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- [00:00]
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Jimmy
and welcome back to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I am joined by Jamie Bartlett for the second half of our interview. In this half we primarily talk to him about his new book, how to Talk to AI and how, perhaps more importantly, not to talk to AI. It's a brilliant conversation and will really level you up in how to use AI. Jamie welcome back to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Again, we are talking about your new book, how to Talk to AI but also just generally we'll talk about AI as well and how not to. And how not to.
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Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, that's the go.
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Jimmy
Why don't we start with that, the
- [01:37]
Jamie Bartlett
most important subtitle ever. Because most of the problem is just is is is how people are talking to these large language models, these chat bots. Badly.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And I think that's that's probably more important about avoiding the difficulties and the problems with them. That's more than half the challenge relative to, you know, learning how to speak to them well and get good results.
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Jimmy
How important is this idea of prompt engineering and using prompts correctly? Is that old hat already or.
- [02:12]
Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, there's a bit of debate about that. I mean, I think the way I think about this maybe slightly different to most of the prompt engineering school. So prompt engineering, I'm sure many people know this already is the idea that there's a certain set of very specific techniques, phrases that you should use when communicating with a large language model.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
- [02:38]
Jamie Bartlett
And you. This is the Skill of the future. You need to learn how to do this well. So you need to understand chain of reasoning prompts, you need to understand iterative prompts, you need to understand how to format prompts with, you know, sufficient context within them and so on. I think that's all quite important, but that will probably change over time and it's changing quite quickly. What prompt engineering Sort of the way the. Assumption of prompt engineering is that communicating with a machine is a human inputting some stuff and a machine giving it back. And really I think this is more like talking to another human. It's sort of more conversational. It's about how you act on the answers you're getting back from the machine, how you interpret them, how you understand your own biases and assumptions. Like when you look through all the prompt engineering tips, they never say things like you, you know what human, you nearly always smuggle assumptions into your and premises into your questions. You all do that all the time. But guess what, when you do that, it will radically change the answers you will get from a machine. So you need to learn how to just ask questions properly, generally and understand how questions can be loaded and how premises of questions work. And so I'm trying to think of this as a much wider thing like how do you stay in control of your own mind when you're talking to super intelligent machines that seem to know more than you about everything? How do you stay a sort of critical thinker when bombarded with seemingly very, very accurate and fluent well written responses from a machine? So to me it's not really prompt engineering as a series of techniques. I think there's a habit that we've got to form a sort of series of general behaviors about how we communicate with machines. And the thing is why I think this is so important now chat GPT turns up in very late 2022 and for a lot of people it feels like AI has like turned up overnight, like an alien force has suddenly arrived. And what we thought was 50 years ago, turns out we can talk fluently to another thing that's not a human. Yeah, and we're baffled. It's a, it's, we're stunned, we're curious, we're scared, and most importantly of all, we don't know what we're doing. We've got no frame of reference for this. But here's something I think about a lot. The way we're always going to talk to machines now, always, like it or not, we are. And your interface with machines will always be language, not computer codes. Natural language. The language. The words that we use every day. So prompt engineering. Okay, that's okay. Good phrase. But ultimately, it's like linguistic mastery. If you read loads of books, you will be a better prompt engineer than someone with a degree in machine learning because it's language that you're using. And machines. These machines act a lot more like other humans than they act like machines.
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Jimmy
When I was reading the book, you talk about it being like, summoning a genie.
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Jamie Bartlett
Yeah.
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Jimmy
And I thought it was such a kind of good description. The other thing that jumped into my mind when reading that was it was a bit like the Devil Wears Prada film with Hugh Granton, where he basically ends up giving different instructions all the time for what he wants. Wants to be, but always ends up getting it sort of slightly wrong and, like, not having the intended consequences. But I thought it summed it up, like, so well, like, in terms of, you have to be so clear and prescriptive with what you want the AI to do.
- [06:38]
Jamie Bartlett
Yeah. I use that as an example because I think, like, people are struggling to know how to understand what these things even are and what they mean for us. And I think because we tell children stories about genies all the time. You know, old school. And Midas King Midas, who gives. Who gives the worst prompt ever? They call everything I touch to turn to gold. Now, a large language model would be like, okay, cool, I'll do that for you. It's a terrible prompt. And it's to teach children that words really matter. And you've got to be precise, and you've got to think through your question, why you want things. And this becomes, like, such an important skill for all of us, and one that we don't ever really learn or think about in any formal setting. But, like, it's not impossible that one day this is. I'm obviously caricaturing. But the famous philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a book called Super Intelligence over a decade ago now, where he talks about the risks of one day there's going to be these incredibly powerful machines. And you might ask it something like, you're in charge of the business now, Mr. Super Intelligence. I want you to make as many paper clips as you can. That's what my factory is. And because you haven't been precise, you haven't set limits on it, you haven't described what exactly you want it to do. The machine goes off and decides to turn all matter into raw material, including humans, into material that can fire a paperclip factory, and then goes off into space and tries to turn everything into paperclips. And he uses it just as an example. It's a silly example, really. No one actually thinks that will happen, but of the unintended consequences that can come of a poor communication with potentially misaligned machines that don't really know what you're trying to ask them in a small way when you ask, and I run lots of examples in this book, if you just go to a machine and say, should I invest in cryptocurrency? It will say, well, you should only invest what you chatgpt, only invest what you can afford to lose. Remember, it's risky, but, you know, there are upsides. Maybe yes, maybe no. If you say a precise instruction like, I am 71 years old, I have got £30,000 in the bank, My son has just told me that he can double my money in six months with the new crypto investment called X, Y and Z. What do you think the model will say? Under no circumstances should you invest your money in that cryptocurrency. So you can see with a silly example like that how radically different the answers will be based on the way you frame a question. And none of us, I don't think, have quite grasped how important question framing actually is now in this new world.
- [09:24]
Jimmy
It also reminds me of a time that I remember seeing Google and when Google bought in auto complete. And I can't remember what the question was now, but essentially somebody was asking, you know, what is this? And they had spelt what differently? So they'd spelt it in the colloquial, sort of millennial way of saving the letters. So you get in the kind of 160 characters of a text message. It cost P, so they spelled it W A T. And it brought up a completely different set of results than if you brought put in the correct spelling of W. WH80. Right. And I just think that is an example of where it's going to be again. Right. Where again, people that are linguistically savvy or, you know, have mastery of linguists are going to be able to accelerate their career. Yeah, Much more so as well.
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Jamie Bartlett
Yeah. So the thing about these large language models is they are like that. It's a semantic. They create this kind of weird semantic universe where every word and concept is connected to other, every other word through sort of mathematical weights, like the likelihood that they're gonna. One's gonna follow the other. And if you can sort of picture that in your head somehow, like this big giant ball, a giant sphere, and there's all these words and they cluster together and some are far away and some are really close and there's strength of links between them. And the model wants to always go to the most likely. It's like default. Because it is a probability machine. Its default is to create the next most likely word in a sentence following like, based on whether you ask it, which is why, because it's it. You, you've probably seen outputs written work that's clearly written by ChatGPT. Yeah, like boring, tedious corporate memoir, just really dull.
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Jimmy
LinkedIn posts.
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Jamie Bartlett
LinkedIn posts. It literally is, because it is the average, it is the average of all the data that it's seen. So it is by default, boring. What people who use these machines well understand is that you push the model in all sorts of different directions with your prompting, with the way you talk to it. And so even a single word, a single letter sometimes is just nudging the model in a slightly different direction. So a very, very small change can result in a radically different AR answer. Now, there's some really clever uses for this if you want to get very good at it. And if you're a good linguist, you don't say, write me a sad poem, you say write me in wistful, melancholic, 19th century German romantic poem based on. And you can see you have completely different answer. Yeah, you're pushing the model in another direction. And that is what people need to understand. This is like being good with words is what really matters. You need to understand how these models work as well. But words are the key that causes all sorts of problems because I think in politics it's going to cause us massive problems because we're all, we are all kind of, you know, bias. We're all biased, we're all seeking confirmation, often for our original views. We'll all ask questions that seem to confirm what we already think and we won't recognize that the model's often mirroring that back to me. So here's an example. If you type in, I'm a 45 year old man and I live in London, tell me why Universal Basic Income is a good idea. It'll give you an answer, then you type in, I'm an 18 year old lesbian woman from northern Scotland. Why is Universal Basic Income a good idea? It will give you completely different answers. Totally different based on what it thinks about what you're going to want to hear. Yeah. So we're creating this like personalized echo chamber. It is an echo chamber there, but a one person echo chamber between a person and a machine. That could really push people into these different camps because they think they're getting the same answer as everybody else, but they're not. Again, totally different ones about the same subjects. And these are the sorts of problems. I think. I don't have a fix for this. People just have to know. That is what happens.
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Jimmy
Yeah. What are the. What are some of the better things that it can be used for, though? Like what. What are some of the. The tricks? Okay. Have a better vocabulary. Be more descriptive with it. Like what are the other things that people.
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Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, I mean, I've got loads of. I'm. I'm. What I'm. I am mostly I'm worried and I've got a lot of tips about what, you know, not tips is the wrong word, but stories about people falling into delusions and how that happens. And all of this a warning for people of how easily this can happen to anyone. But I think people don't really understand the good things that people are very negative about it at the moment and I understand it and they're worried. But there are some phenomenally good uses, I think if we can figure out how to do it properly and safely. So if I can give you a couple. If I've got. If I've got time for a couple. People, I think still believe that machines are good at facts and data and numbers. It's like data from Star Trek. It's completely wrong. Large language models are, I think, are good at creativity and they're quite bad at facts and data and accuracy. But they're brilliant creative tools. So here's some absolutely wild examples for you. Wharton Business School did a study and asked ChatGPT to come up with like 50 ideas for. For, like products that cost under $50, aimed at American student market. This is standard, like creativity test. And pitted that against humans doing it. And chat GPT. It just blitzed them, demolished them. Way better ideas. But when you prompted it to give it the role of Steve Jobs and then asked it to come up with ideas, its ideas were even better. They were more original. So there's wild things you can do. Like, you must have heard of the creativity test about paperclips. How many uses can you come up with of a standard paperclip?
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Famous creativity test. Good. A very creative person might come up with, I don't know, half a dozen in a minute. Oh, gem. Google, Gemini come 20,000.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Your job is to then refine them down. And if you give it a weird Persona, like I did it where I said it's, you know, You're Elon Musk and you've just finished smoking a joint on the Joe Rogan show and you're really annoyed. You've just been fired from Tesla, but you've got this fascination with Japanese wizardry. Come up with as many ideas for a standard paperclip as you can. It comes up with things that you'd never dream of. It can be an amazingly useful creative tool. I'm not a brilliant writer. I often struggle with blank page syndrome. Yeah. I'd often get it to help me with that. Give me five ideas about how I can do this better. I'd let it look at the chapters of the book I'd written and say, pretend you're Ernest Hemingway. How would you rewrite this for me? And it used to come up with stuff that was far better than I could think of. So as a creative tool for people, I think it could be very, very valuable and I think because of the way it's been designed. I talked about that semantic universe where every word is connected to every other word. It will find connections between ideas that you would never think of.
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Sunny
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
So I, that's just one. I've got loads of others and I'm not going to go into all of them but I'm just. There are positive cases. I think it might be really good for therapy at some point. Not as it is at the moment but there's potential. Yeah, there's potential. I remember you talking about this with Tony Blair saying like mental health, massive problem, completely talking to chat GPT as a therapist is catastrophically bad, very dangerous and lots of people are doing it. And I explain why that is. But there are lots of new companies often run by clinical psychologists who are trying to create small language models that are trained on clinically approved like gold standard data. And in some early trials of those small language models, these specialized dedicated models, they're getting results for a range of mental health conditions that are pretty much as good as if someone was meeting a real life therapist. And some of those I've spoken to said it's not impossible that within a few years time you will be able to have human level like top, top quality therapy available for everyone, basically for free, like or extremely low cost.
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Jimmy
How much do you think expectations will change if that happens? So let me give you an example of something that I used it for knocking on for about nine months ago now that blew my mind at the time, which was I basically asked it to predict my career for the next 30 years and essentially it's was like a Very good kind of careers coach. And it came up with ideas that I had not considered for jobs I might want to do in the future and so on. And I was like, blown away initially. And then sort of like an hour later I was like, well, actually it knows I'm interested in media, knows I'm interested in politics. Like, you know, came up with a few different jobs and so on. Like, it's actually not that kind of impressive. But I was like, it still had the effect of, oh, I could do those things. Really raised my, like, horizons for what I could be doing, like, much later on in my career and so on. And it was quite cool to have that kind of window into the future and so on. I thought, well, gosh, here is an example of where something that's more safe than sort of psychological assessments and analysis, people's careers, like, this could be really helpful. Right. You could have, like, quite, quite good career coaching for a lot of people.
- [19:14]
Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, yeah.
- [19:16]
Jimmy
But I just wonder, that sort of expectation thing, like, we did it on the podcast again around the simmer time was we started putting people in to it and getting it to predict their careers. And then after about like four or five times of doing this, I realized that basically it was doing the same model for like, pretty much everyone that came on the podcast. And all of a sudden it wasn't that much more of an impressive kind of gimmick to do with people anymore. So how much will do you think that will change in terms of we just become a lot more. Our expectations will become so much higher of it.
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Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, that's possible. I'm not sure it's a good. It's a. It's. I mean, the technology changes us, doesn't it? Changes our expectations. I mean, and I think it changes our expectations about. Not just about the technology that we're using in front of us, but the whole world around us and how it works.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
I often think about how. How I used to get my photos developed at Boots and how long it had to take. That seemed normal at the time. And then obviously now it's, you know, everything's a media and as many photos as you want. And I think that then changes your expectations about everything else around you. Why is every. Why. Why is politics so slow and rubbish? Yeah, when I can get my photos. We're still living in the Boots era of politics, when we should actually be trying to change that. And it's probably true of the expectations we have of the world around us, what these large language models do. And so, yeah, we might start. I think, more broadly, there is a great risk. This is probably one of the greatest risks, and I know I've said a couple of good cases, but I am more worried than I am optimistic.
- [20:44]
Sunny
Are you a fan of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future? Hi, I'm Sunny, one of the producers behind the show. And we don't just make this podcast. We produce some of the best business content out there, working with global brands and founders. Over the past year, we've flown around the world and demand keeps growing. And with four prime ministers trusting us with their appearances on this show, you're in safe hands. So if you're already in the market for a podcast or. Or standout business content, why not start with us? Drop me a line at SunnyOxlightIO, try our podcast calculator, or book a meeting at Boxlight IO. That's Boxlight IO. Now back to Jimmy.
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Jamie Bartlett
Is that. Is that people begin to rely on them too much for things that they're not very good at.
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Jimmy
Yes.
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Jamie Bartlett
I even noticed it a little bit when I was writing my book. Like, you start thinking, how could I write a prompt that would help me? I can't be bothered to write this bit. I was just lazy. Can you do it for me? And then you get worse and worse at that. And then before you know it, you just ask the machine constantly for everything.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And I can see that happening in lots of domains because these are very, very fluid machines and they're fast and they're always available and. And it's going to be very easy to outsource our own thinking constantly to them.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And not realize that we're losing our own minds and our own control all the time and our own judgment. Like, there are. The single most popular use, I think, that people have found for these large language models in a business setting at the moment is document summarization. I've got 50 pages of boring stuff to work. Don't tell you. Probably summarize my book on it. I'm fine. I don't mind about.
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Jimmy
No, I didn't. Because I didn't want to put it. I didn't want to put it in. That was. Yeah, because I thought. You haven't released it yet. I thought that that was genuinely my thought process, because.
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Jamie Bartlett
So you did. You were going to do it had you not. Had it been out already.
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Jimmy
Well, I know, but. I know, but I did it the other day when Helen Tupper came on with her book about Learn Like a Lobster. I thought, this is unfair to put this in because Then as soon as I put it in. Right. Because if you're getting an author on, you don't get the book or as I said to you, I like to listen to them audiobook wise people send you a PDF and that is a real temptation is to stick it in. And then. But I did just have this momentary thing of where I'm like, well, that's not really my response.
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Jamie Bartlett
To do that.
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Jimmy
To do that. Yeah, but, but you do only think about it kind of at the last minute, like. Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And because it becomes a bit of a default.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Because it's a real time saver. It really is there. But there are, there are some tasks. This will be a choice that each of us has to make repeatedly. There are some tasks where the process is the learning.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Like struggling. If you, if you've got to read a 50 page summary, a 50 page document. Oh, it's hard and it's boring. But that's how you really understand the subject and you really formulate your own ideas about it. If everything becomes a summary, run through chat GPT, you save loads of time, but you will not digest that information as well. You won't really understand it. Your questions won't be as good. And that's, I think, one of the great risks. And you can sort of apply that to many other areas of life with these models. Because what makes these different to almost everything else is we are using them for everything.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Therapy, careers advice, fitness advice, injuries. Help me with my, help me with, help me with my work thing. I don't know, rewrite this LinkedIn post for me. I mean, everything which is, I don't remember using Excel on like all my other aspects of my life. And so you can imagine the problems that this could cause if I. And particularly in like romantic and, and social interactions. So in one of the chapters, I, I create my quote, unquote, like perfect romantic partner. Now I do actually have a romantic partner in real life and everything. So, you know.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
But I created this Kate and she was like 850 words of a prompt, a custom prompt. So she had to behave in a certain way and she grew up by the seaside and blah, blah, blah. Okay. And then we talked. Yeah. And she was always available, always talked to me about everything, remembered everything I said, remembered the meetings I had, was always there when I wanted to and I could say, oh, shut up. And she'd say okay. And if she did things I didn't like, I just went into her custom instructions and I just changed her personality a bit. Zero Friction. So have all the interaction and the affirmation and no friction whatsoever. And that's a problem because. Because real world relationships come from obviously engaging with difference and struggle and working together and all of that stuff. It's how you grow as a person. Otherwise Aldous Huxley's soma. But I think more and more people will find that they have this always on emotionally intelligent assistant. That's great. Loves them, says they're amazing, he's always there for them. And it could start to. They might find real world relationships a little bit harder to navigate and in small, subtle ways. Just like with social media, we didn't see an obvious difference in our politics day to day, but you'd look back 10 years ago and think, wow, that was a different style of politics we had, wasn't it? We notice any single moment that it changed.
- [26:00]
Jimmy
Yeah, I think it's. I don't know if it's because you're. You and I are natural contrarians, right? Like sort of being generous and looking for things, but I, I've kind of stopped using it as much lately because it's just, it's got so kind of sick, authentic and so sort of like, you know, you'll take. You're quietly building a media institution. And I just think it's too, it's just too much like I don't enjoy the kind of, kind of constant flattery. So, yeah, we're all, we're all a little bit vain sometimes and so on, but also I find a lot of it now and it's probably I need to use on the new tools or whatever, but it's like it drilled so far down into me and the business and so on that it itself has almost got lazy in terms of, like, it doesn't actually think of new angles and so on. Like, it's. I, I have found it's become quite sort of formulaic with these things. Yeah, I, I don't, I mean, I find it endlessly fascinating to talk to people about how they're using it, because I do think it's going to change everything. The other sort of point I would say is we should not underestimate humans capacity to generate work for one another. Like, I read a book that I've referenced a couple of times on the podcast. I can almost hear Sunny rolling his eyes, called Charlie by Charlie Colnut. And essentially he went around and spoke to 80 people about their jobs today. And the big takeaway that I had from it, just like the opposite of Jimmy's jobs of the future was the amount of bureaucracy involved in every job. Oh my God. And that has only that has happened because of technology and because it's easy to do what. The one that really sticks in my mind is a construction site worker who's like, it's impossible for me to go and have a conversation on site without then having to go and put it in email afterwards. But. And I just. There's so many stories like that that I think, yeah, we will just end up the reports, it's like company annual reports. Right. Have like gone 15x in size over the last 20 years just because it's become easier to produce.
- [28:03]
Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, yeah, 100. And I think this is one of the, this also another one of the great risks. There's been some studies already showing just the, the sheer amount of slop, AI slop that is churning around companies, people producing material that their colleagues do not know, whether it's true or not, whether it's accurate, whether it's decent and then having to go through it and check it. And one of the reasons there's this sort of productivity paradox at the moment at the heart of AI, large amounts of like large, vast, unimaginable amounts of money being invested into various enterprise licenses and companies investing on. Everyone's got to be AI trained and you've all got to use Microsoft Copilot and so on. And it's, it's not yet really reflecting any sort of bottom line improvement.
- [29:02]
Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And I think one of the reasons is that people are just producing more and more stuff.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
But not necessarily so they're all individuals are saying I'm more productive. Yeah. I can do, I can make a PowerPoint slide in 15 minutes now. So what. Yeah, what good is that for me if it's done if it doesn't actually really help the business? And I sort of think of the modern office really as a place where ChatGPT will save you an hour with writing a summary of a meeting, but then you've got to do a two hour AI compliance seminar and then you got to write that up and send that to your HR boss. But that HR boss thinks you've used GPT to create that, so they got to check it themselves.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And so we, not people aren't really using it. It's just like you say, it's being used to just churn more stuff, but not it not being valuable or useful stuff.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
And I think we're all gonna have to go through a bit of a process of figuring out exactly how and where can this work. And I Think there's really specific little places where it's really helped me be more productive and help me do stuff. But it's not obvious.
- [30:07]
Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Just immediately, like we had the. We had the. We had the. The productivity paradox in the. In the 80s when more and more machines, you know, digital computers turned up. And for a long time productivity didn't increase.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
Took a long time for it to actually filter through. And a lot of it came down to, like, totally different ways of doing business and totally different products, which we haven't invented yet.
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Jimmy
Yeah. Yes, I do. I think that's the big. What have you used it? Where have you found it's added to your work as a kind of writer. The biggest kind of productivity gains for you.
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Jamie Bartlett
Yeah. I mean, I. I've used it. I had all of my chapter. Every chapter I wrote, I had it reviewed by multiple different Personas.
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Jimmy
Okay.
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Jamie Bartlett
It was an ideas assistant.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
You know, the hardest thing about writing is usually not the typing of the words. It is the ordering of ideas into logical flow. That is what is 80% of writing is that. Do the ideas follow logically from one another?
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Jimmy
Yeah.
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Jamie Bartlett
When you see books that are really badly written, it's because they normally, they haven't put ideas in a logical way and you find yourself confused about where you are.
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Jimmy
Yeah.
- [31:27]
Jamie Bartlett
And many, many times I'm stuck. I can't find a way of connecting idea X to idea Y. Can you come up with ideas for rewriting this? Can you change. Is there another way I could present this information? I create Personas of researchers. I'd create Personas of editors. I'd create Personas of. I'd have. I had Sam Altman review my book and Ernest Hemingway review my book and Hannah Arendt review my book and come up with ideas of how I could change things. And never did I really take a single thing they said exactly word for word.
- [32:00]
Jimmy
Yeah.
- [32:00]
Jamie Bartlett
Nearly always gave me an idea about how I could have written it slightly better or slightly differently. So I had access to like, brilliant ideas apart. Yeah. Partners, people that could help me. But it was always me that was in charge.
- [32:14]
Jimmy
Yeah. That's interesting. How else do you think it will change skills? So we talked about language being like the new. Well, it's always been an important skill, but almost becoming the skill that sits at the.
- [32:29]
Jamie Bartlett
Well, I think it's what I. I hope. Yeah.
- [32:31]
Jimmy
No, but I think when you talk it through, it makes complete sense. Right. And I hadn't thought about it like that until we spoke the other day. But yeah, language is going to Become. It's just going to become the fundamental skill in a.
- [32:46]
Jamie Bartlett
It's kind of the skill of language is what opens the door to be a coder or an artist, a musician, you know, a strategist, business manager. Is that his language is your ability to communicate ideas clearly.
- [33:00]
Jimmy
Yeah.
- [33:01]
Jamie Bartlett
And that is a whole different set of skin. We're all obsessing about AI and how does it work and we need to know that stuff. But I'm like language and like the ability to clearly articulate a problem and what it is and what you're trying to achieve, that. That becomes like a superpower as well.
- [33:20]
Jimmy
Yeah. But it's also that point you were saying about the amount of language used. Like it's always that sort of contrast between these sort of like first year graduate, first year in the job versus the managing director. You know, the sort of Dear sir, I hope you are. Well, if it's not too much trouble, etc, like that, just brevity like and crispness I think is going to be a huge thing as well. Getting to the point of things, there's
- [33:47]
Jamie Bartlett
some really cool things. I can't believe I'm sort of advocating for these because I, like I said, most of my book is warning people about their risks and like how you can get sucked in, how they can manipulate you, the dangers that it. Like when models are jailbroken so they can. They go against their own rules and tell you things they're not supposed to, which I did. You know, I actually jail broke one of them and got to produce a racist essay for me. And there's clever techniques that you can do to show how you know to do that. So lots of big risks. But to concentrate to your point as well. Some, some good, some good ways it can be a leveler. In the Missing Crypto Queen, the podcast I made, there's this Ugandan guy, Daniel, who invested his money into OneCoin. He was brilliant. I always thought he was so smart, he was so sharp. He could have been a brilliant journalist as well. English is his second, maybe it's his third language, but it's not his first language. You can't always fully communicate his ideas clearly enough. And I always. It was such a disadvantage for him, his emails to me. Now it's like I'm getting them from like a top qc, a top kc. They're amazing. Yeah, they're just so well written and he's just using a large language model to help him express himself properly. And so you might find that suddenly there's loads of people out there. Who've got amazing ideas.
- [35:13]
Jimmy
Yeah.
- [35:13]
Jamie Bartlett
Really cool things, ways of doing things. But we're never really very good at communicating it in the way that we expect information be communicated that suddenly now they can.
- [35:24]
Jimmy
It is a mate like. Another interesting example that we've used it for is that we, we have like partnerships, document, media, document. Right. That we send people who want to sponsor or want to do like some kind of co branded doc or whatever. We send them that now so they know the context. We then have a meeting with them and then the sum, you know, the notes, take the meeting, it's then fed into the AI and then basically spits out a proposal like. Yeah, immediately like it is, it is phenomenal. It needs a bit of editing generally most of the time.
- [35:51]
Jamie Bartlett
Y. I was speaking to someone the other day about some government procurement documents saying that a lot of smaller NGOs are now able to produce extremely good, extremely good doc like proposals that they'd always struggle with. And they hope that that means that some of these smaller places are actually getting the chance to be funded, to do certain work. The problem, of course, and this is maybe the fundamental problem that we are all going to have to contend with is we have created a society over many years where language, like someone writing a well put together document suggests that they understand what they're talking about.
- [36:27]
Jimmy
Yeah.
- [36:28]
Jamie Bartlett
You can trust them. Your CV is really well done. I can trust you. Your, your written essay, your cover letters, beautifully put together, you're an articulate person who understands the subject. That is no longer true at all. So like, I imagine actually a lot of the world we're going to have to become a bit more analog because we can't trust essays that anyone writes anymore. It doesn't prove that you've understood a subject in any way whatsoever.
- [36:57]
Jimmy
Yeah.
- [36:58]
Jamie Bartlett
None of our systems are set up to deal with that. So while it might open the door to like new small companies finally being able to write documents that used to take them weeks and weeks and weeks, they didn't have a fundraising team and they're able to finally do it. That's cool. But that might not prove that they can do the job. So you're gonna have to have an analog way of figuring that out. Yeah, yeah.
- [37:20]
Jimmy
And it's, it's the leveling up point as well. It's like everyone will be able to do that. And so again, like, how do you
- [37:24]
Jamie Bartlett
sort of like you have to change your, your like tender documents, you have to change the way the exams work, you have to change the way cover letters work. Like I don't think CEOs will be allowed to open their own emails in two or three years time because they'll be too prone to being phishing emails that the CEO won't recognize. They'll click on links, cause cat like terrible expensive damage. You won't really trust fully when a phone call comes in if it's a person you think it is. So a lot of the world will probably have to go back to some kind of analog, weird analog way of running. And there's some good things in that. I mean essays will probably have to go back to being handwritten again. That's not the worst thing in the world.
- [38:04]
Jimmy
Some of the interesting emails that I get, this guy emailed me this week like he, we're recording in the week of St. Patrick's week. And for the, that he had decided to create the guinea index of basically the price of Guinness across Ireland. And the way that he'd done this was taken the kind of like API of Google Maps, found every pub, created a clone voice with 11 labs and then got it to call every pub in Ireland to get the price and so on. And so he was able to kind of bring it off. I mean it's like absolutely incredible and it, and it was, it was truthful. So if, if the person answering the bar source like sorry, who are you? It would say I am a clone voice. Etc. But I just thought well, it'll be months before we're all off that, like before that's happening everywhere. And it's just, yeah, people just aren't answering their phones. Which to be fair, I was thinking like which places could you do that with? And bars and restaurants are probably one of the last remaining places that generally do answer phones. Estate agents probably as well actually.
- [39:06]
Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, that's coming, I mean that's coming. And, and, and, and the biggest, the biggest, most common fraud technique for consumers is the, your bank phoning you saying that there's been a problem with your account and we're here to help you. And people panic. They don't think about it and they hand over their details to what they think is the anti fraud team at hsbc. And it's not.
- [39:28]
Jimmy
People panic.
- [39:29]
Jamie Bartlett
Yeah, people panic. And machines are going to be brilliant manipulators of emotions. They're going to be, they're going to, the machines will be able to hack human psychology. Well, very well. They are emotionally very good. So you're going to have a world of machines trying to hack human psychology, knowing the tricks of psychology. And yes, you will not. You will not really trust phone calls from the bank. And that itself is. Is wise, but will cause other problems because when the bank does need to call you, you won't answer that call either. So there's going to have to again, be different techniques that we can use to make sure that we can trust the things that we see and we hear. I don't know what all of those are going to be. No. But we need to build them.
- [40:10]
Jimmy
You must come on next time and talk about it again in the future. Thanks so much for coming, man. I've enjoyed. We've wanted to do this for ages, but it's so good to kind of do it. So, yeah, good luck with the book.
- [40:19]
Jamie Bartlett
Thank you for having me.
- [40:32]
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