What is up, my friends? Welcome to Speakeasy English. Today we talk about artificial intelligence! 

Welcome back to another episode. This podcast is designed to give intermediate English speakers material that you can listen to every day to become fluent in English. If you listen to English audio every day, and you try to understand those messages every day, you will become fluent. If you want to learn more about this method of learning a language and acquiring fluency, then go back and listen to the first ten episodes of this podcast. Okay, today we are going to talk about artificial intelligence and specifically Chat GPT. Remember, the transcripts for this episode (and all episodes) are free and they are available on our website: www.speakeasyenglish.club . 

Okay, so what is Chat GPT? Chat GPT stands for Chatbot Generative Pretrained Transformer. That basically means it is a chat bot, an app that you can communicate with using normal human language. And the chatbot will generate responses that are also in a normal human type of communication. So this artificial intelligence language model has been trained on vast amounts of information across the internet. This training is on such a wide variety of material that it has allowed Chat GPT to be able to offer responses regarding many different topics. Chat GPT was developed by a company called OpenAI. And you can access this application by going to the website. You can find it just by searching OpenAI on your favorite search engine. Once you create an account, you can start a chat and you type some sort of input, like a question for example, and chat GPT will generate a response. You could ask it a simple question like what year a historical person was born. Or you could ask it something complex. For example, to explain quantum computing or explain the theory of relativity. 

I have to be honest. When I first tried this application, I was blown away. That means I was very surprised at how well it works. I spent a couple days just playing with the application. I asked it to write silly children’s stories and poems. I asked it to write my wife a love letter. I asked it to teach me about dairy goats. I really just wanted to test the boundaries and see just how much Chat GPT could do. But at that moment, I had not yet considered the idea that this tool could help me become much more efficient in my personal and professional life. So that is what we are going to talk about today. 

The first truly useful thing that I did with Chat GPT was planning a vacation. I’m very blessed to be planning a trip to Spain with my family later this year. I have been extremely busy with work, and the podcast, and our little farm, that I have not had time to do any vacation planning. Our plane tickets are already booked, but that is the extent of what I have planned so far. After playing around with Chat GPT for a day or two, I realized this tool could probably plan our days in Spain, so I asked it to help. The results were incredible. Within 15 seconds the tool had planned out every day of our trip, including free time to wander and explore on our own, but also making sure that we had time scheduled to visit the most significant cultural and historical places in each city. This saved me countless hours of planning, and evaluating our options, and trying to fit all of those things into the time we have available. 

Before that experience, before using GPT to plan our trip, I was mostly thinking of artificial intelligence as something that will take away our jobs. I mean, something that will eventually replace much of the workforce. But this experience, using it to improve my own efficiency, changed my perspective. Since then, I have been thinking nonstop about how to use this tool to improve my daily life. The next task that I was able to complete with the help of Chat GPT was creating a meal plan for the week. My wife and I are always trying to find time to do better with meal planning. But as I have mentioned in a prior episode, we have triplet two-year-olds. (yes, that is three two-year-olds), and we also have a hobby farm with goats and chickens and lambs. And so we are very busy. We never seem to find time for meal planning or for trying new recipes. Chat GPT was able to quickly change that for us. I typed the ingredients that we have in our refrigerator and in our pantry. That is, I told Chat GPT what food we have available and it immediately created a meal plan for the week, including multiple options and various recipes that we had not even thought of. At that moment, I became completely convinced that I can use this tool to accomplish more in my daily life than I ever thought possible. 

I would like to take a moment here to talk about my shift in perspective. As I said initially, I was scared that Chat GPT would take my job or would take a lot of jobs, and it probably will replace a number of jobs, just like computers did, and just like the internet did, and just like computer controlled machines in factories did. But in all of these instances, the technology also dramatically increased the productivity of the workforce. So from one perspective, artificial intelligence could replace 50% of the workforce – but from the other perspective, artificial intelligence could make the existing workforce twice as productive. So instead of taking ten employees and reducing them to five because they can do the same amount of work – now, using Chat GPT, you could do that, or you could keep all ten employees and have them be twice as productive, and essentially have ten people doing the amount of work that it would take 20 people to do, if we did not have artificial intelligence to increase our productivity. 

To recap and summarize that: I now see GPT as a way to increase the productivity of each individual instead of a way to replace some of those individuals. It’s just a different perspective on the same technology. In my personal life, I am now able to plan our vacation. I’m able to create meal plans and find new recipes using the ingredients I already have. I’m able to create a new exercise plan. Instead of doing the same exercises that I always do. I’m able to create a plan for my garden. My wife and I were able to create an activity plan for our children, including lots of activities that we had never even thought of. And this list will go on and on. The next thing I’m going to do is to create a schedule to apply organic fungicide and organic pesticide to the grapes that I grow in our yard. All of these examples are in my personal life, and so they might not seem overly important, but this tool is allowing me to be much more efficient, and it is giving me the gift of time. So instead of spending hours and hours planning our vacation, I can spend that time with my kids. And instead of trying to plan out the perfect design for our garden, I can go and have a date with my wife. I mean, really, that’s what efficiency is. It’s the gift of time, getting done with the work you need to get done so that you can do the things you love to do. And this tool is allowing me to do the stuff I need to do much, much faster. 

Now, let’s talk for a minute about professional life and using this tool. In your professional life, I would say if you are what we call in English, a white collar worker, that is, someone that typically works in an office at a computer for most of the day, then you absolutely need to be thinking about how to use artificial intelligence to increase your productivity. For example, you can use it to create drafts of documents that you need to write. You can use it to help you respond to a complex email. You can use it to create to-do lists and help prioritize your most important tasks. If you have to create content for your company’s social media, or write blog articles, or create engaging headlines, you can use it for all of these tasks. So instead of being afraid that it will take your job, I would recommend that you use it to become even more effective at your job. If you spend all day replying to emails now, you can do it even faster and more efficiently. This increase in productivity is likely to drive your wage upward. So instead of being replaced by artificial intelligence, it could actually make you earn more money by becoming more efficient at your current job. 

Okay, so that’s my take (my perspective) on Chat GPT specifically and artificial intelligence in general. I think there are two ways to look at it. We can be scared of losing our job, or we can use this tool to become even more efficient at our job, or even create new jobs and start new companies. The opportunities that this will create are endless. 

Now, I do need to say that chat GPT is not perfect. It can generate incorrect or irrelevant information, and so it is very necessary to verify the information that it provides. Additionally, artificial intelligence is trained on text and books and content on the Internet. And unfortunately, human created content has a lot of bias built into it. That means that artificial intelligence is likely to also have some of the same bias built into it. That said, I’m sure that they will continue to improve the tool and find new and creative ways to limit or even eliminate the bias that these artificial intelligence models have acquired from the data they were trained on. 

Okay, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. I think artificial intelligence is exciting and I think it is going to revolutionize how we interact with technology. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As these tools become integrated with other platforms that we already use, we are going to see a world of new possibilities open up. 

I really appreciate you guys. And if you appreciate having this free resource, please leave a review. A five star review will help us to gain visibility and reach even more people who are working to become fluent, just like you. Don’t forget to check out the free transcripts on our website, speakeasyenglish.club. And if you have a few minutes, feel free to send me an email and say hello. My email is brandon@speakeasyenglish.club. Alright, don’t forget to listen to this episode multiple times and we will see you in the next episode. Cheers!