How to Use ChatGPT

Hosts

How to Use ChatGPT – Transcript

Greg
Why am I using it? Why am I using this? What is it going to help me do? And if? If the answer is, it’s going to save me time? I might be okay with it. But I need to unpack. How is it saving you time. Because if it’s just saving you time, and I don’t have to learn a whole bunch of other stuff. And I would say that’s actually bad or bad or bad word, but it’s might not be the best use of the tool. Because the reason why I say that is, I know we all have busy lives. I know we all want to jam as much as possible into our lives. But what we actually always sacrifice is the opportunity to learn.

Bob
Welcome to the circuit breaker podcasts where we challenge the status quo of innovation and new product development. We’ll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I’m Bob Esther, and I’m the co founder of the rewired group and I’m one of your co hosts. And we’re joined by Greg Engel, who is my co founder and chief Bob interpreter. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset reorganise and recharge your brain to build better products. Hey, Bob, hey Greg. What’s up, man?

Greg
So today, we’re going to talk about something that I’m gonna screw the name up a bunch of times already, you just have to forgive me. But we’re gonna talk about chatGPT. Oh, my favourite. And the reason why we’re gonna talk usually about everything. So I’m not sure dude, I guess everything’s your favourite.

Everything I like just like anything, you talk about your favourite, or you hear about or learn about. So it’s cool. But really, the reason why we’re talking about it is because I’m not a big social media guy. But the last couple times I went on LinkedIn or went on Twitter, people have either tweeted at you or or posted to you or even just to me about how they’ve used chatGPT to do jobs, interviews, or summarise a book or things like that. And it kind of pains me a bit when I see that or hear that because I’m afraid that we’re actually outsourcing thinking,

Bob
Yes, that’s my biggest fear with it. I think it’s a really good search tool and maybe summarising tool, but it’s not the it’s it doesn’t give the subtleties of what, what the meanings are. And so it’s it tends to create, in my opinion pablum, that higher level stuff of like, oh, it’s gotta be easy and fun, and blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, Okay, what does that mean? And so there’s no context. And so I think the other thing is that, you know, they can do an interview, and it can, it can help summarise the interview. But it’s, it’s the thinking between the interviews that are way more important.

Greg
I want to challenge that because it cannot really summarise a true job to an interview, because it’s just going to give you the words, it’s not gonna give you the intent, because they can’t actually see the intent.

Bob
Yes, that’s the way the algorithm works is, is looking at the next highest probability of a word. So it doesn’t actually have logic. It’s based on kind of the the data that it has at the time and looks at it. And so it’s, again, it’s a summary tool, I think, if anything, but it’s not necessarily it’s not, it doesn’t get to what we would consider the essence of the job or the detail of the unpacking of it.

Greg
I’m afraid of when it’s a summary tool, especially using it in a job interview, is we’re going to summarise to those belief systems that everybody already has it actually, it actually is going to force it more towards the supply side than the demand side, because that’s what’s out there. Right. So I’m afraid that by putting it through there, and I understand why people want to put it through there because they think it’s helping with analysis, because it’s counting the words it’s doing those types of things. The problem is, that’s not really the analysis, the analysis is trying to figure out what were the intents of people in the patterns, and then what, what context and things were happening. And a lot of times people don’t give you the whole context, they give you clues. And that’s where you see the thinking, right? Because that’s the thinking of how do we now put together this puzzle that we’re we don’t have the box to see what it looks like. And we’re trying to put together this puzzle of this interview without the box without the instructions. And that’s what the true thinking of Joss Whedon is, is that trying to put together those puzzle pieces. It’s also…

Bob
…the human, the human part of all this, right. And so what happens is, is it’s like what we used to call, I don’t know, 10 years ago, what we call jobs washing, right, where people would sit around in a conference room and kind of guess what the jobs would be and, you know, kind of hypotheses, but hypothesise what it was, but never go talk to anybody. It’s the same problem is that you can take interviews we’ve done or interviews other people have done and kind of put into chatGPT, but it doesn’t actually help you have that understanding. It just actually builds the summer.

Greg
Well, and I would say the again, the bad summary because it’s just counting words or a might even change a word and might change the word from easy to pleasant to do. And it’s like, okay, that’s totally those are totally different things.

Bob
Well, it depends on the intent, that context wrapped around how they set it and so all sudden, they’re assuming, in some cases, they assume like, like a thesaurus, that the language which is very similar, but in some cases, it’s very, very different. Right? The thing is, this is I want to, I want to make sure we understand like, like for doing these for doing jobs interview, it’s more about discovery and, and understanding the subtleties. And so to be honest, it’s like, it might be a way to summarise but like, it’s a great tool to prototype to learn, right? In other cases. So like, I just want to make sure in the terms of jobs, I would say, it’s a dangerous thing. Because at some point, if you don’t really have a good understanding of what the jobs are, and, and you’re, you don’t actually have that, that the notion of intent and the summary and the subtleties behind it, the champion GT GT can come back with what seems like a good job, a clear job, but when you actually unpack it, it’s not clear because you don’t have the detail behind it of what people meant,

Greg
…right. And, you know, to your point, we’re not trying to poopoo it, we’re not saying that it shouldn’t exist. As our were saying it, all we’re saying is understand. And this is where us humans have to understand how to use something, how to use a tool, just like you have to understand how to use jobs, read and write, chatGPT is a tool, and we have to know how to use it. And I’ve heard some schools that I think have a really good take on it, which is fine, go ahead and use it as the starter, and see what other people have written and give it give it give you a starting point. But then add your original thought to it, because that’s what we’re trying to do as humans add original thought, if we’re just going to regurgitate stuff, then we stop thinking and if we stop thinking, we stop humanity.

So that’s what scares me about it is those types of things. And then the other thing that scares me about it, as I saw somebody, put a book through it, right? Instead summarise the book for me, at some level. And I’m like, okay, that’s dangerous only because what I know, when you write a book, and we went through it a bit is we have an intent. The customer or the person reading the book doesn’t have our intent, they have a different context, they have different jobs we’ve done they want out of a book, right? So you already have a distortion of what is going to happen, right? Because we have an intent that we’re writing the book for, they have an intent that they will how they want to receive the book. So there’s already disconnect, there’s already a possibility of missing misalignment. But now you add another layer of distilling of this, this thing going out and saying, Okay, if this is the summary of the book, let me change this word from prototyping to experimentation. Or let me change this word from liking to something exactly as it would be or another word pleasant. And now you’ve actually distorted even more from our view of the author, right? So now it’s even more distorted. So if you’re one or 2%, off at the beginning, now you can be five or 10% off because it might not even match what you’re trying to get out of it.

Bob
This is this is where I, the way I talk about that is, is you know, they’re getting more and more efficient, but less and less effective. Right? It’s some point like who give me a summary of the book. So I don’t have to read the book. And so here’s the summary. Okay, I got the gist of it, I can move on. And, again, I think there’s intent behind it. And so, again, I think ChatGPT can be a useful tool to help like with starting points with with prototyping with having, you know, contrast to create meaning, some different things around it. But at some point, you have to understand the content that you’re actually asking to summarise, in order to take it to the next level.

Greg
I think I want people to ask themselves a question when they go to use it is why am I using it? Why am I using this? What is it going to help me do? And if? If the answer is, it’s going to save me time? I might be okay with it. But I need to unpack what is how is it saving you time? Because if it’s just saving you time, and I don’t have to learn a whole bunch of other stuff. And I would say that’s actually bad, or bad or bad word, but it’s might not be the best use of the tool. Because the reason why I say that is I know we all have busy lives. I know we all want to jam as much as possible into our lives. But what we actually always sacrifice is the opportunity to learn or go deeper. Yep. And learning is staggered in deepness, right, because there’s there’s surface learning, or theory learning…

Greg
…what I’m afraid of is is everything becomes CliffsNotes. And then do we actually really understand what they meant. And then I can, you know, you could talk to clay struggle towards fortune towards the end of his life of how people were taking disruption theory and distort and distorting it to fit a context. That was not what he was trying to say. And even I’ve distorted what he what he says, right? Because Because my take on it is, at the basic principle, what he was trying to get done was say, look, sometimes even when you’re a business leader, you make very rational decisions.

And you make the right decision for the moment in time. But you might not make the right decision for the long term. And you have to start looking at both and you have to understand it. And that’s my take of what he did, but that’s not really what his take was. So I’ve distorted it as well. to fit my narrative or to fit my thing, so we all know what happens. But can we, I acknowledge it happens. I acknowledge it. And by acknowledging it, I could also read his stuff and say, Okay, what else was he trying to get across? And I think people use the word just, you know, describe disruption is all kinds of different things. Any new thing was just your thing was disruption. Right. And that’s not what he was saying. He was saying disrupt, well, you could probably say, but Right.

Bob
Yeah, the whole premise was that the incumbents, the people who are leading a market basically can be disrupted by somebody who is at the lower end of the market, and that most incumbents would look at and laugh at, because at some point, they’re not as good as the incumbent. But at the end of the day, they’re serving the underserved, and they’re actually bringing in new technology to bear to literally get to scale that ends up, you know, basically killing the the incumbent. Right. And so it was a very, very detailed, rigorous work around kind of studying kind of how the smartest and best leaders can kind of be met and misaligned because they’re still worried about short term profits and not actually looking at the underserved.

Greg
Right. So that’s what I mean by it. So if I put his disruption theory book in through this thing, it I don’t know what it will come up with. But it’s probably not his intent.

Bob
Well, and I think part of this is to realise it’s a it’s a tool that needs respect, and that you need to realise it’s only going to give you so much, it’s only going to regurgitate what’s there. It’s not going to help you actually with new thought, right? And so that’s why again, I go, No, even though we’ve done, let’s say, interviews on multiple categories in multiple ways, like we learn something new every single time, and we hone and refine and peel back that onion. And so to me, the warning label is look, this might help you get to a certain point. But ultimately, you have to get into the details to get to the next level. The thing that I really like about jet, GBT, though, is the fact that it, I think we’re gonna notice this flip. And maybe we already have, but I feel like there’s a flip from knowing the answers to asking better questions. And so people are asking chat between GPD way better questions, do you think? I think they’re thinking harder about the questions. And so when you look at kind of how it’s way better than search, right?

Greg
Well, I think it does things better than search for a lot of things. I think, like, I know, we had talked in the office with a couple people that are closer to the field than we are. And they’re like, look, if I have a technical question, like how to fix x, they go to that because it does search better. Yeah, right. That’s right. So for those types of things, I think it does well. And I think what you’re saying is for original thought or for understanding things, it might, it might search up some stuff, but then you have to go do work, so are actually doing more work or less work by doing this. And that’s the question I have, for a lot of it, right? We think we’re shortcutting it, but are we actually creating more work for us? Exactly, exactly.

Bob
I think that this gets back to kind of our overall kind of approach and kind of the mindset shift we’ve had in the last couple of years, which is like this is about thinking development is about thinking it’s about thinking differently, right? And it’s about actually framing things from different perspectives, and being able to connect dots and do those kinds of things. I think that Chat might be able to help summarise, but it’s not going to actually connect those dots. Right. And so this is where there’s, that’s where I think we have to be very careful that it’s not going to give us the answer is going to give us a better summary of the data that we have to still integrate and we still have to do the work that’s

Greg
…in the question to me, if you use it for like jobs you’ve done and stuff is it summarises but then does it actually bring you a degree further from what the person was actually trying to say. And that’s my fear with it.

Bob
I saw somebody I saw somebody take the the, you know, an interview we did and break it down into its components of a push up poll and anxiety and habit. And, you know, here’s the statement, here’s what it is, but it’s like, it’s still missing all the details of what they meant by it. And so this is the, and this is the debrief part afterwards. And so to me, it’s the it’s the arguing it’s the it’s the clarifying, it’s the unpacking that happens afterwards. And so the raw data itself sometimes is is misleading because they use a word over and over and over again. And it seems like okay, this is a big word, but it’s like, now has eight different definitions as opposed to one…

Greg
…it depending on whether you’re talking about being a Porsche, or you’re talking about being a fool could have been different definitions. Exactly. Exactly. And so it was anxiety saying exactly right,

Bob
…exactly. So this is where it’s, it’s it, I think, being able to sense those things is is important, but I think it’s more of that is decided in the debrief than it is in the interview, because the interview was just a lot of pieces of data. And then ultimately we’re actually connect, connecting those dots to say what really was pushing them and pulling them etc.

Greg
Well, I think it’s both because you have to have the right questions and the right thing to get to it. And we’re going to do a podcast more on that. Yeah, I think I think what we’re saying is, I mean, to kind of summarise is, look, it’s a good tool. No one’s saying throw it away. No one’s saying don’t ever use it. We’re saying make sure you’re asking your questions, and I think that’s to your point. Have you think there people are doing better questions, which I don’t know if they are or not. But stop and ask yourself question, why am I putting in here? Now? What is it going to help me to

Bob
…progress from I tried to make by putting it in here? And what is what is the limitations of what I’m going to get from?

Greg
And the easy answer for people is to save time. Well, why are you trying to save time? What is it you’re trying to save time with? Because if you have to write a column or a blog, and you want to get an idea, yeah, I think that saves you time because it saves you research time? Well, if you say, hey, it’s gonna save me time, because I don’t have to do the work. And I don’t have to think, Well, I think you’re doing something, I think you have to rethink that you’re gonna be in trouble. So that’s what we that’s all we’re saying is take the time to actually figure out why you’re doing it. What’s going on? I mean, I could tell a story like, my mom passed away recently, and I had to write the the obituary, right?

And I don’t know how to write an obituary, right? And I kept thinking, should I put it in there? And have it helped me write it? And the struggle there was? Yeah, it would help me write it. But does it actually take away from my relationship with my mom? Right? Because writing it is the remembering to do that stuff. So was that the right time to use it or not? And I decided it wasn’t for some people it might be. But that’s an individual thought process that you have to actually think about. And I think a lot of times, what we do is, we see a new shiny tool, and we try to shove everything into it without thinking of what it’s going to do for us or, or what it’s going to take away from us. Because in my case, it was it would might take something away from me. Right? So that’s what I want people to just stop and think about why you’re doing it. And, and I get people are just playing right now I get it. So I mean, I get why people put our interviews to it, I get why people are trying to use it for analysis, because you got to see if it works, I get it. But don’t think it works just because it spits out an answer. Yeah, that’s all you need to also think about what it really did or didn’t do for you.

Bob
And the hard part is that what you’re getting back, especially if you’re not an expert in it, you don’t know if it’s any good. And so this is where all of a sudden, it’s like, it might be good at some superficial level. But when you start to unpack, to go develop something, I’m not sure that I would actually build based on what ChatGPT tells me to build.

Greg
And I always try to figure out like, we laugh a lot, because, you know, we just laugh, we work hard, but we also have more flexibility than most people. Right? So when we’re working, we’re working very hard. And when we’re off, we get to do things we get to think, and you always talk about the thinking part of it. And what I’m afraid of is people because their drive of saving time because their drive of trying to jam as much as possible. And they’re actually short cutting the thinking time. And that’s that’s not only do I think it’s dangerous, I think it’s bad for the person.

Bob
I think it’s bad for a lot of reasons. I think in the end, it’s it’s that it’s the my being the myopic, of being more and more efficient, that were less and less effective. And that’s where we lose sight of like, oh, I can do this faster and faster, faster. But now I can’t change like so I look at schools and schools are so efficient that they actually can’t change. And so there’s no room to do any innovation. There’s room, no room to think about anything different. And so when it does, it’s like like innovation is a luxury, because they’re not thinking they’re just executing, you know, time after time after time. And the reality is like, they need time to think.

Greg
So I think this this week that the thing we’re we’re asking people to do is just a step back anytime they use a new tool you be a chatGPT or not. Why are using? What is it doing for you? And also I want to challenge people to carve out some time in their work schedule.

Bob
To think that’s that’s I think the bigger the biggest thing we’re really trying to get people to understand is how do we give you tools and frameworks to think and then we just started the newsletter. And the newsletter is, again, similar to the podcast, it’s just trying to cause you to take a minute, take a step back and think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and using a framework or two to help you kind of go a little bit deeper and a little bit better.

Greg
So as always, thanks for listening, and hope to see you guys next drop. See ya.

Bob
Thanks for listening to the circuit breaker podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe so you won’t miss an episode. If you know somebody who’s stuck on the innovation treadmill please share it. If you’d like to learn more information visit us at the rewired group.com to find out how we work how we can help some resources some books some software. Join us next time as we trip the circuit breaker to help you recharge re energise and refocus your new product development.

Resources:

ChatGPT