Listen in below as Kristen Kniep discusses AI, how we use it with Nevada News & Views, plans for the upcoming AI Campaign Academy, and the move from “Ask Google” to “Ask ChatGPT”.
Click to read transcript
Alan Stock 00:00
And a good morning! Great to have you with us on this Thursday morning. It’s Thursday – It’s got to be Nevada News & Views Thursday, which it is, you can always find out more about Nevada News & Views by going to NevadaNewsAndViews.com. A great source for information about what’s going on locally, statewide, as well as nationally. One of your best sources, I’ve got to tell you. And joining us right now this morning on behalf of Nevada News & Views, is Kristen Kniep. She’s Associate Editor of Nevada News & Views and Executive Assistant for Citizen Outreach. Kristen, thanks so much for taking time to join us this morning.
Kristen Kniep 00:35
Absolutely, happy to be here.
Alan Stock 00:37
It’s so great to have you here. You’re going to educate us this morning, and I haven’t teased yet we’re going to be talking about, but it’s, I think it’s really important. And I have to admit right off the bat that I am not up on a lot of this stuff. So I’m going to learn, along with everyone this morning, about AI. We hear about it all the time. I mean, it’s everybody’s talking about it, but let me just get right to it. What is AI?
Kristen Kniep 01:03
So it stands for artificial intelligence, a software basically, that uses the internet, the web, to search and answer your questions. It acts more as a thinking machine rather than just a searching machine. So when you talk to it, it behaves like more like a human would, and really kind of thinks about the best way to answer your questions.
Alan Stock 01:33
So does it keep your questions in its its bank there? So it always kind of knows, you know, does it develop a profile on you by keeping the information in its bank?
Kristen Kniep 01:49
If you, if you build an account, yes, definitely. It does have a memory. It learns from you, as you –
Alan Stock 01:56
Say that again, you cut out.
Kristen Kniep 01:58
Oh yes. If you build an account, it does have a memory, and it learns from you, and will try to give you the best answer based on what it learns from you.
Alan Stock 02:08
Okay, so how is it being used today?
Kristen Kniep 02:14
It’s being used in, I mean, as many different ways as you can think of right now. With Nevada News & Views we’ve been using it a lot – we’ll go out and we’ll pull information, say we see something on like X, for example. We’ll go into ChatGPT, is the big AI engine that we use right now, so we’ll drop the story –
Alan Stock 02:40
You cut out. Start again, when you see it on X, what do you do at that point?
Kristen Kniep 02:47
We’ll summarize it. So X has an AI tool within it called GROK – so they’ve actually got an AI engine in there. There’s a lot of different ones, some people say some are better than others, but that one works great for a post within that platform. So they will go give us a little bit more information on the background of the post. I will take that summary and drop it into ChatGPT, which I think is a better writer. And it will use a prompt that we’ve developed. The prompt works based off of what we’re looking for. So a conservative voice, 600 words, this and that, and it will give us a draft of an article. I’ll go over it with my human lens and improve it a little bit, tweak the language here and there. Right now, a human voice is always going to be better and more realistic than the AI engine, but it can – it’s only getting better. But right now I’ll go, I’ll review it, edit it, and then I will go and post it on Nevada News & Views.
Alan Stock 04:03
Okay, okay, so it’s kind of the background information, and then you tweak it, you know, to give it a human flavor?
Kristen Kniep 04:13
Absolutely.
Alan Stock 04:14
Okay. So tell me something. How can, and this is what I think a lot of people are thinking about, how can it be misused?
Kristen Kniep 04:23
I think the big thing that frightens people, I think, is that it is a a pleaser. It wants to give you what you what you ask for. So if you’re asking for, say, I’m trying to think of a bad example here. There are, there are safeguards that are being worked on, but right now it does try to give you what you’re looking for, so you can ask it basically anything similar to how Google was in the beginning. You know, you can search for whatever you want. There are a lot of services right now that produce images. So for example, you could produce an image of somebody that is not exactly tasteful, and that could look very realistic, depending upon the way it’s presented to the public. It could be damaging. So you do, you want to be a little bit careful. They’ve got content policies and things like that. But because of the way, because of how new it is, there are workarounds.
Alan Stock 05:26
Well, does it manipulate the pictures to make somebody not look good then? Or is, is it something that you find that already doesn’t look good?
Kristen Kniep 05:36
It can manipulate the photo, yeah. So it can. It can.
Alan Stock 05:39
Oh, okay, so it can be misused somewhat in that way. And so you said that it was like Google in the beginning. So what’s the difference between searching Google and searching AI?
Kristen Kniep 06:00
I think the best way to explain it would be Google is a search, whereas something like chat GPT is an answer. So think about it like A is the question that you want to ask. B is the research portion. So with Google, you would be performing B by yourself. You go and you look at the different sources, compare the different things on your own, and decide what is the best answer for yourself with ChatGPT or a different answer engine you go right from A to C, you tell chat GPT like say you’re looking for a car. You want a car that sits six people, your family is growing. You want it to be safe, good on gas mileage. You tell ChatGPT all these things. It does the searching. It does the researching and brings you the best answer. So you kind of just skip that middle step.
Alan Stock 06:59
Does it give you options? Or just gives you that one answer?
Kristen Kniep 07:03
Oh, it gives you options. Yeah.
Alan Stock 07:07
Okay, options like it puts them in order, so you know the top choices, and then you have all the rest in a list, kind of, right?
Kristen Kniep 07:16
Mm-hmm, and its answer is a little bit more human. So it will tell you “here’s why I think that this is the best option for you. Here is maybe a con that might make you not think that this is the best option. If that con is a deal breaker. Here’s some more options that I also think would fall into what you’re looking for.”
Alan Stock 07:38
You said something else earlier intrigued me that that it gives you, it can give you answers that please you. It tries to please you. So I mean, will it – does that mean that it will not give you alternatives or things that are that are against what you believe, or what you what you’re looking for?
Kristen Kniep 08:04
If you ask it to it will. So that’s a big portion of the prompts that we develop. So we don’t want to present things from, you know, just just one side. So we will ask Chat to give us, say, a more left leaning perspective as well, and compare it and say “this is what critics of this, of this issue, are saying as well.” So we ask it to give us things that we maybe don’t necessarily agree with, to give us the full picture of what we’re looking for.
Alan Stock 08:39
Excellent. Can you stay with me?
Kristen Kniep 08:41
Yeah, absolutely.
Alan Stock 08:42
All right, because we got to take a break, and I want to come on back and talk about the AI campaign training that you guys going to be working up. And also talk about this. You and I talked yesterday about it, SEO versus AEO. And I don’t know if anyone else knows about it. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s important to know about. So we’re going to find out in a moment from Kristen Kniep, and she is the Associate Editor of Nevada News & Views, and we’re going to continue in just a moment right here on Vegas at 8:00.
And a good morning. Great to have you with us on this Thursday morning. It’s, of course, Nevada News & Views Thursday and this morning on Nevada News & Views, we have the Associate Editor of Nevada News & Views, Kristen Kniep, and she’s here to educate us. We’re in school this morning, and I’m learning along with you about AI. I have known very little about it. You hear it all the time bandied about, AI this, and AI that. But what is it? What does it do? How do you use it? What are the drawbacks? And you know, is it expensive or, I mean, nobody knows. I don’t know any of those answers, but Kristen does, and that’s why she’s with us. Thanks for joining us this morning, Kristen.
Kristen Kniep 09:52
Of course, happy to be here.
Alan Stock 09:56
So exactly, how does this work if I wanted to go to use AI right after the show, what do I do?
Kristen Kniep 10:04
The service that we use the most right now is ChatGPT.
Alan Stock 10:10
I’ve heard of that, yes.
Kristen Kniep 10:14
We do have a paid account, but you can sign up for a free account and use it just basically right from the minute you type in ChatGPT into into your browser.
Alan Stock 10:28
So if I, if I type that in, then I’ll go right to ChatGPT.
Kristen Kniep 10:33
Yeah, I would have to double check what the what the exact URL is, but I think it’s just ChatGPT.com or something of the like.
Alan Stock 10:43
I can just put in my browser and find out. But I’m going to do that too, because now I’m very curious to find out about the I mean, I have not been stimulated to think about this until I’ve chatted with you about this to find out more. And I know you’ve been using this for a while and successfully, and you even have a campaign training coming up, is that right?
Kristen Kniep 11:04
Yes, absolutely. So with with everything that we’ve been learning right now, we’ve been using it a lot to help develop the stories on Nevada News & Views, but there are so many different branches of what AI can do. ChatGPT is not the only AI service out there, and what’s really important is who you’re learning the AI from. Right now, we’re part of a mastermind group that teaches this and is really on the pulse of all the new gadgets and technology that you can use. So with everything that we’ve learned from those experts, we think that we’re, we’re kind of getting there – and there are some people using AI in politics right now, but nowhere near in the way that we are preparing to use it.
Alan Stock 11:56
But, but you are using, and again, you’re doing, you’re doing campaign training using this AI or ChatGPT.
Kristen Kniep 12:07
Yes. So basically, just reviewing that that information from those experts and how it can be put towards developing websites. For example, we’ve learned easy ways to produce a website basically in no time. You tell it your candidate’s name and their and their main issues, and it produces a website within, you know, five minutes. And that’s something that in the past you would have had to pay, you know, website developer for and you tweak it, and you say this and that. But with AI, it just happens so quickly and and honestly, much more, much more cost effective.
Alan Stock 12:47
Wow. Okay, let me ask you this question. We’ve got very little time, but we’ll see if we get as much as we can. You talk to me about SEO versus AEO. What does that mean?
Kristen Kniep 13:01
So SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s something that businesses would use to make sure that their website shows up higher in something like Google search results, things like like keywords say you’re looking for Nevada News & Views. If you type into Google “Nevada news” Google will look for what has the most interactions, what people are looking at, if it’s using those keywords that you typed in. AEO, is going to be how ChatGPT and other AI engines produce those answers. So AEO is Answer Engine Optimization, one thing that a lot of people are doing is they’re moving away from using search engines like Google, and they’re asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, or a number of other AI agents, and AEO is going to be the process of how to get your business or your result to show up and be recommended by those engines.
Alan Stock 14:12
Real quick, a few seconds, if people want to go to AEO, where do they find that?
Kristen Kniep 14:17
Right now, it’s very, very new. There’s not a whole lot of people talking about it. I do know that our mastermind that we’re in has a workshop coming up on it, guy by the name of Perry Belcher, so you could look into him, and he’s on the pulse.
Alan Stock 14:32
I’m gonna get you back on some time to further educate us. Okay, because as this gets deeper and you become more educated, we’ll become a little bit smarter too. So you’ll join me again to talk about this?
Kristen Kniep 14:44
Oh, I would love to Yeah.
Alan Stock 14:46
Kristen Kniep, joining us this morning, Associate Editor of Nevada News & Views, Executive Assistant for Citizen Outreach. Kristen, thanks so much for being with us. We appreciate the the education this morning, and we will do it again, and we’ll do it again very. Soon as well. Thank you very much. Take good care.
Kristen Kniep 15:03
Thank you. You too.
