I’ve noticed there are two kinds of people using AI. You’ve got to work out which one you are as it will make big differences to your life in the long term.
A couple of months ago I found myself standing on a stage, blinded by lights. I plugged in my new Takamine guitar and positioned myself in front of a mic about to sing in front of strangers at a local pub for only the 5th time in my adult life. I was nervous but excited at testing something new.
As an early adopter of ChatGPT, I’ve used the AI tool considerably. In the beginning it was fantastic to have something who could be anything you told it to be – a copywriter, a top-notch marketing executive, it could even adopt personas and tell you how a given audience would feel about a particular blog post. The excitement at having a virtual editing team at your disposal was giddying. This was something out of my league that was suddenly in reach. It was hard not to see how this would change the world. In many ways it was like digital clay being sculpted into whatever desire or need you had – often not perfect but, in most cases, good enough. However, just like the old myths about clay figures brought to life to serve their masters, there would be a catch – one that would ultimately cause me to pause writing for a year.
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Seven years ago, I embarked on an ambitious attempt to build a rudimentary rule-based AI chatbot. Frustrated by the limitations of Apple’s Siri and motivated by exciting updates to Apple’s Natural Language Processing APIs, I dreamed of building something that could understand complex queries, construct mental models of objects, and seamlessly interact with users using just their voice. Siri was merely a fancy voice control toy; I wanted to perform calculations, manipulate data and leverage the dynamic power of language to build a tiny virtual world inside my iPhone, just like an intelligent computer system from Star Trek.
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Imagine a song nearly 50 years in the making, waiting for technology to advance, to finally free a lost voice trapped inside a long-lost tape recording!
John Lennon recorded some rough ideas for a hit song on tape for his friend, Paul McCartney but, tragically, he’d never get to record it properly as his life was cut short. After John’s death, the tape sat in a cupboard until 1994, but the technology of the time couldn’t free his voice from the demo tape as the vocals were merged with the piano meaning his rough idea couldn’t be edited and produced into a polished, releasable song… until now!
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For a long time, I’ve been interested in continually fostering a growth mindset. It’s a powerful belief that you can change your situation in life; that you aren’t fixed in terms of what life gives you. Instead, you can change it, learn new skills, and make your life dramatically better! Compare this to a fixed mindset where you believe that you are handed your lot in life and nothing you do will change it. That trying to improve yourself is some acknowledgement that you are not enough.
Recently I’ve been exploring ways in which ChatGPT can amplify some of the various self-help techniques I’ve picked up along the way to building a growth mindset… Techniques that have the potential to radically change your life.
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