AI Isn’t Going Anywhere. How Can We Use It Properly for Web Development?

AI isn’t likely to replace professionals, but we do need to learn to work with it. Here are some tips for web developers.

Video Transcript

Dave: Okay, a rundown on the AI stuff. What was interesting? Are you guys ready for this?

David: Okay, hold on. I’m sitting down.

Tricia: Yeah. Okay.

Dave: The two most important mindset points from this are Nathan had a quote from somebody from Google years ago talking about computers and accountants. He said, “Computers don’t make accountants obsolete. It’s accountants who don’t use computers who will be obsolete.” So, I think no matter what our professions are here, we’re doing SEO, so SEO folks who don’t use AI properly are the ones who are going to be obsolete, no matter how AI turns out. And so, I think that’s kind of the way it’s going to be with lots of different industries, lots of different things. So, that was one. The other big mindset thing is it’s all about the prompt.

David: Yeah.

Dave: Be really good at prompts. And then, I guess, after that, it would be to continue to refine things and use AI to help you work through a problem. And sometimes, you have to start over. If it goes off in the distance and it’s not giving you what you want, start it over again or remind it where you’ve gone. That’s one thing. Another thing was, and I didn’t even realize, you can add plugins to this thing. So, you can bring in a plugin that will allow it to go out to the web and process several links that are out there. So, you could do all kinds of stuff, even from a social media perspective. You could tell it to go to my client’s website where they’ve written these five blogs and give me 20 social media posts for TikTok that are like A, B, C, and D, or something like that. So, it can read stuff on the web. So that was good. Another thing you can do is you can have it actually give you some of the plugins. You can actually have it give you a diagram. It’ll draw a diagram for you. It can create a spreadsheet for you and download it CSV. That was really cool.

Tricia: Question. Is most of this using ChatGPT, or are there lots of different ones that they were talking about?

Dave: Yeah. This was using ChatGPT.

Tricia: Okay. Alright.

Dave: Another thing to get out of this is to continue to experiment. Because in a lot of ways, I think this is the Wild, Wild West. There are all these different tools out there. I think there’ll be some consolidation in the industry at some point. Tool companies will buy others, or Microsoft will buy this tool and incorporate it in, or whatever. So, I would say, in a lot of ways, don’t get too enamored with some of these tools. I’m trying to stay as much as I can with just plain old ChatGPT because I know they keep adding capabilities and stuff like that.

Tricia: I mean, when I use a different one, it is only when I try ChatGPT, and I don’t get what I want. So, then it’s like, let me just open this other one up and see if I can use the same prompt. And if I do, then that’s good.

Dave: I think another thing is to allocate some money to experiment with this stuff. Try a couple of tools and see if it helps or doesn’t. We just did a book club on $100 Million Leads. That’s why I was late because we had to reschedule it because Larry was sick. And we did it at ten and just got done. And one of the things that he talked about is using tools. He says they try a new tool on something about once a week. They try it out, and they see what happens. So why not? Why not spend a little bit of time and energy trying a couple of these different things out and seeing what helps? And just realize that you’re going to waste your time sometimes. But other times it won’t be a waste. Another method is what I think Nathan is probably going to do. Nathan Ingram is probably going to do a workshop, maybe every quarter or something like that. That was my suggestion to him, to do a workshop every quarter on what’s changed, or at least a presentation on what’s changed, since it’s going so rapidly.

Tricia: Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s hard to keep up. There are just so many changes.

Dave: Yeah. I think one of the things that I talked about, David, was it on the last fifth Wednesday, where we talked about the DADDA funnel?

David: Yeah.

Dave: Delete, automate, delegate, delay/defer, and attention. I’m thinking right now that the funnel needs another step. In other words, maybe before delegating it, you use AI to help you.

David: ADADDA

Dave: Something like that. Yeah, I don’t know, but it can speed up and help you do things so quickly. I was doing an analysis for a client, the tarp site, and we are going to be redoing their site. And we wanted to know which is going to be the best day or two, where they get the least number of orders, the least busy day of the week. And so, we exported all of their stuff to a spreadsheet. And the way the orders were, it was just kind of a mess. But I asked ChatGPT to give me some formulas to start whittling this thing down, and it didn’t take long. A half a day or a day of work to do it was turned into about a half hour.

Tricia: When you said that, it kind of refreshed my memory. When we were at Word Camp Atlanta, I think it was Jenny Munn who mentioned this. She said to realize that when you import data into it, that makes the data public and searchable. Is that right? Were you there for that, David?

David: It wasn’t Jenny who did that. But, yeah, that is true.

Tricia: Yeah. So just be aware of that when you’re uploading, especially client data. It’s one thing pulling something from the web and sticking it in or whatever. But just to be aware of that. That part of it concerns me. I don’t know.

Dave: Yeah. This wasn’t like sales data or anything like that.

Tricia: Yeah.

Dave: And there was one other thing, speaking of that. One of the recommendations was to give ChatGPT an example of what you want as the output. Right? So, in other words, you would say, hey, I want ten responses about how I can improve my managerial skills. So, one example might be to meet with my team every week. Give me ten more or something like that. That helps.

Tricia: Yeah, I can see that.