What you really need to know about AI and how to use it to save time in your business (with Ronsley Vaz)

Ronsley Vaz is a podcasting specialist, author and TEDx speaker with an extensive background in computer and software engineering. The host of multiple podcasts, including My AI Love Affair, Ronsley joins me today for an eye-opening chat on all things AI.

– Ronsley's podcasting journey and why he is pivoting his focus to the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
– The importance of “not being the intelligent being that fears intelligence” by breaking down the definition of AI.
– Defining the endless opportunities of AI and the benefits of using this in your business with “empathy”.
– Why exploring AI at a deeper level is imperative to debunk the misconceptions of today's users.
– Understanding the practicalities of AI and the outcomes it can provide using the correct context.

Listen to Ronsley's podcast at MyAiLoveAffair.com

 

 
Today, I'm so excited to bring to you my good friend, mentor, podcasting expert, and AI expert, Ronsley Vaz. Ronsley's been in the podcasting world for 11 years, but he has an incredible background in computer engineering and software engineering, which makes him so perfectly positioned for this new world of AI, Artificial Intelligence. 

Maybe you've heard about ChatGPT, maybe you've been using it, maybe you are terrified of it and in today's conversation, we are diving deep into what AI looks like, how it actually works, not how I originally thought it worked, and many of you might think that it works and how you can start to use it in a more practical sense in your business.

Now, Ronsley is an author, podcaster and TEDx speaker. He's the host of multiple podcasts, including his newest one, My AI Love Affair, where he talks about how he's used AI to save a heck of a lot of time in his business and in podcasting. He's been listened to more than 5. 1 133 countries. And he's one of those people that I just call a smart cookie.

Ronsley, welcome back to Imperfect Action. Ronsley, you have obviously got a huge background as a podcast producer, podcast marketing agency, all of the things podcasting, and now you have started another podcast called My AI Love Affair.

 

What made Ronsley start his new podcast and how did he get into the world of AI.

What made you start this? What made you get into the world of AI and what made you start the podcast?

“Well, before I was a podcaster and before everyone knew me as a podcaster, it's really weird because now no one could even imagine that I had a job at one point, but I did. I had a career and my formal training was as a software engineer. So I did my Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering. It took four years to get that degree and I took 64 exams to get that degree.

I worked for a few companies, and then I went and got a Masters of Software Engineering, where I wrote a thesis on process quality. So now everyone talks about Agile methods. My thesis was on Agile methods and how to measure quality. And then I got my first job out of university, which was lucky because I got to implement my thesis and I took two companies to ISO 9001, which is great, which is a standard.

You know, different companies are measured when it comes to quality processes. So companies get acquired as a result of this ISO 9001 or different types of accreditations that they get because that certifies the company that they're doing the processes in the right way, they're not ad hoc. 

So they paid for an MBA, which I did at Q.U.T and I did that in psychology and leadership. So, following all that, doing my master's of business administration, I saw business, which was crazy and I saw the whole world as an opportunity, which I never saw before. And I thought because I was always told I was a technical person. Everyone told me, Hey, you're technically very gifted. You need to be a technical person, not even realising that there was this whole area of business and management and that I was missing out on. And as soon as I got exposed to that, it just opened up a whole new world and that's when I became an entrepreneur.

So, I started the new business because I've seen a lot of people give that advice. In fact, when I was a podcaster, someone who just started a podcast started to help others but it doesn't, definitely does not work in an AI world. So, after a lot of arguments with myself, I finally sort of stepped into that and here we are.”

 

What makes Ronsley excited about AI as an entrepreneur, as a content creator and a podcast creator.

“I feel like it's important when things are not clear to make sure that you mentioned that are not clear, like how you just mentioned, like these things are going over my head. And I feel like because of that, there is this reasoning to kind of really understand what artificial intelligence is.

So let's break this down, right? It's very simple to think about artificial intelligence. But it's also very easy to get confused because we've been using search all this time and we just think that we put stuff in the chatGPT is going and searching for something and it's coming and returning back like how Google used to.

And I want to clarify that and say that artificial intelligence is just a silicon-based life form while we are a carbon-based life form. It can think like us, it can reason like us and it is built on our neurology, it is built on our psychology, it is built on our long-term, short-term memory. It is built to think just like us and reason like us.

The only difference is artificial intelligence right now is in its infancy. So it's still a kid learning and there will be a point where that will flip. So, I'm excited because I do not want to be the intelligent being who fears intelligence and I want everyone else not to be in that same boat.” 

And I think the reason everyone's fearing it is because we just don't understand it. I mean, the way you explained it just then is the very first time I've heard it explained like that. And, I've been using chat GPT, I've got a whole bunch of apps, like all the AI apps and things. That's the first time that I've actually thought of it in, wow, that is, that is mind-blowing.

 

What are the huge opportunities that business owners can start to use with AI and what’s the journey ahead.

“Let's deal with the first question. I think what's happening right now is that we all have to realise that artificial intelligence is going to easily be the biggest conversation of our lifetime. I'm not even exaggerating. I'm going to say that by magnitudes larger than anything we've thought about before, it's easily going to be the biggest conversation of our lifetime.

It's going to change the way we do things and if you think about the different ages that came, you had the industrial revolution that made machines a commodity. So industry became a commodity. We now have washing machines. We would not be caught dead for three hours washing our clothes anymore, right?

We just press the button because the industrial revolution came and gave us machines, and machines can do a lot of cool things. Because of those two ages, the Industrial Revolution that gave machines, and Information Revolution that gave information, we now have the Intelligence Revolution which is commoditising intelligence.

So we need to understand that AI has just commoditised intelligence. So we've got to use it in the right way and the best way to use it is to understand that we need to be part of this conversation. So we need to use it for us to understand what to say or even how to begin the conversation and the main thing is that we've got to use AI with empathy. That is probably that one line might actually save our species because if we don't change the way we do things right now, we will be extinct soon.

 

AI with empathy.

“Thinking about the other person, right? Thinking about how you're using it, thinking about where it is applicable, not how am I going to benefit from it? It's like, where does empathy come into play? Empathy comes when you understand the other position.

And I think that is super important. All we're thinking about is our position and if we do not change that. Right now, artificial intelligence is amplifying what we have captured as history, but who's written the history? White colonial people have come and told indigenous people that their ways of doing things are uncivilised, and this is a new way of doing things. And it's really important for us to capture those conversations, capture that wisdom that has been lost and destroyed and burnt in a lot of instances.”

 

The good thing about AI when we start to use AI with empathy.

“If we just start to use AI with empathy, everything is good. We can solve some of the world's biggest problems. 

So, if we think about the good news, I think people are only going to be scared if they think that they can't change. People are only going to be scared if they only think about themselves and that's obviously scary because we are not taught to think about other people. We're actually forced to think about ourselves and in a lot of the instances and in a lot of the literature in some places, they kind of go, well, if you don't think about yourself, no one else will.”

 

Things we can start to do with AI in our business.

“Well, I think in general, as a business owner, entrepreneurship is lonely, right? We're just kind of usually in a silo and a lot of the time people around us don't actually understand the way our brains work. However, the machines will if we kind of ask it in the right way. So when we are ideating, that's probably the best time to use Artificial Intelligence.”

What you're telling me is AI in general can give us that level of depth that we'd be able to get from having that conversation with a real human.

“I think it will be deeper than asking someone because a lot of the times when you're asking someone the question, they are trying to figure out to give you the answer. Sometimes they either give you the answer because you're in front of them or they're trying to make it out because they have not thought about it before.

However, artificial intelligence doesn't have that bias and doesn't have that sort of thing. So you can actually refine until you get to a point where you kind of go, Okay, that's exactly what I'm after. And I think that we are at a point right now where that intelligence is already available and doing it manually is like going into the bathroom and washing your clothes for three hours.” 

 

Some of the big mistakes that people are making with AI.

“Well, I think in general what tends to happen is in this digital world we see other people doing stuff and we think that we need to be experts straight away and this is the big misconception. So, really understand how prompting works. Understanding what the context is, really understanding how a computer thinks or how we think because that's exactly the way the computers are built. How we take information and how we process information. 

And here is the thing, for every business owner, the biggest jump they can go through is going from solopreneur to entrepreneur because from solopreneur to entrepreneur you bring the team into focus. And a lot of us are not business owners or haven't learned to be business owners and that big jump is a whole new learning because we've got to learn recruitment, we've got to learn team management, we've got to learn operations, we've got to learn culture. There are a lot of new aspects of business play that come into play when we're talking about solopreneur to entrepreneur jump.

Now, artificial intelligence is no different. It is you, if you don't have a background and you just copied someone else's prompt and you've got a result and you don't know what to do with it from there, that is a problem right there. So really going in and understanding how artificial intelligence works, especially prompting, because now you see multi-modal functions coming into GPT 4, which is fascinating.

And for everyone's mistakes, we are going to chatGPT or AI to try to do the things that we are really good at, that's the big mistake everyone's making. Go and do the things you're not good at and ask intelligence to make, to give you a superpower.”

 

How does Ronsley structure a prompt in a way that is unbiased.

“I'll just ask it a question like how you would normally ask a question of someone that you don't want bias from. So getting that fresh perspective is where you can start to sort of see the blind spots that you have.” 

 

How to properly utilise chatGPT.

“So if a lot of us business owners who've never been to marketing school, don't realise that there are marketing frameworks and copywriting frameworks which the world is built on and marketing is built on and content is built on. So, we kind of just use whatever we've been taught or whatever we've used in the past before and just replicate that.

Now, the best way to use artificial intelligence is to take a framework that exists and then apply your particular personalised situation to that framework. Now that could be the sunken cost bias is a framework that you can use to write a landing page where someone has invested money into something and they don't want to lose that and you can write copy from that perspective. Now you can find a whole bunch of copy frameworks. So depending on where you're at, if you're kind of creating a landing page, you're creating an email nurture sequence, you're creating a sales page, you're creating a sales email, whatever it is that you're making, there's a framework for it. 

So find that framework, figure out what the pieces of the input that framework require, and then ask intelligence to do that for you from your personalised vantage point of this is my business, these are the people I help, this is the way, this is the outcome I give them, this is how I give them the outcome. Now apply this framework and write me some sales copy.” 

 

How Ronsley produces his podcast using an AI.

“Everything is AI'd. When I started doing podcasting, I had to look at the waveform. I can tell you from a waveform what's an um and an uh, yeah, right? And, um, and now, I don't think anyone even looks at waveforms when they edit, that has changed quite a lot.”

If I see anybody editing their podcast in GarageBand, Audition, or any of the things where they're looking at a waveform, I'm like, sorry, what are you doing? You know, you can do this in Descript now. It's so much easier.

“The main reason for that is we've known these algorithms, machine learning, and deep learning algorithms for decades, right? This has been around for a long time. What has changed is that computers have gotten faster, so processing speed has gone up. Network speeds have gone up and storage has become cheaper because of these three main factors, the last year has exploded. And that's why everyone thinks that AI has just come. AI has been around for a long time.”

 

Would AI really replace someone else’s job?

“Well, the same advice I'm going to give. I would give a driver who would tell me that their job is going to go. Drivers in particular have had at least a decade to make a change. So if a driver comes up to me now and says, Hey, you know, my job is going to go to driverless cars or driverless vehicles. I'll be like, dude, you have, you had a decade to prepare. 

So I would say the same thing for everyone now, you have time to prepare. Don't use ignorance and lack of knowledge to be in your comfort zone and do the same things again and again the way you’ve been doing it.

I mean there's obviously a really meta way of looking at it, but there's also a really woo woo way of looking at it, and I'm going to start with the woo woo. I think human intelligence is only so small because we can't remember everything. We're not as fast. We're not as accurate.

If we practice, we can, but just in general, we're not, but we can augment that with artificial intelligence, right? We can augment our human intelligence with artificial intelligence and then if we align that with divine intelligence, then we have an ethical way of using AI. If we can't use our human way of ethics because we don't have the best track record of ethical ways of doing so that alignment of human, artificial, and divine intelligence is a really good way to start to align yourself. If you kind of go, okay, where am I going? 

 

Ronsley’s imperfect action.

“I do that all the time. You know me, and I do that all the time but I'm going to be very specific because this is something that I'm really good at. When it comes to business and entrepreneurship, but may not be as good when it comes to my personal life.”

 

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