Unlocking the power of Communication with AI [AI Today Podcast] AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast AI Today Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Insights, Experts, and Opinion

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Unlocking the power of Communication with AI [AI Today Podcast]) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (AI Today Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Insights, Experts, and Opinion) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: AI Today Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Insights, Experts, and Opinion

Episode: Unlocking the power of Communication with AI [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:07:26

Episode Shownotes

Effective communication is vital for enhancing both human-to-machine and human-to-human interactions with AI. Clear communication ensures more accurate and optimal outputs from AI systems. Additionally, AI tools can improve our communication skills by helping us better articulate and present our ideas and creative needs. In this episode of AI Today

hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer continue with the soft skills series and discuss the soft skill of communication. Continue reading Unlocking the power of Communication with AI [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_00
The AI Today podcast, produced by Cognolitica, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:00:10 Speaker_00
Learn about emerging AI trends, technologies, and use cases from Cognolitica analysts and guest experts.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Hello and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Walsh.

00:00:26 Speaker_02
And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer.

00:00:28 Speaker_02
And if you've been listening to our most recent set of podcasts, we've really been talking about this interesting idea that the more that we're using these AI systems, especially generative AI systems that depend so much on

00:00:42 Speaker_02
communication between a human and a machine, the more we're realizing that the skills that are the most important for the typical person, the person, most people who are using AI systems are not the hard skills, the ones that involve math and science and engineering and physics and all that sort of stuff, you know, but mostly computer science and mathematics that we traditionally needed.

00:01:03 Speaker_02
The more we realize that the soft skills are the most important, because for us to get the value that we want out of these AI systems means being better at interacting with these machines and handling what the machines give us back.

00:01:17 Speaker_02
We have this series that we're doing on soft skills, and we've talked about how critical thinking is really one of the most important ones because we can't take everything that the machine gives us at face value.

00:01:26 Speaker_02
But there are those other ones as well that are just as important, the communication, the collaboration, creativity, and a few other things.

00:01:33 Speaker_02
We figured we're going to spend some time diving into those to show sort of the essence of what these soft skills really mean in this AI world that we're living in.

00:01:45 Speaker_01
Exactly. And so on today's podcast, we really want to talk about the skill, the soft skill of communication and why it's so important and kind of how it goes both ways.

00:01:55 Speaker_01
So how we can enhance our communication skills for more effective AI interaction, especially when it comes to prompt engineering, but also how AI is helping to make us humans better communicators.

00:02:07 Speaker_01
So on the one hand, being able to provide that clear communication is really, really critical for enhancing that usability when it comes to generative AI. Because clear inputs help us just get more accurate outputs.

00:02:23 Speaker_01
And you can go, OK, well, that makes sense. And you're like, yeah, of course, at face value it does. But what does clear prompts mean? What does clear inputs even mean?

00:02:31 Speaker_01
Well, if these systems rely heavily on that clear, direct wording, they need specific examples, then you need to get better at your communication and the way that you are typing in your prompts.

00:02:44 Speaker_01
So if generative AI responds better to these well-defined prompts, then we want to do things like say, OK, well, let's follow prompt patterns. And so we've had previous podcasts on them.

00:02:55 Speaker_01
But some of the more common or popular prompt patterns are RTP or Create or Flipped Interaction, as opposed to those single-shot prompts. So say, what is the capital of Canada?

00:03:08 Speaker_01
Or, you know, that can be a single-shot prompt just because it's easy and it's one word. But if you go, where should I travel to in Canada? Well, I mean, that is a really open-ended question. What time of year? Where do you live? What's your budget?

00:03:22 Speaker_01
What activities do you want to do? I mean, you have to get more specific so that it can help give you a better response. I remember I was talking to a friend and he was planning a trip to Italy.

00:03:31 Speaker_01
And he goes, well, I typed into ChatGPT to help plan my trip and it didn't give good results. I'm like, well, what kind of prompts did you give it? If you gave it generic prompts, you're going to get generic results.

00:03:42 Speaker_01
And then don't be surprised it gave you not great ideas. And so I always think about that. And he was like, whatever, I'm just going to do it another way.

00:03:50 Speaker_01
And I'm like, OK, but you wait, because if you just gave it better prompts, you'd get a really awesome itinerary. But again, that goes into communication.

00:03:59 Speaker_01
And so you need to understand first that the better prompts, the more clear, the more specific you are following these best practices, prompt patterns, the better your results are going to be.

00:04:10 Speaker_01
We also say, look, we say AI has never said it and forget it, but also when it comes to prompt engineering, your first answer, the first response that it gives you probably isn't gonna be the best. You gotta continue to refine it, right?

00:04:23 Speaker_01
Just like you would do with a human. I mean, these soft skills all come together, right? That's collaboration, but communication as well.

00:04:31 Speaker_01
So, you know, maybe my first draft at an article isn't so great, but then someone edits it, they provide feedback, they tell me to think about something a different way. And I'm like, what do you know? By edit three, the article is really top-notch.

00:04:44 Speaker_01
Same thing goes for prompts. Your first set might not be good, but you have to continue, you know, to play with it, to get what you want. And that really is so important. being able to understand that context, the nuances.

00:04:57 Speaker_01
We've also talked with people and they say, you know, sometimes words, words really matter. And so if you, you know, change the order of your words or you use different words, you can really change the results and the outcomes.

00:05:10 Speaker_01
And it's interesting that sometimes it could be, you know, even better with just a few words that are different.

00:05:17 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I think it's interesting because that is a skill that we need to talk to other people too.

00:05:22 Speaker_02
It's kind of funny, we think about this in terms of communicating on the machine, but in your case about the trip by tenory guide, Italy is a good idea. Let's just say you walked up to a random person on the street and you said, hey,

00:05:34 Speaker_02
Give me a trip itinerary to Italy. First of all, they probably wouldn't know what to say. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that they were trained like an LLM, so they actually could answer any question.

00:05:43 Speaker_02
Well, they're going to give you a very generic response. Even a person would do that, because they have no idea what your interests are. So how would you talk to that person? Imagine it was a travel agent, even.

00:05:54 Speaker_02
So let's just say it's not a random person. Just like you talk to a random travel agent. You go, give me an itinerary for Italy. you know, they would probably come back with just as random or generic, I should say, a response as the GPT.

00:06:05 Speaker_02
You need to effectively communicate. And unfortunately, we're not really teaching effective communication skills anymore.

00:06:12 Speaker_02
Maybe we never really were, but like I can tell you, in sort of the modern economy, we don't teach skills like how to communicate effectively.

00:06:19 Speaker_02
And the irony of that is that it works really well with a machine, because the more effective you can be in communicating with the machine, the more you can get them the systems to do what you want.

00:06:30 Speaker_02
We talk about that effective communication is not only important when it comes to interacting with a machine, but it even comes when you're trying to do things like figure out what data you need, figuring out how to even data labeling,

00:06:44 Speaker_02
or figuring out how to make things clear and precise, because there's a difference between some generic reference to a body part and some specific reference to some particular ailment or illness or whatever it is.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
And the more specific you can be, the more specific you're going to get the response. So I think one of the things that people do need to learn, especially if they're trying to get more value from these AI systems, is to really improve

00:07:09 Speaker_02
and make their communication skills more efficient, more effective. Maybe, ironically, that'll help us better with communicating with other people.

00:07:18 Speaker_02
Because maybe as we're going to start realizing that, you know, being vague and being generic only results in vague and generic responses, we're going to become more precise.

00:07:28 Speaker_02
Just as texting and the use of emojis has made its way into common speech now, people say lol and people say I'll do all sorts of things now that

00:07:38 Speaker_02
were part of the efficiency of texting because, you know, using a small keyboard at the time, especially when you have flip phones, typing a lot of letters wasn't very easy. So, you know, that's where all that comes from, right?

00:07:49 Speaker_02
But that's now sort of impacted the way people speak. So maybe now even generative AI may, in the future, impact the way people communicate by making people be much more precise in the language that they use.

00:08:03 Speaker_01
Exactly.

00:08:04 Speaker_01
So, you know, we talk about on one hand how we're using, how we need to be better communicators with our prompts so that we can really, you know, kind of have that back and forth interaction and engagement with these systems so we get what we want.

00:08:17 Speaker_01
But then on the flip side, we say, well, how does prompt engineering and large language models and AI in general make us better communicators? And we're already seeing this.

00:08:28 Speaker_01
So it can help with maybe creating social media posts or help with creating marketing material. And through that use of better prompt engineering, you can say, OK, how do I best articulate this idea? Or here's all of this email that I wrote.

00:08:48 Speaker_01
Help me write it in this tone for this audience at this level of detail.

00:08:54 Speaker_01
You know, for example, maybe I need to communicate weekly with stakeholders and I need to be providing them really detailed responses, but the executive committee doesn't need all of that.

00:09:04 Speaker_01
So how do I go in there and have it help me refine that email so that it pulls out all of that necessary information that the executives needs, but then still keeps that high level of detail that all of those stakeholders need or, you know, people that are really working on that project on a daily basis?

00:09:22 Speaker_01
So as we continue to do this, you know, that does help us become a better communicator or maybe, you know, as I had said earlier, well, if you're writing something and you need that editing tool, well, what if you don't have a human editor?

00:09:33 Speaker_01
How can you use this, you know, your prompt to help you get that edit that you need and kind of refining on that?

00:09:41 Speaker_01
Because anybody that's put in something, you know, write me a 500 word blog post on the topic of whatever, the soft skill of communication, you're gonna get a pretty generic, you know, article that's written and it's not gonna be that great.

00:09:55 Speaker_01
But if you can use it to help you say, okay, now this is what I want, act as this, you know, define that role. Start with an outline, and then really go step by step.

00:10:06 Speaker_01
It helps you to also craft better blog posts, or better writing, or get better with creating images.

00:10:13 Speaker_01
And so it really can kind of go both ways, that communication, where you need to be a better communicator, but then it can actually help you be a better communicator as well.

00:10:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's really interesting.

00:10:23 Speaker_02
There's a trend happening now in schools, especially in higher education, where people are using now these AI-powered note-taking systems that will either listen to the live lecture or maybe the lecture has been recorded because now, of course, people are going to hybrid models too.

00:10:39 Speaker_02
So it's kind of interesting how all these trends are converging. So if they're delivering a lecture on Zoom or Google Meet or heaven forbid, Microsoft Teams.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
If they're doing all these sorts of things, there are AI tools built into them that will not only do the transcript, but also do the automatic note summarization and do all these things. This is now, I would say, just bread and butter.

00:11:02 Speaker_02
This is happening every day. Especially if you're doing lots of these meetings and lots of these lectures, you're probably using it. It's one of the most powerful uses of the tool. But then, of course, it begs the question, which is like, well,

00:11:13 Speaker_02
Why not just read the summarizations? You only go to that long lecture, I guess, if there's some sort of point of confusion or ambiguity or you really need some detail. But will this actually change the way lectures are done to begin with?

00:11:25 Speaker_02
It's like, maybe just the whole hour lecture is not that important. Maybe instead,

00:11:32 Speaker_02
the patient is trying to teach something provides a lot of nuggets of information and then tells people to use the AI system to dive deeper and say, maybe I start the course by pre-recording, you know, like a hundred things, right?

00:11:44 Speaker_02
Or like, maybe I already have this. And so now you, you know, day one, go in and listen to all these things and then uncover the nuggets and maybe ask me some questions and we're going to all get together to explore something, which is kind of nice.

00:11:58 Speaker_02
It's the flipped learning model. Maybe we'll see that. Maybe we won't.

00:12:01 Speaker_02
I know but I think you know to this point here that the reason why communication is such a powerful skill just like critical thinking is that These AI systems are basically doing that they're communicating with us and we're trying to extract value through the communication so one as we said the both sides of it improving the way we communicate to the machine and having the machine improve the way that we communicate is hopefully going to have a

00:12:25 Speaker_02
better results, maybe even better results for society, just as if people can become better critical thinkers, that'll be better for society too.

00:12:32 Speaker_02
So this is one of those hopeful things, you know, people talk a lot about how things like social media and the internet and things like that have really separated us into little communities where we don't talk to each other.

00:12:45 Speaker_02
I'm hoping that these other things will start bringing us back together because we can start improving our communication and our critical thinking, our collaboration and our creativity and work towards hopefully a common good with AI.

00:12:58 Speaker_01
Exactly. So we'd love to hear from our listeners. We always do and we appreciate everybody that reaches out.

00:13:03 Speaker_01
So when we post about this on LinkedIn, please share your comments, how you have, you know, seen AI help you get better with your communication skills and how Maybe you've seen that better communication skills helps with your prompt engineering.

00:13:19 Speaker_01
And make sure to subscribe to AI Today if you haven't done so already, so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes within this soft skills series, as well as additional topics that we're going to cover.

00:13:29 Speaker_01
We have some great interviews lined up, as well as some additional topics and series that we have planned. So with that, we also have a newsletter and I will link to that in the show notes. I encourage you to subscribe if you haven't already.

00:13:41 Speaker_01
We have the link in, it's a LinkedIn newsletter and we publish it weekly where we go over various topics, sometimes podcast related, sometimes adjacent to that, you know, and so I definitely encourage you to subscribe to that if you haven't done so already as well.

00:13:57 Speaker_01
Like this episode and want to hear more? With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:14:07 Speaker_01
Make sure to subscribe to AI Today if you haven't already on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, Amazon, or your favorite podcast platform. Want to dive deeper and get resources to drive your AI efforts further?

00:14:20 Speaker_01
We've put together a carefully curated collection of resources and tools. handcrafted for you, our listeners, to expand your knowledge, dive deeper into the world of AI, and provide you with the essential resources you need.

00:14:32 Speaker_01
Check it out at aitoday.live slash list. This sound recording and its contents are copyright by Cognolitica. All rights reserved. Music by Matsu Gravas. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.