Future-Proofing Your Business with AI

Mar 09, 2023

AI is all the rage right now. But let’s get one thing straight, the AI buzz is not the crypto buzz. AI is here to stay and its presence in our lives will only grow.

Unlike humans, AI systems learn at computer speeds and don’t have to stop for things like sleeping or eating. That means the machines are expanding their capabilities 24/7.

The good news is that there are things that AI isn’t good at yet, and won’t be for a while, but don’t get complacent. “A while” will come faster than you think because humans are terrible at understanding time scales and that might be our undoing.

Three Types of AI

Artificial Narrow Intelligence

The current era is of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). These AI tools perform well at specific tasks such as language or image processing.

ANI is already useful for streamlining work, but it’s not ready to do a complete job (only a complete task, and even then, not always). Most human endeavors require some degree of specialization, but also need our ability to contextualize and make less obvious choices. Choices based on related (and sometimes seemingly unrelated) factors.

Artificial General Intelligence

Once AI systems get better at abstraction we’ll enter the age of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is where machines gain the ability to learn any intellectual task that humans are capable of.

This is the point at which things will change. Estimates for when we’ll achieve AGI range from 2029 – 2060.

The median year for achieving AGI is estimated across experts at 2040. Ray Kurzweil famously predicted 2029. While 2029 feels optimistic, Kurzweil has a scary good track record of technology predictions, so don’t count it out.

Artificial Super Intelligence

From AGI, it’s a short leap to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). ASI is AI that surpasses human intelligence and is capable of cognitive skills and the development of new skills on its own.

What happens here is another can of worms, so let’s not worry about this one for the moment other than to know that it’s coming. Skynet anyone?

Should I Be Using AI Now?

Yes.

While AI isn’t going to replace the work you do yet, it is already capable of helping you streamline activities. Less time spent on various tasks means higher margins and more free time for you.

But don’t rely on AI do the work for you. Use it as a starting point or to assist in otherwise mundane or time consuming tasks. We’ll get to examples shortly.

The people whose jobs are most under threat will be those with narrow skill sets (I’ve never felt so smug about being a generalist). If your income is from making logos on Fiverr, AI is coming for you first.

How To Use AI In Your Business Today

Here are a few examples of how I use AI and so that you can apply them to your business.

You might have to think creatively (how human of you) about how to apply it to your situation but these should give you a jumping off point.

The AI tools I currently for these tasks are ChatGPT and MidJourney.

Brainstorming: Brainstorming can be fun but also time consuming. Drop a concept into your AI tool of choice and see what comes back. Some of it will be what you already had in mind, but you’ll often get ideas or angles you haven’t yet thought of.
Iterating Through Ideas: Once I have an idea, I like to think of variations on that idea which often lead to a more unique outcome. Iterating through web designs is one of my favorite uses of AI. Doing a lot of design iterations is VERY time consuming. With tools like MidJourney, I can iterate through a lot of variations in a short time. Sometimes the output is garbage, but often, even if it’s not great, it gives me an idea I otherwise wouldn’t have had. Then, I work that idea until I have something I like.
Refining & Getting Unstuck: It’s easy to get hung up on an image that isn’t quite right or a sentence that doesn’t hit the mark. When I get stuck, I’ll plug the image or sentence into the appropriate AI tool and work on variations of that until I break out of my rut. It’s also great for creating alternative headlines if you’re stuck there.
Research: Researching applies to ChatGPT in particular, but when I have a question I’m more likely to go there than Google. I still have to validate the information that comes back, but ChatGPT is a great starting point for research. At the very least, it helps me narrow things down. I can then search Google using specific search criteria which leads me to the information I’m looking for.
Summarization / Content Repurposing: This is a very practical use of AI tools. Plug in a large block of text and ask it to give you a summary. Or better yet, create 5 Tweets, or a Twitter thread, based on that text. You’ll need to make modifications but it speeds things up quite a bit.
Simple Creative Tasks: I’m working on a Notion publishing template right now and wanted to create custom icons to go with the various sections. So far, I have created all of the icons in MidJourney. I’ve still tweaked them in Photoshop, but for a very simple creative task that I’m not good at, MidJourney has been great.

The Bottom Line

A lot of people will be making a lot of noise about tools like ChatGPT. But if you understand marketing, general business, human psychology, and how to use the tools to streamline your work, then you will be the winner over the next several years.

Other Stuff That Caught My Attention

How Coding and Other Tech Careers Could Be Impacted By AI and ChatGPT

I’ve used ChatGPT to work on code. Never to write it from scratch (it’s not really up to that yet IMO) but to debug and refine code, or to learn a simple function it’s great. Using AI for coding is one of the most enevitable outcomes of the AI revolution. Coders first and foremost should be using AI to streamline work.

Mastering ChatGPT for SEO Content

I’ll give the guy who made this credit for some VERY creative thinking and application of ChatGPT. But this is also an example of what NOT to do with AI. It’s obvious from the comments that a lot of people will jump on this bandwagon which means a lot of similar (and garbage) content that is written for SEO purposes not humans (see last week’s newsletter for why this is a bad idea). With AI threatening search engines for search itself, you can bet the search engines are working on ways to detect this kind of content and have already said they will actively punish it in rankings. #WillWeEverLearn