Niki’s Notes May 25, 2023

Hi!

I just love that quote. And I took it to heart this weekend by investing time in learning how to use ChatGPT. More on that later. There’s so much else to share about this week too. So grab something hot/warm/cold to keep you company while you skim this issue, and then take a deeper dive into the pieces that really pull you in:

• Back in 2015, Dan Price, aka “The $70,000 CEO” was lauded for making $70,000 the threshold salary at Gravity Payments, Inc. Last year, he resigned from the company after being charged with fourth-degree assault and reckless driving in February 2022. Stories about leaders tumbling down, including this from Leslie Feinzaig for Fast Company prompted me to consider whether the time has come to applaud the ideas but not necessarily the people behind them. Our culture has long celebrated the innovators along with their innovations and I’m wondering if we’ve been too hasty, too often, to assume the person is great just because they have shepherded in new technologies, discoveries, creative works, etc. Maybe we would have less cancel culture if we applauded the work and held off on celebrating the creators. What do you think?

• Luke Harlan’s got a few perspectives to share about embracing communications around conflict. And on the topic of conflict, if you haven’t seen Jefferson Fisher on Instagram, I highly recommend following him. He’s all about excellent tips for improving your ability to communicate in challenging situations. I love his approach: he’s always spot-on and takes the high road.

• Do you think creativity diminishes over time? Adam Alter, writer for The Atlantic, believes persistence is key. Embracing difficulty and allowing the serial-order effect to take place can lead to greater creativity and success and that failures along the way actually improve the creative process—and its outputs. Intrigued?

Do Good Spotlight
🌟 Black Girls CODE 🌟

Black Girls CODE is teaching thousands of young women to lead and innovate in the tech/science/math space. Since 2011, BGC has been helping to improve the pipeline for girls of color in tech. The organization has 15 chapters across the globe, including New York, Seattle, and South Africa. Learn how and why this organization needs your support: Black Girls CODE.

• Are you inadvertently holding back women in your organization? Before you say no, check out this Fast Company piece and think of recent decisions you’ve made regarding female employees. (It’s okay, we’re all friends here, trying to improve, go ahead, be quiet for a moment and really give this a think.) Done? Okay, have those decisions passed the flip test? If not, how can you use the flip test next time?

• So yes, I’m what’s called a fast follower. Not an early adopter, but that next wave of folks who wait a bit to see what’s what and then jump in to play with our new toys. And now: ChatGPT. I spent a few hours over the weekend getting an overview from Udemy.com and then playing around with this much heralded AI to see what it can—and can’t—do at the moment. I’m sure it will continue to rapidly advance, but I was surprised by a few things and maybe you will be too:
  • It does a solid job of summarizing content if you copy/paste that content into the query box.
  • It cannot go to a web page to analyze what’s there—it doesn’t access the web at all.
  • Which begs the questions: where does it get its info from and how current is that info? Here’s the answer it gave me:

• I was concerned about potentially infringing on copyrights if I used the OpenAI (ChatGPT’s parent) product called Dall-E 2, which enables you to edit images. It is concerned about that too and said I should only work with images that I own, or royalty free images. Okay…
• Someone at a meeting of The Connective this week raised an interesting ethical question: if you’re a copywriter and it takes you 4 hours to complete an assignment, but ChatGPT gets that time down to 30 minutes, do you charge your client for 4 hours or 30 minutes? And my answer, again, is we need to rethink where we place the value: it was never about the time. We need to get much more sophisticated about how we measure productivity and value-adds like time savings.
• My advice on ChatGPT and other AI tools is exactly what I said when social media became “a thing” back around 2008: experiment. Learn. This isn’t going away and if you don’t have a working knowledge of it, you can’t informatively weigh in about privacy, copyright, intellectual property, and other challenges new tech brings with it.

• Wait, we’re not done with ChatGPT yet. The Wall Street Journal says forget about ChatGPT, and work with the apps it says are the best AI-powered ones. Okay, now we’re done.

I told you this was going to be a long issue—I hope it was a good investment of your time. We’ve got a long weekend coming up, make the best use of it. On Monday, please take some time to honor the people in our armed forces who gave their lives to protect us.

Niki