We hear a lot about AI replacing humans, but what if it could actually help us become more human in the best possible ways?
In this episode of The Ambitious Introvert®, I’m joined by Dan Chuparkoff – one of the world’s leading experts on AI, innovation, and the future of work. With decades of experience leading tech transformation at companies like Google and McKinsey, Dan is known for making complex technology feel practical, approachable, and surprisingly empowering. His grounded optimism about the potential of AI is seriously refreshing.
Dan believes AI can support productivity, deepen self-awareness, but that being ethical with technology is not optional, but essential. Whether you’re tech-curious or tech-cautious, this conversation will help you reframe what AI really means for your work and your life.
Here’s what we cover:
- How AI note takers are revolutionizing productivity – how they’re a game-changer for meetings, podcasts, and idea tracking
- The truth about AI ethics – why the danger isn’t the technology itself, but how we choose to use it
- AI can be a mirror for self-awareness – how Dan uses it for reflection and deeper insight
- Why context matters when prompting AI – and how to get smarter responses with fewer headaches
- Using AI to simplify writing and research – and how introverts can stay authentic while working smarter
This is a must-listen if you’re curious about how to use AI with integrity – to support your goals, protect your energy, and thrive in a world where we’re experiencing rapid change.
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
🌐 Dan Chuparkoff Website
◾️Dan Chuparkoff LinkedIn
◾️Dan Chuparkoff Youtube
◾️ChatGPT
◾️Wolfram Alpha
◾️The Catcher in the Rye
CONNECT WITH EMMA-LOUISE:
Website: https://theambitiousintrovert.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalouparkes/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmalouparkes
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Dan Chuparkoff: You’re just writing something that’s already on the Internet. If it wasn’t on the Internet, AI wouldn’t be able to write that blog post because it’s using training data, right? That’s already out there. And so, you know, the middle part is your responsibility. The crux of the thought leadership, if you’re trying to be a thought leader.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Is your responsibility whenever your current work and life situation. I would imagine you have somehow in the last few years been affected by the exponential rise of artificial intelligence. Whether it is through utilising chat GPT, whether it is desperately trying to get through to a company to talk to someone and get in the AI chatbot instead, or whether it is one of the numerous apps that are popping up on the daily to help make us more productive. There is no way that life is not now impacted by AI and of course that is only going to continue. It is not going anywhere. And to honour that, I thought I would bring in one of the world’s leading experts on AI innovation and the future of work. And that is the amazing Dan Chaparkoff. Dan was a technology leader at Google, McKinsey and numerous other places, leading transformations for teams in every industry through three decades of technological change.
Dan’s superpower is making complex things simple and useful. And now as an AI educator and an expert on innovation, he is sharing his thoughts with us. Dan 1000% believes that AI can support us as humans, help our productivity, help us become more self aware if we use it in an ethical way. And that is a big part of what we’re talking about today. Dan and I are both share in ways that we use AI in our business and in our lives. We talk about the ethics of it, we talk about the context and really the fact that it’s only as potent and powerful as the input and prompts that we give and also from what we take away from it and go away an action. So this is a jam packed episode. I’m thrilled to be able to bring Dan’s expertise. He is many things and he’s also an introvert who makes a living as a keynote speaker. So he knows very, very much about managing his energy too. I know that whatever situation you are in, you’re gonna get so much from this episode as I did. So please enjoy the wonderful danrop Parkov. Dan, thank you so much for joining me. I have been very excited about this conversation for a number of reasons, but how are you doing today?
Dan Chuparkoff: I’m good and thank you for having me. I’m excited about the Conversation too. Looking forward to diving in all things.
Emma-Louise Parkes: And you are, I believe, in or near Chicago.
Dan Chuparkoff: That is correct. I m mean the Chicago suburbs, Midwest American guy, have been here most of my life, but I’ve lived in a bunch of different cities as well.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So Chicago is, and people always laugh when I say this. My favourite city in the world.
Dan Chuparkoff: Wow, that’s a bold statement.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It is a bold statement. And then people are like, have you not travelled much? I’m like, oh no. And I’m reallyeling off like Asian cities, you know, Australia, all across Europe and they’re like, Chicago. I’m like, yeah, Chicago has the best energy.
Dan Chuparkoff: Okay.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It has the best people.
Dan Chuparkoff: That’s true.
Emma-Louise Parkes: And it has the best food.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yes, all true statements.
Emma-Louise Parkes: so yeah, so I’m kind of living vicariously through you today.
Dan Chuparkoff: That’s amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Chicago’s a wonderful city. It’s like a big city with all the big city activities and energy and stuff to do and all of that. But it’s also got the sort of like Midwest like people vibe, where people are nice to each other and you. There’s some crime and stuff, but it’s scattered around like any normal big city. And so I love it. I don’t think I’ll ever leave. It’s a pretty great city to be, living in.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I don’t blame you. I think I expected a smaller version of New York when I first went and it felt like New York with better architecture and cleaner sidewalks and friendlier people.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah, that’s a great way to describe Chicago in general.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Apologies to all the New Yorkers that I’ve just offended by mistake. Anyway, thank you for joining us from Chicago this morning. For you, this is a topic that I don’t think anyone can escape. Whatever people’s thoughts are on AI, I think most people have come to accept that it’s not going anywhere.
Dan Chuparkoff: Most people. I think some people would like to think of ways of shutting it down or slowing it down or something like that, but, but it’s a, ah, it’s a, it’s a pretty powerful, amazing, helpful tool. And so as long as we figure out how to manage some of the, some of the things that are scary for people, I think it will be an amazing force for humanity. When I was at Google, Sundar Paai used to say, AI is going to be more important for the world than fire. Wow, that’s a pretty bold, that’s a pretty bold statement. So, you know, we’ll see, we’ll see what happens. But I think it’s useful and I use it every day.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So where did you first become involved on an active basis within your career in AI?
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah, I think you know, when you dig into what AI actually is, you’ll see that AI is really just machine learning. It’s like looking at a bunch of data and trying to identify patterns like the most, the most common thing to do next it given this problem. So I started using machine learning in the 90s. We were looking at grocery store traffic data, purchase data for grocery stores and consumer packaged goods companies and trying to find patterns in that data to help package goods companies or grocery store companies like market their stuff and anticipate patterns in consumer behaviour. And so that was in the 90s.
Then we were looking at shopping data and trying to figure out like what’s the most common popular thing this person might buy next. That’s really exactly what’s happening now. When you ask chatuppt a question it’s answering that same question. What’s the most popular likely answer to this question? And so if you really, if you really dig into what I’ve been doing, it’s been a 30 year journey buterative AI like this language model stuff like ChatPT answering questions.
That really started happening in about 2020 when I was at Google. You know we started to notice that language models got dramatically better all of a sudden. They were moderately useful before but all of a sudden they could answer questions on any topic in any subject with like mastery level, maybe not expert level but, but like really great answers to questions, whatever we could think of. And that changed the way we worked at Google almost overnight.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So when Chat GPT became publicly available, which m. I think would that been about 2022?
Dan Chuparkoff: November. The end of November of 2022, yes.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So as an entrepreneur it was a big deal. People were buzzing about it. You know everyone started going oh you know you can get ChatGPT to write all your content and all of this kind stu.
So I started to play with it we on the free version in I think early 2023 I scrolled back on my chats to see what the earliest one and it’s okay. It was impressive at the time it was okay. And I’d ask it some questions and it would give me some answers. I use it daily now for various things I would say in my experience in the last six months it’s gotten exponentially better. Like, like frighteningly so in that I don’t even need to prompt it a lot of the time now it knows What I want.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right. Yeah. It, it is not just anecdotally getting exponentially better. It’it’s empirically getting exponentially better. When it first came out, the version of the algorithm that was being trained was being trained with 175 billion examples of content. Right. 175 billion things written on the Internet fed in there to train the algorithm. The version of it that came out in April of last year. So, almost exactly a year ago today, that version was trained with 13 trillion.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Okay, right.
Dan Chuparkoff: And so it’s just getting better because we’re feeding more stuff into it and not we, I’m not doing anything. But it’s getting better because it’s learning more stuff about the world from more diverse sources of information and they’re finding the places that are more reliable for information versus the places that are less reliable and they’re sort of filtering through that data a little better than they did at the beginning.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So reliability, I think, is an interesting one because it’s very easy. I think especially for younger people. I’m going to say that maybe the millennials and younger that grew up without. I had a completely analogue childhood and teen, ah, mobile phones. The Internet kind of started to come around when I was about 18.
But for people that have always had a device and a connection to the Internet, it’s very easy for them to accept that that is fact. What we presented with is fact. And we’ve seen this with fake news and echo chambers on social media. And for me, I have a bit of a sceptical brain, which is maybe a good thing. So when I get a response from ChatPT, I don’t necessarily 100% trust it.
And I have to employ some critical thinking to be like, like is this correct or should I go and fact check this somewhere else? Or you. This feel, does this feel right? I got it to do, a calculation for meuse, I’m really bad at math and chat GPT is pretty good at math.
So I got it to calculate when my current mortgage rate expires and I need to refinance based on my rate, based on how much I pay each month, and based on my outstanding amount, what would I owe in two and a half years? Right. So I was like, okay, great, this feels really good. It’s gonna work that out in seconds. And it did. And it said, oh yeah, you’re not paying enough, you’re not paying enough to cover your capital and interest and you’re gonna have an extra like $100,000 of debt. In, in two years. And I was like, I don’t think that’s correct. Could you run that calculation again? And it came back and you went, oh no, sorry, you’re absolutely right. And then gave me the correct calculation.
Dan Chuparkoff: Sure. Right.
Emma-Louise Parkes: How common is that? How common is it that it will just throw something out there that someone could take as absolute fact when in fact it’s just gone, gone off on run, as we’d say in the uk?
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah. So there’s a couple things I’ll dig into there. The first is, first, GPTs are language models, not mathematical models. Right. And so they’re pretty good at math, but they’re not actually doing math. They’re like doing language language, like trying to write out the answer to your question and using probability, not math, figure out what the numbers are in the sentence that it’s constructing. And so most people, if they asked a question about their mortgage, might have some answer to that question.
Right. The question, what do most people have left in two years with their mortgage? Has nothing to do with the question you’re asking, but that’s the question chat repute is answering. So first, be really cautious when you’re asking a language model math questions. There is a mathematical model called Wolfram Alpha which is doing like AI stuff but for mathematics and it’s great and it will definitely get that question right.
So I’ll send you a link you for listeners that want to check that out. So be exceptionally cautious when you’re using math inside of your ChatGPT experience. The second thing though is even if we weren’t talking about math, we’re asking at some random question about a bird we saw, or the strategy we’re trying to create, or the sales email we’re trying to write.
AI is going to give you some suggestions and it will have some probability of error. Maybe that is 99.9, maybe it’s 99.999% accurate. But there’s always that point.001. And depending on the question you’re asking it and how commonly that question is discussed on the Internet in public places, that error changes. It gets dramatically worse. If you’re asking it a new weird question that only you and your company discuss, the AI error is going to be very, very, very bad, very high. And so you’re going to need to check it atom random undiagnosable degrees of difficulty.
So as you start using AI, know that it could be wrong sometimes we don’t have any examples of technology that works flawlessly every time. Right. And so with other kinds of technology, there’s a team of people sitting there watching for mistakes, watching for crashing servers or security issues and they’re jumping in to fix those weird problems. With you and AI, it’s just the two of you. So you are the person that’s jumping in and looking for weird problems to diagnose and fix.
A lot of kids these days won’t realise that you’re right and they will report facts as facts that aren’t actually true. But also if you ask any random stranger a fact, they’ll give you an answer and it might not be true. Right. A AI might have a better fact retelling accuracy than most of the people you interact with. So we might not be in worse shape than we’re already in.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It’s so interesting you mentioned kids and we’ve said about this where people have just been brought up in a digital world. What are the implications with AI now for students? I know a lot of teachers are complaining, you know, oh, I’m getting the same essay and it’s obvious that people have run it through there. But what are the longer term implications for that? What impact do you think it’s gonna have on us as humans and our ability to be innovative, to critically think, et cetera in the future?
Dan Chuparkoff: I think that, I think it will help us because we will spend less time doing the non critical thinking stuff, so we’ll have more time thinking strategically about how to solve new weird problems or how to imagine a different future that doesn’t exist yet. Right now we’re spending so much time with like basic information processing, taking this info and putting it in this system or double checking these two systems to make sure they’re still, they’re still in sync or trying to remember the thing we heard in that meeting nine weeks ago. we’re spending all this time with stuff that AI can now do for us much more reliably.
And so that should free up some of our time to do other things. That that’s going to create two problems.
First, our schools are primarily teaching us fact recall right now. Here you learn. Read this history book, remember all these important dates and people, and let’s answer those questions on the test. That’s not a useful skill anymore. Your aiant will be able to tell you any fact on the fly with some margin of error. That’s not the thing schools will need to teach. Schools are going to need to shift to critical problem solving.
I was talking to, an English teacher in the high school near my house in our School district here. And he was asking that same question like what do I do?
How do I know students are cheating? And I said you might be giving them the wrong assignment for 2025.
Maybe say write an essay and let AI help you and then find five things in that essay that are wrong that AI gave you the wrong information for it. That’s the skill students need. Writing a random paper from scratch isn’t a thing people will do anymore if you are doing it. If somebody, if somebody tries to write a strategy for my company from scratch without using AI to help them, they’re fired.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love it. But it’s this idea of like co creation and using it as something that can support us. Like for me I’m someone that I need a lot of like wide open space for thinking. That’s how y, that’s how my brain works. I don’t do very well in admin and busy work. but some people do and have a wonderful assistant. She’s great at all of that but it’s not for me. It bogs me down and so I need a lot of white space. So to be able to use something like chat GPT to, I use it to kind of brainstorm with almost to give me inspiration and ideas. So it’s not like hey, write this email. Because I still write my own emails but it’s like oh, know what you know about me and my audience. Give me three topics that you think would be a really great newsletter for this week and I can see something go oh yeah, I’m going toa go with that.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right. Yeah, that’s a great way of leveraging AI. there’s something called the AI sandwich. It’s where at the beginning you have a project like you’re going to write some great content this week. At the beginning of that project you have the brainstorming task, right? You need ideas, you want to vet your ideas. You and AI is great at that, right? AI has an infinite number of ideas and you could say give me 10 ideas for content this week and it will give you 10 ideas instantly and then you can use the context in your head to decide like of those 10, what’s. What feels right for me right now. You pick the one that you like and you write some batch of content. Then you go back and you say hey, I wrote this thing.
Can you help me make it a little bit more concise and clear? Can you polish the rough edges for me? And that so it does the bottom layer right where it gives you A rough draught or some ideas or some prompts or some questions you should think about.
Then you write that stuff that’s in your head. And then the top layer of bread is the polish, where it’s like, you know, Grammarly on steroids. It’s going to, you know, make your sentence structure a little bit better. It’s going to remove the passive voice if you want that, or add it in if you want that. Right. And, and that’s the partnership that you will have with AI.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I think one of my entrepreneur clients said this. She’s actually a great writer and she has a lot of ideas and she wrote something and then she ran it through to say, hey, can you tidy this up? Can you just polish this? And she was almost a bit shocked and she went, my God, it was great. It came out way better than I could have written it. But the crux of it, the content, the heart of it was still her, it was what she’d written.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right. Yeah. And that’s, I think, an important part for that people should remember. Because if you do the opposite, if you give AI the m. Middle part of the work, right. You give AI the bottom layer. You say, I have this one idea for this thing. Please write a blog post for me on this subject.
And then it writes it and then you take a look at it and change three things maybe, and then publish it. Then, you’re just writing something that’s already on the Internet. If it wasn’t on the Internet, AI wouldn’t be able to write that blog post because it’s using training data. Right. That’s already out there. And so the middle part is your responsibility. The crux of the thought leadership, if you’re trying to be a thought leader, is your responsibility.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So let’s talk about the ethics then. Because essentially what you’re saying there is if you’re getting ChatPT to write your a blog post, it could be plagiarising someone else’s blog post that already exists.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yep.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So where is for creators, let’s just say for people that are like you say, wanna be thought leaders or they’re posting on LinkedIn or they’re blogs, newsletters, they’re putting something out there.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Cause I know a lot of my clients feel this like where is the ethical line? How much is okay versus how much is. I’ve just, you know, gotten a robot to write this for me and posted it on the Internet and it’s nothing to do with me.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right, right. So a couple things in there I think the first is if you, if I were to write a poem with Chatgpt’s help and I said, whatever. I want a poem about walking in the woods and the sun is shining and I’m, you know, whatever, blah, blah, blah, and it writes me a poem, then I think it’s probably going toa pull information from some other poets, but it’s probably thousands of other poets pulling tiny little slivers of information from each of them.
Right, but. And I think that’s okay. I think actually people are also just doing that. Right? If I, if I, was inclined to write poetry, I would have looked at a bunch of other poets and I would have learned from m them and I would have used the stuff I learned from them to like, influence how I write poetry. And that’s all AI is doing.
However, if I instead said, write a poem in the style of Robert Frost about walking in the woods and I come up to a fork in their path and I’m going to, you know, take. That’s very clear, copyright infringement by me because I gave AI the instructions to steal Robert Frostwork.
Right?
So that’s where I think the line is, right? The copyright infringement is in the prompt, it’s not in the AI, Right? If you say, take this other person’s work and mimic it, then I think you’re stealing. If you just let AI take little tiny bits and pieces from everything it’s learned in the world, I think that’s exactly what people are also doing.
And I think that’s okay. But everyone will have a different interpretation of that line. That’s where I think mine is.
And I think if there’s ever a copyright court case in the courts, I think they will say, what did the person type in to that prompt? And then, you know, we’ll see that that person said very clearly. Take the. Actually, there is a court case. New York Times, right?
New York Times is suing ChatGPT because it was copying content from the New York Times, right?
And creating an article in the style of the New York Times. In that court case document, it says the prompt and the person typing the prompt in said, give me an article in the style of the New York Times about this topic. A
nd here’s a New York Times article about that topic.
Like he posted the article into the prompt. Like that’s not Chachptt’s fault.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Like the person could have recreated the article without Chat GPT. It just would have taken them longer and it would still have been copyright.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right, right, exactly. And so there are ethical lines that we should be careful of and we should probably rewrite copyright law for a more modern age. All those things will happen. But I think generally, if you’re just asking it generalised questions, I think that’s probably fair use. And if you’re getting super specific trying to say, you know, create a cartoon profile picture of me in the style of Disney, I think that’s stealing and I don’t think you should do that.
Emma-Louise Parkes: There’s a couple of things you said there that really resonate with me. One being that we’re all drawing inspiration from other people. And when I first started out as a coach six, seven years ago, I remember looking around and all of the things that I wanted to talk about with personal development and psychology, a lot of other people were talking about them and I’d be like, oh, I can’t say that.
Cause that person’s said it. And I can’t do that because that person referenced that. And I remember having a coach at the time who said we’re all recycling ideas, but fundamentally we are portraying them with our own energy and with our own, take of own thought leadership, as you and I might say on it, and presenting it to people.
So I present my information to introverts and therefore it’s presented in a slightly deeper, way because we’re deep thinkers.
Right. But there could be another coach who’s very extroverted and you. The brand’s very bright and all, but essentially we’re probably helping people achieve the same thing and we’re probably talking about the same topics but in a different way.
And the second thing that came up is music, as you were saying that, you know, the amount of copyright claims musicians have and ultimately them people saying there are only so many notes and there are only so many variations of those notes. So eventually you’re going toa have a song and it’s goingna sound like someone else’s song.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right, yeah, yeah, exactly. So these are tricky. These are tricky things in the world for us to figure out for sure. I think the world wants multiple people talking about the same thing because theyn to hear how all those thoughts sort of converge together. You know, if I listen to nine different people talk about leadership, I’m gonna take good bits and pieces from each of them and create the leadership style that works for me. And that’s true of any topic. It’s helpful to have diversity of thought with different people talking about the same topic, but with their own flair, their own experience, their own mindset. all that stuff is helpful, I think.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Yeah, I agree, I agree. And for me, as someone that creates content and creates this podcast and newsletters, I like to listen to different podcasts and read different content and see other people’s opinions. A lot of the time I go, no, I don’t like that, or I don’t agree with that, or, you know, that doesn’t resonate with me. But I think we have to be open minded to the nuance which is almost you, what we’re saying here. It’s like copyright laws are very black and white for the last 200 years and now we need a bit of nuance and we need a bit of critical thinking and these different skill sets are gonna become more and more important for us as we go forwards.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So when you think about AI in say five years, what would you love to see or, and, or what do you think you’ll see?
Dan Chuparkoff: I think AI is moving so fast. 5 years is super far away. But what I think will actually happen is we won’t even say AI anymore. More in 5 years it’s just going to be built into all the things we use. You know, our inbox will just automatically summarise messages for us. Our document creation tools will just automatically give us suggestions.
Our search engines will just have chat, conversational, you know, search built into them. All the software that you buy, we’ll just have AI in it. There’s every software developer’s already working on putting it into their tools. Whatever, whatever those tools are. Our thermostats have AI and our CRM systems and our video meetings, all these things will just be part of the, it’s the plumbing now.
And so we’ll start talking about it less and less, but it’ll be there more and more. But I think the thing that’s dramatic about the way we collaborate I think will start changing. Like at the beginning of this conversation we talked about bringing your fathom note taker into the conversation because having a note taker is super helpful, right. We used to sit in meetings writing words down on in little books, right? In little books, little notes that we maybe looked at occasionally. We write maybe.05% of the conversation down in little notebooks.
Our ability to transcribe what was said in meetings is horrible. We’re terrible at note taking. AI note takers are going to be dramatically better at it. We’ll bring them to every meeting. We’ll have this conversational repository of all the things we discussed. We’ll be able to search that repository quickly, it’ll bring it in to. We’ll be writing a document and our AI note taker will just jump in and say, hey, don’t forget you had that conversation with Emma Luise. Right.
That would fit really good here. Like bring some of those thoughts. The AI note taking I think will be dramatic. Like most of the time in the world we are spending talking to colleagues at work. Right. Two thirds of our time at work is spent interacting with our colleagues or customers in some way. And most of that is just lost intellectual property right now without noe takers just evaporates into the air and we have the same conversations over and over again. And that’s going to go away. Five years from now that will be extinct.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I can see that it’s made a huge difference to my podcast admin because I used to have. I’ve always got a pen and paper at the side of the desk. But as we’re having this conversation, I love to be really present. I love to be really focused listening, active listening. I’m thinking about what I’m going to ask you next, where we can take the conversation. When I used to have to write notes because I knew I was gonna have to go and write the show notes and I would either write notes during the interview or I would have to go back and listen to the interview again and which takes an hour. Which if I was doing that four times a month is a lot.
So then I would feel like I’m down here brightiting and the guest’talking and I’m kind of not that present. Having an AI note taker was game changing for that because when I go now to write the show notes or to record your intro m it’s all there. It’s pulled out the key things that we.
Oh yeah, we talked about that. Oh yeah, great. We mentioned that. And it means that I can write more accurate show notes. See, I can create a better, intro to tell people what we’re going to be talking about. So for me, that’s where AI has really enhanced business.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I think that’s, I’m already starting to see very real productivity gains from that. It also helps me make some of the stuff I say better over timeuse. I, you know, I say something like, I just use that Robert Frost example for copyright. I’ve talked about copyright infringement a bunch of times, maybe I don’t know, six or seven times. And I never used Robert Frost. And I actually like that. I just thought of it now. Right. I usually use coldplay as an example, Coldplay music, copyright infringement, whatever. That’s not as good as an example. Robert Frost was, is way better. And so like, because I could like look at the evolution of that thought in my head over time, I can see it getting better. like I can go back to all my notes and like replay them and see like, what did I do in that second time that was better? What’s the best time I ever use that copyright infringement analogy? And I can sort of learn the random things I say and watch them get better over time. And that’s a really cool feature of note taking that we never really had before.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So overall, and I’m asking this, I’m literally asking this for a friend. I have a wonderful friend who will be listening to this and she has been down the rabbit hole of AI and she’s followed some creators that are maybe not so positive about it. And she’s definitely had some concerns and some fatathlistic ideas. Although she also enjoys to use it and benefit from it for, for her business. And when I said that I was interviewing you, she said to me, does he think it’s a good thing? Is he positive about it for the future? And I was like, I believe so. But I’m going to ask that question, are you positive about the future with AI?
Dan Chuparkoff: I’m very, very positive about it. I think it will do some remarkable, amazing things in the world, like allow us to cure cancer.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Wow.
Dan Chuparkoff: Won’t be able to do that as normal people writing numbers on sheets of paper like it’s too hard of a problem. AI will allow us to do things like that, right? Solve really, really important problems in the world that, that save lives. Second thing that makes me optimistic, AI can’t actually do anything, right? It’s just a big database, right? You can look stuff up in that database anytime you want. And it might say, hey, kill all the humans.
But AI, just because a line in a database says kill all the humans doesn’t mean AI can do anything with that information. Now a person that just follows the instructions that they get out of AI blindly might accidentally kill all the humans, right? But there are people out there aggressively trying to harm us all the time already anyway.
They don’t need AI giving them those accidental suggestions. That doesn’t make that problem any worse. There will be people that blindly follow AI’s instructions without critical thought, without adding their own layer of ethics.
And that’s bad.
That’s not an AI problem, that’s a person education problem, right? People should use AI responsibly And if people aren’t doing things responsibly in the world, that will create some harm. And some of us will have to work aggressively to try to mitigate those risks. Right, but we are, we’re working really, really hard to make sure that, like, there’s always a fail safe button.
You, know, people should use AI responsibly. You shouldn’t put AI in an endless loop, letting it talk to your customers completely without you. I think that’s a mistake. But letting AI help you as a co creator, as an assistant, those things I think are dramatically helpful for the world. And the world will be a better place because of those.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I have a very analogue metaphor for what you’ve just said in that. In the early 90s, I got very big into the Beatles. I discovered the Beatles as most teenagers do at some point. And so I read the Catcher in the Rye and I could not see anything in that that would make me want to kill John Lennon. And yet John Lennon’s assassin said repeatedly that it was there in the Catcher in the Right to make him wanna commit that murder.
Dan Chuparkoff: I haven’t read that book in a long time. And now you make me wanna crack that book back over.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It’s a great book. It’s still a great book all these years later. But I remember being like, oh, I really don’t see anything in there that would make me wanna shoot someone. So again, it’s not a book problem, it’s the reader problem.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if it wasn’t that book, if that book didn’t exist, there was some seed inside that guy whose name I forget.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Yeah, I can’t remember his name either.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah, he shouldn’t get airtime anyway. But like, there was something inside that book that was like, inside that guy that was blooming. And if there wasn’t, Catcher in the Rye would have been some other catalyst that pulled it out of him. And so I don’t think it’s an AI problem. but I do think this is a message for people as we start getting AI powered apps that can just do stuff for us. People should remember there’s always that point.
001% of possibility of error. And in some Contexts it’s not 0.01%. It’s like 20%. Right. Probability of error. And so my recommendation for people as they start using AI assistance is let your AI do a bunch of work for you today and line it up. Like, let your AI assistant say, think of 25 things that you Might do for me tomorrow. And at the end of today, we’re gonna talk about that list of 25. And I’m going to say these 23 look great. Go ahead and do those. But these two are kind of weird. I don’t know what you were thinking there. Don’t do those two. Right.
You should always have like a checkpoint conversation with your AI if it’s going to do work for you. And people that don’t have a CheckPoint conversation with AI, I think are making a mistake. Whether that’s customer service bots or CRM automation or nuclear power plant administration. You need a checkpoint at least at the end of every day to talk through with your AI assistant what it’s planning on doing, and so you can make the decisions for it to keep it aligned with you, morally, ethically, responsibly, whatever that means to you.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I think that’s such a good point of it can’t actually do anything, I think, because it’s so effective now and so fast, and it has such a fast repertoire that it can feels like we’re conversant with it in a very human way. That’s a great reminder. And when you see about a nuclear power station, thinking about nuclear weapons, people are like, oh, AI is go going toa push the button and destroy us all. But what you’re saying is, no, it can’t actually do that. We would still need humans to carry out that action.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right? Right. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s just a big Excel spreadsheet. That’s all it is. And every possible question is written in a spreadsheet and every possible answer with a probability number next to it, like, that’s. That’s all it is. And you can look stuff up in that spreadsheet anytime you want. And that’s amazingly powerful. But, like, it can’t do anything.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love that. And you said you use it every day, which I want to dive into some more to give people just some inspiration of ways they can use it.
Dan Chuparkoff: But.
Emma-Louise Parkes: But I followed one of your prompts. You popped a prompt in the Impact 11 community a while ago that we’re both in about asking AI about yourself and what it finds about you on the Internet. So it was pretty accurate. I was quite pleased with what it pulled up. It used good sources. It used my website, it used the podcast, it used another podcast I’d been on, a blog post, something else. And then I asked it to say something about me that is almost like a compliment that I would never have heard. So tell me something about myself that I’d never really thought of myself in that way. And it said that despite my constant. How did it word it? Like constant growth and transformation and ambition, that people sometimes miss that because I’m so calm. That’s like. That’s so interesting. That’s probably true because I’GENERALLY quite calm and grounded, but there’s always a lot going on. I was like, wow, that’s quite impressive.
Dan Chuparkoff: That is. That is pretty impressive.
Emma-Louise Parkes: And the one that you posted in the community where you’d asked, like, hey, tell me about myself, essentially. And it was so accurate.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah. I’ll also talk about how the first time I asked it, it wasn’t that accurate. And I mean, it was accurate. But, what I’ll say to caveat that was, you know, I’m 55 years old. I’ve done a lot of things in the world. I did some things in the 90s that have nothing to do with what I do now. And when I say now, tell me about Danter Parko, I want it to tell me about how I’m an AI educator and an innovation keynote speaker and I left my job at Google and now I’m independent and I talk about public speaking and all this stuff.
But AI doesn’t know when AI looks at the whole Internet over the last 25 years, or however long the Internet has really been there, it factors every one of those years in equally. And so when it finds stuff I did in 2004 and it finds stuff I did in 2024, it mixes those together into the same pile. And so it was pulling a lot of stuff from the early 2000s m from my history into the answer to that question. And that was great. It was all true.
But it didn’it didn’t have an understanding of the chronology. And when I asked the question, what does Dan do? I have an understanding of the fact that my career has been a progression. And what I really mean is the newer stuff, like, what am I doing now? What have I progressed to? And you can ignore some of the stuff that I did earlier in my life, and AI didn’t understand that at all. And so to combat that problem, because I wanted be AI by the people that hire me, right. I had to make a lot more content about the newer stuff that I was making.
Right. I had to, like, overshadow some of the older stuff with volume because AI doesn’t know anything about time. It only knows volume. And that’s an interesting thing that I uncovered about A.I. if you’re in marketing, you might want to know that and play around with it a little bit.
Emma-Louise Parkes: That’s like when I was in air traffic control, we would have subconscious decisions or micro decisions that we’d call them and for every single aircraft that passed through our airspace, we would be making decisions for it. It’s literally thousands and thousands of decisions an hour. Yeah, yeah, but some of them are so subtle that m they’re made, and not really registered. And that is what you’re saying about. If I googled you and I saw oh, this article from Danrop park off in 2014, my brain’s go goingna filter that out because I’m goingna say, well no, that’s not really now. And then if I see something that was published last week, I’m gonna recognise that that’s probably more relevant and valuable. But that’s not a conscious decision, that’s just something we do. That’s the way the human brain filters things.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right, right. And no matter how good you get at prompt writing, when ah, you go into chatpt and write a paragraph of information about the question you’re asking, you’re never gonna put all the context in your head into that prompt. You have so much context in your head, right. Your prompt is always going to be inadequate. So when you’re asking AI questions, ask it for lots of answers, right?
Say give me 25 things that I might write a blog post about this week. And then you look at that list of 25 things and pick the one out that matches theext in your head because you’re right, you’re using all of those micro decisions. I definitely want to talk more another day about air traffic control because that seems like fascinating, but you’re all of us are making lots and lots and lots of decisions every day using all that context in our head and AI doesn’t know anything about that context. So my rule is never let AI make any decisions for me. Right? Anytime I’m asking ah, a prompt, I say if you have to make any decisions along the way here, tell me what they are so I can make sure you’re making the same ones I would make. I just don’t ever let AI make my decisions because I know know there’s a lot of stuff in my head that helps influence how I make decisions and I don’t feel like writing that all down.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I watched a training on AI last year, I think it was, and she had a really good point similar to yours there of if you’re given a prompt at the end to say do you need clarif do you have any clarifying questions to be able to carry this out? Because you might feel like you’ve given all the information but if there’s a big chunk, you’re gonna get the response and feel like well that’s not very accurate. And I’ve used that and it’s come back and said yes, can you clarify? And asked me like three really good questions. I’m like, oh, so interesting. So it’s like, that’s when I say like a brainstorm. That’s why I feel like it’s a back and forth.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right, right, right. Yeah, for sure is I think when the easiest way to think about AI right from the start is it’s just the new search engine. Anytime I was going to Google and saying like, you know, what’s my favourite colour Google, give me an answer and I would just trust that answer. And now you have to have a dialogue with it. You know, if you get, if you ask one question to get one answer back, you’re probably using AI incorrectly. if you ask AI, one question and then say I don’t really like that, that’s not really what I was thinking. Here’s why I don’t like that answer. Can you try again with these things in mind?
And that gives you another answer and then you say I think that’s true, but what’s the source? I don’t know if I believe that. And then it gives you the source. Once you get to three or four back and forths with AI, then you’re probably doing it the way it was designed to work, I think.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So before we wrap up, I would love to know ways that you use AI in your everyday life that even maybe a few years ago wouldn’t have been habit, but now are just so natural to you and time saving that they’re just part of your daily routine for sure.
Dan Chuparkoff: The most frequent thing I do is take a bit of content that I’m writing and I put it in and I say can you make this a little bit more concise and clear?
Right.
I will sometimes over explain some points that maybe I don’t need to in an email message or you know, the opening of a blog post or in the script for a particular slide for in a presentation I’m writing so that that’s the most common thing. I’m using it to help me make my writing more crisp and clear and concise and persuasive or engaging or whatever, whatever that I do a couple times a day.
I think that’s, that’s my most common thing. I’m trying to have it help me to become a better writer. I also don’t just put it in and then copy paste and I like read it and say, oh yeah, you’re right, that would have been better. So that next time I write I’ve learned.
So I’m not using it as just a content polisher, I’m using it as a content teacher. So I become a better writer. That’s my most common use case. The second thing I do really frequently is I work with teams in lots and lots of industries to help them figure out how AI might change their work.
And so I go into AI and I ask a question like, what are 10 ways that AI might change the work of people that build woodworking machinery? Like, I have a saw in my workshop, but outside of that I don’t know anything about woodworking machinery manufacturing. But I need to know something if I’m going to talk to these people with some insights.
And so AI helps me, inform me about, like, how their work might change. What kind of, what kind of work do they even do? Like, what does it take to build CNC machines for industrial workshops at scale? Like, those are things that AI is helping to inform me about in a very niche way.
You know, if I went to college and took a class on manufacturing, I would have for four months. I would have learned all about the manufacturing and supply chain process. And that would be great. It would help make me a good consultant or manufacturing leader or general business leader. But like, AI can drill all the way down into woodworking machinery manufacturing. And that’s amazing. You know, as a research assistant, that’s my second best use.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love your choice of language. It can drill down into woodworking machinery. It’s perfect. Soilliant.
Dan Chuparkoff: I should use that.
Emma-Louise Parkes: You should use that along with Robert Frost. Yeah, you should definitely use that. So this idea that even like you said, if you were to Google that, even if you were to Google woodwork manufacturing, and how it’s gonna be impacted by AI, you would have to sift through so many results and they may not be relevant. Like you say, they may be old. All of this. That to me is where the efficiency of something like Chat GPT is where you’re asking a very specific niche question and you get the responses all in one place rather than you would have literally spent hours going through blogs and reports and, I don’t know, company data and all of these things and then it’s delivered there to you in a few seconds.
Dan Chuparkoff: Right. And it’s a mixture of lots of people’s thoughts, which might give you more diversity of thinking on a particular subject. The old way, before AI, we went to search and we typed a question like, tell me what’s going on in manufacturing for woodworkers? And it would have given me 10 answers.
Right.
Or seven.
And some ads. Right. the person who’s at the top of that list, the non ad person, the person at the top of the list that I probably would have clicked on probably would have been the company that has the most money to spend on marketing and content creation. And so the companies with the most money are at the top of the search results.
Because getting to the top of the search results means having a whole team of people that’s constantly creating backlinks and, and writing articles and creating blog posts and doing case studies and all that stuff takes money. And so you don’t get diversity of thought, you get purchased. Right.
Exposure and that’that’s not that different than ads. And so it might be true that AI gives us more diversity of thought. It equalises the playing field a little bit for thought leaders and content creators. Maybe that will go away as, as people try to monetize AI and they’ll take money again. And maybe people figure out how to game the AI training and they’ll, you know, create all the same problems we had with search. But for right now, you get more diverse combination of people’s perspectives on any topic and that can be kind of cool.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love that. Dan, thank you so much. I can’t believe we’ve been talking for almost an hour. I could have talked to you for another hour. I think I’m gonna share all of your links in the show notes and anything that we referenced so people can come and follow along with you and connect and find out more about what you do.
And, before I let you go, I’mnna ask you, like, ask all of my introverted guests. As an introvert, running a business and using tech regularly and all of these things, travelling regularly as a speaker, what is one practise or habit that you have that can really help you to manage your energy as an introvert?
Dan Chuparkoff: I think the most important thing I’ve learned, I think about being an introvert, is that p people just like me. I just try to be the genuine human that I am. and people like collaborating with me because of that. And so don’t try to be an extrovert because you think extroverts are more successful. Don’t try to be like outgoing because you feel like being the centre of attention will get you more business or more attention or whatever. You be a genuine, good human and be authentic to yourself and that will get you way farther than anything else.
Emma-Louise Parkes: In the world and takes a lot less energy than trying to be something that you’re not.
Dan Chuparkoff: Yeah. Yeah. True.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Perfect. I love it. I love collaborating with you. I appreciate you. So thank you so much for joining me today.
Dan Chuparkoff: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I’ll talk to you soon.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Thank you for tuning in into this week’s episode. I hope that you’re feeling expanded to what’s possible for you, motivated to take action, and inspired about how you can start to own your energy. I share even more tools and resources on my Introvert’only email newsletter. By signing up, you not only get early access to the ambitious Introvert products and services, but you also get brand new podcast episodes delivered straight to your inbox every Monday, meaning you’ll never miss your weekly dose of Introvert friendly inspiration.
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