The Intersection of AI and Community: Insights from a Live Podcast Taping

[00:00:00] Sharon: Elizabeth and I go way back.

[00:00:02] Elizabeth: That’s true.

[00:00:03] Sharon: Yeah. She was actually one of the first people I met in Flagstaff.

[00:00:06] Elizabeth: It may have been in this very space.

[00:00:08] Sharon: That’s true. . we both got out here as East Coast transplants, to serve with AmeriCorps. So we both did service through AmeriCorps and that’s how we met.

[00:00:18] And now we’ve moved on to bigger and better things.

[00:00:22] Elizabeth: Yeah, we were in the same AmeriCorps class. Gosh, nearly 20 years ago now. Oh, you remember. That’s good.

[00:00:31] Sharon: Yeah. I know.

[00:00:32] I am Sharon Tewksbury Bloom. I am the founder and CEO of a company called Bloom Facilitation, and I am very curious about AI, artificial intelligence. And so I pursued my curiosity over the last year, and I hope to be a leading learner to those in the community who are also interested in this.

[00:00:53] And one way that I’ve done that is I’ve started a podcast series called AI for Helpers and Changemakers. I used to have a podcast called Do Good, Be Good, and I interviewed a lot of people here in Flagstaff who were trying to help other people. So you get the idea, we both started in AmeriCorps, we’re both really interested in service and helping people.

[00:01:12] I originally did a podcast for two and a half years about helping other people, including interviewing, Cathy Ferretta about the Flagstaff Festival of Science and her volunteer work through that. but I decided to revive the podcast in this new iteration with a focus on how are these same people, everyday people who are doing work that they hope will help other people or will make a change in the world, how are they being impacted by the introduction of artificial intelligence into their lives and into their work.

[00:01:45] So that’s really where the idea came from and what it’s about. So that’s where you’re at. Hopefully that’s What you want to listen to. And I’ll let Elizabeth give some announcements about the Flagstaff Festival of Science before I jump in any further.

[00:02:00] Elizabeth: I have some announcements, and then also I was going to introduce Sharon, but she just stole all of her own thunder.

[00:02:07] so I’m not sure if I have too much more to say. But, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Elizabeth Vogler. I’m the Festival Director for the Flagstaff Festival of Science. And in case you all didn’t know, it’s ten days of science programs, events, and activities. And we’re about halfway through right now, so we have, through Sunday with more festival programming.

[00:02:32] The best way to find out about all of those different events and activities, which of course are all free, is either on your app, which you can use on your smartphone of any size. either choice or any choice. that’s really the easiest way to use it.

[00:02:48] So all the events are free, as a part of the festival. and so far it’s been really exciting. This is also our 35th year of the Flagstaff Festival of Science. Pretty incredible to be around in the community for that long. So we’re quite delighted about that. And I’d also like to just thank some of our sponsors, not by name, but just a shout out to all of our sponsors because the festival is free.

[00:03:13] we rely very heavily on corporate sponsors, grants and individual donors. just shout out to all of those folks, that do support us. And we have the full listing, on the app or on the back of that pamphlet that I mentioned before. And one other thing is, when you’re going to festival events, we want to hear from you.

[00:03:34] We want to hear what you liked, what you, what improvements you might suggest. and we take all of that very seriously as we begin to plan for future years. on the way out, I also have a little QR code and a link to the website that you can take that survey online. And it’s real quick, but we do want to hear your thoughts.

[00:03:52] let’s see if there’s anything that I, that Sharon didn’t mention about herself, that I can be of any type of, help or service at all. Sharon’s the founder and CEO of bloom facilitation and do good, be good, which she mentioned, and it does a lot of professional facilitation and organizational development, consulting.

[00:04:14] She’s also been spotlighted on Volunteer Nation podcast, Authentic AI podcast, How to Change the World podcast, Flagstaff Business News, and Discover Flagstaff. And that’s what I’ve got. We’re really happy to have Sharon here. [00:04:29] Sharon: Thank you, Elizabeth. I’ll let you out of the hot seat now.

[00:04:33] Elizabeth: I was really nervous there.

[00:04:35] Sharon: Alright, so without further ado, let’s go ahead and give you a sample. What I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you a little bit about my journey so far in learning about it. What I’ve learned and then you’ll hear directly from some of the people I’ve interviewed and the voices of those people and how they’re experiencing AI.

[00:04:54] So we are doing some speculation in my interviews on the show about how AI might be used in the future. But most of our conversations are actually about uses for AI right now. Uses for artificial intelligence that are impacting people on a daily basis in their work. And this is really a theme that’s come up a lot just in the last year.

[00:05:20] is that a lot of people have been confronted by artificial intelligence technologies, by AI enabled technologies. many of the people I interview did not seek out the opportunity to work with artificial intelligence or to incorporate it into their work. They really found it finding them and either, decided to embrace it and figure out, okay, what can I do with this?

[00:05:47] What’s possible now that wasn’t possible before? Or they really had to go through their own process of, I’m afraid of this, I’m confused by this, I don’t know what to do about this, how do I try to navigate this time in which this really dramatic change is happening with technology? So that’s why I really wanna have these conversations, because I do think that we’re getting an interesting revolution happening and how people do work, and I’m an organizational development geek, so I’m really interested in that topic, and I think it’s going to make a huge change in every sector.

[00:06:25] This is just one example of how I’ve used AI and how I’ve, talked to people in the helping fields about how it might change their work. So one of the most familiar technologies when we talk about AI to the general public would be chat GPT. ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot tool based on a large language model.

[00:06:48] If we have time we’ll get into some jargon definitions for you. but ChatGPT kind of jumped on the scene late in 2022. Most people didn’t see it until 2023. And now if you’re in the working world it’s becoming pretty ubiquitous. And people are using it or trying to not use it or dealing with the implications of other people using it.

[00:07:11] And so it’s really a learning curve of everyone trying to figure out what does this mean for me and my work. So one use of it is to write things for you. And I work with a lot of non profits. So many non profits come to me and they say, what could we use the most? We could use grant writers. Now that’s an interesting ethical question of can you have Chattanooga T write your grant for you?

[00:07:36] And I often push them to say, we can talk about that and whether or not that is ethical, whether that’s going to be effective or anything. But before we even try that, there is a great use case for it, which is put your grant that you’ve written into ChatGT along with the grant guidelines that you were provided or the rubric for scoring and have ChatGT help evaluate you as a, first reader providing you with feedback of how well does this grant that I’ve written match up with the guidelines for the grant.

[00:08:11] So I’ve done this before. I find that it does work very well for that use case because one thing that it’s really good at is understanding patterns and language and being able to match things. So just like they’ve been using So when people complete versions of AI in resume evaluation for a very long time, they look for keywords and they’re able to identify and sift things in a pile to say, yes, this resume is worth a human review versus no, this resume is not worth a human review.

[00:08:42] So you can use some of that same underlying technology to say, tell me how well my writing is matching the language that they’re asking for in the grant.

[00:08:55] I’m also exploring really fun ways to use AI creatively. So we’ve been remodeling our house right now and I got interested in whether or not I could use AI to design my own wallpaper. So these two images were used, were designed by me using AI. They use mid journey and they’re done very differently. So the one over here was me using a prompt to A written prompt to ask the AI, in this case I used Midjourney, to create wallpaper in the style of William Morris using, sacred datora plants and hummingbirds.

[00:09:39] And my thinking was, I really love William Morris style, I love that, style of wallpaper. But I’m in the southwest, I’m in Arizona, and I really wanted to bring in some of the natural flora and fauna of this region. And that doesn’t really exist, William Morris didn’t do that. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to see if I could recreate that with it.

[00:10:00] It was fun, I liked what it came up with, but one of the challenges, if you’re doing wallpaper, is that you need to have a seamless repeating pattern. And that’s really hard to do with an intricate pattern like a drawing like that. Then, I learned that mid journey was one step ahead of me, and that all I needed to learn to do was add a tag to my prompt that said hashtag tile, and that would actually create a seamless repeating pattern based on whatever prompt I gave it.

[00:10:32] So when I went to the roses, I knew that by then, and so I said, okay, this time I want, and I forget my exact prompt for it. But I also took another step, which was this idea of collaborating with the tool. So I love photography. I do a lot of photography of plants in particular. So I took a photo that I had taken of some roses and I uploaded it into the tool and I said, use this photo as inspiration and create a wallpaper with a seamless repeating pattern and with this color palette.

[00:11:10] And so that’s what it came up with. So that’s where I think it’s been really fun for me is to figure out how could I collaborate with the tool to create something that I alone couldn’t do with my limited skills and abilities.

[00:11:27] And then the podcast itself has been a fun curiosity and a chance to explore creativity. So these are the tools that I’ve used in the creation of the podcast that are AI powered tools. So chat. gt might be familiar with. Canva is really the latest and greatest in graphic design software. If you’re talking to anyone that does any sort of graphics in the work world today, they’re probably using Canva because it’s just burst on the scene and took over.

[00:11:57] No longer is anyone using Photoshop or any of those other tools. They’re all using Canva. Canva has introduced what they call magic features. So this is an interesting thing, right? How we start talking about. So Canva, being that it’s fun and colorful and creative, has decided to call its AI enriched tools magic.

[00:12:21] Which is a whole thing. I have a sociology minor where you can go into a whole thing about what does it mean to start calling things magic that actually, have the science and tech, powering them and aren’t actually magic. So if you want to use a magic feature, for example, you could give it a handout that you’ve created and you could ask it to create a slide deck based on that handout.

[00:12:47] So it can translate from one form to the other using content that you’ve already created. It can also translate into other languages. So I can give it a handout and ask it to translate it into Spanish. And that’s just built in as a feature of Canva.there’s amazing possibilities for it to expand, how much you can get out of one piece of creative content that you’ve created.

[00:13:13] For Descript, Descript is my editing software. I used to use all kinds of tools. I was originally trained in high school on the Adobe suite and,I’ve learned lots of different technology over the years for audio editing. For Descript, Descript is my editing But Descript, again, has changed the game.

[00:13:30] I feel like I’m going to be cheesy with every metaphor possible. What Descript does is if I take today’s recording and I upload it into my computer and save it to Descript, the very first step that it does is it automatically creates a written transcript of the audio. And it does so in about ten minutes.

[00:13:55] That’s an hour long audio recording. And it’s pretty accurate. I used to pay for a service that would transcribe all of my audio, because I wanted it to be as accessible as possible. So I know how hard that can be. I’ve even done it myself, and it took me hours to do it myself. So the fact that it can practically instantaneously make a transcript is already revolutionary.

[00:14:19] Secondly, if you don’t want to learn how to edit audio, You don’t actually have to anymore, because Descript allows you to edit the transcript like you would a word processing document, and it will edit the corresponding audio file to match what you’ve edited in the document. So you don’t even have to look at the audio if you don’t want, you don’t have to look at the timeline.

[00:14:45] It also has AI powered features, which it cheekily calls Underlord. And its Underlord features will do automatic adjustments if you enable them. So for instance, it has one called Studio Sound, which allows me to click a button, it will automatically even out the audio, equalize things, make things sound better, just with one click of a button.

[00:15:10] I can adjust that, I can tune it if I feel like it’s doing too much, or I can pull it back, anything. I can also say, in one click, Please remove all filler words. All the uhs, ums, anything like that. It’ll tell me on the day to find 120 filler words, and I can say great, either delete them automatically, or I can tell it to just ignore them and I’ll go through and check and make sure that I actually want them removed.

[00:15:37] the abilities that it has just built in, this is like 30 a month for this software, Allow me to run a podcast by myself, which I used to have to hire an editor. and that’s why I had to give up my last podcast was I was doing it as a passion project. I couldn’t afford it and I had to stop doing it.

[00:15:57] So now I’m able to start doing it again because I have these tools at my fingertips. I already mentioned mid journey. That’s my AI generator, the logo that you saw earlier that was created using mid journey. In combination with Canva, so I created the background image in Midjourney and then put it together with the text in Canva.

[00:16:20] And then finally, Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs is a voice generator. So now we have image generators, we have text generators, you can also do a voice generator. So again, I used to have someone who would be the person who announced, was the, Broadcast announcer to do the intro and outro of my podcast.

[00:16:41] I now have Brian, who is an artificial intelligence generated voice, who does my intro and my outro.so I just wanted to play with it and experiment and see what was possible. I have also considered you can actually create your own deep fake of your own voice. And so since I have hours and hours of audio of my own voice, I might.

[00:17:05] Actually, someday create a recreation of my own voice, and then I would be able to feed it written text and have it read it as me, in my voice, and wouldn’t even need to record. It’s something I’m playing with and seeing what’s possible. Alright, let’s hear from some of our podcast guests. Some of these people you might recognize, some of them either live in Flagstaff or have worked in Flagstaff.

[00:17:31] Diana White. Splits time between the Valley and Flagstaff. She has worked for Moonshot up here. And she used to be the bookseller. She managed the bookstore at NAU. so she has a love of books. And I have a little clip from her.

[00:17:47] Diana: What’s coming, and while you embrace it, you mold it, you shape it. There are so many different examples. Things that you’ve seen in movies, or things that you’ve read in books, or bad ones. And then somehow, somebody, because they were empowered by it, they made it reality. And I think that’s what embracing the nerd is all about.

[00:18:14] Mixing the science and mixing it with passion and humor. And that’s what I do. So that’s why I call myself a nerd. I love everything, sound, space, you name it, I love it. And it’s not that I’m a nerd. So well versed and educated in any of these fields, right? It’s just, you put me in front of your space documentary, I’m sucking it all up. If there’s a new development in science, I want to exactly understand from my layperson point of view. And then I want to have discussions with my friends. See how they feel about this. Which is why I love, AI is the next new thing to either embrace or be scared of. [00:19:04] I love it. I want it as much as I can understand.

[00:19:09] Sharon: Awesome. those are a few things I loved about talking about with this with Diana. Is, she’s not a technology expert. She’s not an AI expert. She is the perfect example of someone who’s just curious, who just wants to stay on top of the latest technology.

[00:19:24] And is trying to stay on top of this. we talked about how she took a class and added [00:19:33] We talked about how she, her very first introduction to artificial intelligence was Grammarly. Not sure if anyone here uses Grammarly, but it’s a certain, yeah, we’ve got a few people. anyone who’s ever felt anxious about whether your spelling and grammar is correct on things probably embraced Grammarly really early on.

[00:19:54] It’s a tool that, originally was like having spellcheck. It could check everywhere you went. It could check your spelling on websites you were filling out a form on, or in your email or something. So it didn’t just live in your word processing software, it could go with you and help you.

[00:20:09] And then, it really has evolved, and one thing that she talks about is, it would send her weekly reports. these are your most common errors that you’ve had with grammar, and here’s the things that you, could be working on to improve your writing. And she said that it helped her build confidence with her writing and being a more professional writer.

[00:20:29] And that she’s learned since then that, Grammarly was an early technology that started to incorporate using artificial intelligence to improve its service and be able to, do, have more features and serve more people. And that’s been interesting because one challenge that’s come up in a few of my interviews is for teachers and professors, to a group of students who are trying to navigate this world in which their students can use AI to write their assignments and to write essays. And I talked to a professor at NAU, not on the podcast, but just in life and in my friendships, who was mentioning that there was a real controversy because a student was punished if they were told that they were going to be suspended or, have disciplinary action because they had written their paper using AI, because it had been flagged using a software program that was meant to detect AI in people’s writing.

[00:21:28] But it turned out that the student had used Grammarly to check their grammar on their paper. Grammarly is AI. It’s using AI, so it got flagged. correctly by the AI detection software, and that’s starting to show the nuance that we’re getting into now, where it’s not always black and white, but what does it mean to have AI assist you in your writing, and can the education system actually monitor this, or is it too blurry now, where those lines are and what tools people are using.

[00:22:05] Alright, we’ll go to our next guest.

[00:22:11] Alright, Thenera Bailey.

[00:22:20] Thenera does not live here in Flagstaff. I’ve met her through my work with nonprofits. She’s a consultant who’s based in California. I thought it was interesting when you talked about disrupting and dismantling systems. I hear a lot of fear around AI disrupting the ways we’re doing things. And for me, I’m thinking, Let’s not assume that’s a bad thing.

[00:22:48] Diana: Some things need to be disrupted, some things need to be dismantled. I think sometimes

[00:22:53] Sharon: the mainstream narrative can be, this is a dangerous technology, it’s disrupting things. But then I often talk to small non profits and things that say, you didn’t have the resources and power and the ability to get things done and this is disrupting the technology in a way that actually allows you to have access to these platforms.

[00:23:14] resources that used to only be available to larger organizations or systems.

[00:23:21] Thenera: I think the only way I’ve had a problem, Meredith, and so So, the song a little bit it gave was for the  infernova and tons of meaning. I see some of these trailers that came in a, not 12 weeks,  just back in non profit time.  She’s my favorite.

[00:25:08] Miss movement forward, right? you can get her notes out here. Sometimes that’s the biggest impediment. It’s not a bad thing. And everyone gets that deep progress moving forward. That’s where I,

[00:25:48] Sharon: so I don’t know if you’ve been in an online video call meeting lately, but you may have encountered an artificial intelligence note taking app, trying to join your meeting, or happily being invited to your meeting. This was one of my first ways in which I was. in the workplace and in which I had my first AI faux pas in the workplace was trying to embrace the note taking apps.

[00:26:13] she mentions an app called Otter. I now use, almost exclusively, one called Firefly’s AI. And basically, you invite it to your meetings and it comes and it records the meeting, it creates a transcript, and it can even identify It can do sentiment analysis of the meeting, it can use, commands that you say in the meeting to create an action list based on what people said in the meeting.

[00:26:40] So there’s lots of extra features that you can add beyond just a transcript. It often usually does a summary as well. So I’ve been using Fireflies extensively, but when I very first started using a meeting note app, I invited it.I didn’t know how to do the settings, honestly. I was, learning.

[00:27:02] I didn’t realize that it was set as a default to invite itself to all of my meetings. And, I had to actually disable that if I didn’t want it. That wasn’t Fireflies, by the way. That was an earlier one.which is one reason I switched to Fireflies. Because Fireflies is much better about consent and actually asking for permission to join your meetings.

[00:27:23] So this other software I was using called Fathom, it invited itself to my meetings. I went to a closed meeting of, other business owners who were going to basically a mastermind session. They were just there to talk to each other and get ideas from each other. The whole thing wasn’t being recorded by anyone.

[00:27:42] It was supposed to be a private meeting with just a, a small group of people. And unwittingly, I invited this person. This robot interloper into our meeting that automatically was recording, too. And so I tried to get it out of the meeting and apparently I had no control over it. I couldn’t get it out of the meeting, I couldn’t do anything.

[00:28:05] We had to shut down the entire meeting to get it out. And so this is one of those faux pas, you think about some of the early things we saw where people had, devices in their ear and they were walking around talking on the phone, people thought they were crazy, they were talking to themselves, people using, phones in restrooms, all these things that happened when we started introducing this technology into our lives, that was one for note taking apps.

[00:28:28] So now I know to set the defaults the other way and I just intentionally invite it only when I want to. And also a lot of these services have changed so that they will notify people, there will be an AI note taking app coming into your meeting, do we give consent for that, and allow that to happen though, I want to expand on the fact that Venera, she and I talked further about this, we’re both frustrated by the fact that non profits are often the last to embrace the latest technology.

[00:28:59] And so one thing that she said is, by the time we embrace it as nonprofits, it usually has a big price tag added to it. right now is when everything is free because things are being tried out and they’re still being worked out. And so a lot of times nonprofits, they come in late to the game, they end up spending a lot of money on technology that doesn’t work as well as the latest technology.

[00:29:23] And, it’s really frustrating. Okay. I think that’s one thing that I want to do is help educate people about the actual risks and the perceived risks of the technology. And one of the risks that we hear a lot is about privacy. And, just like I said with the note taking app, it’s being recorded.

[00:29:43] Also, when you upload things to chat2pt, there’s a real question of what happens to that data that you’re sharing with it. We can talk about what they say is happening to it, but I think it’s a pretty open question right now because it’s a new landscape and people aren’t really able to promise what’s happening to that.

[00:30:02] but this is where I feel like non profits often hear about these risks and concerns in mainstream media and other places and they adopt more of a fearful mindset. Whereas really what they’re asking for instance, the grant example I started with, it’s something that’s going to be publicly available anyway.

[00:30:20] It’s something that they would literally be publishing on their website, so it’s content that they actually are perfectly fine with sharing with the world and putting out there, and there’s no intellectual property concerns, there’s no concerns of people’s individual personal data, and so they’re, they’re often, where their concerns lie doesn’t necessarily apply to the exact situation.

[00:30:41] Still a good reason not to, upload all your client data into these systems, but there are tools that still have a way to be used.

[00:30:56] Alright, another local, Abby Chan. I apologize in advance, Abby was actually the first person I interviewed when I was having some issues with my phone, so her audio is not great. But, she’s so wise, and I still want to hear from her. Abby Chan is the founder and CEO of Evolve Flagstaff. she’s a registered dietitian who does amazing nutritional consult, counseling, and is just a great person to go to if you want help with your health, particularly as it relates to nutrition.

[00:31:31] Abby: But I think there’s, yeah, so many fitness devices out there. Depending on where you wear them and how you use them, the accuracy will be very low. Also, the So that’s also an interesting aspect. Where to something, being in the whole system of it, cost money. It costs money and it costs time. And so that’s one of the things where we have this data and we think it’s so valuable, we base our lives around it.

[00:31:56] But if it goes away, what do we do? Oh, we have to listen to our bodies. Oh my gosh, that’s so hard. So I think there’s some things there. You can grab a plate. The example that you gave from a one on one I’m going to think about this and again Saying, here’s the calories I’m only concerned with Here’s where you should be eating Oh, you ate too much And then apparently someone’s going to feel Bad, guilty, shameful But, from my point of view I like to use a lot of serving sizes I don’t like to give up A lot of move ins or exchanges or a lot of really strict things, because we’re, I’m telling people that we may need to provide.

[00:33:00] It’s all going to be said is actually to improve our health. And are we still able to listen into our bodies and continuously ask the question of, Why am I using this? Why do I have to continuously use these things and not trust my body?

[00:33:26] Sharon: Yeah, and I think about ways in which the technology could be used to. More adeptly fit into the ways we want to interact with food and our friends and all of that. [

00:33:40] So for instance, when you were talking about it could be useful to the provider without requiring someone who is dealing with an eating disorder. They need to somehow report this data back to their provider, but if they’re the ones having to tally everything, just feeding into an unhelpful cycle. And so I was thinking about how my husband makes pictures.

[00:34:07] I love, and so I thought, oh, if I was working with a dietitian, it would be helpful if I take a picture, which, to everyone around me, this is that kind of person who always loves to take a picture of their food, but then maybe it’s, I can tag in autobots to an app if I need to, and it allows me to more easily integrate into those social settings. One thing I would appreciate when you’re talking about people trying to make a change to their food, Is that so many people, when they make that change, like going on a diet, it disconnects them from culture and from community.

[00:34:54] Cause they’re like, Oh, no, I can’t eat that thing you made for me. I can’t come out to dinner with my friends cause there’s nothing there that fits in my diet anymore. Break down everything. It’s very public.

[00:35:12] So I think ways to allow people to still maybe get the support they need from the qualified provider, but also be more seamlessly in their day to day without being taken out of those. Yeah, so when we first started talking, Abby and I, it was because I had been listening to these other podcasts about the latest technology that was coming out.

[00:35:38] And the consumer electronics show that happened in Las Vegas every year, at the last one, one of the products that was debuted was something called a smart tray. So it was a tray that could somehow, Judge how many calories were on a tray, or what type of nutrients were in the food that was on a tray.

[00:36:03] I wasn’t there. I don’t know how it does that. But, we were philosophizing around, okay, there’s all of this, technology starting to become what they’re calling multimodal, where, the wearable devices like our watches, the refrigerator at your house. They’re starting to make the Internet of Things, where they’re putting the Internet into all of these things.

[00:36:26] now, when they put the Internet into it, that sometimes also comes with them putting artificial intelligence, into it as well. And how does that impact people in their daily lives? I was actually surprised. I thought that she was going to be completely against smart trains, and I could see, like, all the ways in which this could go poorly.

[00:36:46] But I like that she did also have a reframe for me of, maybe there is a setting in which this would be really helpful to allow the provider to get the access to data without needing to recreate those, behaviors that are a problem for the person with the eating disorder who’s getting the help.

[00:37:03] that one was a hypothetical. That’s not an exact situation that she’s dealing with today. She did talk in our episode more about, how she is working with people today who are using tracking devices, and she said that she’s doing an experiment with different types of tracking devices.

[00:37:19] there’s a lot of science out there around, how it impacts someone if they have a watch versus a heart rate monitor versus a step monitor, and the different kinds of devices, how that can impact you. in terms of the behavior change you’re making, also it’ll impact your mental health, and, some interesting work being done there.

[00:37:42] So she’s doing an experiment on that for herself, and had some great things to say on the episode about what people need to be thinking about when this, is gonna be hyped more and more, because everyone’s in this sort of AI arms race right now, from a consumer tech standpoint. And so they’re starting to put this technology into things to say that it’s new and different and worth more money, so you’re gonna start to see lots of products that have AI in them. Whether they do, or whether it’s more AI washing, it’s definitely a technology that’s being rolled out in a lot of consumer products. And that can impact people’s health.

[00:38:25] I will give a shoutout real quick. I don’t actually know I don’t know which technology this uses, but, my mother is an early adopter of technology, and she’s obsessed with all Apple devices, and so she loves going to the Apple store and taking all the Apple classes, and she’s got an iPhone, an Apple watch, and an iPad, and a laptop that’s, whatever those Apple things are.

[00:38:51] One thing that she taught me is that because she and her friends are now in a category of health, she’s had five surgeries in the last year. She just turned 80 this last year. So she has certain concerns, like being a fall risk. So she wears her Apple Watch with her all the time. And she actually taught me how you can make it more waterproof somehow.

[00:39:15] And she wears it in the shower. Because she wants it to be there as a fall detector if she were to fall in the shower. And she has actually had a fall with it on and it did do what it was supposed to do of letting, her be able to vocally call for, an ambulance if she needed it. And notify her loved one that, there might be a fall detection, detected.

[00:39:38] it is really exciting to me because, Some people were here when I said that I actually got my start here in Flagstaff as an AmeriCorps member. When I was an AmeriCorps member, I was working with senior services, and I recruited volunteers for homebound seniors. And trying to help people stay independent as long as possible, and stay safe in their homes, was like a huge part of what I did.

[00:40:00] And I love the ways that some of this technology could be incorporated and to help the community. So that way people will live more healthy, safer, independent lives, the way that they want to.

[00:40:16] Alright, another Flagstaff local here, this is Amy. She is the owner of the only B Corp that I know of, which is a company that is also committed to sustainability. And has a bottom line.

[00:40:37] I said all that, and I realize I don’t have hers queued up. Alright, so I’m quickly just going to note something that I learned from Amy. which is that there is a real concern in this, the amount of compute that is needed for this new technology. It does still use energy. there’s a huge, there’s been a huge increase in the amount of energy that’s needed for all of this technology that is impacting the environment. That is a risk to our environment. and so that’s something that we need to be really aware of and have as part of our plan. and then we’ll have a conversation as we’re moving forward. when we’re seeing all these great use cases for using artificial intelligence, there’s the question of what, what are the risks and what are we, what are the trade offs?

[00:41:22] What is happening, as the potential pitfalls for that? So she’s really tuned into that. Though an example she gave of how she is trying to use it, she mostly uses ChatGT, and she’s been using it as a research tool. for instance, she creates sustainable belts, and she’s been trying to create them with as low of a life cycle of waste as possible.

[00:41:46] So she’s been trying to research a new type of plastic that she could use for the belt buckle that would be fully recyclable. And so she used Chachi Petit to help her narrow down what potential manufacturers were within the southwest U. S. And then she was able to follow up with that. call those manufacturers and try to change her process of making the belts.

[00:42:10] So it was a great example of for a lot of small business owners, a lot of creatives. It’s basically allowing them to have a virtual assistant who’s really good at research or really good at synthesizing information, analyzing data. Alright, let’s see if I’ve got Julie’s

[00:42:35] I have started talking to a few people who have expertise in technology. In Julie’s case, she has years and years of expertise in data analysis and in machine learning. But she said that she’s really on the same path we are in terms of learning about the new generation of AI tools.

[00:43:01] Julie: Hi! I learned way back in graduate school, when I was getting my doctorate, I learned a lot of quantitative tools, and machine learning, and a lot of those are subsumed today into what is referred to as AI.

[00:43:22] And I’ve been doing this for a while, but the difference is the generative part. So the generative AI, that’s very new. And I’m right there with everyone on chat to be a Gemini and others. Generative AI is really

[00:43:45] Sharon: the new kid on the block. It’s the exciting thing. It’s bringing in a lot of new possibilities, putting all of us trying to learn as much as we can. [00:43:54] How is generative AI changing what’s possible right now with data and with your work?

[00:44:04] Julie: It’s the sort of thing that is such a change, it’s such a transformation that I don’t even know how much of a change it’s going to end up having been, if that kind of makes sense. It’s like the internet, sure. It’s like electricity.

[00:44:30] When electricity was discovered, people had no, they couldn’t even conceive. of what would be possible. it was that profound a transformation. I think this is going to be on par with that. I also think we are very far away from that being our

[00:45:00] Sharon: So that’s interesting to me as to people who are a little bit more knowledge in this area, what are their impressions.

[00:45:09] I feel like a lot has happened in a short amount of time, and there’s been a lot of change, but does that feel like that to people who are on the inside as well? a little bit after we finish the next clip, I’ll show you some of the places I’ve sought out learning. And one of, a big one of those is MIT, and I took an online course through MIT about artificial intelligence.

[00:45:32] And it was a little frustrating because They hadn’t updated the course since chat GT came out. And so I learned a lot about how we got to this point. Like I learned a lot about machine learning. I learned a lot about predictive algorithms and, I learned a lot of interesting information about artificial intelligence as a field and all the ways that could be used, but it was just starting to touch on generative AI.

[00:46:03] And the early statements from the professors at MIT were Oh, it’s still far off that’s gonna, make a big impact. yeah, there’s a few developments that might be noteworthy, but you don’t need to worry about them yet, This was supposed to be a course for business people, business owners, to understand what they needed to know about AI, like what were the implications for business owners.

[00:46:26] And it just felt really out of touch, and I’ve noticed that they’ve just scrambled to try to update everything since then, and now they have their courses just on generative AI and how it’s impacting business. Alright, we have one more clip.

[00:46:48] This is hot off the audio presses, if you will. This episode just came out today, and it’s one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, because I’ve met, Dr. Maha Bali, at Online Open Facilitators, and she works for the University of Cairo in Egypt, and she was actually giving a presentation at the event I went to about inclusion, and particularly she co facilitated with a student of hers who is blind, and they were talking about how some of these tools could make things more accessible for students who are blind or have other disabilities.

[00:47:26] So I really wanted to interview her about that, but we actually went off on a lot of different topics. And, here’s just one of the things that we talked about.

[00:47:38] It’s been  so long. Let’s see if I have it pulled up here too. Bear with me, I’m gonna have to skip ahead. Here, wait for a second.

[00:48:28] Brian AI: This is the AI voice. That’s fine. Changemakers is a show for people who want to do good navigate.

[00:48:47] Yeah, I think the document I sent to him was ]human written language.  this is pretty cool. I’m excited to see how people are going to read this. I’m a poet. I think it’s really exciting.

[00:49:35] Sharon: Yeah, I, I will say, I am one of these. Too much AI. I do have a very specific reason for that. And then, the problem is, My understanding is it is learning natural language. I should use things like, these are thank you, because it’s learning for me how, like it’s reflecting back the way to write based on how I’m writing.

[00:49:58] And if I wanted to use those terms, I wanted to reflect that back to me. It’s not that I think that I’m talking to a human, it’s that I’m teaching it the way that I want it to write. Alright, so that’s just a tiny clip, but we get into some really interesting conversations about how She started using ChatGT when it wasn’t even available in Egypt yet.

[00:50:20] They were able to use a VPN to, make it seem like she was joining from the U. S. so that she could try it out before it was actually available. And how, people talk about the bias that’s in these tools. certainly there is bias and there’s sort of obvious bias that we think about in terms of how it learns from the data it was trained on.

[00:50:41] Much of that is information that was on the internet, it was fed to it through companies that are mostly based in Silicon Valley. it has a profound bias towards English and towards, Western, Western society’s views of things. so we had a really interesting conversation about how well does it understand Arabic, how does it understand, Egyptian culture, she pointed out, for example, like it was trained on ancient Egypt.

[00:51:12] So if you ask it things about ancient Egypt, it knows all about ancient Egypt, but it has no idea that Egypt, still exists and still has a vibrant culture today, or what Egypt today. it was interesting that by the end of our conversation, we realized that There was a profound way that this was impacting everyday people who are starting to use these tools.

[00:51:36] It meant that if you were someone like me, who was closer to the place where these tools originated from, I find myself slipping into that feeling often that, wow, it really understands me. It gets me. it’s so accurate all the time. Wow, it’s so good. And I say that, I have friends that say that, a lot of people I interview say that.

[00:52:00] Talking to her, she was saying, it’s wrong all the time. It makes these stupid errors all the time. She’s like, how does it not know X? How does it not know this? Why is it changing something from the Arabic calendar to the Gregorian calendar? I didn’t tell it to do that. so she’s saying all of these things that to her seem very obvious because of where she lives and what she deals with every day.

[00:52:22] I don’t know. And I said, that’s an interesting bias I hadn’t even thought about is that because you’re in a culture and in a language that it wasn’t trained in, its lack of skill and the fact that it actually isn’t as far along as a lot of people think it is more evident. Whereas those of us who are closer to it in terms of what it was trained on are more likely to give it more credence and give it more, trust.

[00:52:50] Thanks a lot. Than those who weren’t. Those were all the clips that I wanted to share from a podcast. I do have other episodes. I hope to be coming out soon.

[00:53:01] So Ariel Strong is a local scientist, and she also won a second place in the recent moonshot competition for entrepreneurs with her Fireflight company. And she and I are actually meeting tomorrow and, we’re hoping to have her on the podcast soon. So she is using AI as part of, fire detection. The other contest winner from Moonshot, oh, now I’m going to forget the name that was there.

[00:53:30] Feel free to shout it out to me. but they also are using AI in fighting fires in Arizona. So there’s actually a grant that came out through

[00:53:44] There’s a grant that’s basically trying to put money into wildfire detection and, fighting wildfires and trying to help with technology that goes in that direction. both of these companies that are both based here in Flagstaff are able to be part of that and are trying to scale up companies that could, do faster detection.

[00:54:07] I know Ariel’s company works on drones. The other company I believe works with, using mapping from above. There’s a new institute starting at NIU for doing this type of mapping and having more sensors that can actually detect, fire starts earlier in remote areas that you wouldn’t be able to see the smoke yet some really interesting use cases for that right here locally in a big problem we have.

[00:54:36] All right, this is just one more use case I’ll mention, is it can do, not only can it transcribe audio to video, but it can also, You can also transcribe your handwritten notes. like Kathy and I met both being volunteers at Rudin. I was talking to the park manager there, and we were both like, don’t tell the volunteer mansion that Chattanooga GBT can transcribe cursive handwriting because they’ve had volunteers working for decades, literally, to try to transcribe all of those documents that were part of our local history archive.

[00:55:08] I do journaling on a daily basis, and I like to take my journal outside. I’ll just take a picture with my phone using the ChatGT app and have it transcribe my notes for me. If it’s something that I think of where I’m like, oh that’s a great idea, I should turn that into a blog post or I should turn that into an episode. It allows me to actually have less screen time, but still capture that.

[00:55:34] So a few things that I recommend that have been helpful in my journey. If you’re looking for business or for marketing. Definitely Kinsey with, her podcast, Authentic AI, and her business. She does some great resources, and I learned a lot from her. This is the course that I took with MIT and CSAIL. Like I said, they now have some additional courses that are specific to generative AI, if you’re interested in that.

[00:56:04] And then, I love podcasts, so I listen to a lot of podcasts, and these are some of my favorites.

[00:56:12] Me, Myself, and AI is from Boston Consulting Group at MIT, so they tend to talk more about business and different sectors and how it’s impacting. Black Box on the top right, that’s more about the real concerns, and it was really raised by our keynote speaker on Friday about the idea of explainability, and that many of, she mentioned the term black box, and that a lot of these AI tools are, working in a black box so that the everyday user of it, or even some of the people working on it, don’t know how it came to the conclusions or the outputs that it came to that dives deep into that, into the whole series. And then AI for Creatives is really great. It’s the one that inspired me to start the wallpaper. AI for Humans is annoying, but surprisingly helpful.

[00:57:07] Alright, while I keep up this slide about some risks and hazards, I also want to give you a chance, does anyone have any questions since we’re about to wrap up here? I know I went through a lot of different use cases and things, it was a smattering to just whet your appetite to learn more. Yeah.

[00:57:26] The episodes we talked about are live now, so all of those are live now. I’m trying to release a new episode every other week or so. so there’s seven episodes that are up right now, and you can find them at Bloomfacilitation.com or at, in Spotify or other podcast apps.

[00:57:51]  Brian AI: Any other questions?

[00:58:02] Sharon: Yeah, that’s a great question. this was really, one thing I did learn from that MIT course was how the ability for, us to move towards natural language. in the past, you had to learn a computer language in order to program the computer to do what you wanted. I know I took an HTML class when I was in school and I could, program, this really basic website about Care Bears.

[00:58:25] It’s very embarrassing. Hopefully it doesn’t exist anymore on the internet. but now, what really allowed everything to jump forward is that they made it so that You can actually just use natural language. You can talk to it like you would talk to an intern or an assistant and use just regular, instructions and it can interpret those and give you your response.

[00:58:49] I will say that this was part of my conversation with Maha is that as long as you’re speaking English and you’re using regular language like business language or the language of, common news jargon, things like that, it does a really great job. Yeah. If you start speaking in a different language or something it wasn’t trained in, it’s not going to be able to follow your prompting or instructions very well.

[00:59:13] So you don’t need any particular prompting classes or any particular syntax to use with it. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question? Yeah. And one thing I like about it is, I’ll give one more use case since you all don’t seem to be running off, so that’s great.my A family member, I won’t out who it is actually, was in a custody battle for his child.

[00:59:39] Really negative, bad situation where he was fighting with the child’s mother. And it had gotten to the level that they had to have court orders. And the court had said, you’re not allowed to talk to each other anymore. You have to put everything in writing and it has to go through a court supervised app.

[00:59:59] And So I realized, hey, this is a great use case for ChatGPT, because he had to follow specific instructions. he had to say in the subject line what the topic was. He wasn’t allowed to do more than a certain number of sentences. it was strict to teach them how to speak to each other without creating conflict.

[01:00:19] So we actually did what’s called custom instructions. We were able to customize ChatGPT with the instructions from the court. And we said, here’s how we have to write, please, anything I tell you, write it according to these instructions. And so he would actually use the voice note feature, and he would just speak out loud to it, and then it would translate his voice note, and it would translate it again into what was compliance with the court’s orders.

[01:00:48] And then he could send that off to his, ex wife. Didn’t sound anything like him, but that was the point. The point was to sound exactly like they wanted it to. And it worked really great. So I think there’s weird use cases. Yes?

[01:01:11] It’s interesting, the AIs, most of the AIs, so we say it generally, but we’re talking about the main ones, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot. Most of these have been trained with similar instructions, which is to try to be friendly and helpful. So they tend to interpret whatever you say also in that context.

[01:01:31] They tend to, be a little bit locations. And that is a bias that comes in. for example, I asked, Chachi Petit to help me prepare for this podcast. I was like, what kind of reactions might people have? What might they want to know about? And at first it was really positive. people are going to love this.

[01:01:50] This is a great idea. You should do, this, and this. And then I said, You and I know that this is a fantastic idea. It’s going to be great. But there might be a few people who might have concerns or negative feelings about it. Could you give me some examples of what they might think about this podcast?

[01:02:10] And it was like, oh sure, and then it gave me like 20 responses of, they might think that, you’re a sellout, or it’s a, gonna take over the world, or you’re just part of the problem, like all of these things, and it was funny, it was like, it’s bias was so positive, but the moment that you turned around and gave it an excuse, it could go into a different direction, so I don’t know if that answered your question, but it doesn’t do great at, I don’t know, I use Firefly and it does do sentiment analysis, And those generally seem to be fairly accurate.

[01:02:40] It tells me what percent of the conversation was positive, what was negative, and what was neutral.

[01:02:45] Audience: Oh, yeah.

[01:02:58] Sharon: Yeah, absolutely. AI for Humans does a lot of experimenting with that. they’re comedians, and they also are gamers. And their whole thing is trying to create characters. And they use a lot of the, they’ll create characters using AI, both create the voice, but also have live chatbot characters that, and they give it a whole backstory.

[01:03:18] And so some of them are really rude, some of them are angry, so yeah, they can go all directions, yeah.

[01:03:32] that’s how to find me online; Bloomfacilitation.com, you can listen to all the episodes directly there, or find them. or feel free to let me know and I’ll have to hand you a business card if that’s easier. If you do have any recommendations for people you think that I should interview on the show, I’d love to know.

[01:03:49] But otherwise, I really appreciate you coming and learning and being part of the learning journey with me.