← The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
Ep 52 - ChatGPT Guiding Principles Updated For 2025
00:31:13
In this episode, Cary Weston reflects on a year of the ChatGPT Experiment by revisiting his original "Guiding Principles" from Episode 1. He reviews each principle, assesses its relevance after a year of hands-on experience, and shares updates to...
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Michael
Well, hey there. Episode 52 the close of my first year of the Chat GPT experiment. Thanks for joining me. Appreciate you being here. I thought what I would do with my last episode of the year here is to go back to my very first episode, which is called My Guiding Principles, and kind of review them and see if they are still true. If there needs to be some changes, take a year's worth of experience and wrap them into the guiding principles and kind of share a new perspective if there is one, see if it holds up, see what's true, and see what's moving forward. So what I'm going to do here in episode 52 is go through my guiding principles. I've got a couple that are no longer relevant or I'm going to modify them and I'm going to go through them one at a time. It remains to be true that my Guiding Principles episode is the largest downloaded episode in the ChatGPT experiment. And so moving forward, I want to make sure I keep that relevant and fresh. So episode 52, ChatGPT experiment. We're doing that right now. All right. So Guiding Principles. Let's just start with a discussion of what is a guiding principle. Right? What are the guiding principles? These are evergreen philosophies, practices, theories. These are things that are true. So as we talk about different situations, different goals, different outcomes. Right. The different tasks that we do with ChatGPT, there's always going to be variances and there's always going to be things that change. But guiding principles to me remain true regardless of the situation, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the person I'm talking to or the goal that they have. Okay. And so there's 10 of them, and I'm just going to read my 10 now, and then I'll go through each one. And there are some differences here because that's what experience does, right? You change, modify based on hindsight, based on experience. And so there's been a few things that have become more important to me, more important to the work. And as the experiment. Right. Continues, you test and learn. And that's what life is all about, is making your next decision based on the information that you have now and the experiences and learning from where you've been. So here's my 10 guiding principles updated for the end of 2024 for ChatGPT. Okay? Number one is an amazing instrument. Using AI as an amazing instrument instead of thinking of it as artificial intelligence. Number two, my three favorite words in ChatGPT, tell me more. Right. Number three, the practice of there are no experts is still true for me. We'll dig into that a little bit. Number four, the phrase that gets, I don't know if it's the most AHAs or at least more relevant connections, and that's treat it like an intern and I'll go through that. Number five is the BDR framework, the background detail and revision framework. Number six is exploring perspectives. Number seven, you are the key human. Experience enhances the capabilities here. And so you are still just as important as you were ever. Number eight, documenting everything and keeping records and prompts. Number nine, find your lane. And number 10, of course, the principle that drives everything that I do here on the podcast, be curious. Right. So Those are my 10 guiding principles, and let's go through each of them so I can talk a little bit more about what they mean in the realm of chat GPT and how to get the most out of what you're doing using. Using these principles. Right. So the first one is AI stands for artificial intelligence. And that phrase really does, I guess it. It creates some visions of technology that's not approachable. Right. It's the terminator clause. It's the robotic dogs. It's artificial intelligence is something that we can't touch, feel, interact with, and be a part of. And so it scares folks. And technology can scare folks in many different ways. Right. There are people that are unfamiliar with computers and technology as a whole. And so I think making folks understand that there is a comfortable, familiar approach, a Safe approach to working with ChatGPT or AI as a whole is really the foundation of teaching and learning. If you can get someone to be comfortable, then the likelihood of them actually utilizing and experimenting with it becomes greater. And so I learned this a while ago that I changed AI to an amazing instrument. And I still am looking at the piano here in my basement. It's. The piano has the ability of creating magical sounds. It just saw my daughter who's a sophomore in high school and she is in this concert band and they had an opportunity as a high school to go up to the University of Maine and play with the symphonic band at the university, which is fantastic. And I see all of these instruments on stage and they all make amazing sounds individually and then collectively the ensemble and the symphonic output is amazing. There's, I mean there's just a wide range, an endless range of what the sounds and beauty can come from those pieces of metal. Right. That's really what it is. And brass. And the truth is I could never make, in my current state, I could never make any of those instruments sound anything like what I heard on stage. It is an amazing instrument, but it requires input, talent, skill and knowing what you're doing. And so the same thing is true of ChatGPT. There's some pretty fantastic outputs, there's some pretty fantastic value, there's a lot of efficiency and productivity that comes from it. But it's just an instrument. It's just a tool. Right. It's just the way by which something is going to get done. And just like that clarinet or that trumpet wouldn't play itself. Right. There certainly are self playing pianos, I get that. But for the most part those instruments don't play themselves. They still need human guidance, experience, talent and all the things that go with it. Right. So thinking of it as an amazing instrument allows folks that I coach and teach and work with to kind of put it into perspective. This is just a tool. This is something that's going to allow us to work through something or create something, or make something better, or organize something, whatever it might be. And it's just a tool. It's not going to do anything for us that we don't want it to do. And we are in total control of it. Yeah. So that still remains true. And if you are a curious beginner and you're wondering how to look at this thing, I think that from an umbrella point of view, from where do you start? That's the most effective, straightforward and comfortable way that I have to explain how to look at something New and foreign as chatgpt is AI as I can come up with. Okay, so another principle for me, tell me more is the. These are the three words that help folks go deeper and get more insights and just get just more out of the work that they're doing. And here is a phrase or an example, let's say that helps to put this into context. If I were to ask you to raise your hand, just everyone listening now, just raise your hand. You put your hand up. But if I said raise your hand higher, the majority of you, if not all of you, would be able to do that. And I ask you why, and in rooms that I do this too, I ask why. Why are you able to go higher? Why did you not go that high all at once? Well, it's because we don't put full faith and effort. Most of us don't do everything at 100%. And ChatGPT is the same way. And so it's going to give you information, it's going to give you feedback, it's going to give you answers, it's going to give you output. But the magic is you directing it from that point forward. And by saying, tell me more, you'll get a whole subset of detail and output and a tremendous amount of value. The ability for it to narrow and give you more detail is an exceptional trait of ChatGPT that many people don't get into because they accept what they get from it and then make a judgment based on that. So go ahead. Next time you do something, if it gives you a list or an output or an answer, say, tell me more and see what you get for more details, I bet the hand is going to go up a little higher, right? So number three is there are no experts. Okay, so it's pretty common where we categorize people's experiences, right? We categorize our own. We categorize our ability to understand. We categorize our ability to function. We categorize our ability to own, be relatable, to drive. Right. Compared to others. And so it's very common for us to think of somebody as being more experienced or being an expert because they, on the surface, know more than we do. And what's really true here is that AI, ChatGPT, all of the tools are changing so fast. There are things, it's common for me to say there are things that are true at the end of this podcast that were not true at the beginning of the podcast episode because there are things that are happening at such a regular interval of change that being an Expert in something just isn't realistic at the moment. Now what do I mean by that? It means that there are people who have more experience, there are people that have tried more things. But don't be scared, don't be intimidated. If you are just starting out, there's no need for you to be an expert in anything and there's no need for you to be intimidated by someone that may have a lot of experience. Don't keep that from, don't, don't hold back trying and allow you to be intimidated by diving in just because you don't have as much experience or you haven't tried. What it really means is you haven't made as many mistakes as somebody has, right? So they can. The continual experiment. They can continual kind of trying, learning and testing is just a continuation of finding out what's next with ChatGPT. So there are no experts. The ability for you to feel like you belong using this technology is important. You want to be comfortable, you want to be confident that you can make mistakes, that you can go slow and you do not need to be an expert in order to engage. So that's important. Tip number four, treat it like an internal. So here's what I mean. If you were to have somebody come to work for you and they knew nothing about you specifically or your business and they sat down next to you and you gave them a one sentence, go develop the TPS report for me, right? And that's all you gave them as guidance. I would not imagine that the TPS report that you're getting is going to be of much quality unless they went and did a lot of homework on their own and asked other questions on their own, right? The ability for you to just give it one sentence or give one sentence to somebody and have them create magic without having background and experience and context is probably unrealistic. And the same is true here. If you were to think of ChatGPT as that person that comes into your office and sits next to your desk and you are in charge of allowing them to do things with you and for you and the success is going to be based on clarity and background and details, right? Guidance, clear context and goals. The more you tell it, the more it's going to understand and be able to help you. Okay, so I start there is just think of ChatGPT as that willing and capable intern that is multi talented but doesn't understand yet which talents to use until you give it context. So the ability of understanding what your goals are and what success looks like and all that thing is important, right? So feed it as much information as possible, which moves right into principle number five, which is what I call the BDR framework, the background, detail and revision. Okay, so to treat it like an intern, the best thing you can do is give it ChatGPT context, detailed instructions. Here's a very specific for instance. The background you might want to give it is the company that you are at, the role that you have at that company, the tasks that you do in that company, what success looks like, the type of people that you engage with. You may want to give it some background in terms of what has worked in the past and what has not worked in the past. You may want to give it just a number. I mean, we could keep going, right? The ability of it understanding what you, what situation you are in the context of the situation that you are in, what you want it to understand, leading up to the request that you make of it is important. And then the second one is the detail. So being detailed and clear as to what you're looking for it to do. And I'll give you a specific for instance here in just a second. What is it that you want it to do and what does success look like? And then the ability when it's done, not to accept what you get as the only answer or the only output. There's the revision phase, the BDR background, detail and revision. So let's go, let's go something real specific here as a for instance, as I can tell you. So let's use BDR in motion. So let's say we're a pet shop owner and we are staring at social media and it's our goal for Q1 to have a more engaged social media platform. Let's say we're going to use Facebook and try to be more productive in getting visibility, leads and customers from it. Okay, So I might sit down and I might say, hey, listen, I am a, this is my background. I am a pet shop owner. I'm a one person operation, okay? So I don't have a large marketing staff. I don't have a marketing staff at all. And I've tried Facebook in the past, but it hasn't worked for me and I need to do something different. And so what I'm looking to do is put together a way to use Facebook so I can build a community and get more interaction and find more customers and make more money. Okay, so that's the background, okay, that's a real quick background. And then the detail might be the task at hand. Okay, so now that I've given you the background, the detail. What I'd like to do is create a 90 day posting plan for Facebook. I deal with a lot of dogs and cat owners and so what I want to do is create posts that will relate to and connect with dog owners and cat owners and help them understand that I understand their pet, I understand their needs, and I am a trusted guide and advocate for things that they may need, be it supplies or food or training. These are the things that I do. Okay? And so my goal is to work with you to come up with a 90 day social media plan. I'd like to post three times a week and I need ideas and I like to outline those ideas and break them down into months and weeks so I can have an understanding of how do I plan and what kind of things I'm going to talk about and what are these posts going to cover. Okay? And then that's my background, that's my detail. And then it's going to say, might ask me a few more questions. It might just go ahead and give me some bullets, right? And then the revision, this is when you look at it and you say, okay, I like this and I don't like that. I don't do this, I do more of these. I want to get more involved in this. I want to do less of that. You're giving it feedback and revision. You may say, tell me more. You may say, I don't even sell this, let's take that out. Or nobody ever asked this question, right? This is the revision phase. So you can see, just in that one example, how I gave a background and gave it some detail and then I got revisions, right? And by the way, the way that I just talked is literally how I use ChatGPT. And I do that through talking. I do that through conversing with ChatGPT. If you've listened to the podcast before, you've heard me say this, that it allows me to be thorough and detailed and more engaging than I would if I was typing. Okay? So I think talking to ChatGPT as a task is a very effective use of the tool because it allows you to get more context. Okay? And by the way, one of my episodes is called Voice to Text. And in the show notes of that episode are instructions whether you have a PC or whether you're on a Mac, how to set up your computer so that just by pushing a button, you can talk into your microphone and have that be voice to text rather than typing. Right? And it really does make a big difference. You can see what I just did in this background and in detail. I can just give a lot more clarity. And I probably would not do that if I was typing with my fingers. It just wouldn't be something that I would do. Okay, so number six, exploring perspectives. This is an interesting and highly valuable way in which ChatGPT has served me very well. And here's what I mean by that. You can have ChatGPT take on a personality, a Persona, a perspective, whether it's role playing, so you are going back with it and it's playing a role whatnot, or you're just saying, listen, here's what I'm writing. Can you adjust it for an 8th grader? Can you adjust it for an expert? Can you adjust it for a highly trained and experienced mathematician? You know, I'm just coming up with stuff here, but the ability of taking whatever it is that you're working on and say, what would a lawyer think about this? Or what would a kid think about this? Or I can't relate to this type of person. So why don't you play that role and read what I wrote and tell me how you see it? Right? What am I missing? The ability of getting perspectives, viewpoints and roles right isn't. It's really powerful. And here's a couple for instances that's really come into play. You may have heard me talk before about practicing to have hard conversations. And let's go back to number five, the bdr. So practicing to have a hard conversation, I may say, hey, listen, I need to have a conversation with this person. I'm going to tell you everything that I know about them, temperament and personality, right? And how they answer and the way that they conduct themselves. And I want to practice having this conversation. Can you be that person? Can you take on the characteristics of that person? Can you be that perspective so I can do that with you? Right? So that's one way. The other way is you may be writing copy for your website, you may be creating marketing materials and the ability for you to say, I want to make sure that I am being clear and straightforward so that people that, for instance, know a lot about what I do can understand it. But also people that don't know anything about what I do can understand it. And so you can run the same kind of copy through those filters and say, show me what it would be like, what should I say? Or how should I change my wording if I were to do this for someone that's highly experienced and highly knowledgeable. And now let's do that Same thing, same copy, same project. For someone that has no idea this is the first time they've ever done this. Okay. And whatever that might be could be heat pumps, could be weddings, right? Could be paving a driveway. So what is it that I need to share for someone that's highly detailed and highly experienced versus someone that really doesn't know much about this and maybe going into it for the first time? And you can also go through those Personas. So if you kind of combine a few things that I've said here, one of the things from a perspective point of view is you can say, be that person that's never done this before. Okay, so let's take the paving the driveway situation. Maybe you're a driveway paver and you're creating copy for your website and one of the audiences that you want to consider is someone that's never done this before. So you may put your services out there and say, look at it through the lens of someone that's never had this done before. What kind of questions are they going to have? What kind of information do they need? Help me think about their perspective, be empathetic about their needs so that I can understand what I need to put up there. And that's right, that's a way in which you can utilize the perspectives of ChatGPT to really have a powerful multi perspective tool. Okay? So all of this comes down to you, okay? So whether it is giving it background or treating it like an intern or giving perspectives, human experience is going to enhance. Your experience is going to enhance the capabilities of whatever it is that you're using, ChatGPT, cloud or otherwise, you know, so that's number seven is you are the key to this, okay? Your perspective, your skill, your experience is invaluable. It's necessary, right? And it enhances the work that you do. And the more that you pay attention to the tell me more in the background and detail and context and perspective, the more that you as a human, the more that you can be relatable to those perspectives and utilize those experiences and dig in and be really clear and straightforward as to what you're using the tool for, what success looks like, how it can be helpful, the better whatever it is that you're doing is going to be. Okay, so number eight is document everything. So there are many times in which I have found people will spend a lot of time with ChatGPT and come up with a marvelous end result, a marvelous answer, but they've been revising and tweaking and changing, right? And then forget to save their work, meaning not understanding how I got there, or not leaving with some instructions that I could start with next time to fast track that hour that I just spent getting to where I'm at. So documenting everything. And here's a tip. Whether it's a perfect sentence or conversation starter or prompt or whatever it might be that you document and save, one of the things that I've done before is when I really get to a place that I'm happy. So let's say I've been working with ChatGPT and I've been creating something and I've had to revise, right? And get details and start over and all those things that you do when you're either writing or creating something. I usually say this, hey, listen, I really like where I'm at, so could you please take a look at the work that we've done and give me a summary that would help me start here next time. So take all the things that we've done, all of the changes that we've made, all the edits and all the information you now have, and give me a starting point that would allow me to fast track this and make more meaningful progress next time with the same task, whatever that task might be, right? And it will. Okay, sure, here. And it'll spit out some instructions. It literally will give you. Copy that. You could provide Chat GPT to start where you ended, right? So that's really cool. And then document that and save it. And the reason I tell people to document it is because you never know what's going to happen to software that you don't own or any tool that you don't own, right? So if you were to take that experience and kind of log it and save it somewhere, then you could always recall it on your own terms. And you don't have to rely on something disappearing from a platform that maybe you don't have access to or something changed or whatever it might be, right? But the more work I do with ChatGPT, the more amazed I am with how it can consolidate, how it can analyze and how it can give me really meaningful information that summarizes the tasks and the output that we've done that really encapsulates the essence of what's important and strips away the things that maybe are irrelevant or not necessary. So that if I were to do that same task again, I could just literally start with this piece that it gave me and I'd be so much further ahead. So documenting everything you don't want to avoid, you want to avoid Losing it if you put a lot of time into it. Right. Number nine, find your lane. So how I use ChatGPT has nothing to do with how you need to use it or anyone else for that matter. You can use it as simple as you like, as complex as you like. I think the important thing is just to find what you need, whether it's work or in person or personal, and just find what's relevant to you and just ask a question or find a task. One of the best pieces of advice that I received through interviewing for the podcast was if you really are curious as to how ChatGPT can be valuable to you, just ask it. Literally ask it. Right? And so finding your lane is just being relevant and focusing on things that matter to you. Okay, so here's a tip. For someone that's just starting out and really wondering, how could this thing be valuable? Just tell it who you are. Let's say this is a work question for you. Tell it the company you work at, the position you have, the things you do, the things you're responsible for, some of the things that you do over and over again. You know, give it a background and then just say, I'd really like to know, how can you help me? How could you be valuable to me in my daily work? You're going to be very interested in what spits back, and it's going to give you some answers that, yes, some of it you're going to expect and some of it you're not. Okay? So in that regard, in that case, if you ever ask it to provide a list, this is where principle number two, the tell me more, will come into play. So let's say you do this. You share who you are, what you do, the positions, the things you do, the tasks and duties, all that fun stuff, and you say, you know, I'm just curious, how could you be valuable to me in my daily work life? It may came back. It might come back and give you 10 things in a bulleted form. Right? Right. And this is where you take those three words. Look at something that you want to know more about, or look at something that may surprise you, or look at something that may be of interest to you and literally say, tell me more. Right? So let's say it's bullet number three, whatever that might be. Hey, tell me more about number three. It'll say, okay, great. And it'll take another level of detail and it'll really get specific, and you'll be surprised by what it can share. If you take. Tell it that you're curious and you want more details, okay? And you've heard me say this word multiple times, but it is the essence to everything that I teach, everything that I coach, and everything that's going to drive your success with ChatGPT. So principle number 10 is just be curious. Maintain the exploratory mindset. Know that you need to be patient. You've got to go through all of the experiments of what does this do and what does this do? And if I say this and if I say that it's not going to be perfect out of the gate. This is just something that's going to be a natural evolution of your experiences. You're going to see the outputs that matter to you. You do more of those and less of the things that don't matter. You're going to become more comfortable in guiding it and directing it as you see what certain words and phrases and questions and directions give you. Right? But it's your curiosity that's going to help you create meaningful work, meaningful results from ChatGPT. So that's it. That's my 10 guiding principles. I've stripped away a couple of them because they were no longer either relevant or as important as others. And these are the 10 that I'll continue to look at until we get through 25. And that's the best part about experimenting is something that you thought to be true, may not be, or something that you never knew about may become more important than what you know at the moment. Right? So we just survive in advance. We try, we learn, we test. What happens, what do I like? Is it helpful? And then we continue to move forward. And that's really the overarching umbrella for the coaching and expertise that I see in ChatGPT, the experiences that I have with ChatGPT. The guidance, you being curious is the number one asset, the number one component that's going to be successful or make this successful for you. So, hey, listen, as we wind down episode 52 here in the in the end of 2024, I want to appreciate say thank you. I appreciate you listening. Thank you for the feedback. Looking forward to the coming year in 2025. Have a safe holiday season. And until we talk again, do stay curious. Okay, bye.
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David
All right, folks, that's a wrap for today's episode of the Chat GPT experiment. Thanks for hanging with us and diving into the world of ChatGPT. We hope you found it helpful and fun and informative. And speaking of helpful, we'd sure appreciate you taking a moment to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. By the way, five star ratings are our favorite. Till next time. Keep experimenting, keep learning. And remember, ChatGPT may be smart, but it can't make a decent cup of coffee yet. See you soon.
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