean, we can use that in the future, but I love that so much. I can't wait to chat about AI stuff with you. But before we dive into all the nitty gritty tips, I always like to kick off the conversations by asking, how did you start to dip your toes into the world of AI? What has that journey looked like for you? I don't know that too many people leave school and kind of go, I want to be an AI. Right.

It's a little bit like for the customer experience. And that's where my career has predominantly been. So 35 plus years in customer experience, but predominantly contact centers all over the world. And probably 10, 12 years ago, I really started to track AI just as a hobby interest almost. I'm a nerd. Yeah.

And I was tracking AI, but it really never delivered on the promise for customer experience. It wouldn't do the super fantastic things we wanted it to do.

And then a few years ago, as generative AI just started out, even when it was GAN models and then really early large language models, I started to see the real potential for what it could be. And so started getting more interested in learning more and playing more and self-educating and all that sort of stuff.

I remember telling my wife that I was going to leave what I was doing and just go full time into AI, whatever that looked like. And she told me I was insane because nobody was talking about AI. Nothing was happening in that field. And about six weeks later,

ChatGPT launched to the world and the world collectively lost its mind and off it went. And suddenly I was just getting asked by people, hey, you know a bit about this. Can you come and talk to us? Can you come and talk? Before I knew it, I had an AI advisory, even though that wasn't even the plan.

I love that. I know. I feel like a lot of people have that experience in the world of online digital marketing. I remember even after I turned toward it and embraced it and stuff, I was still hearing people say, oh, it's just a fad or there's still the AI haters out there. This is the modern TikTok. It'll go away. And I'm like, actually, TikTok hasn't gone away yet.

Yeah. And that ultimately culminated in me trying to write a white paper to answer some common questions. And white papers are five to 10 pages long. I got to 30 pages and realized that this was more and was going to be a book. So I just wrote a book called the AI Empowered Customer Experience. And it was all about how AI is playing out in that space. Yeah.

Yes. And I love this topic, too, because at Authentic AI, we are all about using AI, but in an authentic way that still feels like genuine and real and integrating the human touch into boosting your productivity with AI tools and all that stuff. So I love this idea of like really making sure that you're using the AI effectively.

while also making sure that the customer experience is still great and stuff. When it comes to like working with your clients and how you advise them and stuff, like what do you usually do? What does that look like for you? And look, a lot of that isn't yet even at that point of how do you remain authentic?

Most of the people, most of the companies that I'm working with are still back at, well, where do we start? What actually is AI? How would we use it? And where do we start? For some people, it just looks like this huge wall that's just getting bigger and bigger by the day. And it's a little bit almost intimidating. And so they just want to know where to start. Yeah.

And then invariably they do what we all do with new technology. They just rush to implement it or they go and they're led by a vendor and they just put something in.

Like we did many years ago with IVRs, the press one for this, two for that. We did those horribly. And we're seeing some of that playing out now. And people, though, are correcting quicker and starting to get back to authentic. So I'm finding that the companies are more interested in authentic now.

Where it's not happening is in personal things. Where people are using AI personally, they're losing their authenticity. The amount of obviously synthetic content coming out on platforms like LinkedIn is surprising. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Second, that just outlook, because for sure, that's one of those things that I just keep trying to shout from the rooftops for my brand, because exactly. It's a little surprising sometimes how people are just putting out this content that is crappy. And it's but guys, it's almost like, did you not?

what kind of crappy content looked like or are you just like new to using the tool? I think it's so easy for a slave to get caught up in the shiny object syndrome of, oh my gosh, this is amazing and perfect and I love it. But yeah,

Yeah. And like your eyes are gloss over like the pink lens, rose colored lenses or whatever. But yeah, I know it. And you know what's so funny, too? I think it's sad in some ways because I hear pushback from my audience so often and also automated AI like customer service systems and things like that where people are turned off to it.

Because if you don't take that extra step to make it a little authentic or tweak it to sound human, then like it is a turn off. But it's no, these tools can be used in a way that really improves the customer experience. Absolutely they can. And I always encourage companies, the ones I work with, to

do some internal use cases before they do a customer facing use case. Because when you make your mistakes, you want to be doing that in a safer environment or a less risky environment. But when you do face it externally, yeah, you still want it to have a genuine or authentic, consistent sound.

And you've got a couple of things coming together in this space that make it difficult. And one is that there's a mixture of traditional AI and generative AI, particularly when it comes to chatbots. Everybody listening to this podcast, I'm sure at some point has used a chatbot on a website. But I think if you ask them, hey, how many of you didn't enjoy that experience? Most people would put their hand up.

Because most chatbots are built on older style AI, right? They're built on what we call RNN technology. And that just means that the questions aren't contextualized to each other and things like that as against, say, interacting with a modern chat GPT app where it is highly contextualized. It flows. It feels like you're really having a conversation with another human.

And so until some of the marketing hyperbole goes away from some of the vendors and they start making clear distinctions around what form of AI is being used, we're going to continue to see some lumpy

clunky applications being deployed where people can tick the box and say, yay, we've done AI. But you look at it and go, yeah, but you did the wrong kind of AI. And that's a time factor. I don't think it'll be a long one, but it's a factor of time.

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Oh my goodness. I'm laughing over here too, because I think that I just chuckle at there's a lot of memes online too. It can be applied to generative language AI or generative image too, where people love to make fun of AI generated stuff. Oh my gosh, look at this picture. I told AI to do this and look at what I came up with. AI sucks. Or like same thing with, you see the memes that are like, I had AI write a eulogy for someone and it's like a horrible eulogy. And it's

Yeah, those are funny. And like the message that you're spreading to a lot of people is just AI sucks, don't try this. But a lot of it, firstly, is like the model, like you're saying, but also it's the user. That's what I think is funny. Exactly. That's why I'm just so...

passionate about teaching people how to use these tools. And literally, it can be so easy to get a better response from AI than like a crappy response. It doesn't have to be this crazy like training that you have to like... You can ask AI to help you with AI.

So I've asked ChatGPT to write me a great prompt for mid-journey so I can get an image that looks like blah, blah. It writes me a beautiful prompt. I put it in mid-journey and get the image I want. The people that kind of laugh at AI, and I'm with you on this, I jump on every time I hear it, I jump on them and say, if you had a brand new intern start,

and you asked them to write something and they wrote it and it was cute but horribly wrong, would you just stand back and point at them in the middle of the office and laugh out loud and say, hey, everybody, come and look at this crappy work that this intern did? You would never do that to another human.

But that's exactly what they're doing. They're taking a single isolated early thing out of context, predominantly where they've screwed up the prompt anyway, and publishing it and saying, oh, look, AI doesn't, yeah.

I call it bias in adoption or adoption bias. And people are biased against AI. It's how can I prove it wrong? How can I break it? You give somebody a new AI tool and the first thing they want to do is try and break it. And I don't know why, but that's...

That's like the negative approach. And you can waste hours doing whatever, having fun with it that you get a chuckle out on the back end. Or you could actually use these tools in a productive way. I always brag a little bit, tout myself a little bit where I did the math and I'm saving three hours a day, 15 hours a week and 70 hours a month using these tools. And it's insane. That's why I'm like just shouting from the roof. I'm like, guys, let's use these tools and you can figure out how to make them work for you.

you, right? So let's talk about some of those actual ways that you are using AI tools or your clients are. Like, what are some of those everyday business applications that you're loving for AI tools? For me, I have a heap and I pivot

Just for my general language stuff, I pivot between ChatChip ET and Claude. I find if I'm trying to do summarization or really getting into deep stuff, I prefer Claude. But if I'm trying to do ideation, trying to be really creative, I find ChatChip ET works better for me around that. I use Perplexity in place of Google now. I hardly ever Google anything anymore. Yeah.

because perplexity just does a whole lot better job for me. A couple of specific ones that I use, I have a tool called Brand Ninja. It's an AI tool. And what it's designed to do is go and look across the internet, find stories that are in the realm of the area, and this is for the solopreneurs, in the area that I work in, and bring back content and even draft it up as a LinkedIn post.

Every time it drafts it up, it drafts it up starting with, imagine a world where, you know, let's delve into a world of, and so I never use that half of it.

And I tried to train it and I just got frustrated. But I still use it to do the scouring for me. But then I can look at it and go, that's really interesting. That reminds me of something I saw the other day. I can tie those things together and here's a great post. I saw that going right. Another tool that I use, because like you, I have a mini cast. Yeah.

And as I call it, there's a great little AI tool that you just drop your podcast into afterwards and it levels up everybody's microphones. It levels down the music that's playing in the background. And it does all of that for me while I'm

while I go and have a coffee or do whatever. Yeah, there's a heap of tools, but even some of the free tools, I don't think people think about what they can do.

And if you'll indulge me, I'll give you a practical experience. Love it. So I ran a little experiment on LinkedIn about a month ago and I ran the exact same post every day for five days at 4 p.m. The image was the same. The text was the same, except the word Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in the middle of the post.

And all I asked people to do was if they saw that post was like it. So I could try and figure out what the algorithm was doing.

And at the end of it, of course, I had a couple of hundred likes per day on the various posts and I wanted to do some analysis with that data. So I went onto LinkedIn, opened up each post and looked at who had liked it, but there was no way to export that data from LinkedIn. How am I going to sit here and write down 200 names? So I just started screenshotting.

And for each post, I had maybe 10 screenshots. So I threw them into Claude and said, hey, from these screenshots, give me a list of names and whether they're a first, second or third connection in a format that I can put in Excel. Bang, there's the list in Excel. So I dropped them into Excel. Now I have an Excel spreadsheet that has a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday tab.

I get that entire spreadsheet, throw it into ChatGPT and say, I want you to do data analysis. I want you to tell me how many people saw posts once, twice, three times, four times, five times, don't

Don't double count them. And then I want you to graph for me on a day-by-day basis how many of the people that liked it were first, second, and third in a stacked bar chart. GPT did it for me in, I don't know, maybe 60 seconds. Probably wasn't even that, actually. It was probably 30 seconds. All of the data that I wanted in a matter of minutes that otherwise would have taken me hours to

So people often say, how many hours a week do you save? Like you were talking about. And I keep saying to them, I don't know because I don't think about it that way. What I find is that AI gives me the ability to do things that I otherwise just wouldn't have done because they would have been too hard, just too painful, or things I hadn't even thought about doing. It's like, oh my God, I could do this.

wow, hang on, I can do this way and off it goes. I love that example so much. Okay, I have to ask you specifics about that real quick or I'll come back around to that. But first, I just have to say too, I love...

I love, I always share that too. The numbers that I did the math for are like the average time that I save on like my regular tasks in my business. But I always share with people, it's not also including, it's including like the tasks that I'm doing with AI, but it's also taking into account the time that I'm not

wasting because AI is helping me not waste time, like blasting through writer's block or going on a tech forum to try to find a code for something for my website or like things like that also help. And I love too, that you just brought up, there's things that you wouldn't have done that you would have given up on or just forgotten about if you didn't have an AI tool too.

Yes. Okay, let's talk real quick about like how ChatGPT did that because I'm always loving to get into specifics and stuff. Firstly, it took me a while to realize this. Actually, it took a guest telling me that you could do this. Did you know that ChatGPT can actually spit out files for you? It could have created an Excel file for you that you could have downloaded and stuff. That's why I like to get into specific things because I'm like, wait, how do you do that?

Wait, that's a thing? That's so cool. Okay, tell me about this bar chart. What did it look like when ChatGPT generated a bar chart for you? Yeah, look, it just looked like a normal chart. I tried copying and pasting, but the format wouldn't render right and I couldn't change the colors of the things. And so in the end, what I wound up doing was it gave me the bar chart and I said, now give me the underlying data for the bar chart.

And I just copied and put that into Excel. And then I really drew the bar chart the way I wanted it before I showed it online or in a presentation. So it will do it. But the thing that people need to keep in mind is that tools like ChatGPT and Chord in particular

are large language models. They're not large mathematical models. So yes, they will do some of this stuff for you. Don't be surprised if they don't incredibly excel at graphing or numerical analysis because they're a language model. They're designed to drive language. I think as we get further down the path of agentic AI and even for you and I, rather than large companies,

You're going to start to see bolt-ons too. We're all waiting for that ChatGPT shop to happen because you will get, somebody will clearly have a great mathematical model bolt-on for ChatGPT. And today you can get ChatGPT inside Excel. You can do it that way too. Yeah, there's a few things happening out here, but it changes every day. The thing that excites me most, the thing that makes me most optimistic is

The AI that you use today is the worst AI you're ever going to use. It's just getting better and better and better every day. Totally. And guys, don't let that intimidate you because we can start dipping our toes in now and learning and evolve with the tools. That's another one of those messages I keep going back to. But, oh, okay. Quickly.

I just wanted to ask, because I know you're into this side of things. Do you have any specific tools that might make sense for like a solopreneur or a small business owner to use when it comes to that customer like experience chatbot situation? I know you work with a lot of bigger companies, but I wasn't sure if you had any of your favorite go-to tools for that. No, not really. There are so many players in that market and more coming up each day.

I have a very simplistic website. By design, I want people to understand that although it's a hugely complex beast, it can actually be explained simply easily.

And I'm getting a bot written right now for me around the contents of all of the articles I've written and the book I wrote and everything else. So that it's almost ask Simon a question type thing. Yeah. And there were multiple people that offered to build that for me. In the end, what I've looked to do is partner with someone who I think has a similar view to me, a similar set of values to me.

is likely to think about authenticity and think about customer experience and things in the same way I do. So I don't think there's a clear winner out there unless you're trying to do a very specific job. But if it's just for a solopreneur and they're not looking to spend money

$13 million to implement something. No, I would say find someone to partner with that you like and don't rush. Talk to a few different people, find a few different things. The first tool you come across may be the best, but it might not, right? It might look sexy, but there's plenty of fun things going on. I have AI backing up my mobile phone, not backing up, but connected to my mobile phone

So when people call me, they don't get voicemail anymore. If I don't answer, it goes through to my assistant, Lucy. And Lucy says, Hey, I'm Simon's AI assistant. Do you want to book a meeting? Do you want to leave a message? What do you want to do? And if they want to book a meeting, then Lucy texts them the Calendly link so they can just click on it and find themselves a time. And I'm working with those guys now.

to try and enhance what Lucy can do so that I have a full AI assistant sitting there. And I'll tell you right now, the Lucy thing is free.

There's a freebie version that will do some of this. Doesn't even require a paid subscription to get to higher level stuff, of course. Try out some of the free tools first and that'll give you a more idea of what you want to do. For sure. Do you happen to, can you recall the name of the tool that you use for that? Oh yeah, the tool is called Lucy. It's from an Australian company called Curious Thing. I don't mind plugging them because I'm using their tool. Yeah.

So yeah, the tools are at best. Cool. Okay, awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So I did want to ask you too, because you are a host of an AI podcast, guys. It's AI in 5 is the name of the podcast. And guys, I was on it. It's only for episodes. So you better believe I was like talking as fast as I could. Like I killed more girl or something.

Okay, so I know you interview so many people about AI tools and stuff. Can you share any interesting things that you've heard from your guests and what are those interesting topics? Yeah, look, I kicked off the series and I'm talking to solopreneurs. To be true to your show, I'm going to be authentic. I kicked it off as a way of generating content, but once again,

Puts me in the seat of content provider, who's the go-to guy for that type of thing. But what I found along the journey, and I think yesterday I recorded episode 49 or episode 50, is I am getting more out of it myself now.

than I think my audience is. And that's really self-indulgent, but I'm just loving the diversity of conversations that I'm having. So you and I talked about authenticity and AI, and I love that. The one right after you was with someone in the military, and we were talking about the ethics behind swarming drones and

on various things and one drone saying, I think I found a target, two or three other drones have to fly over it and agree that it's possibly a target before they even send it back to a human to say, do you want us to prosecute?

Things like that. I had a great conversation with a woman around where we're going with driverless trucks. I've had conversations around how we're using AI to synthesize new drugs, what we're doing in the bioscience and medical fields. I had a conversation with someone around robots in the orchard of having drones fly up and pick apples at their perfect moment of ripeness. Just...

The thing that's getting me most is the incredible spread that

that AI is having, and it's touching every industry. I am yet to find an industry where AI can't assist in some form, and that might be vision-based AI, that might be traditional, like a regression, linear regression model or something, or it's generative text, generative image, generative video. The opportunities are just incredible. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. I cannot wait to go back and binge all of your previous episodes. And because, too, I love the concept of AI in five as well, because it's one of those things that I'm so curious about that. And can I afford to spend like 30 minutes to an hour listening about like an entire episode like about AI?

all these other things? No, but five minutes, it's like you get a taste of it. Oh, do I want to learn more than maybe all of it? Yeah, it's a yin and a yang. Sometimes I'm having these conversations and it gets to five minutes and I have to say, well, that's five minutes. And I'm thinking, I really want to talk to you for another half an hour. There have been some where we finished recording and then we stayed on the call for another 20 minutes and I just shot questions at them. But yeah, it's a fun format.

Oh, my goodness. I love that so much. Thank you so much for coming on this show, Simon. Can you please share with everyone how they can connect with you and listen to the pod and all that stuff? Yeah, the simplest way to connect is through LinkedIn. I think there's only one Simon Chris that does AI things in Australia. So you should be able to find me or on the website, SimonChris.ai. It says who I am and what I do in one fell swoop.

And then, yeah, you'll find links. And you can also find the podcast on YouTube just by looking for AI in 5 minicast and you'll find it. Awesome. Thank you so much. I've loved our combo. Yeah, me too. It's a lot of fun.

How awesome was Simon, you guys? I love connecting with other AI nerds out there and his tips were just super insightful and actionable for everyday solopreneurs like us. If you loved this as much as I did, make sure that you connect with him over on LinkedIn. That's where he hangs out the most. And you can connect with me on Instagram, which is my stomping grounds. I'm at Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs.

Send me a message. Let me know that you listen to this podcast. Tell me what your favorite takeaway was. And let's just keep the conversation going over there. All right. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and I'll catch you next time I catch you. Thank you so much for tuning in to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, my friend. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your shows.