Barbara's Custom GPT Adventure

A few decades ago, Barbara and Teja would read entire issues of Inc. Magazine while waiting for their slow, screechy 14.4 modem to connect them to a wild, uncharted land called 'The Internet'. Now? Barbara has created her own custom GPT—a personalized AI that can crank out first drafts for technical and marketing text in seconds. 

They talk about how Large Language Models work, why it’s teeth chattering, and what it means for creativity in the AI age.

#customgpt  #techknowledgy  #artificialintelligence #ai #aicreativity  #marketingtools  #BarbaraAndTeja #loidunk  #aiforwriters #generativeai #chatgpt

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I use AI to write boring stuff that I'm bad at.

SPEAKER_03 0:05

Like a response to a parking ticket?

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Ooh.

SPEAKER_03 0:10

Actually. Like a parking ticket.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Say, what do I write to get myself out of a parking ticket in? And then the state of whatever. It would be great. That's awesome. And I'll just search the web for what to say to get out of a parking ticket.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

And then you're off book by the time you get to the police station, then you one tear comes down, and then you recite what you've practiced. Yeah. And it's so it's so wonderful and perfect that the person behind says, like, you know what, that was great. You probably use custom GPT.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

You go right ahead.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

But actually In fact, I'm gonna pay for it myself.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Truthfully though, like I I I don't, I rarely use like what comes out of the AI, like just like by itself, because I'm always rewriting.

SPEAKER_03 1:04

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

But it's still really helpful for that first draft.

SPEAKER_03 1:09

When did you first start using GPT?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Oh, like soon after it was released. Because I was like, this is fascinating. Yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

I mean You actually like out loud said, I'm a geek.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Yeah, at that time I I did, because this was like serious geek stuff going on. Like, like this was like the when this stuff came out, it's it's literally like the internet coming into being all over again. You know what I mean? Like when it's like, whoa, let's try this out.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Oh, a cable modem.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

I I still feel that. Yeah, I still feel the power of when we had the cable modem.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Everyone else was like, and we were just like cable.

SPEAKER_03 2:06

Just like we're the sound it would make.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Yeah, yeah. I'm glad they got rid of the sound because it was a little distracting. Yeah, yeah. I had this job at the time, and I was I was going to grad school, and they said, Oh, we could you could work remote, and this was not a thing. Because this was a number of years ago. And so this was totally not a thing to be able to work remote. But they said, Well, and I said, Well, how am I gonna do that? They said, We're gonna get you a cable modem.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

And you're like, What is this?

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Pretty kind of pricey at the time, and really it was probably only six months before I realized I couldn't be in grad school and work at this remote thing at the same time. Yeah, but there was no going back from that cable modem that we had to do. We're just like, we're just gonna figure out how to pay for it.

SPEAKER_03 2:57

Yeah, yeah, because that was yeah, oh man, I still remember how it felt. And then then we had then we had, you know, uh FIOS, Wi-Fi. Because at the time we were still we everything was connected Ethernet.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

I know, but we've had Ethernet running throughout the house. Like internet.

SPEAKER_03 3:19

We literally had Ethernet running throughout the house.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah, you like you like literally wired the house.

SPEAKER_03 3:25

It went through the what was the chimney stack, uh-huh. It went through there, just had it all. Second floor, basement.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Yep, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:33

Cables running all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Because we can't, you know, that's like when you think about, oh, if you were to move somewhere else, what are your requirements? You know, so like if you get put on a desert island, like what are your requirements? And uh a strong internet connection is right up there with clean water.

SPEAKER_03 3:55

If you're on a deserted island, there wouldn't be an internet connection.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Satellite baby.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Oh, true. Yeah, but okay. Yep, okay. Power? Yep. Solar power.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Solar?

SPEAKER_03 4:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

You just have to be careful not to get all the sand from the desert island into your computer.

SPEAKER_03 4:17

Because all desert islands have a lot of sand and a palm tree.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

One palm tree.

SPEAKER_03 4:22

One palm tree. Which isn't much shade when you think about it. Not really.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

And I'd probably get burned.

SPEAKER_03 4:27

And food.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

I just don't want to be stranded on a desert island.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

Don't. Why did you get yourself there?

SPEAKER_01 4:34

I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 4:36

How did you get there? You were talking about GPT. Alright, so anyway, so you start.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

So then came AI.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

And I was like one of the I was right up there testing out Mid Journey when it first came out. And then like Dali and Chat GPT, just like, hey, what does this do? And it was really cool. I'm like, like, this is a good idea.

SPEAKER_03 5:02

I was reticent to get into it right away. Not because I don't like I obviously love new technology, and I'm a geek as well. I love new technology, but I think it had more to do with staving off as long as I could the desire to use technology to help me do something that I pride myself in doing.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Well, there's pride in doing things like writing my songs, you know? Like, yeah, I'm concerned about a the way people are using AI in music. True. Right? Because what it comes out is just like this everyday drivel that's just like, and then people are gonna try and copyright it and say they did it, and it's like, no, dude, you prompted it, and it was all prompted on other people's copyrighted stuff. Like, this isn't still an open question. And the large language models, too. I mean, I'm an author, right? So is my book uploaded uh somewhere in OpenAI's system? Maybe.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

I think I told you about this when I was doing uh a workshop some months ago talking about um AI and its influence on how we work and how we live. And uh live in front of the audience, I said, Um, you know, let's do a test. And I typed in something that uh prompted AI to generate a version of a chapter of my book, my my first book, which came out in the late 90s, way before uh you know scanning of books or ebooks.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

No, I know, but people were stealing it even then.

SPEAKER_03 6:52

Right, but Chat GPT was able to summarize the first chapter of my book. Which means which means someone at some point had scanned it and then it's on the internet, right? Uh right, so yeah, of course, right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

So in all this enthusiasm about AI, I will say that I am still a humanist. I'm still someone who believes that we have to preserve ourselves as as human beings and preserve part of what makes us special, which is our ability to create from our own minds and our ability to communicate from our own minds. And so that's really important to me.

SPEAKER_03 7:38

So you want to be preserved, is what you said? That's what I got out of it.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

We don't like Octo here, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

But that's what I got out of it.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 7:47

You want to be preserved.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

So cryo-preserved is this. Oh! That's the whole cryo preservation thing. You've seen Octo does.

SPEAKER_03 7:58

I totally forgot that Octo could do this.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Yeah. Wow. Okay, so this is. Okay, now I'm now into it. This is cryo preservation. This is AI takes over every job in the world and makes and makes creative work completely um irrelevant. This is that's what this is. This is AI helps with boring things like performance reviews and marketing text and you know, stuff like stuff like that.

SPEAKER_03 8:35

And and uh um augmented recipes because you're missing some ingredients. How do I make this with what I have? Actually, that'd be interesting, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Well, no, you know what I did do.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

Because I made pancakes yesterday. We didn't have milk, all we had was rice milk.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:52

It came out a little bit chewy. But if I had done, if I had asked Chat GPT to give me an alternate version of it so that I could use rice milk, it might have done a better job. I might have done a better job.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

That's true. And I also um I track my foods sometimes to keep my weight on where I want it to be. And one time I was like, oh, how there's this, there's this, you know, recipe, how can I get all of the nutritional information from this recipe in order to calculate what I needed to calculate? And yeah, you can do it manually. You go in, you do each ingredient, and blah blah blah. But all I did was I typed it in, so I typed it into chat JPT and I said, give me, you know, whatever all the parameters, you know, like protein and carbs and fiber and and calories and and a whole bunch of other things. I said, tell me these things.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

Um can you get as specific as like how many hydrogen atoms or something like that?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Or could you well that's a whole that's a whole other thing from we talk about hydrogen cars, but no, but you can't okay, all right. That's a little that goes a little deep.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Well too deep.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

A little deep. But yeah. But no, it gave it to me, and it specifically said that it it was not using any particular brand, that it was going by based on sort of the generic, what it could find is the most generic um type of that thing, you know, like diced tomatoes, and it would find, you know, so it gave me all that information, which was great. Then I knew sort of what the values were. Oh, and I did, I cross-checked one. Remember, I put in and I said, I'm gonna check it because you know, AI, not always truthful. You gotta do the hands too. Yeah, no, not always truthful.

SPEAKER_03 10:57

Uh well, I mean, what is truth anyway when you think about it?

SPEAKER_01 11:01

No, there's truth, yeah, and then there is, you know, judges deciding cases based on made-up fake cases. Oh no.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

Oh, oh they're not real. AI. Oh, so judges um lawyers can't.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

The lawyer may use uh AI to create a brief. The AI made up cases, and that got included in the brief, and this has happened multiple times. Yeah. Um, first of all, lawyers, dudes, we pay you$300 an hour.

SPEAKER_03 11:47

You know, that's all. I could have used Chat GPT to make the same mistake.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Exactly. I mean, at what point do we say, you know what? I think I'll just take my chances with the old chat GPT. You say chances? Chances. That's my I'm a criminal voice.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:06

I'm just gonna be able to take my chat GPT and choir. I'm gonna come up with uh my my my legal briefs using uh legal briefly.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

That's right. No one'll know. I mean, seriously, seriously, that's just lazy.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

So, where does custom chat GPT come into play? Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Custom GPTs. Oh, custom GPT, right? Yeah, right. So I discovered this recently. I discovered this because I have I get these newsletters that tell me about different things that are happening in AI, and then I read one that was like custom GPT, and I said, ding!

SPEAKER_03 12:52

Ding. What is? What is this custom GPT? You probably asked custom uh chat GPT to describe what custom GPT is. But it would have been just a hat answer.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

No, I didn't have to do that. Um yeah, it was great. So a custom GPT is where you take whatever whatever um system you're using. In my case, at this time I'm usually using uh OpenAI's chat GPT, and you prompt it to set up a special one that is for a specific purpose.

SPEAKER_03 13:30

So you set up parameters?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah, so you can give it information and then you can provide it with your own library of information. So it starts to get better and better at what you want it to do based on things you've actually done. Like I I did create one for my music, right? To help create like captions and short, like if I need to shorten my bio or if I, you know, that all this kind of stuff. And you can create this library. So I uploaded my artist bio to it, and I uploaded a few other things, you know. But the more you then upload into the library inside the custom GPT you create, it's gonna pull stuff from the library. And then you tell it, you tell it like this is this is the vibe I want. Um, this is the this is what you're for right now, this is what we're gonna be doing. Um, how do I want it to sound? What could you you give it all this in the case?

SPEAKER_03 14:32

It's like a style guide.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:34

But it's it's not just style, it's it has to do with what your needs are, your wants are, and also the history of that.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Right. Well, I mean, as much history as you want to.

SPEAKER_03 14:45

Like it remembers it remembers.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Well, it depends, because like it you there are always these conversations, which are like you start one and then like it'll remember within that conversation. But once you start a new conversation, it once again only has what you have in the custom GPT. So that's why like like if if I'm gonna do all one specific kind of thing, then I'll do it all in one conversation. And it'll get to be more and more like I want it to be as I go. Like, let's say I'm gonna do like a you know, description of of a song or something, just a brief blurb, then you know, I can give it the I could could decide to give it the lyrics, I could decide to um just describe what the song's about.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Um, but I've discovered that less is more sometimes. So prompting is really interesting. Prompting is when you tell the GPT what you want. And I used to think that the more I give it, like the the better it's gonna be. And sometimes the more you give it, the more like verbal diarrhea it gives you.

SPEAKER_03 15:59

Wow, that's disgusting, Barbara. Yeah, yeah, really disgusting, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Or language diarrhea, shall I say?

SPEAKER_03 16:05

Much better.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I know, I know. Yeah, it's getting uncomfortable there. Yeah, it was uncomfortable. Um, but and so then I learned, oh, okay, I shouldn't just give it all the raw material. If I tell it about the raw material and give it snippets, right, right, it's more likely to give me what I want, and then I just revise it.

SPEAKER_03 16:32

And that ecosphere is just you, right? It doesn't go out into the world, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Not that, no, not well, like on on uh Chat GPT, you can choose when you create a custom GPT, do you want it to be available to everybody? Oh, or do you want to have the link available to people you're working with and you can send them the link? Or do you want it to be private?

SPEAKER_03 16:57

I see, okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

So my music one I made private.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

And you need a paid account to do that, right? A custom GPT.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

I don't remember. Oh, that's all right.

SPEAKER_03 17:11

You can type that into custom GPT. Actually, why don't you do that?

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Do you need paid paid chat GPT account to use custom GPT?

SPEAKER_01 17:36

AI overview says You do need G you do not need a paid chat GPT plus account to use custom GPTs, but you do need one to create them. Ah so you can access their I see. So you can access their library of the ones that other people have created. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:57

What do you believe comes after custom GPT?

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Um, well, you know, every science fiction book that's ever been written that uh Yeah, no poetry talks about the demise of humanity. Yeah, that's probably right about where it goes. The Matrix. So um Wow.

SPEAKER_03 18:24

So that's what happens next?

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Robocop.

SPEAKER_03 18:28

Wow. Blade Runner?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Blade Runner. Oh, oh.

unknown 18:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 18:32

I mean, we love the.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Okay, you love Blade Runner.

SPEAKER_03 18:34

It's a Bible.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

You loved Blade Runner. Is a Do you want to live in the Blade Runner universe? No! Okay. Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_03 18:43

It's raining all the time.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

What is it with the rain?

SPEAKER_03 18:49

Climate change. Ridley Scott. Climate change.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Yeah, well, I don't I don't know, but I'm only happy when it rains. Oh no, but we can't actually say that anymore.

SPEAKER_03 19:02

But it's raining all the time, it's dark, and then there's sort of pseudo-East Asian characters that pop up on sometimes Japanese or Korean or Chinese. And then that's pretty much the world.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

It's AI and rain.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

Well, pretty much.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

If you think that that is the next step after custom GPT, you sound so excited about custom GPT, but then you're gonna have to limit yourself because what will happen as you self-stated that you are a geek. You told the world that you're a geek.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:44

You are gonna help push that new world into existence.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Oh, that's I'm just saying so! Yeah, I just scene.

SPEAKER_03 19:55

I'm gonna go there.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

I'm guilty. Guilty as charged.

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Well what well, what else would you use custom GPT for?

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Alright, here's what I'm thinking of.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

What I'm thinking of doing because uh I have a science fiction book out, The Chilling Zone. And I like it. I love it. But that's a really good book, by the way. I would love to tweak it a little bit. And it's a really complicated world book. So what I might want to do, actually, is create a GPT specifically so that I can a private GPT so I can I can upload the book.

SPEAKER_03 20:42

I would use a paid account, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

I have a paid account.

SPEAKER_03 20:45

Great.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Because you can only create custom GPTs.

SPEAKER_03 20:49

Right, correct.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

So upload the text and then ask it to document, because I have a document of the world book and it's kind of messy, and it's but one thing Chat GPT seems to do really well is organize information. And it's like, here's this information, and here's this information. So I could ask it to create it from my text, the the world book. And then I could tell it the things that I'd like to update, like I'm thinking I might like to move the timeline, so I could tell it to advance everything 15 years, for example. Or I could tell, you know, and then it will create the world book so that when I'm doing rewrites, like everything I don't have to calculate the date in my head over and over because the date is stated in the in the book over and over. And I'm like, that could get really messy really fast if I had to keep thinking about that, right? Yeah, and then if I wanted to add something, oh, you know, in the section about technology people are using, let's add this thing, let's add that thing, then I can print out the world book, right? And then have that for doing rewrites.

SPEAKER_03 22:06

I see. Interesting. Uh in this world book, is there a lot of rain?

SPEAKER_00 22:14

I don't mention rain a lot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

A lot of neon scientists, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese are a hybrid of that, probably?

SPEAKER_01 22:22

No. No. Although anime music playing in the background? Well, actually, I wrote a lot of the book while listening to techno.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Oh, I remember that.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Yeah. Yeah, I had a whole playlist that I would listen to. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Um, yeah. But wow, we've strayed. But yeah, that that's something I may use a customer.

SPEAKER_03 22:47

I think it's a really cool way. I I I I have not yet explored with custom GPT or even semi-custom GPT. I I barely use GPT, but I am very quickly diving into it.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Every manager out there, chat GPT for your performance reviews because they're terrible, right? Do you feel me here? They're terrible. They give you these boxes, they're like, comment on this and comment on this and comment on this, and and I never know what to say. I can't even fill out a birthday card.

SPEAKER_03 23:30

Think about that.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

I never even know what to say. Exactly. How old are you? Exactly. So I took Chat GPT and I pointed it towards some resources that had to do with various types of phrases that you might use in a performance review.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

And then I told it what section, what the titles of the sections were and what should be included in each section. And then I said, okay, now we're going to do a performance review for so-and-so. And I and then I just put all of my thoughts and the peer feedback and everything. What are your thoughts about that staff member?

SPEAKER_03 24:13

Oh. Because that's a lot.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

For the year.

SPEAKER_03 24:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

And the peer feedback, and I didn't have to organize it or anything. I'm like, this just here's my contribution, here's what I'm thinking, here's my, you know, how I want to put it all together. Enter. And it filled out things and it put it in the various boxes, and it used my words and some of the peer feedback words and some of the phrases from the sites that I pointed it to. And then I just had to do a light edit on everything.

SPEAKER_03 24:48

Hmm. I like that. And it saved a lot of time.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Hours, hours because painful therapy. You've never had to do performance reviews, have you?

SPEAKER_03 24:59

I do performance reviews every year.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

No, like four no, I mean like formalized, like in a square like really? Oh, they have them there? Oh. Yes. You work for he works for a small company, so like people like just sit down and have coffee or something and call it a performance review. That's what I thought.

unknown 25:17

What?

SPEAKER_03 25:18

No, I've formal performance review.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Really?

SPEAKER_03 25:21

Yeah, it's like pages of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Really?

SPEAKER_03 25:23

It's got a whole, you know, like uh uh uh forms and then specific questions, and it has to be done in a certain way, and it's gotta be rated, and then um, you know, metrics.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

And you haven't started using chat GPT for this yet? Wow. All I can say is you are my husband, and you're not using Chat GPT for this yet. I'm yeah, yeah. Look at look, you made awful upset. Oh no, but it's okay. That's okay. That's okay. Lottie still loves you. Oh, wow, okay.