434-SYB-AI-Women.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
Whether you love AI, are curious about it, or are not quite sure your voice matters to shape the present and the future. I’m sharing my recent Ted style talk on why AI needs women. On this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses, running for office, and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a TV political analyst, entrepreneur, and speaker. I interview a coach for purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies, and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is speaking your brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience. Hi and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. This is your host, Carol Cox. We’re continuing the series that I’ve been doing all around. I hopefully you’ve enjoyed the past few episodes to get you thinking about ways that you can integrate AI into your business, into your content production, and into the work you do in in ways that maybe you haven’t thought of before, and not just doing it manually by, say, going to ask ChatGPT to do something and then coming back out, but really thinking about how to automate what you’re doing so that you can do more of the things that you love to do, like public speaking, thought leadership, working one on one or in small groups with clients, and so on. In this episode, I’m going to share with you the recent TEDx style talk that I delivered at an event called Elex.
Carol Cox:
My topic was AI Needs Women why Your voice matters to shape the present and the future. If you would like to learn how to create AI automation workflows that you can use in your business and your content production without needing to know how to code, check out my new live online four week program called Automate and Amplify with AI. I’m going to teach you and show you and provide you with the AI workflows that I’m using so that you can integrate these into the work that you’re doing as well. You can get all the details and apply at speaking your brand AI again that speaking your brand AI. Now let’s get on to my talk. It was the day after Christmas 2022, and instead of enjoying that nice slow week between Christmas and New Year’s, I was at my laptop updating all of the business and marketing classes that I teach at Full Sail University and starting to build AI applications for my company and podcast, Speaking Your Brand. The reason? Well, OpenAI had just released ChatGPT the month before and had taken the world by storm, surprising even the company itself. And as an educator, a marketer and a technologist, I’m a former software developer. I instantly saw that this was going to impact all of those fields and so much more. Now. I’ve been around long enough to see these hype cycles come and go.
Carol Cox:
The next big social media platform, or software application or marketing strategy that was going to, quote, change everything. And of course, they never did. But AI is different. It is what is known as a general purpose technology, which means it really can change everything. And it most likely will. But I’m also a student of history, and I gravitated towards history because I was always looking for the women in the stories. I wanted to see women like who I wanted to grow up, to be sure. I studied the presidents and the military commanders, but I wanted to know what were the women thinking? What were they doing? What did they want to contribute? How did they want to shape society? Because it’s the past that shapes who we are today, and it’s what we do today that will shape the future. And as I look out at the tech landscape and all the podcast and the YouTube videos and the influencers on LinkedIn. And I look at the CEOs of AI companies and their boards. I see a lot of men and not as many women as I was like. And it’s important for all of us, no matter who we are, but especially women, half the population to have a say, to be part of the conversations, the decision making and the leadership around AI because it’s going to impact how we work, how we teach, how we learn, how we govern, and how we interact with each other.
Carol Cox:
I mentioned that I’m a former software developer. I founded two tech companies in the first part of my career, but I don’t look like the typical techie. You probably think of the guy in the hoodie hunched over his laptop, writing all the lines of code with millions of dollars of venture capital money funding his startup, and it is most likely a he because women only get between 3 and 5% of venture capital money for their startups, and that number has not changed in the past 20 years and is actually getting worse recently, not better. But tech hasn’t always been coded as male. Way back in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace pioneered how we even thought of what a computer could be. In the 1960s, NASA employed what they called human computers, who were women, primarily black women, as portrayed in the film Hidden Figures who calculated by hand. On paper, the trajectories of rockets talk about mind blowing. In the early part of the 1800s with the rise of the novel. Women like George Eliot and the Bronte sisters wanted to have a public voice. So what did they do? They published under male pseudonyms, so that, number one, they could get published. And number two, so that their work could be taken seriously. In the early part of the 20th century. I told you I was a history person. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Thompson used the new technology of radio to broadcast their voices, which was so unusual at the time for women to have a public voice.
Carol Cox:
But they did so to millions of homes across the country. And of course, more recently, millions of women around the world have used the internet, social media and mobile to build their businesses, their brands and their careers. But again, as I look out at the tech landscape, I want to know where the women are, where they’re making an impact and how we can amplify each other’s voices. Let me give you two examples of why what we’re doing with AI and understanding what AI is doing to us is so important. About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of five well-known women entrepreneurs. Sure, I could have searched Google, but I figured ChatGPT would give me a nice little summary. A very simple, straightforward Request that she starts writing. You know, you can see the the words coming on the screen and it says number one, Oprah Winfrey. Number two, Sara Blakely of Spanx and so on. I’m like, okay, good. And then I can see it, right? Number five period. Elon Musk and ChatGPT continues. Although Elon Musk is not a woman, he has founded these businesses, etc.. And I was like, okay, hold on a second. Chatgpt first, thank you for acknowledging that, you know, he’s not a woman, but then why is he on my list when, you know, I was asking for women entrepreneurs.
Carol Cox:
So that makes me wonder what is going on in the training data and the reinforcement that is causing it to give this answer. Here’s a more recent example. A couple of months ago, I was co-hosting a writing and speaking retreat, and one of the activities that we had the women do was to write on post-it notes and ask that they have an A give that they would offer. So an ass could be something like they needed help with social media strategy, and to give that they would offer to be beta readers for someone’s books. So they put out their post-it notes on a big white piece of paper, and then we needed to transcribe that into a spreadsheet to hand out to all of the women. Now, I could have transcribed it, but I figured, well, ChatGPT could do this and save me time. So I gave it the photo and I gave it very specific instructions. I told it just transcribe what you see in the post-it notes, do not add to it, do not change anything, just transcribe. So it did it. That was great. I’m looking over the spreadsheet and it looks good. And then a row sticks out to me under the ask column it says the per the request. I’m looking for women to interview who change their career path after marriage. And I’m like, huh? There is no woman here who’s working on a book topic related to that, so that seems kind of odd.
Carol Cox:
I go back to the original post-it notes and everything is legibly written. Here’s what the original post-it note said. Looking for men to interview, not women looking for men to interview. Who changed their last name upon marriage for whatever reason when it was, quote, transcribing. I assume that ChatGPT is neural network, which is based on word associations and likelihood of what words go together. Decided that the words interviewing men who changed their last name upon marriage was so unlikely that it changed it to interview women who changed their career path after marriage, because that seemed much more likely to it based on all of its training data and its word associations. So you can imagine, as more and more of us are using AI and more students are using it. How are biases and stereotypes getting reinforced in AI versus being challenged and questioned and even noticed? So this is why it’s so important for us to use AI. So I’m not saying don’t use it. We absolutely need to use it so that we understand what it’s doing, and we can be part of the conversations to question how is interacting with our kids, whether it’s at school or with the AI companions, and how it’s going to impact our work. I want us to be in the driver’s seat. This is how we can make sure that we are collaborating together, using our voices and amplifying the voices of other women.
Carol Cox:
I think of women I follow who are making a big impact, like Joi Palomino and her Algorithmic Justice League, which is making sure that the algorithms that are right now are influencing hiring decisions, criminal justice, law enforcement, and so on are more fair, transparent and unbiased in women like Fei-Fei, Li is Stanford University professor who created ImageNet. Without ImageNet, ChatGPT and the other AI tools would not be able to see and analyze images or create them. That’s how innovative that technology was that she created. So I invite you to have conversations about AI in your workplaces, your schools, your communities, your governing bodies, and more. You could even set up an informal AI council where you work or at your children’s school to bring people together to talk about what their ideas are around AI, what are their questions, their concern to share resources. Now, this Christmas break, hopefully I will not be at my laptop working on things. Instead, I’m busily having. I helped me to automate much of what I do on my computer in my business, so I can get back to the work that I want to do, which is being human and interacting with other humans. And I invite you all to do the same, because when future generations read the history books of this AI era, I want them to find plenty of women in them. Thank you.
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