EP 41: How AI Can Make Social Media More Social

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Facebook wants to take on Google and OpenAI. But can they? So that's one of the things that we're going to talk about today on Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream, podcast and newsletter helping everyday people like you and me and so many of us out there keep up with what's going on in the world of AI. Because there's a lot and unless you're spending many hours a day trying to keep up, it's hard. So that's what we're here for. So we're going to talk about a lot of things, including how we can make social media more social. But before we dive into that, let's quickly jump in and talk about what's happening in the world of AI news. So, so let's start at the top. Meta. So the Facebook parent company, they want to take on Google and Microsoft at least when it comes to generative AI. So that whole text to speech, text to image, text to anything. Facebook and the parent company Meta want to be there. So a new report just says that they're recently shifting resources out of AI research and into generating products. So make sure that you check out and subscribe to our newsletter on your everydayai.com to read more about that because I think it's super interesting. They just announced a really cool tech to speech platform yesterday that we talked about on the show as well. Another piece of news, a big company trying to make a splash in AI is Vimeo everyone's second favorite video editor? I think. So they just announced today as well a new AI script generator. So you upload your video and you get a whole bunch of marketing copy basically automatically from this AI. Here's the bad news, it's only for paid subscribers. My take on this, I don't think it's going to catch on. I mean we'll see. But there's so many great tools that do this for free and integrate directly with YouTube. So we'll see what happens with Vimeo's new announcement. Third, let's talk politics. Everyone likes that, right? So a new story in Fox News says that AI can now predict a person's political leanings based on their pictures, how they smile, your profile picture. So can your selfie tell you how you're going to vote? Apparently. AI, this new report thinks that it's a thing. So let's, let's actually talk a Little more now, social media. So we're going to bring on our guest today and we're going to talk a little bit about how to not just make social media more social, but can it be human as well with the rise of AI and everything else? So joining me today and joining the show today we have Tiaki De La Norle and she is the co founder and CEO of UT Social. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for being on the show.

Thanks Jordan. Thanks for having me.

All right. I think I got like a, like a C minus on, on the name there. So if anyone's pretty good. Yeah, if anyone's listening to the, to the show, they know what I, what I lack in energy I make up for with my great pronunciation skills. So Tyagi, let's tell everyone a little bit about what OOT social is and kind of what you're aiming to do with the platform.

So OOT is the human connectivity platform. And what does that mean? We believe in helping people connect in real life spontaneously to help build their product, personal and professional connections. And there's everything that we do kind of falls around that particular core belief that we want to enable spontaneous in person connections. We think that the world is a little bit lonelier with a lot of social media and a lot of technology platforms and we want to enable tech to be able to bring people together in real life face to face. We think that that is going to allow for a more healing kind of society.

Yeah, and, and you know, one thing I think that's really happening with social media, which is, which is funny because I'm, I'm streaming live from my LinkedIn account. But aside from LinkedIn, I don't personally use social media probably for some of, yeah, probably. Probably for some of these reasons that, that you're saying that you're trying to kind of fix or improve with oops. Because I feel personally that social media is actually sometimes not social. You know, people spend so much time on social and then they don't really connect in the real world or when they are quote unquote connecting in the real world, they're just on their phones posting to social. So I mean, what's your take just on social media in general? I mean, do you see, is there the ability for social media to improve in this next wave of new tools, new use cases to bring humans closer together?

Well, you know, I honestly don't really love the term social media in the classification of oot. We like to consider ourselves more in the social networking and now we want to create a Whole new genre of human connectivity platform to really bring people together. But when you think of social media, you think of, it's more of an asynchronous kind of view of the world, right? You're experiencing it as an individual just scrolling oftentimes and then connecting with folks, but in a digital realm. And so we really believe that if we can have a technology that ultimately allows people to detect where other people are with similar interests, that you can then have a double opt in process to be able to indicate you want to connect in real life instantly at a venue. Come on, that's going to be pretty cool, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. And just, just as a reminder, if you are joining us live here on LinkedIn or whatever social media you may have found us on, please leave us a comment. You know, for myself or Tyagi, if you have any questions on, or just you know, social or AI in general. So let's, let's dive into that because you know, we kind of talked pre show on how AI is the new buzzword. You know, if you have a startup, if you haven't a SaaS, a soft company, anything, you know, what ways is looking to use AI in its platform?

Yeah, that's, that's a great question. Of course AI is within our, like it's on our radar and OOD has a number of components that are associated with it. So one for example is we are still going to have very much a community based chat function, right? And as you can imagine with any chat you need moderation, right? You need a little bit of like Big Brother up there, just helping a little bit in terms of moderation. So certainly we want to incorporate AI with respect to moderation from a chat perspective. We also want to incorporate AI into things like another component of our platform is around events and curating of events. And so a lot of folks, when they first enter into the system into oot, you indicate your areas of interest. So, so various communities of interest. So imagine marrying communities of interest with all the types of events that are out there and having AI essentially customize your events for the day. Hey, you should check out these events today that's happening in your neighborhood or you're planning on going to this area in the city. Why don't you also consider checking these out? It's just further optimizing the way in which you're going to spend your day and just bring more joy to your life. So that, that's certainly one other major component, right? And then the other big thing is remember How I mentioned, like, we're all about face to face connections. A lot of folks when we spoke to individuals as we were, you know, looking at, like doing our research for ute, a lot of folks talked about social anxiety and anxiety that people face around, you know, starting conversations. Oh my God, like, what am I going to talk about? So, so having an AI kind of like conversation starter based on shared interests. So we will ultimately on our platform will know, hey, this person has similar interests to you. These are your shared communities of interest. Here are some awesome conversation starters that you can kind of get break the ice with. I think those are three really great ways that we're looking to tap into AI and really enhance our solution. And of course we're contemplating, I'm not going to share all the details, but we're contemplating some other avenues of leveraging AI, but we're debating it right now because so much of what we're doing is about the here and the now and the real leveraging elements of AI, but to enhance that human experience. So as a team, internally, we're kind of debating a couple things. We're actually talking on Sunday as a team about a few other avenues of AI that we're looking to, to embark on.

Yeah, love it. Comment here from Lordana. Love the demand products, by the way. So saying social media is a lonely world, if you don't understand it, is that something that you maybe saw or maybe something that led to the creation of Utyagi, that social media can be lonely?

Well, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the origin story, right? About why, why this all came about. And it really started with my own struggles. So five years ago I moved to an awesome, gorgeous condo in downtown Toronto on King West. That's a really happening spot in the city normally. So I was in this condo, I started a new job and of course I had social media, right? I had all these friends, like hundreds of thousands of friends on social media. But then I also had my real friends, right in real life, but many of them were living outside the city. And so between all the thousands of friends I had on social media and all of these real friends that I had just living outside of the city, for some reason, I felt extremely lonely, extremely disconnected. Even though when if I were to walk outside the street, I could literally tap into patios where people were like all around hanging out, having fun. But I felt like I didn't have a way to broke, like, like actually broker a conversation with folks on these patios. So I wanted to I realized that something that was missing in the market was really around a platform that allowed me to understand where other people hung out with similar interests that I could have that double opt in to say, hey, you know what, I really want to join you guys. Is there a way and for them to digitally accept so that I can have more fun in real life? Yeah, that's, that's what I was feeling like was missing from the whole experience.

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on genai. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everyday AI.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen AI. I think that whole double opt in thing is extremely important, you know, just, just to, you know, foster not just safety, but true connectivity obviously requires that on both ends. So, you know, we talked a little bit about, you know, ute and kind of what your, what your vision for the future of connectivity is. But I want to talk a little bit about just how maybe you or the team internally is using different AI. You know, I'm pretty sure you mentioned that you said you're kind of training kind of it to be your, your assistant a little bit, right? Like how are you using, how are you using, you know, those tools? Ye, yeah, talk, talk, talk a little bit about that.

Listen, I mean between things like blogging, blog generation, we're using a number of tools with regards to how we leverage blogs, how we do our social media, our captions, how we generate images, how we like. For example, there are some posts right now on our social media where I have used like Headshot Pro for example, where, where it auto generated headshots for me. And all you would do is you would submit a bunch of your pictures, right? I think it's about 20 pictures. You have to upload in different kind of face positions and then it will essentially find your pick. Now I can tell you the pictures are kind of. Yeah, exactly. So the pictures are. It looks like. It doesn't quite look exactly like me. It looks like my cousin maybe, right? Or like, like maybe my. A sister of mine. So I think it's pretty good. The tech is pretty good, so I enjoyed that. I think that that's pretty cool. But in terms of like our, our everyday. Like when I think of for example, okay, so we recently had Member of Parliament Ryan Turnbull. Right. Actually talk about ute in the House of Commons, which was pretty cool. Let me tell you how we got the meeting. Want me to tell you how we got the meeting?

All right.

And I'll tell you how I use AI for, for getting the meeting. So I knew, I knew that Ryan Turnbull recently made an announcement of $755 million fund to help with social innovation. I went online, I took a look at some of the, the press release. I took some of the snippets from the press release. I then put into chatgpt like oot kind of mandate and who we are. I then said, create a. Let create an email that's compelling to. To Ryan Turnbull who has this as a mandate and put together an email inviting him to our, our launch party event and voila. Right. A beautiful email was generated. Of course it requires nothing in life is just via email. I always believe in true hustle, right? So I'm an enterprise salesperson. You know, that's been my career prior to me really starting ute. And so I understand the mechanics of how to really land someone from a hustle perspective. So I sent the email across, I made a call into both their offices, both their Ottawa office and their Toronto office. And then between all of that, they eventually saw our information and really said, hey, wow, this is actually pretty cool. Yeah, we want to come.

It's so funny because you almost say that. And thanks for sharing that fun story, by the way. I think now when people are landing deals or new partnerships or opportunities by using AI, it's almost like, oh, letting the cat out of the bag thing. But I think like, as a society, like, we need to shift because that's almost like thinking like, oh, 10 years ago or 15 years ago saying like, oh, I got this, this meeting by, you know, using Google, right? Like it's. I don't think anymore that it should be like a taboo Thing, right?

This is how I see it. This is how I see it. I see. So any CEO or any executive, most executives, they have executive assistants, and they have folks that ultimately do certain things on their behalf. They'll give a certain set of instructions to their executive assistants oftentimes, right? And then the executive assistants will take it and go and execute against it. I see AI very similarly. I see AI, especially chatgpt as a form of executive assistant. It's it, it ultimately does a great number of work for you. You just have to be really cognizant of how you engineer your prompts, right? So oftentimes what I, what I end up doing is I, I think through and I think, okay, if I were, if I were someone, how would I want to receive this message? Like, what type of level of clarity do I need in order to go and execute against it? So then I, I engineer how I actually phrase my prompts accordingly. And then sometimes it doesn't get it quite right and you just say, hey, change this or tweak this or do this. And it may take a couple additional tries, but more often than not, that is fantastic. And I see tremendous value. I feel like my workload in terms of my level of efficiency has improved by probably about 40% leveraging ChatGPT.

Wow, that's amazing. Speaking of, I know you kind of mentioned ChatGPT and Headshot Pro, but a question from Audrey here on LinkedIn asking what tools are you using? So are you using any other, you know, even in the building of OOT or just in your, you know, kind of helping you in your professional journey? Anything else that you're kind of using outside of ChatGPT or the, the Headshot tool that you talked about?

Yeah, thanks, Audrey. And I'll tell you, listen, like, our devs, right, of course they're using Copilot, and, you know, there's, there's a number of GitHub tools that you can use in order to improve the code quality. There are, we use, we use AI in different formats. So even tools like Jasper, for example. We were using Jasper before, prior to ChatGPTN. We may, we may look to potentially phase it out in the future, but there's, there's a ton of tools out there that we are leveraging. There was another tool specifically for blogging, but one of our interns, he's actually a young gentleman, he's 16 years old, and he, he's all about, like, I think the core chat GPT with that $20, you know, like, premium solution for chat GPT4. It's fantastic, right? It is truly fantastic. And as long as you're really good at prompt prompting accordingly, I think that's what we all have to get really good at then, then it works well. So in terms of other, other tools that I use, I mean, I don't use a ton of other custom tools mostly because I, I find extreme value in ChatGPT4. That's the one I use predominantly.

Agree. You know, I get the, I get a similar question all the time. They're like, hey, Jordan, you're talking AI every day. You know, what's your tool set? And it's like, yeah, I have access, literally we have accounts to hundreds with an S of softwares, but we spent spend the most time in ChatGPT for sure. Cecilia, thank you for the comment. Just saying. Excited to hear Tiag Journey. 1. One question here from, from Arturo. We were talking about a little earlier, earlier, so saying, you know, when using AI, let's also just say, you know, an app here, but let's say when using AI or an app for networking, wouldn't that create a dependency and thus defeating the whole purpose of connecting people? Yeah, we kind of, kind of talked about that. But what.

I love that. So, Arturo, thank you so much for asking. I definitely think, you know, when it comes to connecting and this. I was talking with a leader the other day about networking in general, right. When you walk into a room, I was actually in San Francisco Tech Week a couple weeks ago and I was walking into all sorts of rooms. And the thing is, our time is so valuable. Like, we want to make sure that we are having that real, meaningful conversations, but oftentimes we want to also make sure we optimize on our time. So when we go to these networking events, it's really important to have, at least at high level, an understanding of potential individuals that we want to connect with. And so if we have the ability to have that indication to them to say, maybe there's a list of like five or 10 that you really want to connect with and you send out those indications to those individuals and maybe a couple respond back and say, hey, yeah, absolutely, like let's connect. Then you know that you're further optimizing that networking experience. And it's. And certainly there's some level of beauty, I think, in serendipity and like, kind of like letting it free, free flow. But then there's also times when you just want to be able to optimize a little bit better. And I really see AI for all intents and purposes really around optimizing your life. Right. In so many ways. I think as humans we are evolving to a certain level of efficiency and a higher level of intelligence over time. But at the same time I think it's really important that we don't forget having those face to face connections just because there's too much data around the health impacts, around how important we need that face to face connection. It's, it's like, it's part of our biology as humans. So we can't, as we continue to dive into other elements of optimization in our lives, we can't forget how important being human is as important as food, water. Right. Like, we need to be able to speak to one another and enjoy each other's company.

Yeah, that piece is so, so important. So I'm gonna, I'm going to maybe toss out one final question here. So whether it's through your experience as the CEO and co founder of a software company trying to connect people or even through the development side, you talked about Copilot, which there's a GitHub copilot, there's a Microsoft Copilot, somebody could buy us, right? Yeah. What would your, what would your advice be? Maybe to an entrepreneur, maybe maybe the younger version of yourself or the version of yourself before AI. What advice would you give to another entrepreneur who maybe hasn't embraced using AI, whether personally or in their team?

I would say you're missing out. Right. I think, I think ultimately we want to be able to do more with the time that we have. And so I personally think like leveraging these tools where necessary and making sure that we tune into shows like yours where you're helping educate and bring forward like additional technologies and ways in which, you know, leaders are leveraging tech in order to make their lives more efficient is a good thing. So I would say, you know, even for myself, if I were to look back, it's all about how are we optimizing our time. Our time is so valuable, but never forgetting that as we look to optimize our time in certain elements of our life, I really think there should be also time that we spend doing absolutely nothing. I think it's so important to just feel free as being so I believe in having that balance of there should be moments of absolute no tech so that you disconnect completely and you feel that freeness and that oneness with nature. But then also you optimize in other areas of your life so that you are uber efficient when you need to be.

This literally sounds like my life ethos, you know, using every tool possible as quickly as you can to get the most out of those every second, every minute, every hour. So, Tyagi, thank you so much for joining the show and hearing your insights. It was great having you on.

Thank you so much, Jordan. Appreciate it.

All right, and as a reminder, if you want to know more about some of those things that Tyagi's talking about, we're going to be sharing a little bit more in our daily newsletter. So make sure you go to your everydayai.com, sign up for that daily newsletter, a lot more information from what we talked about in the show and more. We have a lot in that newsletter. Also, if you are listening to the live stream, make sure to check out the podcast on Apple, Spotify, all those other platforms. If you're listening there, join us for the live stream. We'll be back every day, 7:30am Central Standard Time, and I hope to see you there and every day on Everyday AI. Thank you.

Thanks. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.