Hello and welcome to another episode of the working conversations podcast where we take on all things leadership, business communication and trends in organizational life. I'm your host, Dr. Janel Anderson.

Today's episode is a tech tastic dive into the wonders of generative artificial intelligence and trust me, it is not just another AI story. As someone who thrives on decoding workplace trends and the technology that surrounds us in all of our lives. It is time to demystify how these tools are transforming the way we work and live.

We'll dig into some specific ways that you can use generative AI in your everyday life. From boosting creativity to improving your technical understanding of complex concepts to learning a new language. These tools can accelerate your productivity and cut your learning curve dramatically. So get ready for some strategies on how to navigate the cool terrain of generative AI and get ready to come away with a handful of insights and aha moments as we apply this evolving technology to your everyday life.

Now if you're not familiar with the concept of generative AI, you might have been living under a rock recently. But you can think of it as a virtual collaborator, someone that you can ask questions to in everyday language, and someone who will answer back with ideas, instructions and so much more without any human input or intervention. Generative AI is a subset of a larger field of artificial intelligence that creates content so generative AI generates things hence its name generative. It generates things that didn't used to exist and it does so by combining a bunch of different data to come up with a somewhat novel response. It's accessing vast stores of data, music, images and other content to generate human like responses to your questions. It's kind of like having a conversation with the Google search engine with a healthy dose of creativity.

Chat GPT, developed by the company called Open AI has the widest reach and was one of the first to hit the consumer market back in 2022. Available in free and paid versions it is probably the one app that you'll start with if you haven't used generative AI before. It comes again in free and paid versions and you can just start with the free version and see where it takes you. If you wanted to use Google's version of it that is barred var d and if you want to create images or software code or music or anything like that there are so many more to choose from, but in this episode, we're focusing just on some everyday uses of generative AI.

So Bard or chat GPT will do just fine to do any of the things that we happen to talk about today. And again, we won't be getting into creating images or writing software code or music or anything like that today, but those are all available using other generative AI tools that are out there in the marketplace right now. Now, before I get into some fun things that you can do with it, let me also add that it can give the impression that it is able to do critical thinking but generative AI does not do critical thinking.

So it's super important to understand that whatever it generates is based on a predictive model or algorithm, that it's been trained on. So there are some significant limitations to these tools. And accordingly, you've probably already heard about the many downsides and ethical implications for using generative AI. And I don't want to overlook that so tune in next week when I am going to cover seven things to never ever ever use generative AI for but in this episode, we're gonna cover seven things to use it for that are fun and creative. And I think you will enjoy.

All right number one, you can use generative AI for learning something new. And you can think of anything that you might want to learn. Perhaps you want to learn a new language. Maybe you're going on vacation, and you need just a few words to get by in Japanese. Well, generative AI can absolutely teach you that you can ask for some of the key phrases that you would need to learn in Japanese when visiting Japan for the first time and go from there. You can ask for just a few.

Or let's say maybe you've always wanted to learn conversational French, and generative AI can teach you conversational French can teach you some key words and some common phrases and you could then eventually have a conversation in French with generative AI. This is also super helpful if your child is learning a foreign language in school and you want to be able to help them with their foreign language or if they're looking even just to translate some simple things. You can ask generative AI to help you with that.

There are plenty of other things that you can learn with generative AI as well. It doesn't have to be a foreign language. Let's say there was a cooking technique or a recipe you wanted to learn. In fact, sous vide, which is a French term meaning in a vacuum. It's a technique for cooking something at a low temperature for a long time in a vacuum. If you wanted to learn that particular cooking technique, Generative AI can teach you how to do that. If you want to learn about more things you can do with that instant pot that is collecting dust on your shelf in your pantry, Generative AI can certainly teach you and share with you ideas on how to use that as well. Or maybe there is an ingredient that you have in your pantry or in your refrigerator that you've had for a while and is either going to go bad or you just don't know what else to do with it. Besides that one thing that you bought it for, you could ask generative AI to teach you how to use that ingredient in other dishes. Or you could ask it for specific recipes that you could use it for.

Or maybe there's something that's somewhat unusual that you've purchased maybe not that unusual, but maybe you bought some smoked paprika, which does not taste like regular paprika, and you want to know where it will enhance flavors or what other other flavors that will enhance you could ask it to share some ideas on how you could use your smoked paprika in other dishes or what it pairs nicely with as a side dish if you use it on some meats or vegetables or something like that. So there are just so many different types of things that you might want to learn.

And again, generative AI can help you learn something new so that is my first idea for you. Okay, idea number two is generative AI can suggest a new hobby and help you get started with it. Now here's where sharing more about yourself with generative AI can really help out now obviously, you're not going to want to tell it personal details about you that are highly confidential like your bank account number or your social security number or anything like that. But if you want it to suggest a new hobby for you, the more you tell it about yourself, the more it can provide good suggestions for it to be really useful. And this goes for generative AI across all of these suggestions and if you were to ever use it in other capacities as well like your work, the more you train it the more useful it can be.

So as we think about different hobbies and things do you prefer spending time indoors or outdoors? Are you somebody who is crafty? Or can you not find your way around a ball of yarn or a spool of thread? Maybe you can't keep anything alive for long. You could tell it that too. That way it's not going to suggest that you get a pet or a plant. Maybe you love the water, maybe you hate the water. Maybe you like working with your hands, any of those kinds of things. Would be great detail for generative a generative AI to know about you. Also, this could go for volunteer opportunities or getting to know people in the city that you just moved to as well.

It can offer lots and lots of great ideas much like human the more it knows about your preferences, the better those suggestions will be. And after it serves up a number of different ideas for you about what that new hobby might be. Once you land on one that you like, you could say okay, tell me more about this particular hobby. How do I get started? Is it very expensive? What materials or tools will I need in order to do this hobby, and then generative AI will give you more specific instructions and ideas about how to get started.

Likewise, if you have a specific budget for a hobby you can share that budget with generative AI write this right out of the gate before it starts to even give you any suggestions. So your second idea there is to suggest a new hobby and help you get started with it.

All right, your third idea for how to use generative AI in your everyday life is to use it to complain to or vent to. Maybe your spouse or your best friend is tired of hearing your work troubles or your extended family drama. You can pour it all out to generative AI and get some sympathy or some support. You might even ask for some coaching or some advice from it. But now always remember, it is not qualified to be your therapist and it is only capable of what it has been trained to do. Now there was an example of this a couple of years ago, which is just I think a fascinating use of generative AI.

A woman by the name of Michelle Hong used an earlier version of chat GPT in a very unusual and interesting way. Again, this was back in 2022 she typed in 10 years worth of her personal diary into the chat GPT tool. Now this was on her own private account. We can't access her stuff independently, but she typed up all 10 years worth of journals. Her her own private diary into her account. And then she had conversations literally with her younger self or with a generative artificial intelligence version of her younger self. She wanted to have a real time dialogue with her inner child. And she told that story on Twitter.

It's also been picked up by a number of different news agencies and so forth. So that's a really interesting and novel way to use chat GPT or any of the other generative AI tools that are out there to be your conversational partner. And in fact she was more or less conversing. With her younger version of herself because of what she had typed into it. But again, you could vent you could ask it for support. You could ask it for suggestions, you could just simply ask it to listen, and it will respond back with empathetic responses and it'll tell you to hang in there and Buck up, buttercup. Alright, so that is the third idea I have for you. You can complain to it or you can vent to it or if you want it to get really enterprising you could type in your own journals or diary entries to it and have it respond to you as if it were your younger self.

The fourth idea I have for you is that of product support. Most of us have pieces of technology and consumer products and various things in our homes. That man we wish we knew how to use all of the features or really make the most of that tool or whatever it is that we might have at our disposal.

So for example, I could ask it how to best use all three different cameras that my smartphone is equipped with because my smartphone has two cameras pointing on the backside and one camera pointed on the front side. And each of those cameras have different settings. And each of those cameras are best for different things. So I could ask now. I mean, I'm certain I could go find a technical manual that would have that same information. But I've had the same smartphone for almost three years and have I done that No, I haven't. But if Chat GPT or Bard wanted to explain how to use those features to me in everyday conversational language, well, that is something I'm interested in. In fact, that is something I should do come to think of it because my daughter who has the exact same make and model of phone as I do, knows how to use all these cameras and she is a whiz at taking amazing pictures on her smartphone until I could stand to learn a thing or two from probably chat GPT or Bard because she just doesn't have the patience to explain it to me, but Ted GPT and Bard, well they'll hang in there with me as I learn it. It could also be the smart bulbs that you bought for your lamps and how to get them to integrate with a smart device that you have in your home or again, maybe it's a smart personality that you have on your mobile phone that could use an app to tap into those smart light bulbs or those smart light switches or anything that you have in your house that you don't fully know how to use. Maybe you want to know how to clean your dryer vent and how often to clean your dryer vent. Well, Chad GPD or Bard will scour the internet and they will pull the best advice that they can find on both how to do it and how often to do it.

So it could be again product support with something everyday around your home like your dryer vent. Or it could be specific features of technology or consumer devices that you have that you just haven't spent the time to figure out how to best use. Alright, so that is number four, get some product support on things that you're maybe not using to their fullest. Idea number five is to explain something technical in a laypersons terms now it could be something medical, like how insulin works with glucose in the body to deliver energy to your cells. And maybe you want to know more about that. Now I'm not asking you to have it diagnose a medical condition.

In fact that's going to be next week on things to not have it do. But rather really your understanding of how certain biological systems work in the body. That would be a great example for it because there's lots of valid information out there on that again, remember, it's only going to be able to return results as good as what it can find. In the datasets that it's been programmed to access. It could be something like in physics, like how airplanes fly, what are the dynamics that make it that make airplanes able to fly?

You could certainly ask it that or you could ask it why the sky appears blue. There are just so many different technical concepts that again, the information out there is readily available. You may want to do some fact checking if you don't believe what you what you get back. But you can absolutely ask it to explain something technical in laypersons terms so that you can get a better and quicker understanding of something that's complex. So number five is explained something technical in laypersons terms.

Idea number six for you and this is one I just used the other day. Homework Help for the parents among us. Once kids get to let's say High School, man. It's been a while since we've accessed that part of our brain and that information. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't remember all of the rules and concepts in algebra and helping my daughter with her homework the other night. I needed to ask chat GPT about absolute numbers. And it easily explained to me that absolute numbers are just simply the distance a number is away from zero on the number line whether it's positive or negative does not matter. And right there it all started coming back to me. And it went on to give me some specific examples that made it so much easier for me to not only understand the homework that she was working on, but also give her some guidance on it.

And again, I wasn't asking it to teach me everything about algebra. I was just needing to know that one concept and then a bunch of things kind of came flooding back to me. Now of course not just math, but you can use it for homework help in science, English and grammar, foreign language and so much more. Because us fumbling parents who are trying to make sure that everyone gets fed and gets to their sports practices on time. And well we also need to make sure that our kids get their homework done. And sometimes we can't remember the specific concepts of things that they're working on. So chat GPT Bard and any of the other generative AI tools out there can be real lifesavers for parents with the homework help. Also for aunts and uncles and family, friends and grandparents and anybody who might be in that position to give homework help, not just the parents. All right and idea number seven for you today. You can use generative AI to challenge your own thinking on something and this is perhaps the way that I use it the most often. Now, maybe it is something political in nature. In fact, here we are in 2024 in an election year, and maybe you've got a friend or a family member who is on a very different end of the political spectrum than you are you could ask it for its viewpoint that is different from yours so that you can not in the heat of a moment.

Have a conversation with your you know your relative who views things very differently than you but rather in the confines of you and your laptop, you can ask it to explain a counterpoint to something that you believe politically, and then you can think through it from the other person's perspective because that way you're not like trying to convince somebody of something nor are you being convinced of something. You're just taking an alternate viewpoint for a few minutes. It could also be something that's socially nature that maybe you don't understand something that's happening in popular culture, or you don't believe something that maybe other people are believing. You could ask for a counterpoint to your own belief systems or your own opinions. I often ask it for counterpoints to something that I'm working on in my work. And while this episode isn't necessarily about work, per se, but I have often asked it for counterpoints as I'm putting together a podcast episode, what what would somebody think that's counter to what I'm saying? What would somebody think that's counter to what I believe? And it just opens up my thinking, and gets me in a place where I am more creative and expansive, because I'm not just looking at something from a point of view that comes naturally to me.

I'm starting to think more broadly and more expansively, so you can use chat GBT or Bard or any of the other generative AI tools out there to challenge your thinking on something. Now, if you're not familiar with these tools, I want to encourage you to go find them online, set up an account almost all of them have a free version where you can get started without, you know, again, without putting in a credit card or anything like that.

In fact, I strongly encourage you to just use the free versions to get comfortable with them. And unless you're doing something really advanced, like training it to write in your own voice or something like that. You don't need a paid version. So we've talked about some innovative ways to use generative AI in this episode, and hopefully you've gotten some fun ideas on how to use these tools like chat GPT and Google's Bard.

Hopefully, you've gotten those ideas from this episode. And remember, I know that you have heard about the many downsides and the ethical implications of using generative AI and all the nefarious things that can happen with it. So tune in next week, when we will cover seven things to never use generative AI.

For now, remember the future of work is not only about the technology, it's about the values we uphold the communities we build and the sustainable growth that we strive for. We need to keep on exploring, keep innovating, and keep envisioning the remarkable possibilities that lie ahead.

As always, stay curious. Stay informed and stay ahead of the curve.

Tune in next week, when we will explore the dark side of generative AI and what to never use it for. If you enjoy this content and you're watching on YouTube, make sure you hit the subscribe button and not that little bell so that you get notified every time there's a new episode out. And if you're listening on a podcast player that has a way for you to give five stars and give a positive recommendation please do so because it helps other people find this podcast so that they can listen to it as well. Wherever you are listening or watching. Give a review like I said if you can and until next time, my friends be well.