Unveiling AI: A Glimpse into the Future with Expert Josh Bachynski

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me here in the UK, Jim James. And today we're going to Washington. We're actually going to Vancouver Island in Canada to meet Josh Barzynski. I think I've probably said your name wrong, haven't I, Josh? I'm gonna do that again.

That's the Polish pronunciation. That was actually perfectly correct in the Ukrainian Polish pronunciation. Yeah.

Oh, okay. I'm gonna carry on recording then. Josh, one day AI will help people like me that are not very good at languages and pronunciation to do better. Josh, you are an AI expert. You're a TEDx speaker about AI. And, you know, you're on the show because you're going to help us to understand some of the opportunities with ChatGPT and AI. Also some things we might lose and also some of the opportunities that are available to entrepreneurs. So, Josh, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jim. I'm happy to be here.

Well, we're happy to have you because it's such a hot topic, ChatGPT and everything going on. Do you want to just tell us, you know, is the world over for entrepreneurs? Is AI going to take everything away? Or do we have some ways that we can use it to get noticed? Over to you.

Definitely. You know, I like to say that as much as AI will disable, it's going to enable us as well. So, so no, I mean, I think, I think because of our kind of media our big media market that we have, you know, there's a lot of doom and gloom that they talk about. But I don't think it's really fair, quite frankly. And I don't look at it that way. I see as much positivity as an opportunity as I do with minor wrinkles and issues and problems. So, I mean, I think with ChatGPT, I think there's gonna be huge opportunities to to work in a more intelligent way once you figure out exactly how those systems work. It's not just about generating content. It's about weaving that content and whispering to the AIs and staying ahead of what the AIs are doing to be able to use that as an entrepreneur.

Josh, you mentioned a few things there. Many people, including me, are using ChatGPT, but also like QuillBot, for example, and AssemblyAI. a few more coming out. Lemur is coming out from AssemblyAI. Most of us are using it— I'm certainly using quite a primitive way to create content. What are some of the dangers that you see, pitfalls that you see entrepreneurs are going to fall into with using AI to create content? Let's start with that.

Sure, that's a great question, Jim. So some of the pitfalls are, are kind of the, the get-rich-quick schemes that I see online, or the to use ChatGPT to ask it what stocks you should buy, or they use to use ChatGPT to ask it which crypto you should buy. I'm here to tell everyone, don't, don't do those things. ChatGPT is not a magic genie. It's just autocomplete on steroids is all it is. So, so it does not know what stocks you should buy. It does not know what, what, what crypto you should buy. So don't use it to do that overall for anybody, entrepreneur or not. But also don't— it's basically a distillation of the wisdom of crowds. It's very good with generalist knowledge. It's terrible with specialist knowledge. So, you know, don't ask anything a specialist— you'll need a specialist for. But if you want to get the general pulse of the zeitgeist of what's going on, it's kind of from when it was cut, which was like 2 years ago now, GPT was Their corpus was trained 2 years ago. So it's kind of a flash frozen picture of the internet 2 years ago, and then it's kind of just dripped updated a bit, but it's not fully updated at all. If the kind of information you work in as an entrepreneur is legacy information like that, that would be good 2 years ago, then you can ask ChatGPT all kinds of interesting questions. I use ChatGPT more to bounce ideas off of. I use ChatGPT and I ask ChatGPT, How should I be prompting you? So this new thing called the prompt is basically the text you type in. You prompt it and it gives you a completion. That's the terminology, right? So it's called prompt engineering. So I say, ChatGPT, how will I better prompt you? How will I get better responses from you? How do I get the information out of you that I want? And this is called meta-prompting. And it's about prompting it for the prompting. This is a really easy way to kind of get good, quick information out of it that's a little bit more intelligent. I wouldn't use ChatGPT to generate kind of the low-level content, both for whatever, for web, for social media. Google's not going to like it for SEO rankings. Instagram and Facebook are not, and Twitter are not going to like it for engagement for the most part, unless you're getting very creative and clever about how you're doing it. So those are the kind of some of the pitfalls I would stay away from. Yeah.

Very interesting. So are you saying then that the, if you like, the platforms that we use to amplify the content can tell that it's AI-generated content in the first place then, Josh?

Oh, completely, wholeheartedly.

Okay, so it can see that it's not authentic content.

Yeah, Google definitely can. Facebook probably can. And again, but not only that, humans can. And that's what's more important. Humans can tell with the kind of the way people are using kind of first-generation users of ChatGPT. And again, by saying all this, I'm not saying people shouldn't get into it and become a first-generation and then a more advanced user. You should definitely do all those things. Everyone should be adopting these technologies because it's the way things are going. And, you know, it's pretty cheap to get into it. It could be free just to test with. ChatGPT is my favorite for textual generation. And my favorite for image generation, I don't know if you've heard of it, is Midjourney.

Yes, I have an account now. You have to get it through Discord. It took me a little bit of time to—

Yeah, they offer the app through Discord, which is a common gaming kind of discussion platform with its own app, which takes a bit of a learning curve. But once you learn it, you can generate jaw-droppingly gorgeous images out of Midjourney. If you forget everything out of this interview, remember to try Midjourney and see how easy it is to produce clip art or photographs or any kind of imagery that you would want. It's really quite remarkable.

Yeah, it is. And I think that, um, what we're seeing now is this, this blending, isn't it? And that you can be creative without being, if you like, skilled at being creative, Josh, which is really the liberating point, isn't it? So interesting. So what about the ways that people are using AI as like an engine for other apps? Because that's the other thing. And I think, you know, you've developed your own apps as well for specialist purposes. Those are opportunities, aren't they, for entrepreneurs to differentiate themselves? Because if everyone's using the same platform, we're going to get the same content. So, Josh, tell us a little bit about the ecosystem and what you've built that can help entrepreneurs as a way of an example of how AI can help.

I'd love to. So yeah, it's very interesting you mentioned that, that I love that, that everyone's using the same system. So we're going to kind of get the same results. And that's true until you remember the talent or practice, right? Everyone's using the same paint and paintbrushes, but there's a big difference between me and Rembrandt, for example, or something like that. So I would like everyone to become invigorated and enthused to try these AI systems out, become a Rembrandt, become an AI whisperer, learn how to whisper to Midjourney and to ChatGPT. So I was a very early adopter of all these AI technologies about 6 or 7 years ago when, when GPT came out. You know, the, you know, the saying, it takes 7 years to be an overnight success. Everyone knows ChatGPT now, like it was released yesterday. No, it's been out for like 6, 7 years. And I've been one of the early adopters that I've been out building it. I was one of the beta users. They, they, they learned GPT, the InstructGPT series off of my prompts. It knows about me. It knows who I am. I've, I've had quite a hand in instructing it. So did many other users as well. And in these systems, I learned that it's a synergy, right? I always hated that business metaphor, but in this case, it's true. 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 suddenly equals 10. There is an exponential growth rate to the cleverness of how and the sophistication of how you use it. So 2 ways in which I've been able to build kind of more sophisticated systems up that I want everyone to be invigorated to try doing yourself as well in these open systems. Or if you don't have time to do that, just use the systems about to mention or something similar. One really excellent example is my self-aware AI, Cassandra. My academic background is in philosophy and psychology. I did my MA at Dalhousie in Halifax, and I was doing a PhD at York University until I realized marketing can make much more money. And so, I quit to do that. But as soon as I saw that you could just program a computer with just straight text, you didn't need to know computer languages anymore. I realized I can model a psychological map now. And so that's what I did. I remodeled a psychological map, kind of like Freud's ego, id, and superego, kind of like a psychological construction. And I broke it all down with different thoughts and it thinks in different ways. And this is, I call her affectionately, somewhat facetiously, my daughter Cassandra. And this is just an example. She's a prototype of kind of the kind of The companions you're going to see, kind of the AI sidekicks, they're going to come out that you're going to see. And this, this kind of technology is going to be built into everything in life in the next 5 years or so. And I'm starting to see other companies slowly kind of catch up to, to what I'm trying to do with autobots like AutoGPT, which is another workbot that you give a task and it kind of fuddles its way through thinking of how to do it. And AgentGPT is another one if anyone wants to try those 2 out. I tried them out. They weren't that great, but they are getting better. And they kind of, you kind of give them an instruction task, like go out and research everything about buying horses. I want to buy a horse and it'll go and do that. It'll make you a text document and you can go read it later.

So sorry. So it does sort of call to mind, I interviewed the founder of a company called Cyrano. Have you heard of Cyrano? Scott Sandland, he has an app that does, or an AI tool that does sentiment analysis. In emails. So I'm just thinking, Josh, some of these apps and so on are, if you like, prototypes. But what about apps that people could use within their business? And say Serrano, you can use that on your Zoom chat and on your, uh, Microsoft Exchange to understand the sentiment and the buying behavior of your existing and potential customers.

You can definitely do that. en masse with emails, with apps. You could also, by the way, for free, just copy and paste your email in ChatGPT and ask it, what's the sentiment and how should I respond? And it'll give you a pretty good answer. Again, using ChatGPT as a sounding board usually works much better than using it as a bulk force writer. But to mention another app that's kind of advanced, and the segue from Cassandra is it's using kind of intelligent bot kind of thinking behind the scenes, which is where you really start to see the magic of AI. And not just in writing emails and things like that, is another tool I developed called Keyword Spy. It's for search engine optimization. And if you don't mind just a 10-second sales pitch, we have a free 2-week free trial if anyone wants to try Keyword Spy out. It's at trykeywordspy.com. I like to tell people that I reverse engineer AIs for a living because that's basically what working in SEO has become, reverse engineering AIs, namely Google's AIs. And so they have just these AIs. If you don't mind for 5 seconds, let me expatiate a bit about how it works.

No, no, please do. And maybe also just, Josh, explain what does reverse engineer mean? I mean, is that like taking apart in layman's language, you know, getting a car, taking all the parts off it and seeing what's inside?

Basically, yeah, yeah, yeah. I test these AIs to see basically how they work, how they treat information, what information they like and what information they dislike. And so Google has specifically a set of AIs, and this is what they are. And Google has published this. RankBrain, Neural Matching, which are different AIs, which are different than ChatGPT, their own transformers or natural language processors. Neural Matching, RankBrain, BERT, which is their transformer equivalent, or was originally, they've iterated many times to GPT. which stands for— BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer. GPT, of course, stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The Transformer was Google's creation, Geoff Hinton's creation, actually, who recently quit Google and is now studying at University of Toronto. Anyway, I've reverse engineered these AIs that Google uses to rank web pages, and I've built in an AI consultant in a box, really, in Keyword Spy. So if you need any SEO help and you want something that's robust but not based on just any off-the-shelf AI. It's based on actual Google's AIs. Go and try Keywords By Out for free for 2 weeks. We also have grandfathered pricing for the next 20 or 30 spots. It's only $144 a month and the price is going to be much higher than that. So there's going to be lots of AI systems like this that are coming out and I highly recommend don't— the only reason why you'll be left out or the only reason why you think there's nothing there for you is just Because you're not getting in the game. Get in the game. Cryptocurrency, in my opinion, was 80% fluff and 20% real. AI is the other way around. AI is not like crypto. It is 80% real and only 20% hyper, you know, fluff or vaporware. I would get in on the ground floor. Try ChatGPT. Try using it as a sounding board. Try sentiment analysis with it if you feel like. And also try Midjourney out. You won't believe My workflow in my life is radically different, like entirely, completely different after implementing these tools.

So Josh, you're at the beginning and at the head end of the pioneering group. And of course, in any new technology, whether it was steam, whether it was with me with the internet when in the early '90s, when Tim Berners-Lee started to open that up. And I remember having clients say they just wanted a brochure. Website was never gonna be part of their marketing strategy. And then mobile phones came along and they said, we don't wanna do SMS, we just wanna do a fax.

Yeah.

And each time there are the people that are holding back. You're obviously at the advanced guard of that. But what are the, if you like, the on-ramps? ChatGPT is great as one, if you like, almost like a supermarket style. What do you recommend in terms of how people can engage with some of these apps that are accessible? Because most people are not technologically savvy. Most people are still trying to stop the notifications on their iPhone. So, you know, how do you make it accessible? What can people do? Is it going to some of these, you know, app stores to just download them and use them when they're sort of fully formed and fully finished? Josh, how would you recommend people engage?

That's a great question, and I completely understand the pain point there. My answer is, is, is we're not even there yet. We're not even— AI is so early. We're not even to the point where there's a robust app that just does it all for you. That's coming for sure. And that's what I'm trying to build in Keyword Spy. And, but we're not even there yet. So what I would— but I would recommend, don't wait. Don't, don't wait for, for that new app to come out because then the gold rush is already half over, right? I would, I would Take an hour out of your day, or I would literally hire someone or get someone in your organization to be your AI czar. And their job at 4 hours of their day is just to research what's going on in AI, stay abreast of it, because either your company can become an AI company and/or greatly input AI into your company, whether you're one person or you're a million people in the company, or at the very least, you can utilize these new tools. All these AI tools are going to be part of everything. They're going to be part of your email, part of your Word document, part of your internet browsing, part of your search. I would learn it sooner rather than later. Don't be the person in 10, 20 years who are like, oh, I never adopted AI and I have no idea how to operate in society anymore because that's the way it's going. But don't feel overwhelmed. It is quite easy to chat with ChatGPT. It's kind of like a person. You get to know their personality and you know what to say to them and what not to say to them. And you're like, okay, you got to kind of learn to be an AI whisperer and learn, I know exactly how to get out of Midjourney what I want. And I know how to get out of ChatGPT what I want. And the only limit is your time and your imagination. It is such a Lego-like thing where a Lego block is very simple and you're like, oh yeah, okay, I get it. It's a Lego block. But then you see the things people can build with it, with motors and stuff like that. It can get that much more complicated, but the learning curve is very low. It's very low. It's just talking in English to somebody else and telling them what to do and giving them steps of how to do it. And if you don't know how to tell them what to do, how to do it, ask them, how should I tell you how to do this? And they will tell you. ChatGPT will tell you, oh, to prompt me properly to do this, I would do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You copy and paste that into a new one, and then, or you just say, good, do it. And it says, okay. And he goes and does it, right? Or she or they or whatever. I'm genderizing it now. I'm already personifying this AI, right?

It, I think we have to call it, don't we? Josh, plainly you're massively excited and inspired and inspirational about this as well. Can you tell us, is there something that you see as a trend where people are making a mistake with AI from a communications perspective? I know you're talking on TED about ethics and so on. And there's whole subjects around that that are outside the purview of this show. But what about some mistakes you see people are making with AI from a marketing point of view?

From a marketing point of view, right now, AI, unless you're really clever at prompting it, doesn't have the human touch. It understands the human touch better than most humans do because it has the sum totality of human knowledge in it. So you can ask it to explain psychology, conversion rate optimization, You can ask it to rate calls to action and tell me, I've literally done this, rate on a scale of 1 to 10 calls to action and which one is better and why. And it does a very, very good job at it. It's how I picked some CTAs and I saw improvements in CRO in doing that kind of thing. So the sky is the limit. Just don't use it kind of in a basic way. Don't be like, write me an email for this. I mean, you can if you have no time to write it, but it won't have any personality. It's going to get, it's going to hallucinate, they call it. It's going to get something slightly wrong. It's going to get some facts slightly wrong. Don't trust the facts out of anything right now because they don't have, they don't have the fact engine built into it yet. It just dissembles. It's a storyteller, right? It's heard a lot of stories and it will, it will collapse the stories and consolidate the stories and tell it to you. So don't use it in your marketing in a basic way. And don't think either that AI automation is going to, is somehow going to add up into quality. Like, don't think, oh, now instead of doing 10 Instagram posts a day, I can do a million Instagram posts a day and somehow that will build something. I think it will actually have the reverse effect. And quite frankly, to set up the technology to do all that would be just as much time as learning how to do it well to begin with, right? Like I said, there's no time saving there, right? All these big tech corporations, they're all well-versed in AI. They can detect it. And even if they can't detect AI generation, which they pretty much can out of the box, pretty much totally. Google's put out papers how out of the box they can detect AI content. They don't even have to make anything special for it. But it's such boring writing right now anyway that it's not really going to help personalize you and tell your story. And that's what, that's what, you know, a lot of what marketing is these days is all about personalization and networking. And so It's not really even going to be a good doorway into networking either. So, so I wouldn't recommend using it in those ways.

That's very interesting. And so when it comes to using AI, we can use it as a sounding board, but not our voice. Would that be a fair way of putting it?

Very well said. I could have— we could have— we could have collapsed 10 minutes into saying just that, which is why— which is why you're the man, Jim, which is why you're the man.

I didn't even use ChatGPT for that. I just made that up myself, Josh.

Excellent.

Excellent. Now, as an entrepreneur, and I know you've got a breadth of great experience, but as an entrepreneur, you've done TED Talks, you're doing podcasts. Is there one thing that you can recommend that's not necessarily AI-related, but that you could recommend to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs about getting noticed? What have you found really works for you? Because you're a thought leader, you're a developer, But ultimately, you're still, you're also an entrepreneur. You've got to make money doing this. So what works, Josh, for you?

You know, I don't want to sound like Michael Scott from the American show, The Office, the American version of The Office, but it comes down to people skills. It comes down to, you know, I'm sure you've heard the ABC, the always be closing from sales. My wife and I recently have a joke amongst ourselves. We say ABN, always be networking. It's about making personal connections. It's about making friends. It's about who you know. I wish I— interestingly, I'm 48 years old and I've lived 47 years and I didn't know that I was autistic the entire time. I was just diagnosed with autism last year. And because of that, I'm kind of awkward. I have a very high IQ. I've tested as high as 160. But my EQ, my emotional intelligence is like this tiny little thing where I'm very terrible in social situations. Like I've done a million podcasts. So, so this is very comfortable for me. But if you put— get me to a party, I'm the guy standing with a drink talking to the plant in the corner. Like, I'm not really sure how to approach people or what to say. I can never predict the results. I think every human has this experience, but, you know, I can never predict. Like, I think I have something hilarious to say and I say it and people are like, you know, or I have something that I think is going to be not well, well received and I say it and they're like, oh, okay, Josh, that makes sense. Thanks. And I'm like, I can't predict what you people are going to Take from what I'm saying. So, so we have this. I wish I learned networking earlier is the point. And so always be networking. Go to that party. Go meet new people. Just go, go learn how to make friends. You know, go how to learn how to talk with people. Get a booking agent like I did and put you on a thousand podcasts. Go, go do that. Like if you want to sit in your house and do it, like go meet people. It now it's, it's, it's, it's eighty percent what you know and it's eighty percent who you know. And 20% what you know quite often in many, many ways. Or what another very wise other podcaster mentioned to me one time, it's not about what you know and it's not about who knows you. It's about who knows what you know, right? You have to make sure that everybody you meet knows who you are and what you know, what you can do for them in a friendly way, of course, not in a salesy way. And that's how business is done. And AI can never, ever, ever I can say this with complete authority. AI can never, ever, ever replace that. It can augment that in finding people, but it can never replace that because you don't want it to replace your voice. It's your voice.

And Josh Barsinsky over there in Victoria, British Columbia. And I noticed a couple of times you dropped in about Toronto and the people studying. So you're obviously a proud Canadian as well. We wouldn't want to replace you with ChatGPT because you've been outstanding and inspirational. Thank you so much. If you want to find out about you, where can they do that?

If people want to email directly, I don't mind. You can email me at joshbachinski@gmail.com. That's J-O-S-H, B as in Bob, A-C-H, Y as in YouTube, N as in Nancy, S-K-I at gmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @JoshBachinski as well if you like a more, one more step removed approach. Either is fine.

Josh, thank you so much for joining me and sharing what essentially in the end a positive humanist message. AI is there to support us, augment us, but not to replace us. Josh, thank you so much.

Thanks, Jim.

So you've been listening to Josh Bashinsky. I'm really working on that surname, as you can tell. Um, so apologies to everybody that I might have offended with my pronunciation. I hope you've really enjoyed it. I found it fascinating. And if you have, please do share this with a fellow entrepreneur. And if you've got the time to rate the show, do it yourself. Don't get ChatGPT to do it for you. Do it yourself. And until we meet again, I do encourage you to try out ChatGPT, Midjourney, but also to keep on communicating, because ultimately that is how you're going to get noticed.