Bringing Avatars to Life: Madge and Performance Models

On September 26, The Daily AI Show was co-hosted by Brian and Beth. With the rest of the team out, the conversation ranged freely across AI projects, personal stories, hallucinations, and the skills required to work effectively with AI.

Key Points Discussed

• Brian shared recent projects at Skaled, including integrating TomTom traffic data into Salesforce workflows, showing how AI and APIs can automate enrichment for sales opportunities.

• The discussion explored hallucinations as a feature of language models, not an error, and why understanding pattern generation vs. factual lookup is key.

• Beth connected this to diplomacy, collaboration, and trust—how humans already navigate situations where certainty is not possible.

• Ethan Mollick’s argument about “blind trust” in AI was referenced, noting we may need to accept outputs we cannot fully verify.

• Reflections on expertise: AI accelerates workflows but raises questions about what humans still need to learn if machines handle more foundational tasks.

• Beth highlighted creative uses of MidJourney, including funky furniture and hybrid creatures, as well as work on AI avatars like “Madge” that blend performance and generative models.

• The panel considered how improv and play help people interact more productively with AI, framing experimentation as a skill.

• Teaching others to work with AI revealed the challenge of recognizing dead ends, pivoting effectively, and building repeatable processes.

• Both hosts closed by emphasizing that AI use requires reps, intuition, and comfort with uncertainty rather than expecting perfection.

Timestamps & Topics

00:00:00 🎙️ Friday kickoff, Brian and Beth hosting

00:02:34 💼 Job market realities and “job hugging”

00:06:43 🛣️ TomTom traffic data project integrated with Salesforce

00:11:27 🤖 Seeing prospects with enriched AI data

00:13:12 🔬 Sakana’s “Shinka Evolve” open-source discovery framework

00:17:38 🔄 Multi-model routing as a way to reduce hallucinations

00:23:16 📊 What hallucination really means in language models

00:26:09 🗂️ Boolean search vs. pattern-based reasoning

00:27:24 😂 Proposal story, storytelling vs. strict accuracy

00:30:42 💭 ChatGPT “whispering sweet nothings” as it guides workflows

00:32:20 🤝 Diplomacy, trust, and moving forward without certainty

00:34:56 📚 Ethan Mollick’s “blind trust” idea and co-intelligence

00:37:05 🔡 Spell check analogy for offloading human expertise

00:42:01 🎨 Beth’s creative AI projects in MidJourney and funky furniture

00:46:00 🎭 AI avatars like “Madge” and performance-based models

00:49:38 🎤 Improv skills as a foundation for better AI interaction

00:52:30 📑 Teaching internal teams, recognizing dead ends

00:55:42 🚀 Mentorship, passing on skills, and embracing change

00:57:56 🌺 Closing notes, weekend wrap, newsletter and conundrum tease

Hashtags

#AIShow #AIHallucinations #SalesforceAI #SakanaAI #MidJourney #AIavatars #ImprovAndAI #DailyAIShow

The Daily AI Show Co-Hosts:

Andy Halliday, Beth Lyons, Brian Maucere, Eran Malloch, Jyunmi Hatcher, and Karl Yeh