Become A Better Communicator In The Age of AI with Jessica Mehring

You’re committed to becoming a better communicator to help your clients more effectively—and to turbocharge your marketing. Has AI complicated or instead simplified standing out with your communications? Consultant, author and writer Jessica Mehring shares the results of her research on the impact of generative AI on communicating strategically:

Why even though she writes professionally, Jessica doesn’t use AI for writing (note how she instead leverages AI in the writing process).

How the two key cons of using generative AI can be overwhelmingly trumped by its advantages.

How empathy, listening and storytelling are intertwined in becoming a more effective communicator.

Why becoming a better storyteller is actually easier in the age of AI.

Specific use cases where AI can help you become a better storyteller (one in particular may well surprise you).

LINKS

Jessica Mehring Website | LinkedIn

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Jessica Mehring is a strategic consultant for technology companies, a published author, and M.A. in communication (May 2024). Through her graduate academic work, she has closely examined the impact of generative AI on strategic communication, and is exploring how storytelling fosters empathy and can help us connect in a modern context.

When she's not working to bring more humanity into tech marketing, you can find her researching the intersections of art and science, creativity and data, and communication and innovation.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:28

Jessica Mehring: In the age of AI, storytelling and listening being an important aspect of that is more important than it's ever been because AI will never be human. And as humans, storytelling is how we relate to 1 another. It's more important than ever. It reveals our humanity in ways that AI will never be able to replicate. And it connects us human to human, company to customer, in a way that AI cannot replicate.

00:33 - 01:10

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm here with Jessica Mearing, a strategic consultant for technology companies and an author with an almost master's in communication, unless you're listening to this by May 2024, through her professional and academic work she has closely examined the impact of generative AI on strategic communication and is exploring how storytelling fosters empathy and can help us connect in a modern context. Jessica, welcome.

01:10 - 01:13

Jessica Mehring: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited about this conversation.

01:15 - 01:47

Rochelle Moulton: I am too. And I'm excited to talk to you about this whole idea of AI and its impact on our communications. And in between the times that we were emailing back and forth, I was actually stunned when I read that the Masters of the Universe at Davos ignored 2 inflammatory wars in favor of obsessing over AI and its impact on the global workforce. And the wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine didn't even make their top 10 issues list. So I mean we could talk all day long about whether AI is good or bad for

01:47 - 02:03

Rochelle Moulton: global business, but let's 0 in on how in this early age, relatively early age of AI, we can become better strategic communicators and even leaders because I think it's far more interesting to talk about how we can use AI strategically.

02:04 - 02:26

Jessica Mehring: Oh, yes, absolutely. I was, I was actually shocked too. I went to the Davos website and just kind of went through their 4 takeaways. And you're absolutely right. AI was in the mix on all 4 of those. That's so telling, right? To where we are in the world, where we are in the marketplace with AI being such a hot topic.

02:27 - 02:52

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I then read another piece that said that the Davos things are always wrong. Because it's the CEOs who are insulated from anyone ever disagreeing with their opinion. So we'll see. I mean, right, it could go either way. But maybe we could start by giving generative AI a quick definition. What is it specifically compared to say, other types of artificial intelligence?

02:53 - 03:34

Jessica Mehring: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question because I do feel like there's a little bit of confusion around what generative AI is and isn't. Generative AI in a nutshell is AI that creates content. And that can be written content, audio, video, images. This is AI that creates, which really is different than the AI that we've had in our lives for decades. When you think about Alexa or you think about Arumba or you think about Siri or any of those kinds of devices and software that we've had in our lives for as long as I can remember.

03:34 - 04:17

Jessica Mehring: Predictive text, that's another 1. Predictive text on our phone or in Gmail. That's all AI. Even grammar checkers. The grammar checkers in Word or now there's really advanced software that checks our grammar, That's all AI. So we're used to AI in our lives in those ways, but generative AI is different because it creates. And it does this through natural language processing. So it understands human language and then produces a human-like response. What was so interesting to me, I did a deep dive on this back spring of last year, I did an independent study with the university

04:18 - 05:02

Jessica Mehring: and looked at how generative AI is impacting strategic communication. And of course, because I was just living and breathing that subject, I was talking to a lot of people about it. And what I was shocked by is how people didn't really understand what it was, what generative AI was, but also didn't understand some very serious limitations, which are still limitations today, even though there have been updates since I did that study. 1 of the limitations, of course, being hallucination. And I hope that your listeners all know what hallucination is. It's when chat GPT lies to us.

05:03 - 05:43

Jessica Mehring: It's when generative AI gives us a very confident factual response that isn't actually fact. And when I was talking to people about this a year ago, I got some really funny responses. People would say, oh, hallucination. What a fun word. Did you make that up? No, no, I didn't make up the word hallucination. That's the term for when These tools lie to us when these tools give us facts that aren't facts. And I realized that people are using tools like chat GPT without understanding that not everything chat GPT was giving them was true.

05:43 - 05:45

Rochelle Moulton: Yes. People didn't know

05:45 - 05:45

Jessica Mehring: that.

05:45 - 05:46

Rochelle Moulton: That's interesting.

05:46 - 05:56

Jessica Mehring: The average person I spoke with did not understand that, which was really terrifying when you think of this environment of disinformation that we're living in right now.

05:56 - 06:01

Rochelle Moulton: We're in an election year. This is not the year for that to happen.

06:01 - 06:43

Jessica Mehring: Oh my goodness. Yeah, so that's something I've really been talking about a lot. I've been doing some student teaching, I've been TAing classes and giving presentations to students at the university. And that's 1 thing that I've really hammered on is these tools hallucinate. If you are using tools like ChatGPT, and that's just 1 example, to help you create your content, then you need to check every single fact it gives you. I mean, fact check until you're blue in the face. You cannot trust this output as fact because it's not fact. Generative AI is a prediction model.

06:43 - 07:13

Jessica Mehring: The tools like ChatGPT are, they predict the next right word. They are language prediction models. These are not tools that know the difference between fact and fiction. ChatGPT doesn't have ethics. It's doing what it was programmed to do, which is give you an answer to your question. Whether that answer is true or false, well, it doesn't know that. That's your job as a user of these tools. It's your job to check your facts.

07:13 - 07:21

Rochelle Moulton: What about the creative aspect of this? Can it give you answers that are actually lifted from someone else's content?

07:22 - 07:53

Jessica Mehring: It can. Yeah, it absolutely can. There's always the risk of plagiarism, which again, I'm really hoping nobody's taking the output from from these tools and then publishing it as their own for many reasons, 1 of them being, yes, there is the risk of plagiarism. Generative AI was trained on a mass amount of data, much of it scraped from the internet and much of it under copyright. So there's that issue. But then you also have the issue of AI output is not protected by copyright.

07:53 - 08:08

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that was where it was going to be my next question. What you're saying is if we use let's take chat GPT as an example, if we use that to write something and we add some other pieces to it, we can't copyright that completed piece.

08:09 - 08:45

Jessica Mehring: Yeah, when you add your own words to it, it's a fine line. But if you are taking output from these tools and you are not editing it, changing it, making it your own, if it is direct output from a tool like chat GPT, and we'll just keep picking on chat GPT because that's the most popular right now, But if it's directly copied from output from chat GPT, it is not protected by copyright. And same thing goes for image generation tools. If you use mid journey to create a book cover, your book cover is not protected by

08:45 - 08:56

Jessica Mehring: copyright. Somebody else could use the same book cover. Interesting. Yeah. Not a lot of legal protections for, for creations, for content from AI output.

08:56 - 09:23

Rochelle Moulton: Although, I mean, I'm sure it will get better, but there's nothing I've pulled out of chat GPT that I would want to put my name to so far. I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure it's going to get better, though. There's only 1 way that curve goes. But I did see in a LinkedIn post that you do not use AI at all for writing. And obviously, writing is how you make your living writing in strategic communications. Talk us through your thought process with that.

09:23 - 09:55

Jessica Mehring: Yeah, well, and to be clear, I know we're talking about a lot of negatives with generative AI right now. There are some positives. And I went into my independent study a year ago feeling very positive and came out on the other side a little more pragmatic So I feel like there's a lot of pros and cons. I'm happy to talk about when it comes to my own writing I use chat GPT and tools like that for as a thesaurus to help me come up with more creative words. I Use it to help me brainstorm analogies. I

09:55 - 10:35

Jessica Mehring: use it to Help me think through a structure of a piece or maybe re-swizzle an outline if something isn't flowing quite right. I use it to summarize my own work, which helps me see holes in my thinking. What I do not use it for is writing. And there are a few reasons for that. 1, 1 big 1 for me is language homogeneity, and that just means that everybody sounds the same. Yeah. And I saw evidence of this in the study that I did last spring, which was essentially a literature review where I was looking at actual

10:35 - 11:21

Jessica Mehring: studies done by social scientists and there is already evidence that generative AI is creating language homogeneity. That means a lot of written content specifically is sounding the same. We're all sounding the same. There's very little differentiation. There's been a big push, of course, to remove bias from content, which in Fairness is a good thing, but the resulting content means that everybody sounds exactly the same. Now, I'm a professional writer. I write copy for my clients. I write books. I'm the author of business books and romance novels and cozy mystery. Business

11:21 - 11:21

Rochelle Moulton: and romance.

11:21 - 11:45

Jessica Mehring: Business and romance. Yes, yes. What a combo. My own voice is important in the content that I'm writing for myself and for my business. My clients' voices are important in the copy that I'm writing for them. And I wanna make sure that we're not all sounding the same because how boring would that be? Well, and

11:45 - 11:52

Rochelle Moulton: then why would you need a writer, right? You just go to chat GPT and type in this thing and just pop it into wherever you're going to

11:52 - 12:05

Jessica Mehring: use it. Yeah, well, and I work with technology companies. So differentiation is everything. If my clients all sound exactly alike, how do their customers know who to choose? Exactly. That's a big reason.

12:05 - 12:14

Rochelle Moulton: You said earlier that, you know, there are lots of pros and cons, and we were kind of focusing on the cons. What do you see as some of the pros, especially after you did this study?

12:15 - 12:53

Jessica Mehring: These tools are really great, I think, as jumping off points for your own thinking and for your own creativity. I think a lot of us who are in more creative spaces especially can suffer from what I call the blank page blues. And that just means sometimes you're staring at a blank page and you just don't know what to put down you don't know where to start you've got a lot to say or maybe you have nothing to say but it just feels absolutely overwhelming to be staring at a blank page. And generative AI can really help

12:53 - 13:28

Jessica Mehring: just get those creative juices flowing when you just go back and forth with ChatGPT, have a conversation, see what comes out of it. That can be a great jumping off point for your own thinking. And you can even ask ChatGPT, hey, I want to have a conversation with you about this topic. Can you ask me questions about it? And it will. And you can answer back and have a conversation with ChatGPT and just to get your creative juices flowing. Now another thing that you can do with these tools is to start structuring your thoughts in better

13:28 - 14:07

Jessica Mehring: ways. I'm big on structure because no matter how great your idea is, no matter how unique your take is, if you don't structure a piece of writing well then your reader can't follow along and they're gonna drop off and they're gonna go to something else. So structuring your writing is really important And I think that tools like ChatGPT and other generative AI can really help us to just think through how we might structure something for a logical flow. And tools like ChatGPT are also evening the playing field in some ways. Now there's a lot of people

14:07 - 14:58

Jessica Mehring: in the world who are really great ideators. They are creative thinkers. They come up with really unique takes on things, but for 1 reason or another, maybe it's a neurological difference, maybe it's an educational difference, but they struggle to put their ideas into strong writing. Now that's something that I think generative AI can really help with. Folks who are strong ideators but maybe have weaker writing skills, this is an opportunity for them to get their ideas down in more structured and effectively written formats so the rest of us can get the benefit of these creative thinkers.

14:59 - 15:31

Rochelle Moulton: I just have to share an example. I was working with a client who really didn't like to write. And I'm not going to say that he couldn't write, because he could. Really super smart and very creative, but was really intimidated by writing. And he literally used ChatGPT to help him write his website and to help him write some marketing descriptions. And obviously it needed work. But what I loved about it is I could see the difference in his confidence at the very beginning to once he had gone through and produced a first draft that he could

15:31 - 16:09

Rochelle Moulton: feel good about. So, yeah. And there's a lot of people who are really good ideators, as you call them, who aren't as comfortable writing. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So, 1 of the tenets of your work, which I know this audience is radically in sync with, is that storytelling fosters empathy, which helps us to connect with others. And of course, that draws in clients and buyers who ultimately buy our stuff. Do you see storytelling any differently with the proliferation of AI? I mean, can we use storytelling as an even more powerful tool now? Like, how do you see

16:09 - 16:10

Rochelle Moulton: it?

16:10 - 16:38

Jessica Mehring: That's so interesting that you asked this question because I really have been feeling like storytelling is more important than ever, which is a big statement because storytelling is how we've communicated human to human since we lived in caves. It's always been important. That has been a fundamental tenet of human communication. But now it differentiates us from the machines.

16:40 - 16:40

Rochelle Moulton: True.

16:40 - 17:09

Jessica Mehring: Yeah. AI cannot replicate human experience. AI can replicate a lot of things, but it can't replicate human experience. And because it can't, it can't replicate how we humans relate to 1 another. And story is how we relate to 1 another. So Chad GPT might be able to tell you a story, but there's going to be a fundamental lack...