Build­ing the plan as we wing it

New­ton feel­ing the GRAV­I­TY of the sit­u­a­tion. Meme by Midjourney.

Chan­nel­ing Air-gui­tar­ing-god-lev­el piz­zazz in 3, 2, 1…

The fun in what?

Okay. We shared our mus­ings on what Gen­er­a­tive AI means, and how to align its poten­tial to your own ethos and com­pa­ny culture.

Time to play. Let’s talk about how we use AI tools at Take­FortyT­wo, what’s on our wish­list, and the kind-of-not-there-yet process­es of test­ing and dis­cov­ery we want to put in place.

Hope­ful­ly, these can help you spark your own con­ver­sa­tions, or you can jump in the com­ments and let us know how it’s going.

Dou­ble-check­ing stuff

Cre­ative writ­ing remains exclu­sive­ly in the realm of our team’s imper­fect and won­der­ful organ­ic brains.

How­ev­er, most of our team works in a for­eign lan­guage on a dai­ly basis. Some of us in more than one! For gen­er­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion and oper­a­tions, Chat­G­PT, Writer, and sim­i­lar tools can be use­ful for check­ing basic gram­mar, spelling and style, and plan­ning lay­out or struc­ture. The ideas are ours. We still use Hem­ing­way and Gram­marly for this, too.

Automat­ing non-val­ue tedious tasks

We still write our emails. But sum­ma­riz­ing is a pain, and this vir­tu­al thingy seems effi­cient at refresh­ing our mem­o­ry to pre­vent mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions. We are using it to sug­gest Excel for­mu­las, write legal dis­claimers and place­hold­er con­tent (prompt it to build you a cus­tom lorem ipsum based on any­thing you want, just for kicks) or do basic gen­er­al research that could have tak­en ages with the tra­di­tion­al search engine approach. And for fun too. We use it to choose ran­dom words for our week­ly remote Pic­tionary team games.

Cod­ing

Though we don’t use it as much as we could, it has proven use­ful to find bugs and sug­gest workarounds or solu­tions. We’re still scratch­ing the sur­face on this. Truth is, it’s becom­ing a sub­sti­tute for Stack­Ex­change. Archi­tec­tur­ing or design­ing solu­tions will stay with Team Human.

Illus­trat­ing

This one treads the fine line of the eth­i­cal dilem­mas we dis­cuss in Part II. We like to exper­i­ment, and we don’t have the bud­get, time or tal­ent to paint cryp­tic 60s sci-fi cus­tom images for our blog. The results are usu­al­ly far from what we ini­tial­ly envi­sion, but still cool and dis­tinc­tive enough.

Debat­ing

“Hey, Hal” (we like nam­ing it), ​“I’m con­fi­dent I can prove that Rock Lob­ster is the best song ever writ­ten. Please coun­ter­ar­gue!”. It’s use­ful for find­ing gaps in your own nar­ra­tive, or ques­tion­ing pre­con­cep­tions. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful at 2am when you can’t find any­one ready to con­front you or bounce ideas off.

Bridg­ing ideas

You know when you have this intu­ition that there are cer­tain pat­terns between seem­ing­ly sep­a­rate things, but you don’t know enough to find them? Future Ultron does. It can join the dots faster. Find a few edges and ask the bot to find the com­mon ground, and jus­ti­fy the argument.

Run­ning stats

We’re look­ing into using Auto­G­PT to run data and ana­lyt­ics check-ins on our prop­er­ties, build­ing cus­tom reports with tai­lored data peri­od com­par­isons and auto­mat­ed for­mat­ting. Still in the works, we’ll share when we get there.

Not brain­storm­ing

If we need soft­ware to find us ideas, we bet­ter change our line of work. Our brains, our storms.

Not fig­ur­ing out movies

Yeah, this does­n’t work as we expected.

Shut up and take my money

Tak­ing the AI-Train

Inter­net is dark and full of hor­rors. We’re tak­ing this adop­tion thing slow­ly, but ful­ly aware that the tech­nol­o­gy is here to stay (unless this, or this).

We set aside a bud­get of hours for our team to play and break things. We have an inter­nal forum where our team mem­bers share their find­ings and dis­cuss pros and cons. We’re ask­ing every­one for input to under­stand the role each of these tools may have in our dai­ly work. It will con­tin­ue to be a team effort, and a team discussion.

All in all, we’re curi­ous, but not hyped. The gen­er­al feel­ing is we expect­ed Jarvis but got auto­com­plete on its first day on the job.

It’s a brave new world, nonethe­less. (That has such peo­ple in it).

Coda: The map is not the territory

“… In that Empire, the Art of Car­tog­ra­phy attained such Per­fec­tion that the map of a sin­gle Province occu­pied the entire­ty of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entire­ty of a Province. In time, those Uncon­scionable Maps no longer sat­is­fied, and the Car­tog­ra­phers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coin­cid­ed point for point with it. The fol­low­ing Gen­er­a­tions, who were not so fond of the Study of Car­tog­ra­phy as their Fore­bears had been, saw that that vast map was Use­less, and not with­out some Piti­less­ness was it, that they deliv­ered it up to the Inclemen­cies of Sun and Win­ters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tat­tered Ruins of that Map, inhab­it­ed by Ani­mals and Beg­gars; in all the Land there is no oth­er Rel­ic of the Dis­ci­plines of Geography.”

Borges, ​“On exac­ti­tude in sci­ence”. 1946.

AI has been around for quite some time. The new thing is we’ve fed the LLMs mas­sive amounts of data (our data, btw), and it worked well beyond expectations.

The end prod­uct is an aston­ish­ing sim­u­la­tion of, well, you. 

But sim­u­la­tions age bad­ly, or end up becom­ing a par­o­dy. Cre­ation requires expe­ri­ence, it comes from life. Its out­come is the inter­rup­tion of rep­e­ti­tion, almost a miracle.

If you have some­thing to say, don’t let it be ruined by AI’s beau­ti­ful and per­va­sive­ly use­ful imi­ta­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty. Try it, test it, use it, sure, but draw your own lines and pro­ceed with cau­tion. Own your thoughts, cri­tiques, mis­takes, and dis­cov­er­ies. Cel­e­brate and hon­or the unique, irre­place­able, per­sis­tent rel­e­vance of your tal­ent. The com­pet­i­tive edge is qual­i­ty, not vol­ume. The real prevails. 

Read lat­er 💭

• Once the dust set­tles, we’ll see some real changes in eCom­merce.
• Cre­at­ing a thou­sand auto­mat­ed prod­uct descrip­tions in a minute won’t make the eco­nom­ic down­turn dis­ap­pear. The tech indus­try knows it. Per­haps we should­n’t be so dis­tract­ed by this.
• Check out Nick Cave’s strong argu­ment against writ­ing songs with Chat­G­PT. A good reminder that inten­tion, expe­ri­ence, the need to tran­scend and reach oth­ers, and the actu­al exis­tence can­not be mimicked.
• If you’re lone­ly, talk to a PDF.
• If that does­n’t help, put Slavoj and Wern­er in the back­ground. Our favorite AI art exper­i­ment so far.

Thank you, next

You did­n’t ask for it, and we gave you a triple issue. Imag­ine what we can do if you like, share and comment!

We’ll be back in a month to talk all things #sto­ry­telling. The pow­er of sto­ries, the won­ders of good brand­ing, What Mar­ket­ing Real­ly Is Or Should Be About, and how it can trans­form your business.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

💟, 🍵4️⃣2️⃣