Episode Summary
Artificial intelligence is the future, and it’s transforming almost every sphere, including marketing and thought leadership.
But despite what some people fear, AI can’t fully replace humans. In this episode of the Notorious Thought Leader podcast, our host Erin Balsa welcomes Ben Pines, the director of Content at AI21 Labs. They discuss thought leadership, the importance of a digital detox, and why AI can’t replace expert writers.
Guest Profile
- Name: Ben Pines
- What Diego does: He's the director of Content at AI21 Labs.
- Company: AI21 Labs
- Noteworthy: Ben is a marketing expert who has helped grow several successful online ventures in the past few years.
Key Insights
- A thought leader is a mentor. Thought leaders are influencers who offer guidance and expertise to others. They innovate and inspire, but one of the most important traits of thought leaders is that they are mentors. Ben says, "There's so much to do, and I think some people just forget about all that responsibility and just think about writing LinkedIn posts so they can build their personal brand and be thought leaders. So that's the wrong thing. But if you see thought leadership — sort of a strange side effect of all the points I just mentioned — then you can see how powerful it is. It's like being a mentor. To be a mentor, you do need to do a lot of work. You need to work and become the expert, become the person that people want to be mentored by. So you do the work, and then being a mentor or being the thought leader is the side effect."
- Take a break from consuming mindless content. Content is everywhere. So it's important to take a social media break from time to time and do a digital detox. Why? Well, if you want to have original ideas, you need to refresh your mind. Ben says, "Now in TikTok, when it's just those tips that are changing every five seconds, it's really overwhelming. It's really an addiction to consuming content. And the way out of it is not easy, but it's possible. There are many ways to do it. One way is to just take a cleanse; take a month off of everything. Maybe just write or read literature. Even not books, no nonfiction, no podcasts, and just ridding yourself of all those things and then discovering how you can find questions before you consume any more content. Find a question you have. How can I do that? How can I find an original idea?"
- Artificial intelligence can't replace experts. Despite what some people fear, AI can’t fully replace expert human writers. Ben explains, "Instagram came out, and photographers were saying, 'Are we going to replace photographers?' And no, there are still photographers. Only if you're a mediocre photographer producing mediocre photos, then the app can replace you.But the spectacular photographers are going to succeed even more because someone will look at the photograph and instantly see that this couldn't have been produced by the app. The same will happen for textual AI. Someone will read the text, see the visuals, see the screenshots, see the experience, the stories, and will say, 'Yeah, this wouldn't be possible with AI.'"
Episode Highlights
How does the AI prediction model work?
“The way the current models work is basically with prediction models. So you have a sentence, and the model can predict the next word because you feed the model, all of the internet, all of the textual reservoirs, the internet, books, et cetera. It eats everything up, and then it makes billions — 170 billion and more, it’s growing all the time — parameters to have scales. What is the prediction of the next word? And according to this technology and these prediction methodologies, it’s able to produce these full articles that sound interesting to humans.”
AI can’t fully replace humans
“It can write you a post on how to make an omelet, but it didn’t make an omelet because it has no arms. And eventually, you’re talking about the reader. They want to follow the person that tried to make an omelet, broke a few eggs, and tasted it, and used everything that humanity brings to the table. And this is true for pretty much every topic. So it’s important for the person as well to know that it’s written by a human who tried it and is giving their own personal details. So I think there are a lot of perspectives on how you can understand why it’s not going to replace humans, and it’s only going to change.”
