Let's get started. I'm your host, Chris Dagle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of Demorough Tech. Let's get started. So I'm going to let him introduce himself, but our guest today is Edward Frank Morrison and I just want to encourage everybody that if you're not reaching out to others on social, you're missing out. That's how Edward and I connected. I saw the type of content that he was putting out on LinkedIn in particular, wildly impressed, reached out to him. And now here we are, you know, after several calls and uh emails, here we are. Uh we've got a guest, uh, fantastic guest for everybody today. So, Edward, why don't you take a moment and just tell everybody a little bit about yourself?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a good question. Um
why do I even begin with myself? So uh obviously we're on an AI podcast, but um I have a degree in journalism, so it's a little bit strange, and I get this quite a lot. And my background is actually in communication. Um, so I started off as a journalist, I did a lot of social media marketing, and then I did quite a lot of copywriting as well. And I've always kind of had a foot in AI, so I've always kind of been involved in it in some way or another because it's always been something that's interested me from an ethical standpoint. So to me, I kind of like talked about AI from the perspective of like this is good, this is bad, here's what we can improve, here's how we can implement this. And it just so happened that, you know, around two years ago, it's more like a year and a half or even less, ChatGPT came onto the scene and everyone started using it, and then we started realizing the importance of these GPTs and these kind of transformational models. And so I kind of jumped in. And ever since then, it's just been a bit of an upward rise, really. I still do a lot of AI consulting, but now I'm one of the only prompt engineers in the UK who's um actually done it, you know, who's um not just said, here's how you can become a prompt engineer and here's how you can work in AI. Like I've actually gone out there and yeah, wrestled the beast and made it mine. So yeah, that's that's kind of my background. I've been uh featured in Forbes, um, been on Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, um, worked with some I can't say them by name, but um some massive companies, and I've worked with one company who's recently been in the news. Can't talk about what I've done for them either, but um and a LinkedIn top voice, of course. That's a recent accolade. That too, yeah. I was the very first LinkedIn top voice um specifically for prompt engineering, and um, yeah, it's just been a crazy ride, really. I'd like I it it's weird because I didn't think I'd be growing this fast, but here we are. You know, I'm on the podcast with you, and yeah, it's how we met, man. Like LinkedIn. LinkedIn, who'd have thought.
SPEAKER_02You know, it's interesting that you bring that up. Unintentionally, uh, some of our past guests, there there's been a theme of them having uh copywriting skills, right? And one of the and I didn't realize that about your background, but it makes perfect sense because one of the connections that I've made is that like copywriters, sales copywriters, they spend a lot of time thinking about specific words and how to use those words to convey um uh a meaning, a message, to elicit an emotion. So they're they pay more attention to the language than most of us do who are just you know casual talkers. So I can you address how you think that that may have had some impact on combined with a journalism degree, which again, with that degree, you're studying how do words influence thought. And with all of those things, it seems like because most people they think about prompt engineer or prior to to today, they would think of prompt engineer as the Python coder who's getting in there and doing a lot, which that is one definition of a prompt engineer. But those guys don't have the mastery of the language, right? They understand the engineering side, but not the communication side. So can you kind of talk about like how that has given you an advantage maybe over somebody who just had the the the technical understanding of prompt engineering?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's it's quite interesting, really,
because I think a lot of the time we we look at AI, as you've rightly said, from like a coding and Python kind of perspective, which is fair enough because that's all we've ever really known about AI for the past decade, really, because you need to have that kind of knowledge, mathematics and all these things in order to make an AI tool. But I don't remember who said it specifically on X, but someone said that communication in English is now the top coding skill, it's like the top programming language. And the reason why it's so important is because with these large language models, you have to communicate to the large language model what you want it to do, you know. And one of the biggest tasks for any copywriter in the world is to get a person to commit to an action, that's the end goal for everything. It doesn't necessarily have to be for sales, it can be for clicking a button, it can be for subscribing to a newsletter, it can be anything really. But the ability to command and get action out of something or someone in this case is the most important skill to have as a copywriter. And so when ChatGPT came onto the scene and we had all these people who are fantastic at like guiding people on how to do things and making them do things, it seems like it was a match made in heaven because now those direct language skills can transpose themselves into Chat GPT, because essentially what ChatGPT is trying to do is it's trying to understand what you're ordering it to do. So if you can do that in either a very precise and a concise way, or if you can do it in a way that gets the AI to interact in a particular kind of way with its own subset of data, you tend to get very good results. And so, like just to wrap the point up, when Sam Altman came out with ChatGPT and then all these prompt engineers started rising to the surface, and Sam rightly said prompt engineering isn't like a role that is going to be out there forever. I think he was partially right. I think prompt engineering as it stands at the moment is incredibly important for a lot of companies. But I think what it is is for the average person, prompt engineering won't be as important to them. But if you are a business that needs AI to do very specific kinds of things and you need someone to whisper to the AI to do specific things, if run of the mill isn't good enough for you, you'll need a prompt engineer. And that's where the communication skills come in. Because you can get the best coders in the world to write something and get a large language model off the ground. But if you don't know someone who can talk to it and get it to do the things you want, you have a load of data, but you can't use the data, or in the way you want at least, you can't charm it. It's like having a snake, but you just don't have anyone to play the flute and get it to dance, yeah. You know, yeah, exactly. So that's how I see it at least.
SPEAKER_02So the average you uh user or listener of the podcast, their demands for it aren't gonna be they're gonna have a wider tolerance of of hallucination or or a rewrite. The stuff that you're working on, though, you're suggesting that the the output needs to be extremely precise because so many downstream activities or upstream activities are reliant on the quality of the output that you're eliciting from the models, is that right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think it it depends entirely on on the user case, because I think for most average people, like even non-avage, even executives and people along those lines, you have very specific intentions for chat GPT. I think a lot of them, although they would benefit from uh taking a prompt engineering course or something along those lines, I think a lot of them are quite content just saying rewrite this email in a professional tone and then it does the thing. But when you're let's I haven't worked with them, so I can actually mention a name. Um, let's say you're BlackRock, for instance, you may want a GPT and you may want a large language model that can take 50 pages worth of research data and it spits it out in a very particular kind of format where paragraph three is longer than paragraph one or whatever, and that's where prompt engineer really needs to come in. So, on one hand, if you're like a normal person, you'll find benefit in large language models. But if you are a company that can see all of this data being formatted, or even if it's just technical writing being formatted in a particular kind of way, and you're like, that's gonna save us leaks of time. You're gonna see prompt engineering in completely different light to the average person.
SPEAKER_02So when you were talking about how um Sam Walton said that people didn't really need to learn how to prompt, a couple of takeaways from that concept was one, most people can get that synthetic output that they're looking for just from brute forcing, you know, beating the keyboard, right? They don't need to be precise. However, the type of stuff that you do, you know, is is there some feedback or are there tools that you're using to improve prompt? And and let me let me get it the context. So if somebody is new to this and they think, oh, all I have to do is just treat it like Google, right? Like let me ask you something, right? That's you and I know that that's uh that that's a weak prompt. It can be a lot more uh effective than that. Are you using any tools or have you heard of any tools that an individual who's not good at it can use to rewrite their prompt in a way that would get them a better output?
SPEAKER_01You know, it's interesting because I do see the tools like this. You know, I do see prompts perfect, I do see extensions you can add onto Google, and what it does, it essentially beefs up your prompt. But I think ultimately I don't use any any kind of tools whatsoever. That's the the big thing. And I I I do anything, you know, I do anything from simple kind of make me an email with 500 words and make it sound in a particular kind of way, all the way to seriously complex prompts that require multiple chain entries. But I've never really seen the benefit of using a prompt perfect kind of thing from my perspective, because of prompt engineering. I mean, from the perspective of like the average person, I think the best thing for them to do when they learn prompt engineering or when they try to get into the world of large language models is to also work on their communication skills. Because ultimately, if you want your AI to work in a particular kind of way, you have to communicate that like it's a human being, because it is ultimately meant to be mimicking a human being, right? That's an artificial intelligence. So if you're if you're treating it like Google, you're using 5% of its capacity if that and you're getting 5% results. So it's just like what every other AI influencer says on LinkedIn, which is garbage in, garbage out. So you have to be specific with it if you want specific results. Diamond in, diamond out, right? So if you want a 1,000-word paragraph in written in three-line stanzas and it's written in a Harvard business style, you could do that, but you have to tell the AI that because it still can't read your mind. You have to be specific. And I think a lot of the time when when people get a little bit disenchanted with AI, or they're like, we're not quite there yet, like we're not there, it's terrible, like ChatGPT is awful at doing stuff. I think there are a few reasons why they think that. And I think it's because they pick it up and they give it something impossible to do, or they misunderstand the system completely, which is where I think education comes in quite heavily. You know, I I see all the time on Reddit and Twitter or X and LinkedIn, and people say, you know, I tell Chat GPT to do something like 3 plus 3 or 2 plus 2, and they couldn't do it. I'm like, well, yeah, because it's a large language model, it's not mathematical. But people have their expectations, you know, they have their misconceptions, and it's so easily fixed, you know, it just takes a bit of time to learn, but once you learn it, it's the most powerful tool you can have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's one of the things that we uh uh uh routinely explain to executives is the limitations of the models. Right? There's some these assumptions that it's uh it's perfect, and if you know how to use it, it can be pretty darn perfect. So um for individuals who are now starting to get this concept of, hey, I don't need to be technical in order to prompt well, the advice of learning how to communicate was very good. Are there some specific people that they should follow? Or are there some specific how would one how would a non-technical business person who wasn't aware that they weren't communicating well until they they listen to this? Where do they go from here to kind of get the the hang of talking to the models?
SPEAKER_01I mean it's a it's a great question, right? Because I think it would be very easy for me to say open AI, um, anthropic and other companies that depend on prompt engineering for you to communicate with your system. Um they have courses and they have material out there that you can use and learn from, you know. But I think one of the big things about AI of this style is that it is a communication thing, ultimately. And if if you're a poor communicator, you're not going to communicate very well with the AI. And so from my perspective, I just see it and I'm like, well, if you don't want to communicate with the AI like an AI and you or human, then you have to communicate to it as if it's like a a system, right? So you would then have to bullet point what you want to do. And so instead of you saying, Hey ChatGPT, um, I want you to write me like a 5,000-word essay, whatever, in this style, in this length, or uh in this format, you would then instead open up a notepad and then you think to yourself, well, what do I really want Chat GPT to do? And then you would just start bullet pointing out what you want it to do. You know, dash write a paragraph about X product in a luxury copywriting style, another dash below it, um write out 7,000 words or 700 words that describe how to use the product, another dash below that, then at the very bottom put a legal disclaimer that if you use it incorrectly, we don't hold any liability. And so just by bullet pointing what you want this thing to do, you're essentially communicating as directly as possible. I think there's a bit of a divide because most of my prompts are written in that way because I just want to get the points across the chat GPT. That way, if I if there's something wrong, if something goes bad, I can look at the line and go, that's probably what's confusing it. You know, I'm using this word instead of that word. I'm telling it, here's an example, but actually I'm not using the word example. I'm saying, for instance, they're not adding quotation marks or something. So it's just a case of you know making sure you can actually communicate. And I don't think any prompt engineering course out there can actually do that for you. I think it's it's very difficult to pick up any course, even with the best intentions, and say, you know what, this is going to teach me everything there is about prompt engineering, when inherently prompt engineering is a communication skill, which is why there are so many writers out there who can spot ChatGPT written content from a mile away because they've seen it a thousand times and they're like, ah, you're communicating using this exact pattern that Chat GPT uses. And we can tell, you know, I can tell. Um if you show me a paragraph that's chat GPT generated, I'll be able to tell you. Um, but yeah, that's that's kind of where I stand with the whole matter, you know. I think if you want to get good at talking to ChatGPT, learn how to talk to people. That's that's a thing.
SPEAKER_02You know, so you you bring up an interesting point. There's plenty of courses out there to learn to learn prompt engineering, however, you can learn how to prompt and some frameworks, but until you're interacting with it and realizing the variation and output based on what you're doing, like understanding how to prompt is not learning prompt engineering. Learning prompt engineering is gonna come from beating up the keyboard and going like, oh, that's not what I meant. That's not what I meant, that's not what I meant. And so this is great advice. So anybody out there who may feel like they haven't gotten the hang of prompting, keep prompting. Um but couple it with a framework like what Edward was talking about here, where you're very clear, you don't have to be uh an erudite prompt prompter. You just need to be a good communicator. So that's a great distinction. Now, obviously the models are uh a daily tool for you outside of Chat GPT and and Claude and any of those kind of tools. What are what are some tools that you're getting a lot of value out of that are AI powered, AI driven in your the operation of your business? Not necessarily delivery of your your value, but in the operation of your business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is this is another interesting point. Um, I mean, at the at the very core, it is Chat GPT and generally large language models that my life is surrounded with at the moment. And the reason for that being is because there's so much written content out there. And so the way my business kind of works and the way I work as an individual, I will look at a business and I'll say there are certain areas you can optimize. And it seems that most of my clientele they fall into one or two categories, and it's either they want to implement AI into the business and upskill their stuff and how to use ChatGPT efficiently, which is fair enough because we all want to write stuff, we all want drafts, and we all have long letters, we just want to avoid writing altogether, and so that's completely fine. Um, or alternatively, they'll go down the route of we want our own specific API with anthropic or chat GPT or whatever it is, and we want it to have one core function, and that's a lot more intricate because you have to be good at fine-tuning, and at that point, that's where actual prompt engineering starts mattering. Because we talk about prompt engineering a lot, and I think there's like multiple levels to prompt engineering. But for the sake of the listeners, just to kind of give you an overview, when you enter into the prompt engineering world at that level of the API and stuff, you have to start tinkering with how the AI interacts with your words. Does it want to answer in a 100% this is as hard, factual as I can get kind of way? Or do you want it to be a bit more imaginative and human feeling? And these are some trade-offs you have to start making as a prompt engineer. And then there's other things you have to account for like model drift and all the rest. So from my day to day, it is it is always chat GPT, it's always large language models, and it's always you know these kind of areas. But I think one thing which has saved me a lot of time, even though this is a bit of a cheat because it still boils down to a large language model. One thing that's saved me a lot of time is um meeting recording AI, you know, fireflies, otter AI. Um, this kind of stuff, it's it's invaluable, you know. There will be stuff which we'll talk about on the podcast, and I'll think back and I'll think, did I really say that? Like, can did can I play that back? And sure, I could listen to the whole podcast. But it'd be far easier if I could just hit Ctrl F and then search through the meeting vols, right? It'd be way easier. So these kinds of things are really useful. And there's other things coming up which are very, very similar to it, which I'm even considering getting, even though they're a little bit invasive and creepy. Like, for instance, AI that records your live meetings, so that when you're in a face-to-face situation, you can just put the phone down and take all the notes so you can send those notes off to the other other party, right? Really, really useful tech. Um, and it's stuff like that that I think is probably the most beneficial to me, especially because meetings seem to be the name of the game these days.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think um in modern business, the stats are crazy. I think that that the average individual in a uh you you're entrepreneurial, I'm entrepreneurial, it's a little different, but for the person that that does the nine to five and shows up to the office, I think they're spending like a third of their week in meetings. And if you can more intelligently uh conduct these meetings or document these meetings, like exactly the tool that you're talking about. And here's what's crazy, dude. We built that tool for internal use four months ago. So we've been using that exact thing. So not as creepy because we were all like participating in the development of it, but I can just the wearables that those might be, I don't know, yeah, like like that kind of stuff is a little um it's insane.
SPEAKER_01Like oh, who's the company? I can't remember the company who wants to do it. Um it's it's like a necklace that goes around your neck and it like records everything. And I remember the company and I reached out to them was like, Hey, is this the Like always recording, and they're like, No Ed, don't be ridiculous. It's not always recording, it's just when you press the button, and it's like, oh, okay, so it is always recording. There's gonna be one guy who's like recording everything, and just like Siri and Alexa aren't always listening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you gotta be willing to give up all privacy. So, how did you go from journalism and copywriting into obviously you'd been you'd been uh an AI enthusiast prior to uh the big release in November of 2023, but what does that transition look like? Because we've got people out here maybe we've got copywriters listening to this for sure, who would like to, even though they're well paid as sales copywriters, the application of that skill into an AI enabled environment raises their value, their like commercial value considerably in the marketplace. So for individuals who are interested in moving more towards identifying as a prompt engineer, what was that path like for you and what advice would you give them now?
SPEAKER_01I think I'll just go straight to the pitfall. Um, the biggest mistake I ever made in the prompt engineering and just generally the AI journey that I went on is I only started pushing myself in AI and that kind of field properly, I think in around June, July-ish, so quite late into the hype cycle of Chat GPT at the time. Like before then, I was just lurking on Reddit and commenting on posts and seeing what people were making and doing, and that was fine. I was just upping my knowledge. But the thing is, I I was already using ChatGPT far more than other people were at that point. Like by I I got access in November of 22, and so by that point I had used it way more than the rest of the world had. And so I think the big thing, this is the biggest pitfall. If I could turn back time, this is what I would change. I would just go straight in and say, right, we're gonna talk about AI on LinkedIn from the very start. I might be a newbie, but every piece of new information I come across, I'm just gonna share, and people might benefit from it because it's such new technology. Probably my biggest regret, because if I did that, I'd probably be up there with like the six-figure followers. Although it's like a vanity metric, it it does make a big difference when it comes to trying to get clients, jobs, and contracts. Yeah, it's an it's an authority thing more than anything, and so that would probably be my biggest thing. So if you are considering going from the copywriting route to the AI route, like it, you know, go out there and do your thing. Um, but from the actual transition side of things, that's a quite interesting question because you know, again, my foot's always kind of been in the AI sphere, it's always kind of been there. But going from journalism to copywriting was a purely monetary and a moral kind of thing for me. Because I in journalism, I kind of like looked at the world and I was like, right, Ed, like the here's the world, right? And how do you make money with journalism? You report on the truth or what you consider to be the truth. Like we can we can debate about that if you want, but I mean, that's how it's done, right? Like you you find a sad story, you write about the sad story, you promote the sad story, hopefully gets a few clicks, you get a bit of ad revenue, and you've profited off of someone's misery. Now, I thought to myself, that's not how I want to live, right? I can't live like that because at some point I'm gonna be pushing out like six of these stories every single day in a nine-to-five office, and I'm gonna get so desensitized that at some point in my life I'm gonna look at a sad story or something tragic that has happened, and I'll think, oh, that won't get me that many clicks, I'm not gonna make that much money off of it. And and I didn't want that, I didn't want that on my site. And so I said, Where else can I go? You know, what else can take me on, or where can I take these copy, well, these writing skills? And it led me to social media management. And social media management at the time wasn't a super, super popular thing, but it wasn't very writing focused. It was always kind of like, let's make a viral like video clip and see how good it does. And eventually the market just became too saturated, and I thought this there's no point competing because there's some person halfway across the world who can charge like you know £300 an hour, or like £300 a month rather, and that's their monthly salary. And in the meanwhile, in the UK, you need about £1.6,000 to live per month, and that's on a minimum wage. And I'm like, I can't compete with £300 a month, like at all. Like, I can't. And so I said, Okay, well, I've got marketing, I've got writing, let's just transition into just pure writing, let's just do some features, some blogs, some product description, you know, let's go down that avenue. And that worked out really well for me. Yeah, so I just kept on copywriting and just kept on doing my thing. And I think the initial transition from journalism to copywriting was actually the hardest part. Because for me, I'm now taking the skills that I have and had, where I would tell the news quite factually and then flip it onto its head and say, instead of me just telling the news, I have to describe the news and I have to make the news. Yeah, it changes everything. So when ChatGPT came out and I saw how people were using it, and I thought, this isn't what we thought AI was gonna be, because we all thought that AI was gonna be coding and all this stuff. Like, how is this possible? So Twitter was back then was flooding with videos and pictures and memes, and people were making all sorts of crazy stuff, you know. Um, stuff that these days we would consider mundane, you know, shopping lists, uh people were making full documents, full emails, the whole thing. And we were like, wow, this is insane, it's crazy. Let's see what else we can do with it. So I got Chat GPT. I was very, very lucky because there weren't that many users at the time, so I got the beta quite early. And then in November I started using it, and I was like, this is insane. Like I can get it to role-play fictional characters. There weren't any safeguards on it back then, so I could get it to emulate a doctor, I could get it to emulate a judge, a lawyer, a nurse, all of these high professions. And I was like, even if the output isn't 100% accurate, it's still a proof of concept that at some point we can get something which is so close to accurate that it'll be better than a human being. Then lo and behold, Chat GPT-4 comes out and it says, well, OpenAI says, it's past the bar exam, it's past the medical exam, it's past all these exams. And I'm like, this is it. Like, go go in, Ed, like to put all your chips in. Like, this is it, this is the end game. And so, you know, I've I've still got friends who are doing copywriting, and I still do copywriting every now and then, but like on a more casual kind of basis. And even they're like, why did you transition? You know, why did you do it? If you're that skilled at copywriting, you should never have moved, you should have had faith. But I'm like, you're kidding, right? Like, I can take everything I've ever written, put it into a notepad document, feed this into AI technology that is now a year old, and it will spit out content that sounds like I wrote it word for word, you know? And I think a lot of people don't understand that. Like, sure, it's it's it's almost like you're selling yourself out, but if this technology exists, it doesn't really matter what I think. Because this thing exists, you know. We can't put we can't close Pandora's box, it's open. We know what a large language model can do now. You know, I mean, even if the government of the UK were to come along and say, no more Chat GPT, no more Gemini, no more anthropic, just no more large language models, there are millions of people in the UK, just like myself, who have downloaded offline large language models like Mixtral and Lama, and we can get it to run on our PCs. The people who possess those things are super human because if they're generating work in seconds, I mean, how can a copywriter, a hard copywriter, compete with that? They just can't. And so I was like, you either pivot now, Ed, or you're gonna get left behind. And so I pivoted. I've never looked back since. You know, prompt engineering is something which you have to keep on playing with, you learn the basics. You you can start with a few frameworks if you want. I think the most popular framework at the moment is the SMART framework. But once you've graduated from that framework, you then just like copywriting, you start doing your own thing. You know, there's loads and loads of copywriting frameworks. There's there's a pain aggravate solution, and most copywriters, yeah, yeah, yeah. They start they start with they start with that, but then as they get older into their copywriting journey, they start to realize actually the frameworks are like training wheels. We need to let go of them so that we can grow. And then once you let go, you then you start growing. Just like prompt engineering, you can start with some frameworks. Once the frameworks have done their purpose and you know how it works, spread your wings, you know, go crazy. That's that's that's it.
SPEAKER_02You mentioned uh uh a pretty commonly encountered scenario for people who are using the models to create content. It doesn't sound like me. I can't get it to sound like me. That's a a common refrain that I hear. And you the example you have the benefit of a body of work that you can train the models on, right? Like you've been writing, so you can say this is how I write, here's five years, ten years worth of work, do it like that. The average person doesn't. Do you have any although this is this is everybody wants the models to sound more like them, how do I are are there any prompting techniques or any any frameworks that you found that are particularly good at uh helping an individual create a closer clone of their voice for the output? Good question.
SPEAKER_01Um I think this is gonna be a little bit strange because I'll get to the large language model aspects in a second, but
with Midjourney, um, when people try to generate their own pictures, I think a lot of people mess up. And the reason why people mess up with Midjourney, and for the listeners who aren't quite aware, Midjourney is for image generation rather than text generation. I think what a lot of people tend to do is they they go onto Midjourney and they'll say, I want a picture of a man wearing a black tuxedo, nice hair, um, sunglasses, and it's their idyllic version of themselves. But in order for you to get something that even closely resembles you, you have one of two options. And your two options are one, you give mid-journey a picture of yourself and you'll reference the picture, but it won't be perfect. Or two, you take a long hard look in the mirror and you take note of your face, you know, what is it round, is it triangular, diamond shape, are your eyes almond-shaped, are they you know wide? Are they small? Are they big? You know, do you have a tomato nose? Like all sorts of things. You just be as meticulous as possible, and then you feed into mid-journey, and then mid-journey will spit out something which is closer to you. It'll still be 90% of the way there. But when you finally change it over and you do a face swap with the newly generated image, you then get something which looks pretty scarily accurate to you. It's like a 98% thing, and you can go further, you can get close to 99. Now, the reason I mention it is because copywriting and getting large language models to behave in the exact same way is no different. So you have to be very aware of how you write as a person. Like all of us have habits. So some people they'll start all their messages off with, you know, an introduction line or a joke. Some people start it off with just a straight up, you know, nice to hear your voice after so long and this kind of stuff, and or a compliment, whatever it might be, but we all have our habits. And I think when you're trying to get a large language model to act like yourself, again, you have two options. You can do it the easy way, which is taking all the content you've ever written, or tweets, or LinkedIn posts, or uh Facebook posts, I guess, and you you plug it into a notepad file, you just copy and paste everything you've ever written, and then you feed into Chat GPT and you tell it to use as a reference point, and you tell the model write a post like I would and use the reference point. And it will. I've done it many, many times, not just for myself, but for copywriting. Like there are many luxury brands which I've thought I really like their copywriting style. Let's see if I can emulate it. And I just take the copy from their site and feed into a notepad file, and yeah, it does the job. Um, but there's always that 5%, and then you have to make those edits, and then you have to make sure that it actually fits who you are, because there'll be certain things where you'll go, that's very close to what I would say, but I'm just gonna raise that line or I'm gonna edit that line. But it's that 5% change that you make that will make it really sound like you. And I I'm sure there are gonna be people listening and they're gonna think, well, that's not good, because that'd be you still have to edit it, it's not 100% there. But keep in mind that this AI, this AI can generate, you know, 2,500 words in 30 seconds, and we're asking you to edit a paper for like two minutes. I think I think it saved you enough time, you know. And so, yeah, yeah, that's that's how I view it. You know, you can get things very close.
SPEAKER_02So this kind of is tying into the th the concept that you shared earlier, where in your journalism career you reported on the news, but then in copywriting, you're almost like you said, you're describing the news. With the mid-journey example, here's a photograph of me versus let me describe me. So this this concept of of running the the the what you want to communicate through the how do I describe that instead of just saying it or just typing it, right? It's a very interesting concept. And if somebody can make that because one of the things that I'm I'm always looking to do with with guests and clients and that sort of thing is called get them to start thinking in AI. And what I mean by that is that if I see you do something, that's cool, but I don't know why you did it. When I can start understanding why these things are happening, then I begin to start thinking in AI and I become agnostic to tools or to frameworks. It's like you were talking about earlier, the copywriter who starts by using a framework, once they achieve virtuosity or you know, a level of talent, they have they don't need the frameworks any longer because they've almost internalized how to get how to do this thing. So that thinking in AI, this this idea of describing it as compared to just communicating with it, I think is a heuristic, is a shortcut for people to start thinking in AI. Awesome takeaway. Hey, so where are you getting your news from? I I know you you're an enthusiast, you've early adopter beyond even most of us. Where do you pay attention to what's happening as far as tools, developments, progress, things like that?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a great question. Um, so I usually get most of my news from LinkedIn. Um but that's like just generally browsing through. Um I'm not exactly super active on X. I I I wanted to be, but I just found that growing on X and being your own person on X was just too too strange. Like I don't know what it is. It's just something it just it just doesn't have the same spark as it did before. I mean I'm subscribed to a couple of um newsletters. Um I'm subscribed to the Rundown, which is pretty good. Um TLDR Tech, that's another good one. Um and so there are these kinds of newsletters. I've got my own newsletter, which I'm currently working on at the moment.
SPEAKER_02How can people get access to that?
SPEAKER_01Oh, uh so it's actually on my LinkedIn page. So if you were to find me on LinkedIn, Edward Frank Morris, you would just scroll down and there's like a quite big banner, and you can subscribe to like uh my my newsletter. But the difference is that my newsletter is a bit more thought leader oriented, so I don't I don't really push tools which I haven't tried yet. So the the problem is in the sphere there's a lot of noise, and understandably, because it's a hype kind of cycle at the moment, and so you'll get people who say, Oh, I've tried this fantastic new AI tool, and it does all these things. And it might do, it's just that about 85% of these AI tools these days are a wrapper of some kind. And when you're in the prompt engineering sphere, you kind of know how to spot it. It doesn't make the tool bad per se, but when you're paying people, influencers specifically, money to say, hey, here's like 300 pounds to promote my product, you have to wonder if that product is actually good because it is good and because the influencers tried it, or are they saying it because they've been paid off? And it's it's a quite tricky thing because I'm friends of a lot of these AI influencers, it's a very tight-knit circle, and you know, they're quite vocal about it. Like they get some tremendously bad offers. You know, they'll they'll be offered £250 to £400 for a shout-out, and they've got like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, but they take the offer up even though the actual system itself isn't really anything special, it's just a copywriting tool. But they do it because £400 in their currency is a monthly salary, and I'm like, you have to eat, I get it.
SPEAKER_02That's a good point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's an integrity thing. So weirdly it boils down to the journalism background again. So when I talk about AI tools nine out of ten times because I've tried it or because I have belief in it. So I've been talking quite a lot about Sora lately, and the reason I believe in that so much is because it's leagues ahead of any of the competition. And I I genuinely do believe it's gonna have tremendous effects on society, and I think that's gonna be the next big thing similar to Chat GPT, it's gonna be what everyone's gonna talk about because of the societal effects it's gonna have on us. Um, but that seems to be where I get it from mostly. I I I try to avoid um the major newspapers, I try to avoid you know, major magazines and stuff for news, and it's not because I don't like them per se. It's it's it's yeah, it's it's it's because they tend to blow things out of proportion. So it's like a chat GPT's here, they take all of your jobs and here's why, and then they link in like Klana, and it's like, well, maybe, but like you're you're overhyping it, you know. It's you've made me read like for 10 minutes and you could have summarized into a sentence. It's really annoying, but it's just the nature of the beast at the moment, you know. There's a lot of fear in the air, there's a lot of potential in the air. Um but I think take everything with a pitch of salt.
SPEAKER_02So you mentioned a couple of things, and for the listeners, Sora is a text-to-video release by OpenAI, correct? Best in class at this point. Um and then you also mentioned Klarna. And were you referencing the study, the research that Klarna just showed that their customer service chat bots had like done the work of 700 customer service agents? Is that the thing you're referring to? Yeah, that's that's the one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, so Sora is gonna be the big the reason Sora is gonna be the big one isn't because people are gonna use it, it's probably because it's the proof of concept that comes with it. And I think the fear of AI starts with stuff like that, the uncanny valley, where people can't really tell what is real and what's not anymore. And so that's why I think it's gonna pop off. But as for Klarna, yeah, they're they're kind of like the talk of the town at the moment. They may not have gotten the hype that may have they may have wanted, but to be honest with you, I heard about it when Klarna well, yeah, when when Klarna came along and said, look, we've replaced 700 people with an AI chatbot, 85% of our customers are still happy and they can still go to human to talk, and we're expecting to make an extra 40 million dollars on top of it. And when when you read stuff like that, and as a normal person, that's terrifying. As a company, even if you're an SME, you're reading that and you're thinking, holy shit, I can like I can have all of like these like bots and I can have this stuff, I can have an entire company of like AI tools, and and and that's that's opportunity right there for companies. Whereas the average consumer and people who may be scared of AI hear that and they're like, I'm gonna be replaced.
SPEAKER_02And I understand that. It's it's an interesting topic because you and I we're we're immersed in it, and we have a keen eye for oh, wait a minute, that's not human generated, that's synthetic, right? We're testing with we're we're you know, we train people on how to use AI in small business, and so we test a ton of tools. And we're testing some voice-to-voice AI right now that is conducting phone calls on our behalf with people who um have customer service issues, or we've got a few use cases. And even being somebody who is uh ever like aware of use cases or opportunities to use AI, it's still it's so good at this point, and it's hard for me. If I didn't know, it would take me 60 seconds at least before I was like, wait a minute. Are you real? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's the thing Klarna, with their app removing 700, you know, or doing the work of 700 humans, I there there is that that you know what I I still want to talk to a human. However, what if that human can get you the answer? And what if the AI can say, hold on, snap of a finger, here's what you want, plus here's a few additional resources. It becomes this question of do you really want the person or do you just want the result?
SPEAKER_01This is this is the interesting thing, isn't it? Because I think we we want that human connection, we all do, but when we call up a customer service line, and I'm not really the type of guy to get angry at a customer service agent, I know nine out of ten times it's not their fault, but when they can't solve The issue I'm having, or when they give me a response that I don't particularly find satisfactory, I'm just like I've wasted 30 minutes of my time trying to get this fixed, and I went nowhere with it. But you're right, like what if an AI could get you the answer you actually want? Because this AI, it can it can read through like you know, megabytes different gigabytes worth of content and FAQs, and it's never wrong. It's never wrong, like unless it's manipulated into being wrong, but it's never wrong. A human can be wrong. I mean, I can't even know why I have a breakfast this morning. An AI would be able to tell me why I'd have a breakfast like 12 years ago if I had the data. You know what I mean? So people talk about like AI like I'll never be as good as a human. I I would argue it'll be better than a human in time. I mean, just like the voice calls, right? Like, if you can't tell that you're talking to an AI, like what's the difference? It's gonna give you the answer you want. If you want to talk to a human and get the same response, but in human, then fine. But I mean realistically, you have pretty amazing. Yeah, you can't you can't tell, no.
SPEAKER_02And then with Sora, obviously, the concern is that its output is so good. With Karna, the concern is that the chat bot is so good that people are using it without even realizing that they're not using a human. And oh, there's 700 jobs that go out. So it's an interesting time. You know, you brought up you you had kind of dabbled in X and then ended up on LinkedIn. I think it was a good move. The LinkedIn top voice aside, the content that you're able to put out there is resulting in engagement, not just from nerds like me and you who love AI, but from companies, right? Like, like this. Yeah. So going back to that suggestion for that individual. And I said, Well, what do you what if you're a copywriter and you want to transition out of copywriting into prompt engineering? You mentioned go there and start sharing your AI journey in social, right? If you're listening to this, maybe you don't want to be a thought leader, maybe you do, maybe you want to be recognized. And I can tell you, there's nothing negative that will happen with your career if you get identified as, oh, she's the AI expert. Oh, he's the AI expert. That is not going to hurt your career. So if you're listening to this and this has been engaging and you're looking for and you want to do more, start there. Start documenting your journey. Because one of the things that I know, and I've heard this, Edward's a rare exception. Most people that are professing expertise in generative AI today, they never saw what uh they never worked with any models until GPT 3.5 came out and the whole world got access to it, right? Most people out there who are identifying as an expert, they're an they're only an expert six months smarter than you are. Right. So I think that that was fantastic advice that you were sharing because you I mean you're a perfect you're the result of that. You started documenting your journey, you started getting really good at at well, the journalism background probably didn't hurt. Um but now, I mean, in in short order, in six months, you're a recognized expert in a platform that's very desirable if you're selling B2B services like you are, for them to go, well, who knows? What's this prompt engineering stuff? Oh, this guy knows, and all of a sudden, boom, business out the wazoo.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, that's the that's the thing. And it's it's it's it's it's a bit like I don't want to say frustrating because you can't change the past, but I do wish that it is my biggest regret. I wish I started earlier because if I did, there would have been so much I could have done. But you know, to even have the LinkedIn top voice badge, it's it's such a I don't know, man, like it's it's crazy to be to even have it because
it's such a difficult thing to get. Like, just for the listeners out there, because I know I know this is like you might be listening to this and thinking, I want to do that, like I can do better than he can, and I hope you do, honestly. But like the way you get a LinkedIn top voice badge, and it's the blue badge next to your name, not the yellow badge. The blue badge is when LinkedIn have personally seen what you've been doing, and they say this guy's literally the best in his domain. We're just going to give him the tick for it. We're going to give him like the blue verification tick to say this guy's legit, like he's for real. And so it's not just a single person who does this, you know. It's I think the last I checked was a three-layered system. They're very, very secretive. So they'll find you, they'll scalp you, and then they'll keep on looking at your content to see what you're doing, to make sure you're actually talking about your stuff and you know your stuff, and they'll make sure you're not cheating the system and gaming the system. So a lot of the people that are AI influencers at the moment who kind of just copy and paste their content from other people, they'll never get the badge because LinkedIn are smart enough to catch on. And so, yeah, and so they'll keep on watching, and eventually they'll say, Okay, let's take him to round two. Let's let's get some other experts in AI and tech to look at his work and to see if he really knows his stuff. Then once that's done, it'll go to another round, a final judgment round, and then we'll say, Yep, he gets the blue tick of approval, he doesn't get the blue tick of approval, his why. And no one in the world apart from LinkedIn's internal team know who those people are because it's such a coveted thing. Like, like in the UK, it's not really massively celebrated, and I I understand, I mean, it would be a little bit strange, but it's not a massively celebrated thing. There are events specifically for LinkedIn top voice people, but I haven't been invited to one yet. But to be fair, I only got the badge like two months ago. So fair enough. Um, but I know in Dubai, in the UAE, there are these huge, massive events specifically for LinkedIn and these top voice people, and they get invited to do talks because of that LinkedIn top voice badge. I mean, although it's it's unconfirmed yet, I mean, currently my inbox, I've been invited to be on the panel for two judgment things for AI and tech. So it's it's very strange to me because only you know, last year I was starting to get into AI, now I'm about to be part of like two panels judging AI entries because there's just that's it. It's a thing, it's it's yeah, it's an authority. And I think you, you know, again, you're right. Like, if you want to do this, just document your journey, you know. I think a lot of people go on onto LinkedIn, they they they're like, where the hell do I start? You know, like what how what do I tell people? And I think a lot of people approach this from an academic perspective. But I think just being explorative, you know, just going out there and just doing your thing, I think it it says a lot, you know, and you can always look back at it and you can be critical about that. There's one guy, and I'll give him a bit of a shout-out. Um, he's he's not like a big deal, he's not an authority figure, he's not an influencer or anything like that. His name's John Paggett. And John is a lovely guy. He's he's um a part of a council um for the government within a city which is quite far from me. But he's a really nice guy, and we met through AI, and um he's he's kind of just been a very big supporter of mine from day one. He's only got like 500 connections, not that many followers at all, maybe 200 followers. But he's just out here every day. Like, I've released a new custom GPT, I've released a new book on Amazon, and he's just at it every day, you know, he's just going for it. And he, you know, he's he's getting places because people at work are asking him to implement AI, and in his city he is the AI guy, and he he's getting stuff from it, you know, and I'm really proud of him. I I haven't really given him much in the way of like super advice. I just kept in support of him and helping where I can, and it it really can be a life-changing thing just being vocal on LinkedIn and just you know being Yeah, this has been very informative because just as we referenced already, you don't can't always trust what you read.
SPEAKER_02And with prompt engineering in particular, I spend a lot of time on the the Twitter sphere for AI, and there are so many just crap books for you know, here's my 1,000 Chat GPT prompts to start a business. And you think, oh my gosh, I don't have to learn this stuff, I can just use these look at them and they're trash and they're like one line and all that. So the distinction that you gave with LinkedIn, that's gonna be very helpful for people who are who are looking for thought leaders to start to follow if they don't have that that doesn't necessarily mean that they're they don't know what they're talking about, but if they do have that recognition, like for instance, if if prompt engineering is something that you want a better perspective on, Edwards profile is one that needs to be followed by you, right? So that was that was uh an unanticipated um nugget there that as you're on the platforms, look for the people who are really doing it, not all the people because they're trust me, AI is it's it's the the internet boom once again, right? Like there's all kinds of characters and you know, people coming out saying that I'm the expert and there's stuff is not gonna get you're not gonna experience the transformation that can come from using AI.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. This is this is just like uh just one more point on that because I'm I'm really hoping people listen to this and take it away and they'll be like, I want to go on this journey, but I don't know where to start. I think just be careful um out there. I think one of the things which I really struggle with on LinkedIn and just generally kind
of this particular area is authenticity. And the the sad truth is that a lot of people they do enjoy the 1000 prompt guides and they do enjoy the 100, yeah, they they enjoy it, and the reason they enjoy it is because it's a shortcut to success, and that's an aphrodisiac to a lot of people. Like, oh, I don't have to learn prompt engineering, that's like a whole 12-hour course. Like on the surface, to be 12 hours is nothing. But to a lot of people, they're like, I don't want to do that. No, I want to just copy and paste prompts all day long. Fair enough. You know, you want a prompt library, and okay, fine. Like, here's a thousand prompts, and none of them are really going to be that good because they're not tailored to you. But the thing is, is there's a lot of people who do that, you know, they want you to follow them, they want you to download their 1,000 prompts guide, they want you to make sure your eyes are on them. Because if your eyes are and you're into this AI land, um they can sell you stuff, you know. They'll take that 300 pound payment from some random person halfway across the world, and they'll promote the ever-loving crap out of their product because they've been paid to do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean they know what the product does. And again, for the listeners at home, um I or in the car, wherever you may be listening to this, I suppose, just to put into perspective how easy it is to actually make these guys, and I might make a few enemies, I might lose a few friends, but I'm willing to do that. Um all they need to do is they need to have reference points, right? So the reference points can just be 10, 20 prompts, and you would copy them and paste them into something like anthropic or into maybe chat GPT 4, and then you'd get chat GPT to read, and you just prompt and say, Here are my 20 chat GPT prompts. I want you to write another thousand that do similar things within the field, and that's it. That's all they do, and then they package it up into a PDF, they offer it for free, and they go, Here's my free 1000 prompt PDF guide. Um, it's free. Download it, you've got no risk, but I just want your email address so you can join my newsletter and then I can you know email you stuff I want you to buy. That's the whole fun. Yeah. But it's it's not value. If he dragged one of the influencers aside and you were like, hey, I want you to write me a prompt that can do very complex things, they're gonna choke. They have no idea what they're talking about or doing that.
SPEAKER_02I hope people are paying attention to this.
SPEAKER_01This is the truth. Yeah. It's the truth, it's it's just the truth, man. Like there's there's a lot of people who call themselves prompt engineers, but you strip away the chat GPT, you strip away the large language models from their hands, and you ask them to open up a word pad file or whatever else and write out the prompt in front of you, they're gonna suffer. You know, and that's the downside of Chat GPT, is that it's given people the ability to pretend. And I think the real people who know how to prompt and who know how to use ChatGPT to his fullest potential rise to the surface, and those who don't, don't. You know, there's no problem in not knowing how to use it as max capacity. The problem is pretending that you do and pretending that you know because it harms businesses. Yeah, it harms businesses, man. Like you're taking like a prompt engineer who doesn't know how to do security settings, taking a prompt engineer who doesn't know how to do basic large language model stuff, temperature management, anything really, and you'll drag them in, you'll pay them. I think the going rate for anthropics prompt engineer at the moment is like half a million dollars, and it's it's high, yeah. Like if you even a startup, you know, it's it's like in the UK, I think they charge senior developer rates. I know I do, and you know, you're you're paying like three to four thousand pounds a month maybe for a prompt engineer, and you know, they'll they'll write you out a prompt and it doesn't do what you want it to do, and it's like, well, we're paying you all this money, what the hell are you here for? And then you realize the prompt that they're writing is written from ChatGPT, and like, damn it, we've we've just like put a down payment on this guy. He's a contract, we can't fire him, but they're inept, you know, and it's all because of ChatGPT. It's really strange. It's it's so strange. In fact, my friend works at a uh a full-term job, he's just taken on board a software developer. The software developer doesn't know how to code in Python, he doesn't know how to code in C, even Flutter, or whatever else, and he just sits there with ChatGPT, the free version, um, Google Bard, yeah, well, Gemini, and Anthropic, and he just sits there, all three major large language models, open brazenly, and he's just extracting code from each of them, and none of the code works because he doesn't know how to prompt. So not only does this guy not know how to do software engineering, he doesn't know how to prompt, he doesn't know how to make it work. And that's that's yeah, you you've got to be careful, man. You've got to be very careful. There's a lot of people who pretend to know it all, but they just don't. You know I think they just don't.
SPEAKER_02It's also an indication that the marketplace is looking for these people so much so that they're willing to pay jokers to come in and do, you know, substandard work because the demand is so great and the supply of talent is so low. So individuals who are listening to this, start learning to think in AI. If you can, if you can think in AI, none of those books matter. Somebody can drop you in the middle of the desert and say, prompt your way to a glass of water, right? And you'd be able to do it. If you if all you've got is this collection of PDFs of oh, I know somewhere in here I've got a prompt for that. I know somewhere you're digging around in there. That's not what we're talking about here. And that's the kind of situation where, as Edward was mentioning, if you don't understand why you're doing it a certain way, mistakes are inevitable. They're guaranteed. So, Edward, this has been a fantastic interview. And I my intention was to really kind of dive into the paradigm of somebody who prompts for a living. Right. And I think that we did that here. But the takeaways for me in particular was I I keep here, like I mentioned, man, this is episode whatever, but the people that I've talked to, there's a pattern here that I'm noticing, and I hope that the listeners are noticing, and that is it's not about the engineering comes from understanding how to describe what you want, not from any technical or or being wired like an engineer. That's not what this is almost as you mentioned at the very beginning, that quote that was uh you know, a mastery of the English or mastery of the the spoken language is the new coding, right? That's where we find ourselves with promptly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, English is the new programming language.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. So Edward, I I don't know how busy you are, and I really appreciate the time that you took to do this, man. So um with that, how can people find out more? I know that they can go and and please do go to LinkedIn and start following Edward's content because it's fantastic and it's frequent. But is there any other way that um you want people to maybe reach out or connect with you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, LinkedIn would be the best. Yeah, I mean you can find me on LinkedIn. Uh just search for Edward Frank Morris. Um just for the listeners. It might be curious. Frank actually is my middle name, just in case they think it's like a crazy weird nickname, but it's actually just my middle name. So you can find me on LinkedIn, it's Edward Frank Morris. There's only one of me on there unless I've got a uh a stalker of some kind. Um you can find me on there. I don't really use Twitter all too much, but um you can find me on there too. My Twitter handle is who'sefm. So just straight up who'sefm, you can find me there. Um alternatively, if you really want to, I wouldn't suggest it because it'll take me ages to get back to you. You can always check out my website. It's www.enigmatica.co.uk. That's enigmatica.couk, just like the uh Enigma machine. So yeah, uh please though, LinkedIn. It's the easiest way to get at me. Um and yeah, if you ever need help and you want to know how to build up a portfolio for prompt engineering and stuff that people would find attractive within the prompt engineering portfolio, just drop me a message. More than happy to help. There's a shortage of actual capable people out there. So please, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful stuff. Thank you, everybody. Um, and we'll see you on LinkedIn, Edward.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, see you there.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. Thank you to our sponsors. And AI 600, using AI for BW AI for making this episode using AI work.