Pros & Cons of A.I. (ChatGPT) – Websites.ca Talk Ep. 45

Sean Corbett:
Hello, everybody. Sean Corbett again, Websites.ca Marketing, and I’m joined by our dear old friend…

Ryan Desmarais:
Mr. Ryan Desmarais is back.

Sean Corbett:
He’s back. How long has it been, Ryan?

Ryan Desmarais:
He’s back, baby. Sean, it has been a hot minute since the last time we had a chance to sit down and chat. I’d say at least six months.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, at least. Yeah, for sure. Well, you’ve been busy, and that’s fair. I can’t pull you off the front lines whenever I feel like it. But I was thinking, because people haven’t heard Ryan for a while, “How do I announce him? Is he the GM? Is he the head of sales? Is he the king of Websites.ca?” How are you announcing yourself these days?

Ryan Desmarais:
The king of comfort. No, that’s a good question. I mean, I wear so many different hats with the organization. That’s a very good question. I announce myself differently, I guess, depending on the situation.

Sean Corbett:
Right, yeah, depending on who you’re talking to.

Ryan Desmarais:
Depending on who I’m talking to. But I think business development overall describes what my role in terms of sales and customer management, customer retention… Business development, I think, is a good descriptor.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. That works for me. Well, what’s happened since we’ve talked to you last, Ryan, is we’ve gone out there, obviously, we’ve got lots of different vendors and contractors and experts in their various fields of knowledge, and most of them related to getting what everyone wants to know, which is getting more eyeballs on their website. But being as how you’re on the front lines and you deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of websites on an ongoing basis. I thought it would be nice to bring you on and talk about the hottest topic affecting the internet for the last well year at least, which is AI. And I heard that you just gave a little presentation on AI.

Ryan Desmarais:
I did, yes. I go to business networking meetings once a week, and it was my turn to go up and speak about a subject that is relative to my business and that could be helpful to other business owners. So gave a little talk about these fantastic AI tools that are really taking the internet by storm these days. And yeah, it’s a really fascinating subject. Sean, as you know, with me, anything that’s on the cutting edge of technology, I’m always really fascinated by it, I’m fixated. And there’s a lot of these AI tools that are coming out these days that are helping small businesses, that are really just helping us as a society as well.
I think one way that I can describe… The big name out there that everybody has heard of likely is ChatGPT, of course, which actually only launched less than a year ago, believe it or not. I thought it was around a little longer, but it was just November of last year when it launched publicly. I mean, it’s been in development longer than that, of course, but it launched in November of last year, so less than a year. And man, is this tool just such an interesting perspective on… Not an interesting perspective. Excuse me. It’s more of a really interesting development in how we research and how we learn about subjects that we’re interested in.
Sean, you and I are both old enough to remember the days of going to your local library to research a subject, right? At my age, at that time, I had to hop on the bike, go down to the local library, flip through the index cards using Dewey Decimal System and pull up books on different subjects and research that way. And a way I like to describe it is the jump from that, going to the local library and picking up these books, to using Google as a research tool and getting Google to spit out 10 website results on a page that’s relative to your query was a massive leap forward in just how quickly you could research a topic and also the different perspectives you could get because you weren’t limited just by what that library had in stock at that time.
But now to me, I think ChatGPT and AI tools like it is really the next step in our technology evolution where instead of you getting a Google result of 10 websites and different articles and blog posts to do research on, you could actually ask an AI chatbot about a subject and it’ll essentially boil down all that millions of pages on the web and give you a cohesive kind of conversational response, which is pretty fascinating.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, just in time too for when Google was starting to get less and less useful. So I’m happy about that.

Ryan Desmarais:
Right.

Sean Corbett:
I’m glad that you made that logical connection, Ryan, between all those things because I have something to add to your library analogy too in a second, but I’m so glad that you brought up Google right before you brought up ChatGPT, because unfortunately, a lot of people are… Maybe not a lot of people, but some people are misinterpreting AI as being this magic robot that solves all your problems. Really, when we talk about it behind the scenes, we just see it as a much more efficient search engine.

Ryan Desmarais:
Yes.

Sean Corbett:
And it may change from here on out, but if the listeners can at least think of it from that point of view moving forward, that’ll help them have context of this discussion. But what I was going to say about your library analogy, what I liked is when I used to go the library, if you were observant and you went there enough, which I went there all the time, you found out that there was a special hidden section of other books, sometimes magazines and stuff like that, and you were only allowed to access those if you sweet-talked the librarian and had a good reputation at the library.
So I’m thinking of that as at least in our school library, you couldn’t get Rolling Stone magazine, which I was into at the time because I wanted to get into films, and they had big long interviews with filmmakers, but you weren’t allowed to just walk into the library and get those. The librarian had to let you in the back. I don’t even think they were in the index cards. So I would tie that to the modern ChatGPT’s prompts. You have to know what prompts to put in to get to the good stuff. You can’t just say, “Give me the answer to A.” Would you agree with that?

Ryan Desmarais:
Absolutely, I’d agree with that. And you’re right in exercising a little bit of caution to the listener about, yes, ChatGPT is magical in a lot of different ways, but it’s not going to take over all the writers’ positions in media. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT in even testing it yourself, you can tell that it’s a computer writing it. These beings aren’t sentient yet on the other side, right?

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Desmarais:
And it does a very good job, mind you, but it really is regurgitating the information that it has in its database, and it uses an algorithm to make it sound like like you’re talking to or that you’re asking a human a question, and it’s giving you a human response, which its ability to do that is very impressive.
And one thing I really love about ChatGPT is the conversational element of it, the fact that it remembers what you asked it previously in that session. So you don’t have to phrase each question like you would a Google search where you have to include everything. Your first question could ask, “How does the internet work?” and then ChatGPT will give you this long answer that’s pretty complex. And then you could just respond with, “Can you explain that like I’m five years old?” and ChatGPT will come back with a different explanation. You could ask it to be concise and use less words. One thing I found pretty just comical messing around with it is you could ask it for fun facts about places or things and do so in seven words, no, 11 words. [inaudible 00:09:14]-

Sean Corbett:
So that’s another important distinction to make is that it’s not AI in the sense of an Android or whatever, but the inventors and the people in the know call it a language modeler, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Sean Corbett:
And so that’s an interesting thing for people to pay attention to because it’s not really an idea generator, although it can be used in the process of generating ideas, I’ve found, anyway. But yeah, if you think of it as a language model or a language simulator, then… So here I’ll give a really concrete example to the listener of how… I’m a writer. I’m not in any fear whatsoever of ChatGPT taking my job away. In fact, it’s just a tool. It’s another tool. No more than I was in fear of the laptop or a pencil taking my job away.
But one thing that it’s extremely helpful in is when I give it all the ideas I want and I piece together a first draft, sometimes just to give myself a break, I’ll just say to it, “Here’s my paragraph. I want you to rewrite this using no words over two syllables and roughly at a grade five level.” I’m not a hundred percent happy with the finished result, but what it does is… Let’s say Ryan and I had six sentences, and two of them were solid, I’m not going to change those, and four of them were pretty clunky, mainly because I couldn’t think of clearer or simpler ways to describe what I was talking about, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
Right.

Sean Corbett:
So if I gave ChatGPT that prompt that I just said, it’ll come back with… At least three of the four sentences will be pretty much cleared up. Now, again, I didn’t ask it for ideas. I gave it all the meat, but I just had it do almost like an intern’s job or an editor’s job for me. I could have sat down and done that, looked through my thesaurus and had to think about it. And what it did is it just saved me half an hour, maybe write one prompt, one minute prompt saves me half an hour of work. And that’s a glimpse, I don’t know how you guys have been using it on the ground, but that’s a glimpse at how we’ve been using it in my marketing agency just to make things more efficient.

Ryan Desmarais:
Exactly right. It helps you get to that finish line faster like most tools in our tool belts do. They help us do a job and help us get to that finish line a little bit quicker. I do much less writing on my day-to-day than you do, Sean, but there’s the old term of writer’s block. And I think this is a tool that can really help break down that writer’s block because instead of having to rely on taking a break and coming back or bouncing your work off of a friend or a contact or your partner or whoever, you could actually bounce ideas off of ChatGPT, and it can write things in a different way, come back in a different perspective, and, like you said, just help save that time that… You would have got there eventually, but this tool can help you get there a little bit quicker and write things in a different way and likely in ways that you wouldn’t have wrote it because it’s a computer.
And sometimes that’s better, and it’ll give you a, “Oh, I never thought about writing it that way. I’m going to keep that,” or, “Nah, this is a little too clunky or a little too generated. Let’s give this a little bit of life.” Yeah, it’s an excellent tool for that, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. All these AI tools are just exactly that. They’re tools that help us complete a task or complete a job, right?

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, for sure. Well, so then I did want to hit you up for the main takeaways from your recent presentation. But before I do that, I wanted to ask, because, again, you’re talking to people on a daily basis, a two-part question here, I guess, is what are some of the most common recurring questions you’re getting about AI right now? And again, from the perspective of a small business owner, how can I use this? Or what is it, I guess? You tell me what the questions are. And then the second part to my question is, what would you say are some of the most common misconceptions that people have at this point?

Ryan Desmarais:
Great questions. So the most common questions I have, and I don’t have conversations every day about AI with small business owners, but it is starting to ramp up, and more and more people are getting familiar with it, testing it themselves, hearing about it in the media and in the world, and so the questions and conversations that I have had with business owners is, “How can I leverage this tool in my day-to-day business?”
I had a conversation with somebody in my networking group about them using this as a tool to help them reply to emails because they weren’t confident in their business writing abilities. And they used ChatGPT as a way to essentially generate some templates that they could use to respond to different questions that they would get asked often about the pricing structure of their business or where’s the value in their service kind of thing. They were racking their brains on ways to respond and going through draft and draft and draft, and this one business owner was able to compile these templates for emails using ChatGPT as a backbone to write things in a professional manner. That’s one of the things that’s cool about ChatGPT is, as you mentioned, Sean, you can tell it to write in a really simple way or more complex, theoretical, complex way.
So that was one conversation that comes to mind, and the other thing that I think should definitely be mentioned in how this tool can be used in the small business world is to start writing. So a subject always comes up when we’re talking about websites, is ranking on the search engines, “What can I do to better improve my rank on Google?” And one of those things is if you have a section of your website that you update with original content like a blog or a news section, that’s one way to help improve your position. And this is something that many small business owners are very afraid of because it’s hard work. Sean, you know. Writing is hard work, and we don’t all have the gift to write.

Sean Corbett:
Ryan, I have to pretend it’s hard work because that’s how I get paid, but actually, it’s the easiest thing.

Ryan Desmarais:
To you. To you, Sean, it’s easy. You have it.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, yeah, totally. Prompting the AI, prompting the AI to tell me what to write takes me longer than writing. But yeah, I get it. From the perspective of other people, yes, for sure.

Ryan Desmarais:
But people that don’t do it on a regular basis, I think this tool can be used in amazing ways to help give them a starting point. They want to write an article. They’re a, let’s say, a duct cleaning business, and they want to write a blog article about duct cleaning and how it can help you save money in the long term in terms of the replacement of your furnace. And they don’t know how to write that well. They could go to ChatGPT and give it some prompts about what they’re trying to write, and ChatGPT will give them some body, some meat to chew on. And again, like me and you said, most of the time, you can’t just verbatim copy and paste that info. It’s usually pretty… What’s the word you would use for it, Sean? The responses that you get are… They’re not clunky. They’re generated, right?

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I mean, it depends on how you prompt it, right? Some people get fancy and they’ll say… For fun, I experimented with uploading paragraphs from my favorite authors and said, “Okay. Here’s a paragraph from Hemingway. Here’s a description of an emergency plumbing service. I want you to rewrite the description in the style of Hemingway.”

Ryan Desmarais:
Ooh.

Sean Corbett:
Now, it’s interesting there, because now you’re playing with tone and things like that. And being a language model, especially if you give it examples, it picks that stuff up remarkably better than I thought it would. However-

Ryan Desmarais:
Interesting. I haven’t tried that.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, yeah. But it’ll overplay it like a bad ham actor. And this is obviously a really extreme version of what you’re saying, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
Sure.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, I know what you’re saying. I’m trying to think of the words while I’m talking. And maybe we’ll come up with a description together. I mean, it’s an amalgamated language, and the language is, for lack of a better word, in your example, Ryan, the language is meant to be as inoffensive and without personality as possible. And if anyone knows anything about writing, I’m sorry to say this as a writer, but no one cares about the information you’re saying, and mostly people don’t listen to it. It’s more about personality. They want to listen to a personality or a figure, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
And how you say it and how you deliver it, and what’s your-

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Desmarais:
… potential bias to it, right?

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, all those things. So it does lack that. And then you can bridge that gap by doing such an extreme example as what I just said, but then you’re going to get a parody version of… Okay, so let’s say you said, “Here’s an example of a Raymond Chandler hard-boiled detective novel from the ’40s and ’50s. I want you to write my thing like this.” And then it might pump you out something like, “This plumbing service is good, see? You got to get down here, cool cat,” and it’ll go so overboard. So I mean, I’m sure there’s instances, especially in social media where that could be really fun, but are the two poles between which you’re trying to use ChatGPT as a tool to work for you, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
Right.

Sean Corbett:
Those are the poles. It’s like completely without personality or exaggerated, a cruel exaggerated imitation of it. Yeah.

Ryan Desmarais:
Right, exactly.

Sean Corbett:
So pick which side. You and I have found, Ryan, I’m sure you’ll back this up, is anytime we got log jammed on a website and someone just didn’t… We would ask them, “What do you want to see next? How do you want this to change?” whatever. Sometimes people would say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. There’s so many choices.” And so what we found out as a trick in the olden days is sometimes we would do a not great design or a not great suggestion for page content that we knew was wrong. Because you can get someone started or you can get your brain running by giving the same no, oddly enough, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Corbett:
So I think with ChatGPT, if you can take one of the two examples that you and I are giving them right now, pick which extreme the direction you want to go in and then just say no to it. Like, “Oh, okay, this gets me 80% of the way there, but no, that word is not the right word for my customers because I know them,” or, “No, that style’s a little too hokey. We’ve got to back that off a bit,” and then that should get most people out of their writer’s block. Because writer’s block is really just a function of not starting. So in the writer’s world, what we do is we capitalize our titles and we put in commas, we put in punctuations, we put in lines, anything. If you just start writing anything on a piece of paper, within about five minutes, your brain will turn on. So that’s kind of the ChatGPT version of overcoming writer’s block.

Ryan Desmarais:
Love that input. Yeah. One of the things that’s fascinating about ChatGPT too is its ability to understand common phrases, grammar, sentence structure. It’s pretty fascinating when you start to play around with that. I haven’t done any of the feeding it a style of language and asking it to replicate your question in that style. That’s really fascinating. I’m going to play around with that myself.
But yeah, I think in essence, ChatGPT, I believe it’s really the next phase, the next big step in our computer evolution of, like I said, going to the library to learn about things, asking Google to learn about things. Asking an AI chatbot like ChatGPT I think is going to be the next step. The one tool that I want to get my hands on that I haven’t played around with yet is Google’s Bard, which they haven’t launched yet in Canada. So I haven’t actually played around with that one, but I’m curious to see how Google’s version compares to the ChatGPT version.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’ll be cool to see. Canada always the technological bridesmaid, never the bride.

Ryan Desmarais:
Never the bride, always the bridesmaid. Absolutely.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. So, big takeaways. Yeah. Let’s try to stick then to the ChatGPT that people can use and access right now. So big takeaways from your presentation? What would you want people to go away knowing and then looking to try next?

Ryan Desmarais:
Yeah, good question. I mean, I think small business owners, the biggest takeaway… Because when I gave this presentation, there was about 20 people in the room, and about three quarters had heard of ChatGPT and about maybe a third had used ChatGPT. So the biggest takeaway I was trying to push is, “Hey, try the tool out, because it’s a pretty powerful tool, and there’s lots being said about it in the world right now, but try it out for yourself. It’s pretty interesting. You can get it to do cool things. You can ask it to tell you a joke. You can get it to respond in different languages. Try it because you don’t get better at using a tool without practicing with it.”
So that was one of the biggest takeaways is, “Just get on it and try it, but also try it with a bit of caution.” This tool is still fairly new. It still has a lot of human oversight on it because it needs it, because it’s being fed with information from the internet. And as we all know, not everything on the internet is truth. So I definitely recommend exercising caution, especially if you’re asking ChatGPT things about health or finances, things like that, because it’s really just feeding information from its database of the internet.
But the final takeaway with ChatGPT is I’m a big believer that businesses must evolve or die, and this is another turning point in our technology evolution. A real world example of where this kind of chat generator is being used right now, more for bigger businesses, but I’m seeing more and more smaller businesses get on board with this, is utilizing that chatbot on their website as a live chat function. And most people have probably seen this on some of the bigger corporations out there. Most of them have this where essentially the chatbot acts as a little receptionist on the website that says, “Hey, do you need help? Ask me a question.”
But this is something that more and more small businesses are leaning into because having that live chat functionality, there is use for it. People use it. That’s the reason why it’s there. I use the example often, back in the day, back even 10 years ago, people used to complain about having a contact form on their website because they thought nobody did it. “Nobody fills those out. I don’t fill them out. Nobody else does.” But they were wrong. More and more people prefer to be less contact, like, “I’m just going to fill this thing out and let them get back to me.” You’d be surprised at how many leads are generated every day just by having a contact form on a website.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. The trick is getting back to them, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
A hundred percent. They got to get back to them. Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
And same thing with the-

Ryan Desmarais:
Got to follow up.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. And with the chatbot, same deal. Don’t just turn it on and let it go loose.

Ryan Desmarais:
No.

Sean Corbett:
Like Ryan said, you have to test these tools a little bit because when you get a user on your website, that is a precious thing, and it’s hard to get. And so if you’re going to use the tool, you better make sure that you’re… Have a little consideration that your audience has a specific way of talking and speaking that only you know because you live and breathe it every day. Ryan can’t tell you. I can’t tell you. And yet we’re the supposed experts helping small businesses. Well, the truth of the matter is you guys know best how your customers speak and what questions they have. So you have to assume some responsibility when using a tool like this that if you’re going to put in the least amount of effort, the tool’s going to end up making you look low effort.

Ryan Desmarais:
Yes.

Sean Corbett:
If you’re going to put in a little bit of thought, you can tweak it, just 2%, 5% customization, and then all of a sudden you’ve got something that, well, like you said, Ryan saves the business owner time, but also doesn’t turn off the user.

Ryan Desmarais:
You hit the nail on the head, Sean, by saying your website visitors are precious and you don’t want to turn them off. So yeah, you don’t want to rush into just, “Oh, AI chatbot’s going to make my life easier. They’re going to answer all the questions of my clients and bring me sales through my website. Let’s just sign up for the first one, first result on Google and throw it on the website.” I wouldn’t recommend doing that because, yes, you want to test the experience. There’s lots of different AI chatbot providers out there and varying levels of quality. But if you have a 24-hour business where people are on your website all the time and you need that fast, responsive connection with them, using a tool like this could be helpful, for sure.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, I think so, for sure. Yeah.

Ryan Desmarais:
Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Well, to wrap the topic up, I was hoping to give people a couple of use cases and maybe even some words of caution, because we both are in agreement, this is an important tool to be used. If you don’t use it, you’re going to get left behind and all those kind of things. So what does that really mean? I’ll give people an example of a brick wall that I hit, actually, where I found out that I had a misconception about what ChatGPT could do. And again, keep in mind, like you said, Ryan, there’s lots of different AI models and simulators out there.
So we’ve been talking about the main one. And what I was looking for it to do is, as a marketer, I was looking for it to research audiences for me. And I wanted to say, “Okay. On YouTube, for middle-aged people who live in Canada who are interested in this topic, what are the main questions they ask on YouTube?” And I thought, “Boy, if I can get this information, this would be awesome.” Well, what I learned is, number one, ChatGPT has to have information uploaded into it. It’s not a real time learning alien entity. So it can’t go to YouTube and go, “Oh, just yesterday, this many people did this.” It can’t do that. I wish it could, but it can’t. So that’s one thing.
So then I started thinking, “Okay. If I can’t get real time data from it, I know it must have learned from somewhere, right? They must have been uploading old sites, old discussion boards, old whatever into it.” So I started to ask it, I was doing a historical research project, and I said, “Okay. For these times in history on this topic in this country, I want you to give me the top 10 hurdles that were overcome by technology.” Okay? So I gave it that question. It spit me out 10 answers. I said, “Do Spain, Germany, UK.” So it spits out the 10 answers for Spain. And I said, “Okay. Now that you’ve given me these 10 answers for Spain, I want you to go and give me at least one, but if possible two footnotes, references. Give me links to the web where I can go verify your information.”
So I wanted to build this web of references to ensure that the information was correct. Well, what I learned about ChatGPT is it can’t do that, but what it wants to do is make you happy, so it fakes it. So it gave me all of these websites that were real, and then it appended a blog post into the link that never existed. So it would go like, “Spain.com/theanswertoseansquestion,” and I’d click on it and the page wouldn’t exist. And it did this over and over and over again until I finally decided- “Okay. I’m going to use a website-

Ryan Desmarais:
Wow.

Sean Corbett:
… I built that I’ve controlled from day one.” And I said to it, “ChatGPT, tell me what page on this website would be best to learn about…” and then I put in a question that has never, ever even remotely been tackled on that website. And it immediately returned me the answer, “Oh, go to this page. It gives you the exact answer to your question.”
So I learned you can’t get those links for references using ChatGPT, which is, that’s a real downside to research, or at least it tells you where it’s at right now in terms of what research you can and can’t do with it. But one thing I’ll say, just to not be so negative about it is I found a different AI tool that actually does do a lot of that, and it is much more up-to-date and it can search databases pretty well, and that is called perplexity.ai.

Ryan Desmarais:
Ooh. I haven’t heard of that one.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. That one’s a lot better for research if you want to find out what people on the net have said in the past, and then I would say ChatGPT is a lot more robust in terms of the language part of it. “Help me interpret this. Help me compose a message around this. Do it in this style, in this manner,” that’s what ChatGPT is better at. So that’s my big contribution to the topic.

Ryan Desmarais:
Really appreciate that, Sean, and I actually hadn’t ran into anything like that before because I’ve never asked ChatGPT to provide sources or anything, but that’s really fascinating and kind of scary that it wants to satisfy you so much that it’s going to create fake links and say, “Oh, yeah, here it is.” It’s like what else-

Sean Corbett:
It was putting dates in the links even, Ryan, to make them look more realistic.

Ryan Desmarais:
Whoa, that is, yeah, just another reason why telling our listeners to exercise caution with these tools, that what they say isn’t gospel and a hundred percent truth, it’s fed from the internet. And that was also another interesting thing that we touched on in my presentation, that it’s not connected, or at least ChatGPT is not connected to the live internet. It doesn’t have real time information. You can’t ask it what the weather is like in Vancouver today. It doesn’t have access to that information, mainly because of the human oversight element. It wants to make sure that it’s providing helpful and unbiased answers. And so, like you said, I’m confident it’s being batch fed information in massive terabytes of data, I’m sure.
But yeah, in closing, it’s love it, hate it or fear it. These tools are here and AI is here, and as we move forward, we can expect ChatGPT and other similar AI powered tools to continue to shape our world in unexpected and exciting ways. And my advice at this point is it’s a new thing, just familiarize yourself with it. Try it out. Ask it some questions. Think about how you might be able to leverage this tool on your business or help your business processes work a little faster. You don’t know unless you try.

Sean Corbett:
Yep, exactly. I just wanted to finish by giving people the actual… They might not even know the actual link to it, right?

Ryan Desmarais:
Right.

Sean Corbett:
So it’s openai.com is the ChatGPT website, everybody.

Ryan Desmarais:
Thanks again. Pleasure to be back, Sean.