ChatGPT, Is That You?

In this episode, Christy and Thomas sit down with Carmen Erdie, Web Developer at Catalyst, to discuss one of the hottest topics in marketing: ChatGPT. This form of generative AI has a hold on the industry in multiple ways with its power to generate content for copy, social media captions, slogans, blog topics, and even travel recommendations for your next vacation. While the sky’s the limit with ChatGPT, where do we draw the line on implementing this in our careers and everyday lives? Find out by listening today.

Carmen Erdie
Carmen has been working with the interactive team as a Web Developer at Catalyst for almost three years. She builds websites with the user in mind. Carmen focuses on accessibility and usability, and is always looking for ways to improve her craft. Listen to today’s episode to learn more about Carmen’s expertise.

Transcript

Katie Degutis:

Hello there and welcome back to another episode of Good Mood Marketing. This is Katie, and as usual, I'm joined by Christy and Thomas today. And today we have a special guest from our office. We have Carmen. She is going to be joining us today to talk through kind of a very hot topic right now, ChatGPT. So we wanna kind of look at some use cases, some of the ethics behind it, look through different experiences, and talk all things ChatGPT. With that, Carmen, do you wanna give us a little background and kind of explain what you do here at Catalyst?

Carmen Erdie:

Hi yeah, I, my name is Carmen <laugh>. I am a web developer here at Catalyst, so I just build websites, mostly...

Katie Degutis:

That's all. You make it seem so simple.

Carmen Erdie:

My background is in UX design, so I got a degree in interactive development. And then I decided to move over into coding because making boxes all day was really getting to me <laugh>. So now I code. Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

I understood one thing you said, no I'm joking <laugh>.

Christy McFerren:

Well, we got a long way to go.

Thomas Demiranda:

Yeah. <Laugh>

Katie Degutis:

So with our topic today being ChatGPT, we wanted to start with just kind of a simple definition. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI released last November. I think most everyone around the table has had a little bit of time to poke around in there. And kind of what are your, your main takeaways or how have you used it possibly?

Christy McFerren:

<Laugh> Well, I definitely have spent some time playing around with ChatGPT just to see what all the buzz is about. I thought it was gonna be kind of, you know, a process to get in, but it's really just a simple, for those of you who've never touched it, whoops. For those of you who've never touched it, it's just log in with your Gmail account and answer a couple quick questions and then off you go to the races, you can pretty much ask it anything. So, me being the philosopher that I am, I started asking its beliefs about God and it's beliefs about family and all these things. And it just gives you bland answers of, I'm a robot, don't ask me these things basically <laugh>. So I'm like, okay, fine. Write me an essay about this.

Christy McFerren:

And, and then it was like a long eight page, or not eight page, eight paragraph essay.

Thomas Demiranda:

Wow.

Christy McFerren:

And then I was like, okay, change the tone to be a bit more authoritative. And then it would like spit that back out. So I just, I've had some fun, like playing around with it and realized like the power of it. You know, and then spent some time asking it for captions, for photos.

Thomas Demiranda:

Oh wow.

Christy McFerren:

And then asking it for, I was doing a little bit of volunteer work with our sailing club and asking it to tell me a good topic for sailors at this time of year. And it was like five or six different options. And so I, I really like it because I feel like it's sort of, you know, that brainstorm assistant kind of thing.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah.

Christy McFerren:

Like, you can't, it can't definitely like, tailor everything to where you're trying to go to, but it can certainly start the juices flowing. That's what I've used it for mostly so far.

Katie Degutis:

It's like it gets you past writer's block.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

Yeah. I, I've found that people that are probably like journalists or investigators or just people who asked really great questions, probably their first go at it is, you know, it works very well for them.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

For me, I was like trying to continue to write, you know, to ask the right questions because, you know, you get these bland answers and so it's like you have to be a, you have to like know how to prompt it and then ask follow up questions to really get where you're going so it doesn't completely just provide you exactly what you want, but I went in there to like work on like sales scripts and, and things like that and I, I thought it was really interesting what it would give me. But I'm still learning on how to use it and how to ask better questions so it can get to like where I'm like satisfied with the answer.

Christy McFerren:

Mm-Hmm.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. I've used it for mostly coding stuff. CSS, I was, I needed a specific, I think I needed a gradient border on something and I was Googling it and it just wasn't pointing me in the right direction, so I figured I'd throw it into a ChatGPT and it spit out exactly...

Thomas Demiranda:

Wow.

Katie Degutis:

That's wild to me.

Carmen Erdie:

...what I needed.

Thomas Demiranda:

Bye Google! <Laugh>

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. But it has its limits. Like also you get a lot of errors, that's just how it is when you're working with any kind of code. So I started like throwing error codes in there and it di it didn't exactly push me, like it was just, it didn't know what I was talking about.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah.

Carmen Erdie:

So you still have to use your own expertise in your job.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah, definitely.

Katie Degutis:

Funny enough, one of the things I used it for was to create the outline for this podcast that we're having today. So definitely helpful on that, that front. It got us a little kickstart and then also I've used it for kind of on a personal level, some trip planning and stuff like that. So...

Christy McFerren:

Did it steer you wrong?

Katie Degutis:

I didn't actually use it as my itinerary. But it was definitely interesting to play around with for a while. And I think to Thomas's point when you know the right questions and you kind of finesse it down to what you want it to be, it can be super useful.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah.

Katie Degutis:

It, one of the things we asked was like, what are some of the best brunch places in London?

Christy McFerren:

Nice.

New Speaker:

And I could do that in Google and probably find six different articles all that had maybe one or two of the same places on 'em. But this way it kind of condensed it down to where you didn't have to do that, that research part of it, which was nice.

Thomas Demiranda:

Yeah. I'm interested, like for this particular outline, what was like the first question you asked and did you put in like a, like some content already to help it generate this?

Katie Degutis:

I did not put in any content prior. I just said create or draft an outline for a podcast about Chat GPT.

Thomas Demiranda:

That's incredible. Wow.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah, it gave me an error at first and I was like, oh, somebody's a little shy. Don't wanna talk about yourself <laugh>. But it came back pretty quickly and gave me exactly what we're looking at, so.

Thomas Demiranda:

That's incredible.

Christy McFerren:

So if it's awkward, it's not our fault.

Thomas Demiranda:

Yeah, no <laugh>.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. I don't know if this is should be included in the podcast cause it's very niche, but there was a F1 podcast...

Christy McFerren:

It should definitely be included.

Thomas Demiranda:

F1? Oh, it's going.

Carmen Erdie:

I think it's already, it's called Pit Stop Boys. And they like went on to the F some F2 drivers podcast called Screaming Meals, which I don't understand that title.

Katie Degutis:

I didn't know that there was an F2 until you just said it. <Laugh>.

Christy McFerren:

And an F3!

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. And they they were just, they said that a lot of people, I get, maybe they were, I don't know specifically what they said cause I wasn't gonna listen to them cause they're dumb. Sorry. Like, no, I shouldn't include that in there <laugh>. But they were talking to, they didn't know who the F2 drivers, like were, they were saying that people were only into F1 because of, you know, drive to survive and like, because of drivers look good and that kind of stuff. And then they submitted, they put out an apology and then people were saying, you built that, you wrote that with ChatGPT.

Katie Degutis:

Oh the apology?

Carmen Erdie:

The apology.

Thomas Demiranda:

Wow.

Christy McFerren:

That's funny. <Laugh>.

Katie Degutis:

And there is no human emotion behind this whatsoever. <Laugh>.

Christy McFerren:

Well that kind of leads you to another point. You know, like we were talking about how SEO can be impacted and Google won't rank things that were AI generated. But I have to question, you know, how Google will know that if it's not doing the one writing it. And the answer is like, you can go ask ChatGPT a question and if you don't like the answer you can say, you know, push the button and refresh, try again.

Katie Degutis:

Mm-Hmm.

New Speaker:

And so how does Google really know that it was AI generated if it's not the owner of that engine? And so I don't know. I mean, I think, I don't think that you should just verbatim accept what ChatGPT gives you because we'll get into the ethics of that in a bit, but I do think it would be hard for it to over time like really recognize that or what if it starts misclassifying things that a human actually wrote for, you know, it mistakes it for something that it, it thinks an AI wrote, so...

Katie Degutis:

Right. Yeah. So....

Christy McFerren:

It's gonna get messy.

Katie Degutis:

Definitely. I think that brings up a really good point. So some of the different use cases that we have seen both for within the industry and personally we just talked through kind of some of the personal ways we've used it, but some of the benefits of using it within marketing could be things like content development, so blog topics, things like that. Starting points for emails and professional communication. I think in general, to the point we said earlier, sometimes you just need that little kind of idea. You need something to get out of that writer's block mindset. It, sometimes a simple task can just make itself so big in your head when you don't know the starting point. So having something that can kind of give you that kickstart helps writing simple website code and then...

Carmen Erdie:

I don't know if it can do that.

Katie Degutis:

Draft outlines...

Christy McFerren:

Have, have you fed it any problems to solve?

Carmen Erdie:

I guess when I, I hear "simple website code," I'm thinking like a whole website and it's like, no way. I wouldn't trust it.

Christy McFerren:

What about some CSS? Would you be like, make, give me like a semi round square that's a gradient of these two rides?

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah, you, that's pretty specific. You could probably do that, but I've been burned by like, so like I know Adobe does it. Their Sketch equivalent.

Katie Degutis:

Is that Adobe XD?

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah, XD I think it is? Or also Figma does it. They'll oh, they'll spit out like code like CSS code for what's on the page and it's not, it like uses position absolute, which you guys don't know what that means...

Katie Degutis:

I was gonna say immediately that went over my head.

Christy McFerren:

It's not relative <laugh>.

Carmen Erdie:

it's not relative to the...

Thomas Demiranda:

Now I know what it means.

Carmen Erdie:

<Laugh> We need it to be responsive and absolute is gonna remove the responsiveness from it.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah. It'll take it all the way off your screen on a phone.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. Potentially. Potentially. If it's not contained within a bigger div.

Thomas Demiranda:

Well, I mean, we're saying today, right? ChatGPT can't do this. I, you know, it would be naive of us of not thinking like in a year or five years or 10 years that it could probably write a whole website...

Christy McFerren:

Well I think...

Thomas Demiranda:

Based on the technology and they've all, you know, just listening to some podcasts and people talk, we're not gonna get into ethics yet, but like, just people talking about like what it could do and AI and all that. There is a, you know, maybe a dangerous proposition out there that this could become something else.

Katie Degutis:

I'm interested in Carmen's response to that.

Carmen Erdie:

Well I just think...

Christy McFerren:

Would you feed it like a layout?

Carmen Erdie:

I'm just so cynical about like AI and stuff like that. Like computers are really dumb <laugh> and they'll also point out to you as you code like how dumb you are. Cause, you know, I've spent like an hour trying to fix an error and then I realize it's just a comma. And if a comma can break an entire website or a server or you know...

Katie Degutis:

It has to be so precise.

Carmen Erdie:

...break a billion dollar, you know, generating website, then I don't really trust that AI is going to be this thing that everyone, I think it's exciting to think about. It's exciting to think, oh, there's something that could just generate a website. Like how cool is that? But is it possible? Like, I don't think, like not what we have because we're trying to replace a human, but we don't even know what's going on inside our own brains or how they work. So how are we gonna build a robot human?

Christy McFerren:

I think it's like the age old question of like, we build tools to serve us, but they sometimes end up replacing us. And that's okay because then we can, you know, the whole definition of wealth is to move something from one one purpose to a higher purpose.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah.

Christy McFerren:

Right? Whether it's a dollar or a person or, you know, you're increasing the value of your time. If you can have a chatbot answer a lot of basic questions and do a lot of rudimentary work for you, that you can then elevate your thoughts to more strategic level. It's the same reason we developed our dashboards. Like dataLYST, it moves the conversation with the client from, hey, how did we perform last month to, you can go log in any time and know how you're performing when we talk, let's not talk about that.

Christy McFerren:

Let's talk about what we do about how we performed. You're always trying to iterate on what's there to like take it to the next place. Right. And so I think ChatGPT, like we should dive into the ethics conversation because I think, I think it has the ability to propel us forward in a major, major way if we learn how to use it. But if we never let it, we can't ever let it cross that line of becoming us. It has to serve us. And so if we let it do our work for us and put out our work product and we turn our brains off, then it's not of service, it's actually an obstacle. But if we start to leverage it, like we would an assistant or a coordinator or an entry-level employee that, you know, can help us start our thoughts because they have a fresh perspective or they have a base of, you know, outside knowledge that we don't currently possess, and then we can leverage our expertise onto that, I think we can move the ball forward in so many ways and become more efficient.

Christy McFerren:

And so, I dunno, what do you guys think about that?

Thomas Demiranda:

I, my worry is who is in control of ChatGPT, like who makes the calls of what's ethical and not ethical? I mean...

Christy McFerren:

Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

You know, it's relative to each person, each government, you know, each country. And so, you know, it's the same thing with social media right now, right? Like we, we have that ethical conversation about like who, who gets to decide who is banned from what platform, for saying what.

Christy McFerren:

Right. Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

It's the same thing with ChatGPT. Like who's gonna put the parameters and say, okay, this is not right, well, somebody from whatever other countries may say, no, this is okay. And so putting those laws in place and then figuring out like the boundaries I think are super important. That's really what I'm most concerned about because no matter where you are on the spectrum, you know, ethically or politically, people are gonna disagree about what the parameters are.

Carmen Erdie:

So the CEO of OpenAI was on ABC News and he answered those questions. So ChatGPT is a product of OpenAI and so they have the code they can kill, kill it at any time or pull it down if it gets out of hand and they have their own ethics that they're following. but he also spoke to that the goal would be for all society or countries to come together and decide what AI should do and then have the engineers and the people who create artificial intelligence do that.

Katie Degutis:

Establish those regulations.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. Rather than just like launching it into the...

Christy McFerren:

The ether.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. The world.

Christy McFerren:

Well, I think it's important to define the difference between OpenAI and ChatGPT. OpenAI is the technology behind...

Carmen Erdie:

The deep learning.

Christy McFerren:

where ChatGPT is just, it's just sort of like a, a really fancy search engine.

Carmen Erdie:

Right.

Christy McFerren:

That's more proactive with its results. But OpenAI is, ChatGPT is one application of AI. And then AI in itself is, can do all kinds of things like robots and who knows what's coming. You know, that's the scary side to me is like, how else are they gonna apply this technology where ChatGPT is cute and it's helpful and I think great for the average information worker. But OpenAI is a whole different sort of matter.

Thomas Demiranda:

<Laugh> You touched on something there. It's like every time there's a new technology that seems to be not unexplainable, but where we could look in five, 10 years, we know it's gonna change and we don't know what that change is gonna be. Like, right. Nuclear weapons. Like when it first came out. The first question we asked is like, what happens if this gets into like the wrong hands?

Christy McFerren:

Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

And that's where my mind immediately goes, you know, what if some person or country gets the technology and then uses it for something else and starts developing it or building up upon it. That's where I, I think it's like, you know, once it's out there, it's kind of out there, right? And so yeah, there could be some engineer working on there now and, and then, you know, now I'm getting into like James Bond conspiracy theory, <laugh>, you know, like spies getting into like, you know, information and stuff like that. But I, I think from an ethical standpoint, it isn't, we have to ask these questions early and often and then hold, you know, the people who are developing this accountable and that they can be transparent as well.

Katie Degutis:

I think also people have to remember that you can't trust everything that comes out of it. We, we talked with Mike Whaling a few weeks ago on the podcast about, it's kind of like an 80% of the way there Junior Copywriter. You still have to vet the information that you're getting out of it. I mean, for the itinerary that I put together, for example, some of those places may have been closed since it was created, things like that. It's not guaranteed fact what it's giving you. So if you're just creating a blog and you think you can copy paste that over to a website, you've got all kinds of SEO implications, both with Google supposedly dinging it because it's AI created, but also is it even accurate?

Thomas Demiranda:

Oh, I was gonna ask is, is the technology built, this may be a really dumb question, but you know, when you go to like Bank of America or whichever other you know, you know place, you're going to ask questions to like a customer service AI thing. Is this technology built on that? I know we talked earlier before we started...

Katie Degutis:

Were you talking like a chatbot?

Thomas Demiranda:

Chat bot? Yeah. Like we talked about the different prompts in like a video game. Like if you're playing Zelda, you meet a merchant and you're...

Christy McFerren:

Do you play Zelda a lot?

Thomas Demiranda:

I don't, we were talking about it, but I know what Zelda is. The other games I did not!

Katie Degutis:

Carmen is helping dumb it down for him.

Christy McFerren:

I'm just trying to take Thomas off brand by accusing him of playing Zelda.

Thomas Demiranda:

Yeah, yeah. She told me Zelda and I was like, yeah, well I know Zelda is. But you know, you have a selective prompt. So the same thing if you go to like Bank of America and like, what is your issue? And you're like, fraudulent card, and then they prompt out a response.

Carmen Erdie:

Right. So that's...

Katie Degutis:

When I always demand speak to a representative.

Carmen Erdie:

...programmed. But like ChatGPT or OpenAI can be used. That technology can be used as like customer service. So like what would happen if, you know, we have apartment complex and they get a, a rush of a lot of negative reviews because maybe the pool exploded. I don't know. <Laugh>

Thomas Demiranda:

There was no water. There was no water <laugh>.

Christy McFerren:

At least it was a cool TikTok video. <Laugh>

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. but what would happen if right away there was a response right away there was a, you can call this person or there was some type of AI-generated, like we would have, if we are the people who are using this, we would have to fill it with the data, like how we want it to respond and the language, the type of language it knows how, what language...

Katie Degutis:

How it would generate that response?

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. But that would be kind of cool. Like, that might solve a lot of problems as far as like reputation from the online side, like if you don't have the maintenance crew to back it up or the, the office personnel to back, like to back it up and make it...

Katie Degutis:

Actually fixed the exploded pool?

Carmen Erdie:

Like it's not gonna work. But for customer service...

Thomas Demiranda:

Could it transfer into voice?

Christy McFerren:

Well, I think it, the, the — I didn't mean to interrupt you. Sorry.

Thomas Demiranda:

No, I was just gonna ask could it, can this technology transfer into like I know we get auto calls and then a robot will start talking. Could that transfer into like a customer service rep? A ChatGPT customer service?

Christy McFerren:

Yeah. There's actually a service that does that, that has a bunch of human actors that will take articles and read them. So same thing that Carmen is saying, like if you pre-populate canned responses, human actors have given their voices to, there's a couple services that do that. And so like, you can make 'em say anything.

Thomas Demiranda:

Hmm.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah. It's, but I think, you know, having done a few of those midnight to 2:00 AM crisis management things, Katie knows she's on this, this team we work with, you, you don't have the operational backup 100% in the apartment industry is not there. I mea, God bless America and all of the people that work in multi-family and student housing, but the resources are way too strapped to trust in AI to lead a crisis management. To think that the maintenance man's gonna be there to think that any operational backup's gonna happen without massive amounts of human intervention.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah.

Christy McFerren:

Because it's just far too risky. And, you know, even within our own teams, I was thinking of one of the most recent events that we won't get into too deeply, but we were pretty sure none of our students were affected and we were almost ready to say none of them were affected until one of them was. And it's like so nuanced that crisis intervention might be one of the last places I would want AI working.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah. And I wanna kind of back up a little bit from the AI conversation cause I know we are gonna have another episode about that. So before we kind of get too far from ChatGPT, wanted to just ask you guys, do you see ChatGPT having the ability to replace creative agencies?

Christy McFerren:

Absolutely not. No. I think the smart ones will leverage it and do that with great intent and build it into their workflows and make it sort of, not necessarily mandatory, but a, a best practice in a lot of different corners of an agency. But I think there has to be governance, and I think there has to be you know, due diligence over the output of that. And the way I was talking to our creative director about it was like, you know, in the nineties when I was in school you know, you go to the library and you wanna write it an essay or a, you know, a paper on a certain topic. You go pull 10 or 12 books down off the shelf, set 'em to your left if you're me, and read, you know, thumb through them, find the chapter titles and the topics you want to weave into your paper, get those little neon bookmarks and stick to the page and flag your spot.

Christy McFerren:

And then you start writing an outline and put it in order. And then you take the quotes and the content from that and you paste it in, and then you rephrase and paraphrase and change the way you look at that, add your own opinions, and you mix it all together. And then you have somebody, hopefully a good friend that's like, hey, read what I wrote. Does this make sense? And then you churn it again and by the time you're done, you've got a source, source is cited but you've got your own thoughts and your own paper, and then you turn it in. And I think ChatGPT is the stack of books. Is the friend, is, you know, your initial outline creator and or you then become the friend that ChatGPT helps you write and leverage that. But there's gonna become like a void in your own soul if you're not doing your own work at the end of the day. Like, take what they gave you but then disagree with it, agree with it, add your perspective. And I think that applies to a lot of different roles in an agency.

Katie Degutis:

I think you just have to have the idea, too. Like Thomas in sales has probably gotten a hundred requests of we want something that's gonna go viral. And that's just not something you can predict. It's not something you can sell because it is so nuanced based on what's trending, what's going on in the world at the time. Different, there's so many different pieces that can impact that and you have to have the good idea to start it.

Thomas Demiranda:

You can't replace a creative agency because there's two things. There's the relationship, which that technology can never have or hold...

Katie Degutis:

Can't hold the gold standard!

Thomas Demiranda:

<Laugh>. But there's a service, which I do think, and I may be wrong, but in the future, you know, like Canva, you can go on Canva buy a logo or whatever.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah.

New Speaker:

I do think that there's gonna be a cheapened version of it. And you know, in every industry there are are businesses that just interact transactionally with a partner or vendor, not even a partner. Right? A vendor. And so some of those will choose a cheap inversion like, you know, AI or, or whatever to use to, to, you know, bring me a tagline, things like that. But as far as like a sophisticated strategy to solve real problems, you need a relationship. You need to get into the nuances of it. And you can't do that with a robot. There's just no way.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. And I think when you interact with a technology that is, as you say, a quote unquote cheapened, like you're, you feel that in inhumanity, like you feel that it's not another person on the other side. There's no...

Thomas Demiranda:

Uniqueness.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. Or even like happy feeling about it. Like you're not getting....

Katie Degutis:

You can tell that it's a canned response.

Carmen Erdie:

Right. You're not getting the feedback and the, like we, the social interactions that we need as human beings. And I feel like the more we interact with technology and the more we use it and the more it is misused, we will probably become more, at least I have become more and more wary of the canned responses, or I want a human interaction. So I don't think in the long run that will work for those companies.

Christy McFerren:

I agree. How many, many times have you guys been on a support call with the company and you're like, I just wanna talk to a person.

Katie Degutis:

I repeat it over and over until I get to one. And I have heard...

Thomas Demiranda:

Customer service. Customer service.

Katie Degutis:

I have heard some ways that you can cut that line and I'm not gonna repeat them because there's a reason they're flagged to cut the line.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah.

New Speaker:

But I will use them every time because I just want to speak to a human.

Christy McFerren:

Yeah. And that's, I I, I'm gonna need to get your hacks because I'm like, talk to a person, talk to a person, talk to a person, talk to a per, like, over and over. I'm like, I don't want to talk to your robot right now cause I have a situation that I know you don't have pre-programmed in your little machine.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. Well it's hard too because you're interacting with something that, not to get too deep on this podcast, but you're interacting with a organization that just wants to make money, right? Like that's all they want. It's capitalistic, like that's it. And you're like, I'm in a crisis right now. My credit card has been stolen from me and I need it back. And they just charge this specific thing, and this might not be a good example, but I want to speak to somebody because if you're in a crisis, you need a human interaction.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah. You need someone understanding.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah, at least just to have like maybe a soothing voice or something.

Katie Degutis:

Yeah, definitely.

New Speaker:

Or I'll even accept somebody... Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

Look, I'll tell about a recent experience. You know, some things have happened in my life, but I have had to deal with a lot of logistical things for my family. And I had to call, you know, this customer service person and this person went above and beyond of being like proactive and caring and empathetic that like, it just lifted a weight off my back. It's like, no, don't worry about it. I'm gonna actually send an email to that department right now. I'll get a response. She gave me all the next steps. She's like, and then call me tomorrow, first thing in the morning and follow up and ask for me and I'll get it done. That's, there's no way that, technology could do that.

Christy McFerren:

Well, and that's the thing Carmen saying like, there's a soul there. You know, there's somebody that cares about what you're going through and that wants to feel good about doing something good for someone else, like that adds value to their own existence. And there's never gonna be a machine that needs to feel the pleasure of delivering gold standard service to anyone. You know, you just can't beat what God made. <Laugh>.

Carmen Erdie:

And maybe the opposite of that is maybe somebody, this is real bad, I wouldn't recommend it, but maybe somebody wants to scream at a real person <laugh>

Christy McFerren:

Yeah. You want hear somebody just listen to you vent.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. Yeah. Which maybe AI would be good for that if you could get a big a...

Christy McFerren:

Here's Carmen for the experience you're having.

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. But not being, yeah. If you made it sound like, like an actual person, like maybe they could just like scream into it like as customer service. Yeah.

Thomas Demiranda:

Or the Morgan Freeman voice.

Carmen Erdie:

Be like, oh, this person just needs to yell.

Christy McFerren:

Talking to God.

Thomas Demiranda:

Morgan Freeman just comes like, I understand.<Laugh>

Carmen Erdie:

Or something. Or even in like an airport, apparently airports just do something to people and they...

Katie Degutis:

It's like they need like a rage room there.

Carmen Erdie:

...lose their minds. Yes.

Christy McFerren:

Seriously. <Laugh>

Katie Degutis:

All right. Well, before we get too far back into the AI side of things, since we are gonna have that second episode, wanted to ask you today, Carmen, what has you in a good mood?

Carmen Erdie:

I am <laugh>, this is hard to explain. So I've, my dog passed and I've been slowly and surely like feeling better and better, like from the grief. And I am in a good mood because I feel the possibilities of being unencumbered by anything and how exciting it is that I can just like go travel or, you know, come into the office and not have to worry about...

Katie Degutis:

When you need to get home to...

Carmen Erdie:

Yeah. Or like, I can go, like, the other day I went to UCHI and by myself because I was going to trivia later and I had some time, like from the office to go eat, and like how nice that is. So I'm trying to see the bright side of that and that's got me in a good mood.

Thomas Demiranda:

UCHI, good place.

Thomas Demiranda:

Okay. Me? Well Friday we have some friends coming over our house, so I, I don't know if we're playing games or just drinking wine, but looking forward to that.

Katie Degutis:

That will be nice. I'm in a good mood today. We've got the full team in office, so we've got a team meeting today. Hopefully on the podcast you can't hear everyone running through the halls, but it's gonna be really nice to have that interaction. I've been out for about two weeks, so glad to get back into the swing of things.

Christy McFerren:

I'm excited about that too. That's one of my good moods, but I'll go ahead and add some flavor. I got to take a couple days off earlier this week and got my son out on a sailboat and he's been out on a boat before, but this time he's, he was out with his full consciousness when he's a little bit older to enjoy it.

Katie Degutis:

And, the tiniest little life jacket I've ever seen!

Christy McFerren:

He was freaking out with the, the waves were white capping just a little bit and every time one would come he'd go, Ooh! <Laugh>. This is so adorable.

Carmen Erdie:

It is really cute.

Katie Degutis:

To see it through his eyes.

Thomas Demiranda:

Yeah.

Christy McFerren:

That's it for us, I guess. Cheers everybody.

Thomas Demiranda:

Thanks everyone. Cheers.

Katie Degutis:

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