Using AI tools ethically within your business - Kieran McNeill | E9

Using AI tools ethically within your business - Kieran McNeill | E9 transcript

Claire Scaramanga

Hello and welcome to the Scaramanga podcast. This is Claire Scaramanga and I'm talking to Kieran McNeill, also from Scaramanga Agency, about the growth in AI, Artificial Intelligence. Kieran has given a number of presentations recently to business groups about AI, so we thought we'd sit down together and go through some of the key things that he's been talking about. So welcome, Kieran!

Kieran McNeill

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Claire Scaramanga

So first off, what do you think has driven the surge in interest in AI over the last year?

Kieran McNeill

AI has been around for a very long time. But in the last year, towards late last year, that's when ChatGPT really did come out and since then I think the industry has just boomed to whole new levels. In all these talks I've done recently, one of the main things that I highlight is, if you go on Google Trends and you type in AI tools, you will see a massive surge of increase in October and November last year, which is roughly the same time period in which ChatGPT came out. So I would say ChatGPT was the sole contributor to it booming as it is now.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah. Okay. ChatGPT isn't the only AI tool out there. So what other sort of applications can businesses use and how would they help?

Kieran McNeill

ChatGPT is just an AI chatbot. There's plenty of them on the scene. We've had them for a long time, but there are other ones as well. Midjourney is a really popular one when it comes to graphic design and DALL.E 2. When it comes to writing assistants, GrammarlyGO is one of the more recent ones out there. Grammarly has been around for a long time but they've made a more AI-focused one in GrammarlyGO. There are also coding tools and meeting tools. So there's a variety of different tools that businesses can really implement in their strategies for their day-to-day operations.

Claire Scaramanga

And in fact, we're using one of them to do this podcast. We're using Otter.ai to record the podcast and do a transcript.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, one of the meeting tools. Yes.

Claire Scaramanga

So looking at ChatGPT in particular, what do you think that offers?

Kieran McNeill

ChatGPT, while it is a chatbot, it offers a lot more. For example, if you ask it a question, or if you ask anything it will give you a response. The way it works is the algorithms that the tools are built on are coded in a way that the prompt is the message you're sending them and they are designed to respond to the prompt you've given them. So if I were to ask ChatGPT, for example, "How are some ways I can improve my business operations?", the response it would give me would be tailored towards that exact prompt I gave it. So businesses can use ChatGPT as a virtual assistant. It's really good for small business owners where they don't have many employees. It's only them and sometimes they would like someone else to help them out. They can use a tool like ChatGPT as that extra employee to really help their business operations.

Claire Scaramanga

And you mentioned prompts, how do they work? And why is it important to get it right?

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, so the actual AI tools themselves are just normal tools, they are not smart and they don't do anything. They're quite useless unless you feed them the information to try to get the response you want. So when I go into ChatGPT, it says "What do you want to say to the bots?". The message I put in that little chatbot is the prompt I'm giving it. I'm telling it "I want to know your response to this exact textbox". So let's say I asked ChatGPT "Give me some information about Croydon", that's where Scaramanga is based. It will probably give me three or four paragraphs about Croydon, which is great, but I probably won't be reading through all four paragraphs of information. But you can always respond back to the responses you were given with another prompt. So I could say, "shorten this" and then it will shorten the same thing it gave me. That's kind of why you need to get it right with your prompts because if you don't get it right, you won't get an accurate response back.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah, got to ask the right questions.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah. You mentioned about all of these AI models. I mean my understanding is that they are, trained. So the models are created, the software's created and then they're trained on information, whatever that might be. So ChatGPT I think initially, when it first came out, it was trained based on what was on the internet up to September 2022, I think. They've updated that now with the free version and we believe that the paid-for version of ChatGPT, which is ChatGPT 4 is using live data from the internet. And I think Bard is also using live data.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, the free version is ChatGPT 3.5 and the cutoff date for that is September 2022.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah, excellent. Okay. I know one of the things that people have sometimes asked us about and when we've done these talks there have been concerns around plagiarism and copyright. What's been your experience on particularly ChatGPT and plagiarism?

Kieran McNeill

It's quite interesting because we've been doing these talks and presentations pretty much starting from the year and one of the slides I made sure to really focus on was showcasing the plagiarism side of ChatGPT. So there was one month I was writing an article for Scaramanga about social media. It was a really good article, by the way, check it out. After I read the article and published it, I thought to myself, hang on a second, let me compare my article to something that maybe AI can do. So I asked ChatGPT "Write me an article on social media" and it wrote a six, seven paragraph article in 15-20 seconds like that's really, really fast. It looked good. I was reading the content and I was like, yeah this is correct, it looks good to me.

So I actually put it into a plagiarism checker to see how much of the content would be flagged as plagiarized and 26% of that content was flagged as plagiarized which I mean, when it comes to Google, SEO and algorithms, if a page on your website is 25% plagiarized you're probably going to get penalized for it. However, I did the same test two weeks ago for one of the most recent talks I've done and I did the exact same prompt. The content it gave me was a bit different. I put into the exact same plagiarism checker and the checker came back with only 15% plagiarized. So from the start of the year to the end of the year, in theory, ChatGPT found a way to make their responses 10% less plagiarized. That's quite a scary thought when it comes to plagiarism checkers out there.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah. I think I heard recently that ChatGPT can now pass the Turing test, which is obviously something based on Alan Turing, the codebreaker and founder of computing. The Turing test is something that enables a device to tell whether the user is a computer or a human being. So CAPTCHA codes, for example, where you have to click on fire hydrants in a photograph, those kinds of things are a Turing test and apparently, ChatGPT can now pass the Turing test. So it's indistinguishable from a human, which is... why, it's a thing!

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah, it does. So what are the sort of ways that businesses are using AI to support them?

Kieran McNeill

It's come a long way. I think ChatGPT has been up for exactly over a year now or coming up to. So in a year, the leaps it's made, it says a lot.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, so many business owners are currently using many varieties of different AI tools right now for their businesses. One of the biggest things when businesses think of AI is, maybe this will help reduce my operational costs. It makes sense, you know. What businesses can do, we definitely do not advise this, but some businesses are just asking AI tools to write content for them and then they copy and paste that content onto their website. That is a massive problem actually, because as we've just mentioned the free version of ChatGPT has a September 2022 cut-off date so it won't give you any information for 2023. So if you're asking it to write you an article about SEO algorithms, you're going to get all the information from last year.

Claire Scaramanga

Unless you pay!

Kieran McNeill

Unless you pay. But if someone else, if another business owner is like, "I also want to write the article on this, let me use AI to help me" and they copy and paste ChatGPT, you've basically got everyone just copying and pasting from the same pool of information. So then there's a lot of duplicated content on the internet. It's the same as just copying and pasting from Wikipedia, essentially. That's what ChatGPT is, it's like AI Wikipedia. But yes, business owners are using it a lot more. One thing that we know is that Excel formulas are a very complicated thing. I personally don't understand how to do them properly. But you can ask ChatGPT to help you with Excel formulas. It will ask you what you need help with and give you very in-depth explanations.

One of the biggest things we've all seen is when it comes to rewording messages and emails, sometimes in professional settings people just don't know what tone of message to use to come across well in an email or a message. ChatGPT or even writing tools like GrammarlyGO are really good for that because they will help you. So the writing assistants, you give them a piece of text and you tell them what kind of tone you want from the text and it will help you refine it, give you word change suggestions, etc. So it's really good for that. Social media captions and hashtags. Like I mentioned before, you know, when it comes to very small business owners or one-man bands, they sometimes just don't have time for social media.

Social media is so time-demanding, and you know, AI coming up with the actual captions and hashtags, it does help. But remember when it comes to the hashtags, it's giving you the best hashtags from September 2022 if you are on the free plan, so do keep that in mind when you're just using it to write content for you. As well, we've also seen it being used as a general learning tool. I can go on Google and search for something and I'm given a million web pages, but if I ask AI tools that exact same prompt or that question, it will just give it all to me in that one form so I don't have to click on multiple different links to find out. But yeah, there are loads of different ways businesses are using AI and I implore many business owners to go out there, research, mess around with it.

These tools, like ChatGPT, are completely free. There's no charge for the free plans as well. Midjourney is a great one as well. Midjourney is a great tool because it designs you graphics based on the prompts you've given it, so very similar to ChatGPT. When I've used it, I feel like I'm a very fancy graphic designer. Obviously, I'm not, because I've just used AI to help me, but it helps fill a void in certain skill sets with people and businesses.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah and I think a lot of organisations are incorporating AI into their standard offering. You mentioned graphics and images. I think Getty, which probably owns the largest photo library in the world, they have just introduced an AI functionality. Also of course customer service with bots that interrogate a database and can answer questions.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah, we do. Obviously, we do a lot of content creation, and we do that... as humans! Not using AI tools to create content.

Kieran McNeill

We've been using them for a very long time. I mean, they're not always the best, from my personal experience they're completely awful but that's a great example as well. I was reading that 80% of Fortune 500 companies have employees that are using tools like ChatGPT in their daily workflow. That just shows you that some of the largest companies in the world, some of their employees already implementing AI technology and tools within their workflow. But you know, at Scaramanga we have an AI policy in place for employees to follow so they know what they are allowed to use AI tools for and what they're not allowed to use it for, which is very self-explanatory, you know, not copy and pasting from AI directly for example. I think it's one thing that all businesses should probably have a policy or procedure in place for.

Kieran McNeill

If you're relying on AI technology nonstop, you're losing that human touch. You don't have a human behind the content and it shows clearly. If we were all just using AI technology to write our content for us, nothing would ever be unique anymore.

Claire Scaramanga

Yeah, and I think you've said many a time that you can tell when content has been AI-generated.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, from a social media point of view, I can tell when a social media post has been done via ChatGPT or not. It's very clear, very obvious. But maybe there have been times I haven't spotted it because it is just getting that much better. But even HubSpot posted an article a while ago and they said on average, using AI can save an employee up to two and a half hours of their daily workflow. So I mean, that sounds amazing on paper, of course.

Claire Scaramanga

And of course, Microsoft have just introduced their tool. It's not rolled out completely, but it's Copilot, which is aimed to help people using the Microsoft suite of products. Obviously, one of the things that larger businesses can do like you mentioned the banks, is they can also create their own AI models, perhaps building off existing technology such as open source platforms, building their own and training their own models with their own data sets. So yeah, it's really across the board, isn't it? But that, I suppose leads me on to, what ethical considerations you think businesses should bear in mind when adopting AI.

Kieran McNeill

It's tough because it also can depend on the sector of the business that you're working in. I'm just going to use a marketing agency as an example, as you know, that's what we are here. One of the biggest things we offer is services to clients that include having written content for clients. There is nothing stopping certain companies out there from just AI generating this content, which you know, at Scaramanga all of our content, and I mean all, is hand-written by humans.

Claire Scaramanga

Yes.

Kieran McNeill

But, you know, there's that ethical point of view from a company's point of view. Do you tell your client that you're giving them AI-generated work? Or do you do it discreetly? There's no legislation in place really right now to kind of prevent that. Legislation regarding social media is so far behind and social media is quite old at this point I feel like when it comes to AI technology, it will be even further away. There is the ethical concern of employee morale in the sense of, is this AI tool that we're implementing within the company going to replace XYZ employees in the future. The answer, I would say is no. It's not quite there yet. We've seen studies that indicate that AI is good, but it still needs human intervention right now. It's not that far progressed. But I mean, if anything we've also seen the rise of newer jobs such as prompt engineers. There is now a demand for people who can manage these AI tools effectively and they're being seen as prompt engineers. You know, I've mentioned how prompts work.

There are a lot of concerns depending on the sector you're in, of course. We've worked with clients all the way from, like the academia industry and that's an industry where you would not want to use AI content in the slightest. So I think the best way to phrase it is to imagine if you yourself were being provided the service you offer, but it was all being done via AI and think about the ethics. Would you like that product to be sent to you? I think that's the best way for business owners to envision it.

Claire Scaramanga

Excellent. Thank you very much, Kieran, is there anything else you'd like to add? Any sort of summing up that you'd suggest?

Kieran McNeill

I think, ultimately, it's a really interesting space right now. I'm not going to say it's new because AI technology has been around for a very long time. In our day-to-day lives, we use it every day. I don't know about you, but I have Face ID recognition on my phone. Whenever I pick up my phone, it sees my face, it logs me in. That's AI right there. Even when we send emails, that's AI. Using social media, that's AI. We use AI literally all of the time as it is. I think there was another study I was reading about and approximately nearly half of all businesses in the world are looking to incorporate AI technology within their corporation this year and next year. We're using Otter.ai at Scaramanga as a meeting tool, which is even recording this and will be used to write the transcript for this meeting.

I really just encourage everyone and all business owners to go out there and use it for themselves. Especially the free ones, they're very easy to use as well, that's something worth mentioning. Tools like ChatGPT are literally foolproof, you cannot mess it up. They're so, so simple. Some of the coding AI tools are a bit more complicated, but again, not too complicated. So they're really foolproof. Anyone can use them, go out there. Whenever we've done these talks, we've got a lot of feedback from people saying, "Now I'm going to go away and mess with AI". Then they sometimes get in contact with me to say "Oh, I was messing with them over the weekend and I couldn't let go of it, it was amazing!".

So yeah, just go out there, use it, mess around with it and see what you think about it.

Claire Scaramanga

Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Kieran.

Kieran McNeill

Thank you for having me.

Claire Scaramanga

Thank you.