The Art of Giving Instruction, Part 2. All about AI

I recently wrote about how important being able to give good instruction is to leadership. 

If you missed it, read about it here.

The lesson was solidified and reaffirmed after I took a 4 day AI workshop. Four days is generous. It was actually 2 hours spread across 4 days to accommodate our virtual learning preferences and busy lifestyles.

I like AI. The thing is, I've had to stumble my way through it.

Before they launched free versions of Chat GPT for the world to play with, I kept trying to figure out how to use AI in every life and work.

I enrolled in several courses to learn more, but most of them were actually about machine learning and what makes AI run. Not that useful to me.

I play around with Chat GPT. I'd say at least once a day I ask it to fetch me quotes and research or improve my writing. I've asked it for marketing tips and the results are sometimes sub par and sometimes spot on. It often feels like a cross your finger and make a wish game.

Of late, I've been able to explore AI embedded in tools like Canva and Adobe and Descript. Very helpful for my line of work. The course platform I use even has an AI author so it attempts to create content for you when you start to create a new course. I've not thought too much of that content. I usually erase it all.

Imagine my surprise then when after a total of 8 hours, I went from knowing that you can type words into an ai agent, like Chat GPT or Gemini, and get basic text results to being able to create entire presentations with images, video, and even a chat bot from an advanced prompt. 

Hours upon hours of work replaced by a few minutes correctly prompting an AI engine. 

Correctly prompting means writing really good instructions.

See, I thought that Chat GPT was like Google Search. And that if you asked it for something and it came back with crappy results then that was because that's all that's available. Occasionally I'd try to refine my request but often I'd end up slightly frustrated and move on to figure out how to get what I wanted some other way.

In reality, what you need to do is give the  AI engine better instruction. 

Incredible. Even machines need to know a lot more about what we want and expect in order to produce great results.

Just like our human teams.

So instead of saying "create a video about a boy who discovers a dinosaur egg"

You might say"

Pretend you're a children's author with 10 years experience and write a video script with images, scenes, and narration about a 4 year old boy named John who's playing in his back yard when he discovers a dinosaur egg. Detail his experience with the dinosaur and give it a happy ending.

A few seconds later, I had an entire script, broken into scenes with detailed imagery and separate narration. I plug that into an ai video tool and a few minutes later it produced an entire video.

That's another key tip. The AI chatbot is good, but i needs other AI tools to be great. Gamma for presentations, for example, is the helping hand that delivers on the complex output the AI bot provides.

Does the video need work? Yes, because it was free. I'm confident if I'd paid for the AI video tool, I'd have an amazing video output.  So, I have to spend time editing some of the images. But the amount of time it takes me to create a script and shoot video or find imagery to compile into video...hours... saved.

The lesson here...spend a little more time and thought when giving instructions. You'll get better results no matter who you're dealing with.