Winter Series, Stacy from @intelligent.designer.ai

The presenting partner for this episode is Pureflor - Use code 'Design' for a sneaky discount  For a better environment | Pureflor

Thanks for listening to this episode of "Designing Success: From Study to Studio"! Connect with me on social media for more business tips, and a real look behind the scenes of my own practicing design business.

Grab more insights and updates:

Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/oleander_and_finch
Like Oleander & Finch on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/oleanderandfinch

For more FREE resources, templates, guides and information, visit the Designer Resource Hub on my website ; https://oleanderandfinch.com/

Ready to take your interior design business to the next level? Check out my online course, "The Framework," designed to provide you with everything they don’t teach you in design school and to give you high touch mentorship essential to having a successful new business in the industry. Check it out now and start designing YOUR own success
(waitlist now open) https://oleanderandfinch.com/first-year-framework/

Remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue providing valuable content to aspiring interior designers. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with actionable insights and inspiring conversations.

Thank you for yo...

Transcript

0:12

Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleandra Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from Study to Studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own today on the Winter series, I wanted to revisit a conversation I had about 40 episodes ago with Stacy, who is the owner of the Instagram account, intelligent designer.ai. And Stacy and I had a big chat about ai and I know that if you follow me and you've seen my stories, you'll know that I have been an early adapter of ai. But I am also trailblazing activity when it comes to creating AI support assistants to go hand in hand with the framework and with my course. Now, today I created one that helps you calculate your pricing. There are some in the wings that will help you to create Instagram captions to create that accompanying hooks and hashtags and to do content creation. And I have a really long list of these AI. Assistants that I now know how to build. So if you have an idea for something that would be really helpful in your business, please do not hesitate to drop into at oleander underscore and underscore Finch, and maybe your bot will be the next bot that I create. So in light of that, while I've been studying how to create all the coding and backend stuff that you need to make these little support wizards, it was highlighted to me that only 37 percent of small businesses are actually using AI. And that to me is shocking. AI is not replacing what I do, but my gosh, it is streamlining. The better and better I get with prompting AI and the more and more I am able to train it to understand my brand voice, to understand who I am and who I am for and who are my ideal clients and how can I get better and better. It's coming up with suggestions. For me to help me to create these support assistants, for example, or it's analyzing the data that I have from the 200 or so designers that I've worked with and their major questions and how I can help them. So it's helping me have a greater impact in the industry and helping me to know what is a good idea versus what is just, you know, maybe they want it, maybe they don't. Anyway, enough about my business. I'm just excited because I am so heavily into the world of AI and it is not scary. There are video tutorials coming with every single one of the support assistants in the framework, and it will teach you how to implement them into into your version of chat. Give me tea. And they just sit on the left hand side in a little sidebar and you can call them in whenever you need them in your conversations, there is going to be for sure a full episode on what it is that I've created, because I know the bots that I am creating are. life changing for your interior design businesses because they allow us to get back to being interior designers and stop us from having to do all of the other things. So I basically teach it in the back end, my process for content creating, et cetera, et cetera, and then teach it to do that process for you. Very, very exciting stuff. So this was a couple of months ago. A lot of this is still relevant. If you are someone who has not explored, Your brand voice, your tone of voice, your ideal clients, their demographics, their psychographics. If you haven't played with chat GPT and asked it questions back and forth and had a conversation, please let this be your sign to do this is the universe saying to you, it's not as scary as you think it is. And when you get it right, it is. is magical. It is only rubbish if you tried it once and you didn't know how to ask it the right questions. You didn't know how to use the prompts. You didn't know what to say to it. So you assumed it didn't do a very good job. So if you need any help, please come and see me over at oleander underscore and underscore Finch. But until you do enjoy this conversation out of the archives with Stacey. Love to hear a bit of background around what's been your experience in general and how did you find yourself in this spot? Like how have you come into AI and AI leadership? Yeah, so it really started with just a natural curiosity. I think like most of us the second half of last year, just started hearing a lot more about AI and the more I started hearing about it, I just got really curious and quickly went down a trail of trying to Learn as much as I could. And as I was piecing together information and tutorials online, I just found that there was a real opportunity for more creatives to be talking about it. I was also a little bit, I found it personally difficult to piece together all of the tutorials that were out there. And I thought it would be really helpful to have more of a central place, AI conversations that are instructed through the lens of a designer and a fellow creative. So that's how I fell into the space of AI education for designers. And it, it took off quite quickly, didn't it? I feel like it, even this. The changes from this time last year to now have been extraordinary in terms of adoption of AI for the wider community. I think there are a lot of us that are early adopters and were like, I'm not going to get left behind in this. I'm going to, I'm curious. I can't break it. I'm going to get in and play with it. And there were some heads in the sand, definitely who were like, I am not going near it. The robots are going to eat us all. I'm not interested. And I think even just from. I saw the other day that you said maybe only 18 percent of Americans were using AI or using it on a daily basis, which was shocking to me, but I would be curious at the Australian statistics to match. Yeah, I think it's. It's a little bit of both, right? I think once, once you start to get in a community of like minded people, then you're hearing about people using it. It's easy to think that more people are using it than the reality. So the statistics out there are surprising, even though we're hearing so much about it, just broadly speaking, there's a lot of people that haven't engaged with AI at all. And then there's also those that maybe haven't even engaged with it. And then to your point, they're very fearful of it as well. So there's really, we're at a point where there's still quite a spectrum of the rate of adoption. The really interesting point, because I guess I would fall into the former category because I use it. I talk to people about it. I teach it in my course. And so I'm so aware of it. I probably think everyone's doing this and they really aren't. There have been a few like mic drop moments in workshops that I've run, marketing workshops. I'm talking about it or going a bit deeper into it and then thinking. Oh, I didn't know it could do any of that. Do you like, Oh, I'm sitting over here thinking everyone's aware that you can just ask for it in a table format instead of in a paragraph format or those little tips that your page does so well to call out and to share so that everyone can start to learn. But yeah, it's amazing. What do you think some of the biggest ways AI is impacting specifically the interior design industry right now? Yeah, so I think right now, there's still a lot of fear and uncertainty around it, so I don't know that we're seeing the impacts as broadly as what we will in a few years. I think there's still a lot of skepticism or not even skepticism, just lack of knowledge and education around it and the right use cases. I think we're really at the very early stages of what that impact is going to be. for having me. If we think about if we zoom out and think about the AEC industry as a whole, so architecture, engineer and construction industry as a whole. It's a very complex industry. So I don't think any fears that designers have of a bot suddenly taking their job. Is just not very likely because of the complexity. If you've ever been a designer, then you know that we, the things that designers have to do, it's a complex job. Because of that, I think there's a lot of job security in the AEC industry, which is encouraging, but where I think some of the biggest impact is going to happen and where we're going to see some of that shift and where we're already seeing that shift are some of those. Processes that lend themselves to automation. If you think about the large building and laying out a floor plate for that building over and over again, there's points in the design journey that really lend themselves to automation and help from AI so that we can focus on more creative parts of the creative process. So I think that's where we're going to start to see the biggest impact, but. I think we have a bit of a way to go until we start to see more broader adoption of some of the tools. Yeah, I agree. And I think. In my, only my personal experience, I've seen a lot of defensive behavior as well. So a lot of designers immediately look, this is really natural for any industry and any business change is scary changes a bit like, but you see immediately this negative reaction. That's not right. Something in mid journey and image, I could have done it properly. It's not to scale. It's not, I feel as though we need to take a breath and step back because often. The intention for that can be a benefit to us and not going to directly compete with us. So where we've got a client and I'm in a consult and I'm at their house and I want to very quickly show them what I can see behind my eyes, but they cannot see. You can sometimes pull up an image in two to three seconds. That's just on now. They understand the bookshelf. We'll get to the technical drawings later, and I'm still going to get hired because that mid journey pitcher can't possibly do what I do. Exactly. I think you hit the nail on the head. It's all about that. And that this is a topic I'm really passionate about is just getting that education out there so that designers don't see it as a threat, but see it as another tool in their toolbox, just as we use other tools. Other tools at our disposal, rendering tools and software. That was a huge leap in the industry. We all thought we were going to be replaced when hand drawings went away and were replaced by computers for the most part with drafting digitally. And so I think it's just, there's always going to be a certain level of resistance around new technology, but it's about that education of, Hey, this is not. This is at least where it is today and in the foreseeable future. This is by no means a replacement. It's just another tool to add into the toolbox. Yeah, and it's so important to remember your clients are not going to use the tool instead of a designer. I think there's a fear there as well that people are like, they won't engage me if they could go in and play. Your clients do not want to learn this tool. They don't want to learn how to use AI imagery in a way that would produce. Anything worth putting in your home, if you use it, great. It's a great backup. As you say, it's a great instrument to use inside of your toolkit and army of everything else that you put into your business. But I don't think my personal opinion is that I don't think clients are going to say, let me just get online and see how to use mid journey to a place where I'm happy with that. And I'm going to go out and make a purchase. Exactly, and it's not unlike if we think about Pinterest, there was a lot of similar comments around Pinterest of and it did. Some of those are warranted right now designers or non designers are putting on a hat of thinking their designer just because they can put a Pinterest board together. So there was a lot of grumbling from the design community when tools like Pinterest 1st launch, because if you went to the doctor, and you said, I. Like I had already diagnosed all of your symptoms, Pinterest and just the amount of information that's out there. It makes clients sometimes feel armed with all this information. And I get that there's a certain level of resistance around that, but again, I think it's so important to think of it as a starting point in the journey. And I personally, I would be all for a client. Bringing me images that they created in mid journey, because to me, that tells me we're going to get aligned much earlier in the process. Visually we've I think all of the have experienced clients that just don't have a strong visual language. And that's 1 of the things that really excites me about AI image generators is that it gives a. Visual language to people that might not have been able to communicate in that way before, and to think about the type of successful collaborations and projects that could come out of that, if you are aligned with your client much earlier and having that consistent visual language as a springboard for the rest of the design process. Yeah, I think it's such a time saving result that people don't factor in. I know you're right. I would rather be like, why go off and do an entire concept when your green meant blue? It can be that simple, but being able to like, just get that language, get that moving, get that whole process tight in concept. Stage so that you're not actually redrawing and drawing again and or re realigning and then you can lose confidence really quickly because you end up having to get on a call and say, maybe I don't understand what you mean. Can we start again? And that really mojo wise hurts your business, doesn't it? Because you feel like I'm maybe not the best. So yeah, I think all positives as far as I see it. Exactly. Are there any specific design tasks that you think AI really excels at where creativity or human touch is still critical, but AI is doing really well at? Yeah, I think, again, it really comes back to, and this is such a great question because it comes back to knowing and education around the tools to know where they excel right now and also to understand the limitations and where they don't excel. And I'm. Very big on being transparent about that, about when to use it and when to not. So if we think about the whole design process, I think personally, I feel like they're best suited right now for that earlier part of the design process. So just like we were talking about with concept design, with early iteration, with brainstorming as a creative collaborator. So that I would say is the most obvious point right now in the design process to use it. But that said. There are so many creative ways and things that I'm personally pretty excited about when we think about tools, like just even chat bots about ways to start utilizing those text based AI tools and other parts of the design process as well. So when you think about client communication, project management. Task management further down the process or going the opposite direction way upstream when we think about sales and marketing and all the other things that designers are usually tasked with, whether you own your own firm, or you're just responsible for new business inside of your firm. They can help so much with those upstream tasks as well. So right now, the obvious answer is to think about it for that brainstorming piece, but I think there's a real opportunity, especially with chat bots to think about ways that you can start leveraging them through other areas of the process as well. Yeah. I think it's important. It's an important thing to do. Maybe even in your quarterly planning or monthly is to audit your business. Look at the tasks that are not automated and think about the possibilities for AI, because I've found that I have just, and it's not just chat GPT, AI is not just chat GPT and it's not just the captions and social media. It's, I have said this in a previous podcast episode, but I follow the hashtags like hashtag, AI for AI tactivity, all that stuff, because on that hashtag, a whole bunch of people post what they've just tried. If it's gamma for presentations or it's other forms of AI tools, I've found that really helpful for staying on top of things and actually getting in there and not putting your head in the sand, but going, okay, what are people doing to automate business? Business stuff, basically, not necessarily how are they using it specifically to support of design, but I am also a designer who runs a business. Press one button and it's all done now and I'm no longer responsible. So I think it's good to audit what tasks could be possible and then go and ask AI. What does that look like? What do you need? How does it work? Does it even work yet? And look at the, what it spits out and if it's still in experimental phasing, but it's still rubbish. Just check it again next month because it's getting better fast, right? Like it's so fast. Yes. And that's such an important point because I think some sometimes there's the tendency, I can't tell you how many people I've heard from is I've tried that and I didn't understand my prompt at all. It didn't sound anything like me. So I didn't use it again. I didn't find it helpful. And it's, oh my gosh, like that you're just to judge a whole platform of tools, just based on one entry point. So it's like anything else it takes. It's a new tool. It's a new skillset. We're all learning. So it's going to require curiosity and then just repetition and a willingness to try new things, try new tools and go back to old tools, because to your point, they're literally evolving on a weekly and monthly basis, and they are going to spit out nonsense until you know how to use. It's like saying you won't. Go ahead with your design career. Cause the first mood board that you ever made was like pretty rough. And so you're like, okay, I won't do this, but obviously you're going to get better and better. And you're going to go to design school and you're going to educate yourself and learn. So for anyone out there who is sitting in that team, try it at once. Doesn't think it for you, I would really implore you to go back and have another visit and check out some of the free advice available to you, like your Instagram page, I will link that in the show notes, but going in and actually thinking, Oh, that sounds fun. I do get feedback from the masterclass that's on my website. Just things like, I didn't know you could do like brand tone, or I didn't realize that I could work with AI to explore deeper elements that are not in my wheelhouse. I am not. It's given me more confidence with copy because of the exposure, but personally, I still have to ask it a lot of questions about writing and teach me a bit more about this. So if I'm, yeah, curiosity is really the key word that you use there. I think you have to be a mind that wants to get in there and pick apart at it and see what it can give you. Exactly. Yeah. And I like to think of it too, sometimes is it, I think a lot of people are entering into the, using the space as a brainstorming tool, which I've mentioned, we've talked about, but there's also this idea of using it as a critic. If you're, if it's something that is not part of your normal skill set, or not something you feel confident in, take a first pass at it and then use the AI as a means of. For feedback and that in and of itself, I think when people realize that they can use it in that way, the light bulbs just go off for the other ways that they can start engaging with it. Absolutely. You also hear lots of stuff about context is key, but I find like just stripping it back to a literally a conversation. This is what is troubling me right now. This is what I'm really struggling with. How can you help me? What are your suggestions for something that's a high impact result with low effort? Because as you can hear from what I just explained when I typed it in, I'm strained or overworked or this is a task that I'm. Have big resistance to, so how can we make it easy for me? Talking to your robot, I think is really, maybe I get better results personally. I don't know if that's how normal people use it, but I feel like if I've got a problem, I present the problem because it's whole MO is to give me the answer. Exactly. Another sort of helpful way to think about it too is thinking about it. If you were talking to an assistant or an intern or someone that you were offloading a task to, there would be some minimum amount of information that you would give that person. Sometimes I think people set out to use it and they mistake AI for a mind reader and it's not a mind reader. So if you think about it through the lens of AI, There was someone at work that I was giving this task to, what are some of the things that I would tell them? And that makes it feel a lot more natural and helps to give the AI the information that it needs to give you a better output. I really love that. I love that in times gone by, I've had lots of conversations with designers around when is the time to outsource when it's the time to bring on a VA. I've got too much work. I don't know what I'm doing. And I feel like what a time to be alive in business because now you have literally, you're not doing it alone anymore. If you want to ask it to be a business strategist, go ahead. If you want to ask it to be a VA, go ahead and find a way to do a data. Heavy task. If you want to ask it to be a social media strategy, like whatever it is that you would love to be able to afford to outsource or hire one of these people. We now have a team just by asking AI to act as that type of copywriter and give me suggestions on the copy I've written to make it more professional or in a different tone, I love that. Yeah, exactly. I think it can be, it's the age old question of once you can start lifting your head up and thinking about what to outsource, it's hard to prioritize what. And there's just so much potential. And it's not saying that you may never need a marketing team or whatever it might be further down in the process, because just like designers have a level of expertise, so do those fields. But it's a great starting point, especially for, Small businesses that have to be really thoughtful about where they're making those investments. For me personally, I get asked all the time, like how I launched my course and my Instagram page on top of, I have a nine to five job and I have two very small children. And I say all the time. It wouldn't have been possible without AI, because using AI through every part of that course launch journey and the marketing content that I put out, it just helped me expedite things in a way that would not have been feasible if I wasn't using AI. It's such a great bridge or band aid, as you say, for small business. We're not usually going from Getting overworked, getting really busy and stepping into a team of 10. Like we're not usually doing that. So knowing that you've got 10 different types of skills that you can ask for and get some advice is really helpful. And I've seen it do some really random things, like people asking it about It's a synopsis for a text on boat mechanics or tell it to me. I'm a person who knows nothing about that. Or so if something's beyond me, I'm liking that you can just go in and say, I have this challenge in my life. People are using it for food planning, like meal planning with kids. And I think people sometimes are not thinking broad enough about the idea that you. What is the worst thing that GPT or another form of AI can tell you? I'm sorry, I can't do that for you, but if you don't ask, you don't get, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The thinking broadly, and that's where I think it comes into just getting in there and starting to engage with it because the more you use it, like anything else, that's just going to open up your mind to the various ways that it can be employed. And where I get really excited about it as well as what we're starting to see with the custom GPTs and the GPT store that OpenAI just launched. And for those that are listening, if all that sounds like a foreign language, basically, if we think about chatbots in their current form, like chat GPT They're very general, right? So every time you engage with it, it's starting from scratch. And so with custom, there'll be a lot more tailored to specific tasks and heading into a direction of a much more personalized, really assistant compared to how we're engaging with it today. So that to me is just a really exciting direction, and I think that's going to propel the adoption rate further when there is more of those tailored use case people feel like they can engage with it, but saves in editing time, doesn't it? And I have the pro version, which allows me for customization in. The bottom, like where you can tell it some things, but for the Australian listeners who are listening, it is about 20 Australian a month, and you can switch it on and off. So if you've got a lot of tasks that you're going to need AI in the next month or so, if you want to block your tasks, cause you don't want to increase your subscriptions, I still thoroughly recommend at least once every three months, upping it and doing a lot of tasks in there, because. The difference is quite noticeable. Like it is like that four is a big jump from three and a half. It's quite a more customized experience. It definitely knows my ideal client. It's talking in my tone of voice. And so I have to do a lot less. Fiddling around with the responses that I get. Exactly. Yeah. Toggling between those different model versions and then experimenting with different chatbots as well. Like Google Bard, which was the laughingstock of the GPT world for some time. It's not bad now. It's good. Now it's really improved. It's quickly becoming one of my go to. So it just, again, speaks to that, if it's something that you haven't used in a while, go and try it again. Yeah, so such a good reminder, even, yeah, I feel like even though I do use things, there are things that I've tried and thought it's slow to return a result or the result wasn't perfect. And I did want to talk to you about ethical considerations, because I think, especially in the design industry, we talked about that sort of defensive feelings before, but then there are a lot of ethical considerations around sharing images that have been AI created versus a render that we have spent hours on, et cetera. And a client lands on your page. Can't tell the difference is possibly thinking that you made that. What are your tips around that and what should we all keep in mind when using AI powered tools online? This is a great question and I'm so glad you included it. It could probably be a whole podcast episode in and of itself. And it's, I spent an entire lesson in my course talking about it because it's so important, right? And there it's multi layered. This might be a bit of a long answer, but I think it warrants it. Off the bat, one thing that I always tell people to be mindful of too is just, and this is where that education piece comes in, is understanding how AI tools work. So image generators are trained on an existing set of images of data. And because of that, It is AI tools are subject to bias and hidden bias. So that is something that right off the bat, anything that you're generating with AI, whether that's an image or a piece of content, it is up to you as the creator before you publish that anywhere. To make sure that it's not showing anything that could be biased, making sure that the information is accurate because there are still things like hallucinations where the bot will just make stuff up. So it is up to you to put that critical thinking hat on to make sure that what you're putting out there is a good reflection of what you want to be putting out into the world. So that's layer number one. And then, yeah, there, there's a lot of conversations right around. If. Is it, can you even call it yours? It because it was trained on other people's images. And that's a very fair question. And there's a spectrum for this as well. I've talked to some designers who say I would never be comfortable putting that on my page cause it's not something that I did, but here's the thing, right? If you think about where we're finding inspiration already, if you think about Pinterest or if you don't use Pinterest, other sources, Google images, magazines, books, free. The entire duration of the design of our design careers, we have pulled inspiration from other designers and design. It's just a natural part of the creative process. When you think about it that way, this is just another means to do that. It's another source of inspiration with the caveat being. I am a huge proponent of transparency. So if it is, if you are putting an AI image on your page, make it known that it's an AI image. If you're sharing it with a client in a proposal, make sure they understand that as well. So they don't think that was this some kitchen that this designer design that you didn't actually design, share with them how you're using it and explain to them how you're using it as a tool in your process, but it's. All about transparency and then the final part is to also just be really considerate around privacy policies as well. And the information that you're sharing with it. A lot of people don't realize when they start using image generators, like mid journey, which is 1 that a lot of us are familiar with. And if you're not it's just, it's 1 of the more popular image generators that it's out there. Every image that you create, unless you're subscribed to the premium subscription plan, there's not even an option to do it in private mode. So every image that you create, and not only that, every prompt that you put out there is all publicly viewable. So there's that piece of it. And then with chatbots, the same thing. So say you get You're using it for, to help generate ideas or something for a client. If you're uploading that client's information or sharing information about your client to that tool, that's something you would definitely want to make sure you're disclosing and being transparent with your client about, so they have a clear understanding of how you're using it as well. So this is where, again, it's a long answer and I could talk about any one of those buckets in more detail. But those are just some of the main things that I think it's not just, it's none of this is to scare designers away from using it. It's just making sure that you're, you have that education so that you're using it the right way, the responsible way. Yeah, I 100 percent agree with all of that. And I think it just comes down to ethics. So knowing that when you are posting something and it always represents your brand in a better light and nobody ever cares that you have a tool like AI to create that particular thing. Things that are being returned. I recall way, way back having a go on Prome AI and some other stuff. And the images, when you type in a basic prompt are so like, Oh, we've got nothing to fear here. You type in coastal, you get starfish. Like it's not really thinking about it from a designer kind of eye and it has improved and it has changed, but I think it's all really great points, especially to your point before around the. The clarity the client needs to have about how you use it to present ideas to them, but they shouldn't expect that's the room they're going to walk into. Because often you're getting these, I find even culturally influenced stuff. You're getting from us in Australia, we get a lot of American looking granite benchtops or countertops. And you've got your, The large great rooms, for example, and that's not actually how we live. So when we design one and it falls in like that, if you really wanted to analyze this, you'd probably find that's not a real room. And that's not what you should expect when you're working with me. I think a lot of the resistance that I have seen is people worried about designers not being clear and not being upfront and therefore writing it off as their own work. So then you go to their Instagram portfolio and you can see it's all AI generated. And I think that's where there's been a little bit of negativity in that whole ethical side of things, because some people are growing through work that they don't want to do. They can pop out in five seconds because it's AI generated. And it doesn't say anywhere that they have used that tool to help them provide that level of eye candy. To me, it's like one of those things. Sure. There's always going to be people with any tool that use it. Maybe not in the way that's ethical or responsible, but as a design community and industry, I think. I don't feel like we need to be too fearful of that because that sort of thing is going to even itself out in time. If it's truly a designer or a non designer that's just relying on AI generated images, it's not going to take very long for a client to realize that. Even if the images are super realistic, there's a certain level of experience. It's going to be very evident that person does not have. So I don't think it's an area. We need to be overly concerned about and it's certainly shouldn't outweigh all of the benefits in terms of how we can use it responsibly to drive positive change for our industry. And that's where I think the important thing is. It's sometimes for the folks that just go so quick to the skeptical side or to the, what if it does, what if people use it this way? Or what if this bad result happens? It's just, it really limits the conversation. And Stops all of the meaningful progress that could happen within the design community. If we adopt it in a responsible way. And are you seeing an increase in that suspicious nature and skepticism of effectively, we're talking about artificial intelligence. We're talking about something that has been. on and around the radar for all of my life, 40, whatever years. And you go, we've always known, but known with fear, we've known with movies, like where it all goes wrong. So what is the sort of consensus out there in the wider community around AI? Is there still a lot of suspicion? I think so. If we take from my own just school, right? If I think about my community on Instagram, I've actually been Pleasantly surprised about the, I was expecting more negativity around it. And the response has been overall very positive, like occasional outliers. I think it's just, it just really comes back to that. Education piece because the more you know about it, the less there is to fear of it. I think there are certainly people in that camp that are going to remain skeptics. But my hope is that the community that design community is just open to it enough to learn about it and then make an informed decision of whether it's something that they want to use or not. And the good thing is I don't think there's any clients who would specifically call out, please don't use AI during my process or please don't do this. It's not that kind of pushback. It's more those who don't, who are afraid won't, and then they just won't, they'll be left behind for someone who will. So it's, yeah. Yeah, I think I don't think we're that far off from designer or non designers and clients actually coming to designers with ideas or things that they've created or thought about through AI. And at a certain point, there is probably going to be a certain level of expectation that you, as a designer and service provider are educated on the tools as well. So that's why I think the more that we can get ahead of it and also. The more we know, the more than we as designers can have a seat at the table to help. Steer the AI tools that are being created in a direction that will be positive for our industry as well. Great point. I was just thinking then around our pricing structures and how they can be affected by, obviously there are many designers who price via, by the hour or on retainers. And if you're able to present a quicker result for your client, it's a win, you're doing less. Yeah. You're charging less, but that. Brings you onto the next job, like that shouldn't be a problem at all. And I think clients really would appreciate if designer A is able to do something in that time because they use AI versus designer B whose quote is three times as much because they do it all manually. I think I know which one the client's probably going to lean towards in the future. So it's worth considering your payment structures as well and whether or not you need to be really thinking about marching that timestamp forward so that you can get on with another job. Exactly. What sort of resources would you recommend for interior designers who want to learn more about AI besides just getting in there and trying not to break it? That's one thing, and it's all good to say that, but you don't know what you don't know just getting in there isn't going to give you a result and education around how to get the best result out of it. So what resource would you recommend? Yeah. So I think there's a range out there, right? From firsthand experience, you can definitely cobble together bits and pieces of information on free platforms like YouTube tutorials and other creators that you follow on Instagram that are starting to engage with it, searching for hashtags and then following users that way that are starting to use it. Certainly my course, which was created to, to help interior designers navigate the world of AI. And it's really meant to be that sort of that mindset of a lot of the AI education that's out there was really I found it to be much more like written by technologist for its technologist and I think we're still there's more coming out every day, which is great. I love to see more designers out there, not only learning it, but educating fellow designers on it. So I think there's more coming in the meantime. Yeah. You can certainly check out things, free resources online, and then would welcome anyone into my course as well. Who wants to learn more? Beautiful. I'll get the details from you and pop them in the show notes, which should be great. Do you have any predictions, hot predictions for me, how AI will transform the interior design industry in the next few years? What do you think is coming? Yeah. So a couple of things. One, I think. The more the tailored is so instead of the generic chat, more Taylor is that have specific use cases for designers. I think we're going to see an emergence of those, which is going to be hugely helpful. I think we're going to see on the, especially in the commercial design side. A much broader adoption of tools that can help with some of that floor plan automation and building optimization which I think is fantastic because it takes out some of that more tedious work and freeze up time to focus on the much more creative parts of the process. And also that could be. Hugely advantageous as we start to think about how we can use AI to optimize buildings for sustainability, for carbon neutrality, for egress and includes inclusive design. For all of those things, I think that could be extremely, Transformative if we can start leveraging to help with some of those areas. And then I also think just we're going to start to see the image generators. They're already getting better every day. But where I think what we're going to start to see, there's a huge push as you can imagine from retailers. If you've experimented with Transcripts Image generators, it's not real products. So you'll get a pendant light. That's maybe beautiful, but you can't source it, which is obviously a big frustration for designers for the clients and for retailers who want their products to show up. And so I think that is coming and probably coming faster than we think where it will be specifiable. Products that appear in the image generators. So good. She can't see me because I'm obviously this is an audio platform, but I am definitely fist pumping over here. Cause I just think that would be incredible to be able to really quickly. And I know that there'd be people out there because I have an e design business and there's people that, oh my goodness, how will I charge the same amount? And how will I do this and that? It is, again, a tool. Right now, it's just taking you a really long time to put your selections and procurements together in a shoppable way. Now it's just instant, but that doesn't take away from you being able to charge for the same ability to curate all those pieces and put them together and know that they're amazing. I just don't see that as a tool. Any kind of glitch except for speed, let's take on more clients. Cause all I had to do was now it's good to go. I love that. Exactly. Fingers crossed. And I love how many things are coming. As you say on the daily, like it's constantly changing and growing. It's anyone's guess. What kind of conversation we could be having next February about it. It's wow. Now I am going to finish up with one question. Put you on the spot here. Tell me something on AI that will blow my mind. This is a tough one. I think this is something that I learned recently that I think a lot of people don't know that they can do. So with tools, with chatbots, where that are able to use the real time internet, for example, Bing chat is one of them, you can Feed Bing Chat your own website or your competitor's website or whatever website you want and use it as a critic to help inform what improvements you could make in your sales copy, in your seo, in your keywords. and also learn from your competitors of what they're doing really well and take those nuggets and apply it to help you improve as well. So I think that when I think about the functionality, that connection back to the real time internet, there's so many exciting ways that designers could be leveraging. I love that. I also love that Some of those words that you use there are quite terrifying to some creative around SEO and keywords and knowing exactly what to do. So we do a little bit of head in sand there because I just, it keeps going back down your to do list because you know it. So knowing that there's something, some sort of tool where you can get it to analyze it, get it to give you high impact changes that you're capable of. And to actually tell you what to do to move the needle, to make a difference, to work on stuff in your business. That's great. Going to drive a result is amazing. Rather than just going, I don't really know, and like maybe plugging it in, getting some advice or paying as he said before, and it was a really good point. There are always going to be places where we do want to hire a copywriter instead of having AI generated sales page copy, because we want that personal touch and that deep knowledge of your tone and what you want it to do. It does a lot of heavy lifting for you, right? So you want to get it right. And so if you're. Skillset isn't in the editing of what comes out of AI, then that is where the bridge needs to be the professional. I think you still definitely do need to get a web developer or someone SEO specialist, if that is something that you are really struggling to understand. But for some people, that's just the perfect result because it's quick, it's easy, it's doing it, and it's better than doing nothing. Which is what is currently happening to most people who don't know anything about that world. So I think that might, that did blow my mind. I think it's a great thing. And also it's something you mentioned before about limitations and understanding the limitations. There'd be people listening who didn't know it's not live time, internet, everything that we're doing. So knowing a bit more about what. AI you're using and then what it's capabilities that you can even ask it. What are you, what are your limitations? What are your best features? How do I get the best out of you? Like, how do I get the best result? What do I do for you to give me something way better than that? Cause that was beige vanilla. Exactly. Yeah. It's honestly, it can be as simple as that of just asking and staying curious. Then when you don't know, ask it and see what you get from it. The conversations get a bit funny sometimes. You do realize I consistently use my manner when I talk to my AI and I like to think if they ever do turn against us, at least I was always the polite one who said, please, when I asked for 10 or 110 ideas and brainstorming things that suit my ideal client. Yeah, there's some fun tricks that people either they think they're not true, but there's actually all this research that supports that some Funny hacks, like telling it that you're going to reward it by paying it in gold or that you really need, you desperately need help and using emotional language or saying that you're going to tip 2, 000 or whatever it might be. It actually is proven to respond better to certain types of prompting that might seem ridiculous, but there again, that just goes to the education piece and experimentation of. See it, keeping yourself informed about what's out there for prompt writing tips, and then having some fun applying it. That sounds good. I remember way back in the early days doing things like asking it to return results in certain celebrities tones and stuff. So you would get the results written as though it was spoken by Matthew McConaughey, for example, or got a real cheesy sort of thing come back. And I think it is important to have fun as well, because Life is too serious otherwise, and it's just a robot. It's not, it's just a tool and it can make you feel a little bit more connected. To your point before around the emotional side, I'm desperate. I need help or whatnot. I think that there must just be something in the background where it has. The ability and the knowledge to prioritize tasks that need to happen straight away versus things that might just be acceptable and so on. So I think when we talked about to tell it what you're really struggling with and give it that kind of language, I have found better results with that. This is stopping me. It's taking far too long. It shouldn't be taking long. How do I make it better? What are your Thoughts, suggestions, thoughts, we use that term broadly, but what do you think is the way forward? Yeah, I just think it's a lot of fun to, to get help and it's very lonely running your own small business. So you've got a new friend in your pocket. Yeah, and honestly, that's such a common theme. I hear from other designers, too. It's very hard to design in a silo. So feeling like you have this creative companion that never runs out of energy that you can always have tap into for these sort of creative brainstorming sessions. And I love what you said about, having fun, because I think if we think about the creative process, we know that creativity is fueled when we're in a relaxed, playful, happy, joyful state of mind. And if we can think about ways to infuse that into the creative process, that's a reason to go, especially when I think about the image generators, just go and have a full moment and see what it comes up with, because that's where you might find some. Completely different inspiration or a different direction for your project that you might not have been thinking about before where you think outside of the box and that I encourage designers so much to just think about it in that way even if you're not using it for a very specific reason, just go, if nothing else, go and have a little bit of fun, a moment of fun in your day by experimenting with it. I love that. I will leave it there. Thank you so much for today. I have learned a lot. My mind has been blown. I'm looking forward to just getting further and further into that AI world because it is a lot of fun and it is very helpful and very focused on making my time easier in small business. I will link everything in the show notes for you today so people can reach out to you, follow you, come and check out your course if they want to get further into the AI world specifically for interior designers. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. See you later. That was still exciting. Second time around. I really enjoyed it. I am so grateful. I hope that it helps one or two of you to think, okay, it's not as scary as it seems. Let's give it a go. And the new look framework is going to launch with a massive bang. There's going to be support assistance, GPTs to help you get through the course faster and faster. They're going to help you do things like analyze pricing, look at Content creation, look at marketing and messaging and all the things that I actually teach, but in a way where you'll be utilizing chat GPT a lot more so we can get it done really quick. If that's something that interests you and you're interested in either the startup level for emerging designers or the scale level for established designers, please DMs over at oleander underscore and underscore Finch or check the show notes to join the wait list because it will all be launching in a matter of weeks and there's a big offer coming. I will not be chatting to you next Tuesday. I've decided to take a fortnight off because I have all these bots to build and I have a whole course to restructure and school holidays and being a one man show, the Swiss army knife of my business, I'm doing it all and I don't take a break from the podcast really. I think I took a little one over the summer time. So this is my winter break. I'm going to take a couple of weeks and I will be back. I'll see you then. I will probably drop some more of the Winter Series as we go, as a little surprise for you. Maybe keep the Thursdays, but the solo episodes and pairing it back for a couple of weeks. And I cannot wait to catch up with you on my return and tell you all about it. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at Ollyanda underscore and underscore Finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. ollyandaandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.