Podcast Episode 45 – AI for Beginners, Part 2: NLP & Generative AI

In this episode of “Website Success,” Chrissy Rey shares the fascinating world of NLP and Generative AI, exploring how these advanced technologies are revolutionizing the way we interact with digital content. Discover the power of tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Anthropic Claude, and learn about the impact of AI on creative processes through examples like DALL-E and Midjourney.

Listen to the Episode

Show Notes

Welcome to “Website Success,” hosted by Chrissy Rey. This episode, part of a three-part series on AI for beginners, delves into Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI, exploring their business applications, current uses, and potential future impacts.

Timestamps

  • [00:00:09] Introduction to NLP and Generative AI
  • [00:01:05] Explaining NLP
  • [00:01:57] Business Applications of NLP
  • [00:04:12] Introduction to Generative AI
  • [00:05:38] How Generative AI Works
  • [00:08:02] AI Applications for Websites
  • [00:11:41] Conclusion and Future Topics

Key Takeaways

  • NLP allows computers to understand and interact using human language, enhancing user-friendliness and accessibility.
  • Generative AI creates new, original content from learned data, like text, music, and art.
  • Practical applications of AI on websites include chatbots, content creation, language translation, and user experience customization.
  • Future episodes will cover practical AI tools, ethical considerations, and AI’s potential future developments.

Resources Mentioned

Transcript

[00:00:09] Welcome back to “Website Success.” I’m your host, Chrissy Rey, and in this episode, we’re going to take a look at two specific areas of artificial intelligence: Natural Language Processing and Generative AI. I’ll also talk a little bit about using AI specifically for your websites and even more specifically using both Natural Language Processing and Generative AI. This is the second part in a three-part series about AI for beginners, so make sure you go back and listen to the first part about AI fundamentals. And then come back for the next episode, which will cover AI tools a little bit more in depth and also touch on ethical considerations and the future of AI.

[00:01:03] Let’s get started.

[00:01:05] Natural Language Processing or NLP is a pretty big deal in the world of AI. You can think of it as giving machines a lesson in human language. With NLP, you can talk to your computer in plain English, or whatever language you speak, and it’ll do its best to understand. So if you’re not a programmer, but you want to tell your computer to do something, you should be able to just speak straight to it using NLP. Now it’s not always spot on, and sometimes the answers are a bit off or even way off. And sometimes it’s even comically so. But it is a huge step in making technology a lot more user-friendly. We’re not quite at the point where computers can get every nuance of human speech. They still don’t understand sarcasm and things like that. But we’re definitely on our way there.

[00:01:57] Now let’s take a look at some of the ways that NLP is already being used or could be used in the future when it comes to business applications.

[00:02:07] In healthcare NLP can be like a digital assistant for doctors and nurses. It can dive into patient records and clinical notes, and sift out any crucial health risks or possible diagnoses. Imagine a doctor saying to a computer, show me the latest health trends for patient X. And then the computer can just pull up an analysis. That’s going to be the use of NLP.

[00:02:32] Over in the world of law and LP can sift through legal jargon in documents and contracts. And it can go through and pluck out any key information, summarize cases and save hundreds of hours on a legal case. So it can be a real time-saver for legal research and other tasks that lawyers and legal assistants and paralegals might have to do. So for example, a lawyer could say to their AI assistant, find me precedents for this case type. And then the AI can find that information. They don’t have to go in and program it or create a search to do that.

[00:03:09] In publishing NLP can help summarize articles, and pick out all of the juicy bits for curated content. So imagine a journalist getting a summary of a lengthy political speech in minutes, courtesy of NLP. The journalist can just say summarize the speech and the NLP can go through and do that.

[00:03:30] Let’s not forget about education. Schools are now using NLP in grading systems, especially for those tricky open-ended questions. So if you have a question on a quiz or a test, and the answer is going to be an open-ended essay, then NLP can help the teacher grade that. And it’s not just about grading. You can also use NLP to tailor and learning to each student’s style. So you can use NLP to make your education a bit more personalized.

[00:04:03] And those are just a few examples of NLP that are either happening now or could happen in the future. There are a lot more out there.

[00:04:12] Now let’s talk about Generative AI. Generative AI refers to a type of AI that’s all about creating something new and original. So instead of just analyzing our processing data, like the examples that I’ve already talked about. Generative AI takes it a step further. It actually generates brand new content. And this could be anything from writing text, composing music, creating digital art, or even generating realistic human voices. I’ve actually used a couple of AI tools to replicate my voice. So I could just write out what I wanted to say. And then it’ll say it for me and using my voice to it. It’s not quite there, but it’s kind of cool.

[00:04:55] A really cool thing about Generative AI is that it learns from existing data. Thousands of paintings, millions of lines of text or countless music tracks, or in the example of a AI version of my voice, it learns it from many minutes of me speaking. Although it probably could use more, cause it still sounds like a robot. Uh, but then it uses that knowledge to create its own original works. So it’s sort of like teaching a computer to be an artist or a writer or a composer, but just remember, it’s still doesn’t have that human spark of creativity. It’s using AI to do this. So if you go back and listen to the fundamentals, I talked a little bit about that, but that’s something to remember.

[00:05:38] So how exactly does Generative AI work? Well, the AI is using complex algorithms and neural networks. A neural network is analogous to a human brain and these networks can process a ton of examples and use them to learn patterns and styles. And once trained those AIs can generate new content that’s similar in style to what they’ve learned, but containing entirely original content.

[00:06:10] One of the best known examples of Generative AI is OpenAI’s GPT, which can write pretty impressively human, like text. By the way GPT in case you were wondering stands for generative pre-trained transformer. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a chat bot that provides human interaction with GPT using NLP. I know that’s like an alphabet salad there. But you can type what you want GPT to do in ChatGPT, and it’ll turn that into original content. There are other chatbots out there, for example, Google Bard, and Anthropic Claude, and they all work similarly.

[00:06:55] And then there are also tools like DALL-E, which is D A L L dash E and Midjourney, both of which can create images from text descriptions. So, for example, you can tell DALL-E to create an image of an orange cat and a purple superhero costume, and you’ll get an image that sort of fits the description. May not be the best picture. It may look a little weird, but it’s going to try.

[00:07:21] These tools don’t just repeat what they’ve seen. They mix and match ideas and the information that they get from the training to create something completely new.

[00:07:31] So in a nutshell, generative AI is kind of like giving a computer, a paintbrush or a pen, and then watching as it creates its own masterpieces, based on what it’s learned from human made examples. It’s really an exciting area. It’s probably my favorite area of AI because it really opens up a world of possibilities that were previously unimaginable. And it can really save you a lot of time when it comes to creating text, graphics, and things things like that.

[00:08:02] Now, let’s talk about how you can use AI specifically for your website. And you’ve got a lot of options. Some of these use NLP and some also use Generative AI.

[00:08:13] So the first step is chatbots. If you’ve ever messaged a website late at night saying, do you have this in my size? And then you got an instant reply, that was probably a chatbot. You can add one to your website and it can chat with visitors, just like a human. It can answer questions, guide them through your site and even crack a joke or two, depending on how it was programmed. It’s sort of like having a digital greeter and a helper that’s always ready 24 7 and always smiling. Chatbots can also hand over the conversation to a human, if there’s a human monitoring, if they can’t answer a visitor’s questions. And you’ve probably seen this in action on websites before. You can use tools like Intercom or Tawk.To and Tawk.To is T A W K dot T O. And you can use those to add AI powered chatbots to your website.

[00:09:06] You can also use AI to create content for your website. So if you’re stuck on what to write for your next blog post, you can let ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude be your muse. Just tell one of those to write a 1000 word blog post about Cincinnati chili, for example. And it’ll try to do just that. You can even tell it what tone and reading level to use. You can also customize it to sound like you by feeding it some of your writing examples and then writing to the reading level that you want for your website. AI tools can cook up some engaging content. Suggest catchy headlines or even draft entire articles like the blog post example.

[00:09:47] AI can also be really helpful for translating your website into different languages. And you might’ve seen this in action with tools like Google Translate. If you have a global business that can make your website a lot more accessible to a wider audience, by adding that translation feature to your website.

[00:10:06] And then you’ve also got user experience customization. So imagine a website that changes its look and content based on who’s visiting. AI can personalize user experience, recommend products, or even give content that matches a user’s interests. So it’s kind of like your website’s a mind reader, always knowing what your visitor wants and giving them that content or that information.

[00:10:31] AI can also help you with SEO. It can analyze keywords, it can suggest keywords, it can also optimize your content to work with keywords, and it can even suggest some SEO strategies to improve your results on the search engine results page. I actually use AI to help me with SEO. I’ll sometimes get ChatGPT, for example, to give me suggestions for optimizing my blog content, give me catchy titles and meta descriptions based on my keywords. Now I don’t just generate it and go, I don’t generate the content and then let it go or optimize it and go. I still have to add a human touch in there.

[00:11:15] You can also use AI to create graphics for your website. So say you need an image of a beach with flying cars for your blog. You can just describe it to DALL-E or Midjourney, and then watch it, bring your futuristic beach to life. Canva also has some really cool AI features that you can use to generate graphics, not just for your website, but also for your social media and other aspects of your business.

[00:11:41] And that my friends wraps up our whirlwind tour of NLP and Generative AI. We’ve seen how these incredible AI technologies are not just changing the game, they’re creating a whole new playing field. And let’s not forget the amazing ways that AI can transform your website into a more engaging dynamic and user-friendly space. So, whether you’re thinking about introducing a chatbot, crafting content, or spicing up your website with some nifty, AI generated art, the possibilities are endless. AI is here to make our digital experiences, not just smarter, but also more creative and more personalized.

[00:12:21] Thank you so much for tuning in to Website Success. As always I’m Chrissy Ray, and it’s been a blast exploring these cutting edge AI technologies with you. Remember, this is just the beginning of our AI journey or it’s actually the midway of our AI journey. In our next episode, we’ll dive into some practical AI tools that you can use. And we’ll also talk about some of the big questions, like the ethics of AI and some of the possible futures of AI. It’s a conversation you don’t want to miss.

[00:12:52] If you have any AI experiences or questions that you’d like to share, or if you’ve tried out some of these AI tools on your website or in your practice, then drop a comment in the Website Success Facebook group, or send me a message.

[00:13:07] I would love to hear from you. Until then, I’ll see you in the next episode.