You Ask, I Answer: How to Gain Practical Experience with AI?

In today's episode, Aaron asks, how do I gain more practical experience with generative AI? I'm trying all the tutorials and watching all the videos. How do I how do I understand how to put this into production? If your organization is not giving you those opportunities right now, that's okay. Here is a simple, easy, straightforward way to get more experience with generative AI.

Volunteer. Volunteer somewhere. Learn the capabilities of generative AI and then go volunteer at your local pet shelter or homeless shelter or you know, intimate partner violence uh program, whatever the thing is in your area that you care about that you want to devote some time to, and right now you just don't have time to do it because you're trying to pursue other priorities. Volunteer. Use these tools to see what you can do with them and what their limitations are and and how to grow your skills.

My friend Ann Handley in her newsletter recently pointed out that animal shelters are using generative AI to come up with catchy, snappy descriptions for you know animals needing adoption, right? Because the staff has only a limited amount of time. So if they can crank out 40 or 50 descriptions very quickly, they can get those animals up on the website faster. They can get them that much closer to adoption. That's a great use case for generative AI.

I think it's a huge time saver, and it will help, it will help cut down the time you know staff spends on that so they can spend time doing other things. Where if you work at a nonprofit, maybe their their finance departments really struggling to do an audit or really struggling to understand, you know, patterns in their data. Use generative AI and a tool like ChatGPT's advanced data analysis to help them analyze their data and understand what's going on. Maybe you have a nonprofit that's got a big fundraiser coming up, and you know, they've they've got a landing page on the internet, and they're like, we're just not getting you know the conversions we want. Lots of people are visiting it, but they're not converting.

Use generative AI to generate an ideal customer profile, and then evaluate that page for UIUX suggestions for that customer profile and help them fix things up faster. The reason to volunteer is because they're real world situations, right? They're not synthetic. If you're gonna spend the time learning this stuff, do it with an organization that can benefit from it, do it in something that's non-competitive, so your employer's not gonna have a problem with it, and do some good with it. Do some good with it.

If you can help that you know, small local business get two more customers a month, right? That's gonna help that business grow. It's gonna help that business succeed. There's no shortage of companies that need the capabilities of generative AI and someone skilled in its use. They also cannot afford it.

They cannot afford someone with your capabilities, you know, real or you know, actualized today, or that you're trying to grow. As long as everyone is transparent and up front, like, hey, I want more experience with this. I'm volunteering specifically to get more experience with this technology. How can I use it with you? It's a win for everyone.

Okay, unless you work at an animal shelter and you really love animals, then Shell and like, I adopted seven dogs. Whoops. It's a it's an emotional win, but it might be a bit of chaos at home. But that's the easiest example. Go volunteer, go find organizations that need AI and can't afford AI.

And using off-the-shelf tools like you know, Gemini Advanced or Chat GPT Plus or Stable Diffusion XL, work those tools into their workflow, help them save time, save money, get more done that they couldn't otherwise get done. Think about I used to work at a nonprofit that was in mental health, and just writing donor letters took them forever. Today, if I was still at that nonprofit, I'd be like, okay, give us give me the facts, give me the template. We're gonna have generative AI spin out 500 letters in the next minute and a half, and you'll be done for this quarter's fundraiser. And you can move on to other things.

And the letters will be better because you know, if as long as your prompt is good, you'll get good results. So please go out and use these two these tools and technologies to make society better. There is an organization of some kind that can benefit from it. A friend of mine the other week challenged me, she said, uh challenge you to use it to write a sermon for a church on a very specific topic. And I was like, okay, I mean, that's not my religion, so I don't I don't know anything about it.

But you know what? Generative AI did. So I gave it some parameters, had a long conversation with it, generated a 23-minute sermon, and the feedback I got from them was that was pretty good. It missed some quirks that are always present in that particular sect's uh way of of talking about things. But longtime members of that church were like, yeah, I had no bones to pick about the content of the sermon.

Uh the machine did a really good job. So even there, something as simple as how do you help, you know, your your religious organization or other volunteer effort, how do you help them do more? Use generative AI. It's the best way to learn it. It's the best way to show real results, and it's the best way to get endorsements about it on things like your LinkedIn profile, right?

You go volunteer for the local pet shelter, and the pet shelter CEO is like Chris did this amazing job with generative AI and you know, cut all this time that we were wasting on these things, and and we were adopting uh you know dogs at at 1.2x the rate we used to be so it's a success story not just for generative AI but for you as a practitioner of AI. Uh go volunteer. Hope that answers your question. Thanks for it and thanks for watching today's show. See you next time.

If you enjoyed this video please hit the like button subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and if you want to know when new videos are available hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live