Working With AI: Twice As Nice For Half The Price
You probably have a job where there are some things you want to do and other things you have to do. If you are a doctor, you probably want to heal patients. Doing what you want to do is nice, while doing what you have to do (like emails and reports) is the price you pay. Working with AI I’ve been able to make my job twice as nice for half the price. It has made me much better at what I do and given me more time to focus on it.
Twice As Nice
Microsoft calls its AI services Copilot. That is a great name, because the best way to use AI at this point is to use it as your personal Co-Pilot. Not just one Co-Pilot, but several Co-Pilots helping you with different types of tasks. Think about the most important parts of your work, then imagine having a Co-YOU always available to help you do it, and this Co-YOU is free to use and more or less knows everything about everything.
This is how I use AI: I discuss with it, debate it, ask for feedback and ideas, and give it tasks that would take humans so long to do that there is no way they would be done. This makes me much better at what I do than I’d be without working with AI, and makes my work at least twice as nice. I use different AIs for different tasks, and to check the work of the others (you can see my comparison of the AI tools I recommend using here), but for the most important tasks related to my work I have assembled a team of amazing colleagues.
ChatGPT (the paid version) lets you create what is called Custom GPTs, versions of GPT-4 that you give additional instructions and information to before you use them, or even let others use them. One of mine is my Co-Professor, that I’ve created to help me teach. Armed with my syllabus, slides, templates, teaching philosophy, preferences, and other information it is always ready to help me teach better, and I mean a lot better! I use it to make sure my classes deliver what my syllabus promises, my lectures cover the right things in the best possible way, the assignments I give my students actually validate that they have learned what was intended, and so much more.
Half The Price
What about all those tasks that feel more like the price of your job than what is nice about it? AI is incredibly good at such tasks! It can read long documents and summarize or extract things for you, combine information and data into reports with specific formats, turn your handwritten notes into accurate and properly formatted digital text (even my awful handwriting!), structure and find patterns in a bunch of unstructured data, then visualize the insights, fact check and improve anything you write, and compose answers to emails in a fraction of the time it would have taken you to do the same. Working with AI can reduce the price by much more than half.
Here is something that would have been so time-consuming that it wouldn’t be worth doing without AI: I use Zoom to record all my class meetings, originally so that students who missed the class for Covid reasons could watch the recording to catch up. Zoom gives me a transcript of the meeting. A recent example is 99 pages of pretty poor transcription of everything that was said in a class, in 828 little snippets of text all preceded by a number, a transcript, and my name. I’ve included an example snippet. Without AI this transcript is completely useless and would have remained untouched.
Working with AI I can get all the information I could possibly want out of it in seconds: Summaries, key points, questions asked by students and my answers, anything you can think of. To get even more I’ve created a “Transcript Cleaner” Custom GPT that when given a transcript automatically writes and runs Python to remove the snippet numbers, timestamps, and speaker labels and returns a downloadable file. (I made it a public GPT, so you can use it too) These files are small enough that I can upload all 14 from a semester of teaching to Gemini 1.5 to compare and discuss them to derive valuable insights. This in turn helps me improve my teaching even further.
Working With AI
Working with AI has certainly made my work twice as nice for half the price. I might also be able to help you work better with AI too! I offer both AI workshops and AI consulting services like creating your custom GPTs. Contact me if you want to learn more!
