AI Is Here, Now What? | Rusty Williams (Episode 30)

Hello, and welcome to You Should Hear This, a podcast for the everyday association professional. I’m Nick Estrada, your host.

Technology may feel like it is ever-evolving, and that’s because it is. Technology has changed drastically within the past twenty, ten, and even the last five years. With new technology at our doorstep, associations need to know if it is worth their time to learn and invest in it. The International Business Machines defines artificial intelligence, or as you commonly hear it, “AI,” as a field that combines computer science and robust datasets to enable problem-solving. 

With new forms of AI coming into the news and our associations, we need to understand the basics, how we can use it, and what we can use it for. Our guest today will be able to provide us with guidance on these questions and much more.

Rusty Williams is the Co-founder of AnswerStage -- a Boston-based provider of automated video collection and production services. AnswerStage helps associations and event organizers feature members, speakers, exhibitors, and other authentic personalities in video marketing. Rusty has helped start and grow several companies, including Delphi Internet, Prospero Technologies, and KnowledgeVision. The common thread in all of these ventures is building and leveraging the value of online communities.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to, you Should Hear This, a podcast For the Everyday association profession, I'm Nick Estrada. Your host technology may feel like it's ever evolving, and that's because it is. Technology has changed drastically within the past 2010 and even the last year. With new technology at our doorstep, associations need to know if it's worth their time to learn and invest in it.

The international business machines define artificial intelligence, or as you commonly hear it, AI as a field which combines computer science and robust data sets to enable problem solving. With new forms of AI coming into the news and our associations, we need to understand the basics, how we can use it, and what we can use it for.

Our guests today will be able to provide us with guidance on these questions and much more. Rusty Williams is the co-founder of Answer Stage, a Boston based provider of automated video collection and production services. Answer Stage helps associations and event organizers, feature members, speakers, exhibitors, and other authentic personalities in [00:01:00] video marketing.

Rusty Williams is the co-founder of Answer Stage, a Boston based provider of automated video collection and production services. Answer Stage helps associations and event organizers, feature members, speakers, exhibitors, and other authentic personalities and video marketing. Rusty has helped start and grow several companies, including Delphi, internet, Spiro Technologies, and Knowledge.

Vision. The common thread in all of these ventures is building and leveraging the value of online communities. Welcome, rusty. Thank you very much, Nick. Pleased to be here. Well, I'm really excited to talk with you. For listeners, if you've met me, you know I love technology, but it's actually part of my role in my day-to-day job, and so I am very excited to talk about this topic with you today.

Such an intriguing area, I think, and what we can learn from it. But before we get into, I think the kind of the, the heavy discussion on this, can you just share a little bit more, I know I mentioned a little bit of it in your intro, but a little bit about your background and why this is an [00:02:00] area of interest for you.

Sure. Yeah. Well, so I've, I've been in technology my whole career and more specifically, Internet related technologies ranging back to, you know, one of the first online services. So I mean, the people who remember America Online and other, you know, when they first connected the internet, we were among the, the original companies to do that.

And as you said in the quick summary of my background, you know, what we learned very, very quickly is that, People interacting with each other and creating their own content and collaborating with each other. What we now call online community or social media is a super powerful force. And so that really is, um, the, the, the, the same force and the same energy that I pursue in basically every venture, the ones you listed, and then certainly our newest venture called Answer Stage.

So that's, that's where my area of expertise is, is in creating. [00:03:00] Those kind of technologies that help people interact, express themselves and and create content that then helps the brand that they're part of. Awesome. Yeah, that sounds great. As we, okay, so we're gonna talk about artificial intelligence today and the AI generally.

Before we talk about its application, I think to associations, can you just help our listeners get a base understanding of what is ai. What's it mean for, I think maybe more broadly, the technology space first? Uh, sure. Why, why is this even something we should be thinking about? Right. Exactly. Well, you know what, I, I think there's, I think we're all gonna mark our calendars that 2023 is the year of ai.

Even though, uh, actually saw a, a, a quick interview with Neil Degrass Tyson, and he was funny out. This is very strange because. If you go back, I don't, I dunno what it was, 10, 15 years ago, we had a computer beat, a world caliber chess champion. And that was ai, that was artificial [00:04:00] intelligence and a computer doing something that a human could do and doing it better.

And you can actually sort of draw a, you know, a pretty steady line from that point forward. And it's only at, at, at this point where it's crossed over into the liberal arts world that we kind of feel like it's, it's become something that is coming after all of us, or can be used for all of us. And by liberal arts, I mean it's writing a.

Term papers and blog posts and helping you decide, you know, what should be. So, artificial intelligence is just that. It's, it's a computer learning how to do things that, that, at least to us, sort of seemed like the, the realm of what, what humans used to do. And helping us make decisions based on very, very extensive and broad based data sets that it's going through and making these in inferences that become part of what, you know, then look to us like, whoa, that's actual intelligence.

But it is still artificial. It's just, it's, it's switching through data at [00:05:00] such extreme volumes that it's becoming more and more and more oppressive as each day goes on. And where do these, where do they get the data from? I guess that's always. A piece of interest for me of like, where is it different based on o Obviously like different models would be different, but as we think about some of these language models, I think probably the biggest, or the most newest one that I've been introduced to was chatt bt.

Right? I feel like that, I heard it at a New York Times podcast and suddenly I felt like I saw Chatt BT everywhere. But where, where is it getting these broad data sets from? Yeah, so I, I think for the purpose of this conversation, chat GT is a perfectly fine. Name to use for, for ai. I mean, that's the, that is the kind of service that I think is getting the most attention is probably the mo easiest thing there.

There are many other things, like there's ways of cars detecting what traffic is and to help them do self-driving. There is, you know, weather pattern analysis, so AI is like, fills, fills up a lot of different categories. Mm-hmm. But for, for the [00:06:00] purposes of this audience and for what we can tap into, I think chat, G B T is a, a good example.

So the data set that is used, I think to inform services like chat, G B T is literally everything that's flowing out on the internet. That is cr, been crawlable by Google, been crawlable by anybody. You know, things that are, that are in the internet, archive, things that are in images, all, all sorts of.

Content, uh, becomes what it looks at to say how do people interact and what kind of content is, is considered, you know, a blog post. What kind of content is available about a place, you know, what kind of content is available about airline schedules. It literally is everything, and that's why the data sets are so huge.

And you're mentioning kind of the, the concept of maybe why chat BT is so. Relevant to the work that we do. You mentioned, right, it's coming into the liberal arts space, right? So that writing, that, that copy creation, [00:07:00] and I would say that's probably true. I think on our side, I think we saw that as like I could, you know, no one else can write an award script except an association professional.

And now I'll be honest, we use Chate BT this past year or to help just kind of spruce up or real, you know, bring some life to our script again, where we'd say, here's the, the description of the award, here's the tone we want to take. Give us an example, right? Mm-hmm. Of what that could look like. And I think at first we were kinda like, this isn't gonna write anything great.

And then we were like, well, that sound almost better than anything we would've written. And so I think it's gonna be an interesting kind of perspective. Okay. So you just mentioned a word that I wanna make sure our listeners are aware of. Cause I think I, I may understand, but I wanna make sure I'm understanding it as well.

You said crawlable. What does that mean in terms of how it's finding information? Well, the, the, the, the search. Technologies that we've been accustomed to Google. The way that they find things and then surface things for you to, to, to get search results is they go out and index any kind of URL or [00:08:00] webpage or content that's published and then allow you to find, and then they did some smarts around that to help you find things that were most relevant to you.

So each webpage, they would, they would, you know, they would literally ingest it. They would. Decode it and say, this is, this is something that we might wanna show you in search results. It's that same concept that's being used to collect data and feed data into, it's actually called large language model for, for a ai.

And so that by crawlable all I mean is that some, some mechanism can go out and find that webpage and, and try to make sense out of it and, and use it as an input for, for what? People will be looking for. And that would be related to like seo, right? I mean, that's kind of Exactly. So, you know, SEO is to help us define exactly the words.

Exactly. So anybody, anybody who knows about seo, the search engine optimization is, is being done by making sure that your page has [00:09:00] stuff that the, that the search engines will find and like, and so that's, That's all it's doing is it is, it's, it's saying when they come here, when it, when it, it gets crawled and indexed, we want the, this information to be highlighted.

So it's, it is inclined to present it to people when they're looking for this stuff. Okay. Yeah. That's great. Cause I think that'll definitely be something I think will be important to be thinking about. Maybe, and you correct me if I'm wrong here. Is this like, what comes first now? Is it, my site is viewed as, An industry leader is an industry thought leader, and so mine's the one that gets used in a Chachi PT example instead.

Or do I need to increase my SEO first to be seen in that light, if that, does that make sense, what I'm trying to say there? It does. It does. I think that's an area that's pretty blurry right now. The, the feeling that I get from what I've read is that seo, as we have thought of it, is changing and that you can't [00:10:00] really just sort of.

Think of, you know, highlighting certain key phrases and having them repeated multiple times so that they get weighted. It will be, and that, and that the number of external links you have will matter as much. I think it will, it will try to find, it'll, it will be, it will try to find content that other people find valuable and also, you know, speaks in the tone and manner that you're looking for.

So there's a lot of new variables that will be added to what gets bubbled up. And my, my guess is you should just, you should just continue to write in a way that really speaks to your audience and that will always come to the top of results because it's gonna, what you wanna do is, is make content that you're, is really relevant to your audience, helpful to your audience that will be weighted higher.

And so I think some of the tips and tricks that have been applied will be a little bit less relevant. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, really put it out there cuz of the, the [00:11:00] more your audience is using it Exactly. Potentially right as we move forward. Exactly. That's the thing. That something like this is gonna weight more important than Exactly.

I, I set that catchphrase 15 times in a blog post and so That's right. Exactly. That's a good one to, the good one to pull. Right. Okay. So I think we've got a, a good understanding now, I think of, or gen generally a, a decent understanding of AI where it's getting some stuff from why that matters. At a, at a base level, what are some of the benefits you think for associations to utilize ai?

Again, I think you mentioned at the beginning, right? It's getting into this liberal arts space and I think, you know, I think any new technology introduces this little bit of fear of it's gonna replace us, it's gonna take away our job. It's, you know, all these kinds of things. But I also think there is a unique value proposition behind what some of this can provide us.

What do you think some of those are? Well, for, for this conversation, I'm gonna focus on sort of how it can be used in marketing. As I said, there are, there are a lot of broader [00:12:00] applications for medical diagnosis and self-driving cars and customer service and, and things like that. They can get personalized member recommendations.

You can get auto automated member onboarding. So there's like, there's gonna be literally an endless stream of where AI will be helping. Associations, better service their members and, and that, you know, we could go on for hours about that, and I'm sure there's interest in some of those things. But for this conversation, it see, it feels, feels better to, as I said, to think about chat g B t, to think about how do we, how do we make marketing that is most appealing to our members and prospective members.

For me, that really comes down to four words. And that is just better understanding your members. And by that I mean what is it that will help them? What is it will resonate with them? What is it that's, that are trends that are, that are trends that they wanna follow? What is it that will help them with their skill sets to enhance their [00:13:00] career?

And that's where I, you know, the, the, some of the AI tools I think are really fascinating because you can go in and you can literally say, you know, what are some key trends that. We work with an association called A U V S I, which is all about unmanned vehicles and, and autonomous driving, et cetera. So you could type in what are some key trends in au autonomous vehicles, and you learn immediately what what people are looking for and what they're interested in.

And then you can tailor content to that. So that's, you know, to me that's kind of the, the, the lens through which AI is most valuable is, What is it that I can do to create content that is answering the questions and addressing the topics and trends that my members are asking about? So, and in that example, rusty, so what you're saying is the what, the reason that that response back from the AI is valid is because it's utilizing information that's already being searched for, right?

It's pulling, exactly. Yeah. Those search. Terms [00:14:00] into, or it's also pulling things that maybe other people have asked it already into. Right. Its response and exactly saying, this is what they're asking. Well, it's doing even more than that. I think it's going to the websites about autonomous vehicles and it's, it's, it's seeing what, you know, blog posts are most, most read.

It's finding out all that, and it's, it's, it's really, it's fascinating and I'm, I'm giving that as an example because I, I, I think in the. The perspective that I, that, that we have and that we, we, we are embracing is that the world really isn't moving to AI generated content. What it's doing is, is moving towards AI assisted content creation.

And by that I mean, you said earlier, That AI assisted you in the, in the, the speaker notes or the, the, the, the summary you were putting together, it assisted you. You didn't, you didn't just press publish on the button and say, go with that, because there, [00:15:00] there still are things that when you read it, you go, that's not quite the way we would say it.

That doesn't specifically address what our, what our associate members are looking for. Or, and or most importantly, it doesn't include real world stories from real world people who are part of our association. And that's really the, the point that we're, we're focusing on is how can you mix artificial intelligence with real world stories and real human experiences?

Because though that second part is gonna be what sets you apart from the rest of the world. When, when you can type in, you know, write me a blog post about automate auto autonomous vehicles, and you'll get something. But the piece that will make it different is when you actually have a story from somebody who has driven an autonomous vehicle or has actually, you know, been the engineer to make that happen.

And that that person can tell you about their experience with that. So, [00:16:00] so those, that's kind of the direction that I, that I, I, we see things going. Is, is AI is an assistance and it, it should assist you in creating a, a high volume of content that is very valuable. But the only way to really have that kind of rise above is to add that next layer of, of personal expertise and experience that gives you that, that human story and that that's gonna be what really resonates in the end.

I think you're right on with that AI assistant piece because, I even saw in my own association recently, I saw someone who had posted on LinkedIn. They said, you know, we just launched our, you know, our newest piece of AI software. We're so excited for it, but no client will ever see it. And he said, because what it's doing is it's providing our customer care team with the ability to provide stronger recommendations for.

The cities that our clients are staying in, right? Mm-hmm. So [00:17:00] they're not, they're in the hospitality industry and, right. I may not live in a city where one of my clients is, but this AI piece that they've installed, created, I don't, you know, I don't fully know what that means on that side, but he said, you know, what we've really been able to do is now they don't have to go and search for all these things anymore.

They can just ask. Their AI piece, you know, Hey, what are some strong recommendations for a restaurant in this area for a client who wants to spend this much money or you know, has this kind of feeling about a food, and then it pops them out. Strong recommendations. And so I think this AI assistant piece, I view it as making us much more efficient at the jobs that we are already really good at doing.

I think you're spot on. But making each of us much more efficient at what we're doing, I think does imply eventually there'll be less of us needed to do all that. So I, I, I'm, I'm afraid that the answer to the question of, you know, will us be replacing people? It probably will for those who don't learn to use AI as an [00:18:00] extension of their skillset, because those who do will become more efficient and I think make it to where there's less.

Puppies at the, at the dinner bowl or whatever the right metaphor is. So how do we, not that I wanna spend the rest of this, this podcast talking about like the fear of, of losing a, a job to technology, but how do we, how do we embrace the technology without letting that fear take over? If that makes sense.

Yeah. I'm not sure we can stop the fear, but the embracing is the, is the best way to move, move through it, the. I think being technophobic is not gonna be good for anyone. You know, this is, this is happening, this is, this is going to, as we just said, make people more efficient. And so my only recommendation is, is roll up your sleeves, jump in and become familiar with these new tools because you'll see how they can help you do the things that you think and you know, are important [00:19:00] for yourself, your own self-improvement, and for your, your members.

So get, get on chat, G P t if you haven't been there. Type in a few things. Learn a bit about how different prompts and different ways of asking for information can change the results. I mean, that's kind of an ever evolving process. And, and just be ready to embrace, you know, that, I think that's, that's the word you use and I think that's the word that most people should con, would, should be ready for.

I.

Some specific, if you have any, I guess maybe some specific tools. Obviously we've made chat, G P T, I think that's a, again, a big one maybe that some people have hopefully heard recently. But I'm curious maybe before we continue on, if there are any other specific tools that you would at least recommend that people are maybe exploring a little bit with.

Well, as I said, chat, g [00:20:00] p T is is a good placeholder, but if you go to Bing right now, Microsoft's search engine, you're gonna get chat G P t like results. If you go to Bard, which is Google's latest or newest, you know, search capability, that's also chat. G p t like, so you know, there's kind of a portfolio of services emerging that are, that are gonna be very similar to the chat, chat G B T like experience.

So any of those I think will help you learn more about it. There are also tools. So those, those tools that we're talking about here are mostly, you know, text based. You type in a, a, a prompt or a query and you get results. And that, that query could be something like, you know, I want you to, to, you know, be a social media expert and to.

Develop 10 different headlines for potential blog posts that we can do to address people who are association professionals and want to [00:21:00] emphasize the, the benefits of membership for an association for, you know, pipe fitters or whatever it might be. And, you know, with that kind of almost open-ended, not open-ended, but kind of, you know, just regular English like instruction.

You'll get some good results. And so that's kind of the, the way that you can just, as I said, just step in and start experimenting. So that can all be on chat G P T, and that can give you a results about headlines or a blog post or social media kind of post. So that's like a first step from a marketing minded person.

The next step if you wanna go to the next level is to sort of think about other forms of media and there are ways of creating images and, and so that's something, there's a service called Mid Journey where you can go in and it's a little bit geeky, but you can type in a, a slash command and you, you can say picture of a medieval queen, you [00:22:00] know, at the top of a castle.

And you literally can get a picture of a medieval queen at the top of a castle, which is. Really, you know, kind of mind, mind blowing you, you wonder where this will go for, you know, the stock image companies and other, other, uh, providers. You know, that, that you can literally be that specific and come up with images that will, will, can compliment your blog posts, can compliment your social media posts.

And, you know, that's, that's a really fascinating area and that's. That's happening with images, that's happening with, with, with video, soon to be, you know, various video capabilities that you can describe and ha get a video for it. And it's also happening in music, which is a whole other thing we could go into where, you know, people are creating songs where it sounds like Paul McCartney's singing, you know, a Nirvana tune.

It's like, it's just, it's kind of going crazy, the different ways you can parameterize your request for content and have it do a pretty darn good job. I've seen recently on, I'm not too [00:23:00] proud to admit, I watch a lot of TikTok now. I think I'm like a lot of people at this point. I love I TikTok is fascinating.

So it's, uh, I, I've learned quite a few things actually from it, believe it or not, even tech things. So, but I've seen a lot recently, uh, Adobe, I must have just released a generative AI that you can use on photos, right? So for retouching or in some cases just completely expanding the image, right? So it might be like a, you know, a portrait of somebody.

You know, on sitting on some stairs, you know, in a historic place. And so I'm assuming that it's using right, lots of pictures from all over the internet to fill in the gaps, right? So it's recognizing, but I mean, somebody can expand the art board and it fills in, right? If they're, you know, maybe they're in Athens, right?

And it's this picture at the Parthenon now I can remove people from the photo easily. I can expand it. I can be on top of the Parthenon now, and it looks like this really great photo that I took. There, even though maybe the person who took it right was like zoomed in on me and I don't have that much.

And so that kind of stuff I, I also think is just gonna be really fascinating because I [00:24:00] think, again, back to your point, I think it becomes an assistive piece. It's not, it's still not full creation that I think we would turn around and just immediately just copy and paste and put into something. Well, I mean the, it's, it's possible you could put in the medieval queen on the, at the top of the castle and be happy with it.

And that probably will happen someday. But more, more often than not the kind of thing you're talking about where you're ki you're enhancing your, your doing photo editing is, is gonna be a, you know, your, your best option. But yeah, that's, I mean the stuff that Adobe's doing with, uh, I think it's called Firefly, is fascinating.

As you said, you can do this generative fill that will, it will like interpolate everything that should go around, uh, an image and, and make it, make it look like it's, you know, full screen. So tho those are, Those are things, you know, we're, we could, we can go on about each day. There's new, new options available.

And I think those listening. Kind of deciding where do you want to, where do you wanna plant your flag? [00:25:00] You know, cuz you could go on forever and, and, and learn about how Adobe's doing this and how Dali, which is another image generation thing, is doing things. They're all fascinating. I think you need to step back and say, well, what is it that really applies to my, my role in my job?

And just learn as much as you can. So there's, there's a lot of stuff, but it, you know, again, you can kind of, you can kind of get off into the weeds pretty quickly. But it's worth, as you said, I think continuing to skim social media sites and just learn what you can from people who are doing these quick summaries and tutorials.

It's, it's just always changing and always learn better to learn what's there and know that it could be used if you need it in your, in your mind, you know, as you're talking about. Right? Like there's lots of options that are out there and you could spend. Days, weeks, months. Right. Learning all the things that are out there.

How do you, how do you decide which of these, if any, right, if you choose to go the AI route, how do you decide which ones might be the best for your association to [00:26:00] kind of begin with? It's hard to say cuz each, each association might have slightly different needs. But again, I think for this conversation, just learning the chat, G P T.

Type of service, Chatt, Bart and Bing, and then learning how that can help you learn about your audience, learn about, get ideas for blog posts. I mean, a, a few minutes ago you asked me kind of what, what should it be used for and how, how, how should we think about it? The, and I said, you know, it's, it's really AI assistance and it's about understanding your members.

So it's really. It's really, it's, it's loading your brain, you know, it's, it's not having the, the blank page syndrome and that's, that's just a huge step forward where if you got a blog, you know, somebody says, well, we need a blog post. Not having to sort of sit down with a blank, blank piece of paper and just kind of start tapping away is, it is a huge benefit because you can just type in, [00:27:00] give me six ideas for blog posts that will about.

You know about key trends, and then you get these ideas and then you just, you get a running start. So that, that loading of your brain and that, that, that idea of AI assisting you doing that, I think is really what's most important. So I, again, I, I would, for most people, I'd say just, just, just focus on chat G B T and, and think of it in that way.

Like what is it you're doing already that you want to do faster and with more kind of peripheral. Visibility into what you might wanna include and, and you know, provide to your members. I'll throw out a, just quickly, I'll throw one. I know right before we jumped on, I was telling you about another one that I'd heard of recently got a group of association friends that I talk with every now and then.

Somebody brought up chat, P p F, which I was like, well that's interesting. Tell me a little more. And you get the ability to load in a PDF and then it allows you to, to chat, quote unquote. Right. [00:28:00] Obviously with the content of that. And that was really intriguing as I think about something that can be used, you know, I think about putting in, you know, a conference no, before you go email or conference policies or something that I know I get a lot of questions from members on sometimes that mm-hmm.

Is there something I could put out there that they can answer their own questions without having to call us all the time, potentially, or even some more complex stuff that it was at least a starting place that I, I think, is use leveraging kind of the same technology, obviously. Right? Yeah. You're giving it the language and it's, it's responding.

Yeah. I mean, that's a great example. It just, you know, what can I, what can you do to help you distill and summarize and build the key points that you want to convey? And I should, I should know, you know, the reason that we're spending a lot of time thinking about this is that, as I said earlier, our focus now is actually highlighting the voices, faces, expertise, and personalities of people that are parts of part of your association.

The speakers, the members. [00:29:00] The people that are going to events, et cetera, and showcasing them as real voices. So that's kinda what we do as a company. And, and so we, we really bang on this, this idea that authenticity and real human interaction and real human stories are going to be better than ai, but AI is a super valuable tool in helping those people.

Express themselves and find out what topics they most wanna talk about. And so we have tools both on the front end where you're entering questions like what questions would be good or prompts would be best to ask people. So we get this information. Then on the other side we have coaching buttons where you can click and say, you know, what are some speaking speaking points about this topic that I might wanna include in my response?

And in doing so, we can help that assistance, provide that assistance on both ends and get. The authentic voices to be better informed and to be better, more confident in all the things that [00:30:00] you want from, from people who are creating videos about your association or for your association. Yeah, and in, in your example there, I think you're just continuing to highlight, right, which is this like, how do we use ai, AI to enhance the thing that AI at least currently cannot do?

Right? Right. AI can't tell the impact the association has had on me individually, but it can help me better craft my story. Essentially, yeah. And I, the, some of the terms that I've become really, really committed to are people first and event led people first, meaning that you want to showcase personalities and the expertise and event led.

Meaning, meaning that in-person interaction conversations are still gonna be distinguished, highly distinctive content compared with, you know, an AI created blog post. And, and there's no AI that's ever gonna share a beer or a coffee with you at a conference. You know, it's just not gonna happen. And that, and the stories you tell and the [00:31:00] experiences you have when you go to that conference or you join that webinar is, is not gonna be replicated because it's mm-hmm.

It's inherently human. And so that's a lot of this in the deep dives we've been doing into ai and the reason that's spending a lot of time with it is it's really wanna be clearer and clearer. How can AI compliment. That real world of people and every time I talk about associations and our, and our, you know, a lot of our clients are associations.

I, you know, I note that the word association literally means, you know, How do we associate with each other? You know, how do I, how do I find like-minded people that I'm comfortable with that are solving the same problems as me? And so that's, that really is the biggest goal, is how do you make people feel comfortable with each other and the organization they're part of.

All this other stuff is really just to fill in that, that, that, that foundation of, of what is it that people are asking, what is they wanna learn [00:32:00] about and how do you, how do you provide that efficiently? Yeah, that's very well said. And I, as someone who cares deeply about events, I would agree with you, right.

Those common experiences, to your point, are never gonna be replaced. Right. I think we saw that even virtually, right? Like a web, oh, you know, a WebEx meeting for a conference was still not the same. It accomplished the ability to get me the education, but it didn't replicate that face-to-face experience and common experience I had with other attendees.

Exactly. I think, I think in person, you know, Uh, things that were, are gonna continue to be e even enhanced or, or more important as we go forward in the world of AI, are in-person events, events in general, and the authentic stories of people who are part of your association. Be that you know, the people who run your association, or the people who are members or the people who are pers perspective members.

You know, being able to tell those stories and those, and convey that expertise. [00:33:00] It's still gonna be distinct, uh, from, from what AI can give you. And as you just said, like it, it, if you're at a conference or a meetup together, there's nothing that replaces the, the, the banter and the back and forth you get from being there in person.

It's just, it just doesn't. It doesn't get replicated. You, you can learn, you know, you can, you can have chat, g p t write you a song and a script or whatever else, but it's, if it's not a real story, not from a real person that you get to laugh with and, and, and, you know, exchange childhood stories with, that's not, that's not gonna, it's not gonna be the same.

It, it doesn't resonate the same way. Yeah, absolutely. As we, as I'm curious if you have any, Maybe specific you mentioned, right, like prompts for Chache pt and so I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for, you know, maybe our marketing and our communications folks as they start to utilize this as [00:34:00] again, creating that base level of some things.

You know, are there, are there best practices, I guess is maybe what I'm looking for of like how to ask chat G B T in the right way to get the right kind of response that you're looking for. Yes, yes. Yeah. So I, I kind of touched on this earlier and, and the answer I think is that you, it's, it's interesting and kind of a different mindset to think of chat, G B T and these other AI things is almost like, Having personalities and that you can say, I want you to take on this personality as you respond to this.

So you can say, I want you to be serve as a thought leader in the autonomous vehicle industry. And, you know, provide some talking points or key talking points about, you know, the trends in self-driving cars. I want you to, to act as a, as a social media expert and recommends [00:35:00] headlines for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter that will, you know, intrigue people about, you know, again, technologies and, and developments and radar or lidar, you know, detection of, of nearby vehicles.

So that, that kind of first putting on what, what, what. Frame of reference or what frame, frame of mind and, and convert and intellectual level is, is I think one thing that's kind of very different now that we have an ai as you, you can sort of say, I want you to, to, to imagine that you're this and, and the results you get will be tuned a little differently as you get better and better at that.

Yeah. So it's always gonna be, I guess when you start a new conversation with the right, it's always gonna be seated with whatever you start it with at some level. Yes. Yeah. And, and I think over time you can, you can, you'll be able to tune it to, you know, say, well look at the, the [00:36:00] blog posts we've published at, you know, abc do org and help write a new blog post similar, using a similar to tone and manner about a new topic.

And that doesn't. Exists right now, but that's sort of, that capability is, is certainly where we're headed. Where you can, you can try to develop, you know, an assistance to, to, to keep a consistent tone and, and personality and use AI to, to do that. Yeah. Well, in that example, it's in, that just sparked me. It reminded me when I was playing around with this, when I first started, I literally did grab like our join us page, right?

And I said, use the, the text on this page and write me an email to a prospective member. And it did, it wrote a very. Again, not all the things I would say, but not always in the exact way I would say it. But it pulled a lot of good stuff from it and I was like, I'm might, I'm gonna steal that sentence and I'm gonna start using that.

Right, right. So I think, I think this opens up a lot of, a lot of doors. I think It sure does. It sure does. Yeah. We're, we're, you know, we're talking about all the good, there's [00:37:00] obviously some, some bad that there's, you know, there's, there's a potential that this would be, you know, just literally just. Used verbatim and it, it, it's no longer, you know, that's the whole term paper fear is that people just submit term papers, but most of the people that I know that, you know, are, are at the forefront of this.

You know, so that, that's, that's, that shouldn't be our biggest concern. Our biggest concern should be, you know, how do we get to where we know, to how we're able to extract. The kinds of information and the kinds of assistance that we're looking for, and that's gonna make our jobs better, our, our, you know, our marketing more effective.

And so it's, again, it's, it's kind of getting out ahead of it and being, uh, in charge of it and using as an assistant rather than using it as a, an entirely a crutch. Cuz it, it actually doesn't fulfill that promise. It, it would be, it will become apparent I think very [00:38:00] quickly. If you use something that's just cut and paste from, There's, there's just things that, you know, aren't said exactly the way you'd say them.

There are things that are expressed the way you want to, and again, they don't include anecdotes and stories and quotes from people who have had that experience, which is still know that's where the authenticity comes from. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Well, this, I could keep talking to you for a long time about this, I'm sure, but I think we are approaching the end of our time together today.

I did just do something very interesting. I popped onto to chat chi PT quickly, actually, and I put in kind of our questions that we've asked us today. I put in a little bit more about the conversation we've had so far, and I, I asked chat, pt to write me a closing for today's podcast that, uh, great, you know, I've got my normal one, but I'm gonna read this one instead.

So let's see. Scroll down a little bit. Okay, so it says that's all the time we have for today's episode of You Should Hear This. I'd like to extend my sincere gratitude to Rusty Williams for joining us and providing [00:39:00] valuable insights into the integration of AI with associations. If you'd like to learn more about Answer Stage and Rusty's work, please check out the links in our episode description and stay tuned for our next episode.

Until then, keep pushing boundaries and embracing the power of technology. Goodbye. Pretty darn good, huh? That's not bad. So Rusty, truly thank you for being here with us today. I appreciate your thoughts on this and your insights. If folks are interested in getting in touch with you to learn a little bit more about AI or, or what they can do to enhance their work, what's that?

How would they be able to do that? Pretty easy. That's rusty@answerstage.com. Or if by phone you can give me a call at (508) 657-4347. Happy to, happy to. Help guide people wherever, wherever they may want to go. And you know this, this is a brand new. Brand new world, a lot of new, new, new frontiers and it's, it's exciting to talk about it and, and I have to point out that there's a lot [00:40:00] still for, for, for me to learn and all of us to learn.

So it's something we're going through together. Perfect. Well again, thanks for being with us here today and to our listeners, we hope you got a lot out of this. And if you have any topics you want us to explore in the future, just let us know. Sounds great. Well thanks for having me. Thanks Rusty. Bye.