[Music] AI is bounded to the creativity of what humans have created where I still truly believe that human creativity is boundless it's absolutely boundless but even just in my day-to-day I feel most excited at ai's potential to automate us out of bureaucracy welcome to another episode of tech bites and I'm your host for this episode Bobby Brill but more importantly that was DIY and Haley Morton DIY serves as the human centered and responsible AI design strategist here at service now and Haley Morton is a senior ux researcher here at service now as well both of whom are watching and experimenting and discovering how to implement AI in the best ways possible in this episode we'll explore how AI has become more commonplace the changes in the work processes driven by Ai and even how human oversight in AI decision-making is being called upon but to start us off my first question is for you die as you're an expert and a watcher of Technology what does this very quickly evolved world where AI tools like Chad GPT start to look like wow such compliments thank you I think one day when we look back on November of 2022 we are going to look at this technological timeline like life before chat GPT and life after chat GPT I really think of that moment as Pinnacle as when an actor in cinema breaks that fourth wall and addresses the audience because then the audience usually just the viewers of a narrative suddenly now are inviting into the actor thoughts the character's development what they're thinking Beyond The Narrative and when we think about what chat GPT has done on November of 2022 they opened the doors and raised the Cur and invited a widespread audience who before were not prived or had access to this type of capability and AI technology and since then you know when we think about almost two years later now chat GPT has done the thing where it has rapidly in an unprecedented way created waves of AI adoption and technological adoption across various sectors verticals and industries specifically in ones that weren't disrupted by technology for decades um it's been able to lead Innovative applications it spawned I think just in the first three months of the release of chat gpts there was an exponential growth of new startups and then when chat GPT announced their latest update a lot of people said in the same breath they waved The Sword and killed the same amount of startups um we also look at like educational sector impact this technology has started having people question our traditions and our brick and mortar methods in comparison of how we look at education and does this technology change the academic integrity and institutions that we have now of course there are always conversations around the ethical and societal concerns um we had privacy ethical misinformation concerns before and this amplifies that but something that's been uniquely interesting is there's always this running joke that when it comes to technology up until now government regulation has always been behind technology substantially and in many ways they still are very few things can keep up with the pace of innovation but in this new wave with the new executive order and then recently last year the EU AI act governments and Regulatory bodies worldwide have very quickly begin to assemble assess use cases and start to implement guidelines to follow suit with the Innovation that's coming and then of course there's the Innovation and research um this technology has led to increase collaboration competition um with many investing their own and developing their own AI models in hopes to compete with chat GPT so in a way this emergence of this type of technology has created very much inspiration to kind of drive people to innovate and do cool things but also challenge existing Norms to see what else they can do with this capability but I think the biggest and for me what's exciting as someone who has been very deep and very passionate about the responsibility and ethical portions of technology and human computer interaction for over a decade is that the public dialogue around technology has completely shifted never have we had this much interest buzz and rallying and participation in the discourse around a technology as we have with AI it's catalyzed this public conversation about the future of AI and the role in society Beyond just the hot takes of Terminator and media influence and that's why I made the fourth wall movie and theater comparison before because prior to internet and what we're doing now media and movies really was in charge of influencing pop culture in a major way but now ai is having that influence on pop culture and movies and entertainment and the way we create art and the complete future of human Ai and human computer and media interaction with technology and with each other has changed you made an interesting anecdote that so many people when they talk about the the turning point in something and often use cinema and movies they always talk about Takis when we went from Silo movies to Takis this is this is not even the idea of the fourth wall is not even in a movie anymore this is you know we are now stepping out of the medium we are in and going into something that is tangible which a weird way of looking at things especially when we're talking about at the very base level somebody sitting in front of a computer typing something in to solve a problem or interact with somebody and Haley that's where I want you to really come in and say and and give your opinion how does this idea change where we've gone from the science fiction to I've heard people say now it's the science future to now we are actually watching people work alongside with this AI almost two years on and as as we go forward in in Ai and generative AI what's your thoughts on how this is going forward from your world yeah I think it's really interesting the breaking the fourth wall comparison I've actually recently been watching a lot of documentaries on what was going on in poo elto in the 60s and 70s and it's really interesting hearing people talk about giant mainframes the way that we sort of hear people talk about AI about two years ago they sort of liken it to some weird deity they described being around a Mainframe like a really freaky weird presence and we were hearing that all the time just two years ago as user researchers people were super hesitant they were terrified that AI was coming for their jobs there's very similar comparisons to when technology feels really huge and monolithic and doesn't have a way to interact with it it's automatically becomes scary we default to those mental models of of fear cuz we don't we fear the unknown right but interestingly you know when main frames got a UI that was a little more usable when it moved into personal computers when people could actually put it onto a desk and it didn't take up two giant living rooms people got super excited and they were like wow the potential of this it's incredible I can't believe I have this thing in my in my house and you have you know all these people just experimenting like you look at the sort of Homebrew communities in like California in the' 60s and 70s and they feel very similar in spirit to the ways that people are coming up with their own models now in uh in the world of Chachi BT so I think the sort of comparison or where I see this going um sort of using that time period in the 60s and 70s as an anchor is that once we gave things an interface and then once we allowed people to have a dialogue and experiment and just kind of do weird stuff with it they're like wait this is a it's not as scary as I thought and B oh what can I do and how can I push the potential of this so I think by giving it its interface and Chachi BT did that really incredibly well and gave people a box to enter prompts in and and play around oh what if I change the wording what if I um what if I stop saying please to it which I know a lot of people are saying you shouldn't say please to chat GT it's it's not going to give you the best request there we're we're seeing a lot of experimentation and a lot of sort of playfulness now that an interface has been given to this once sort of mystical misunderstood thing of AI the idea of of potential and inspiration for um I think D you you had said that you know non-technical people having the ability to do something you only read about if you really really really were into technological things and did your research talk about that potential and and inspiration for for non-technical people let's keep on this train of like before chat GPT and after chat GPT right so before chat GPT machine learning models were still they were quite accessible but required a subset or a minimum amount of technical literacy and ability you could get libraries from like tensorflow um a website that has different pre-ra models but you still had to have you had to think of the use cases access these models somehow create a data set train this model in your use case whether through their API or cloud computing or anything and even though many companies provided heavy lifting it was never through something as natural as something you do every day like typing creating a conversation with a digital entity so now that we have this access where the capabilities are presented to people in a way that is known in their technical vernacular they can spend that cognitive power thinking about the things that they want to amplify so for example someone that I work with their partner is a florist and throughout the year they like to create seasonal advertising campaigns hiring an advertising agency is very expensive hiring a copywriter is very expensive and depending on the season you may not have the capital in order to create those type of campaigns so this person has started creating collaborative seasonal brainstorming sessions with chat GPT to come up with not just relevant catchy phrases for advertising copy for either Valentine's Day or summer or schools out but culturally relevant to their region type campaigns to their neighborhood by feeding it extra information now there are some plateaus to this in the sense where I'm a believer that right now for for the time being AI is bounded to the creativity of what humans have created where I still truly believe that human creativity is boundless that's that's the key to all this is we're we're we're guiding this we need to be using the rest of our brain to create this amazing stuff yes so what I'm looking at artists Now using the visual components of generative AI to create immersive experiences when we looked at what Roblox did for kids with M and Minecraft did for kids and adults the type of ecosystems and the games and the type of Storytelling that they could create is just representative of what that could be now when you remove the technical mountain of having having to learn the system and create things and code things that's fascinating that kind of goes the idea of low code no code you hear a lot in technology and and that brings up Haley where I've got a question for you how did that change when you were now working and researching with with people and interaction I mean I'm also really excited about the potential of AI for artistic creative Outlets it's absolutely boundless but even just in my day-to-day I feel most excited at ai's potential to automate us out of bureaucracy you know all of the parts of being stuck in bureaucratic Loops that we all hate being in like when you get when you make a call to a customer service agent and they transfer you to like 15 different customer service agents and it's like broken telephone you're trying to re-explain why you're calling in the first place to the next person but they only know half the details and maybe the other service agent didn't tell them you know these are the things where I am most excited to see AI make an impact there so as to give us more mental headspace for all the other things that we actually care about but it's interesting because it's not just as easy as throwing AI into these processes that are already pre-established we have to really rethink what these processes mean of risk we are introducing into these systems because just because we drop AI into a customer service environment doesn't mean it's going to work flawlessly quite the opposite we actually have to do a lot of risk management and auditing this is why there's a lot of uh companies enterprise software companies that have uh uh AI governance teams whose entire job is to go in and make sure that putting AI into these administrative systems is actually going to be safe because it's not going to be a thing that we slap into these processes and it's going to make everything beautiful oh my God we never have to wait on a call ever again it's really more of how much risk are we willing to allow into these systems with the potential benefit of removing this bureaucracy that we all don't love to be a part of so that's a really big area that I think we're focused in right now but specifically you know with people like customer service agents what are their thoughts on using generative AI I know that at service now like a lot of the products that we're working on they really prioritize sort of augmenting rather than automating allowing the service agents to really focus on that human touched part of their job at the end of the day they're just trying to help people and I've spoken with several service desk agents that say that's the part of my job I actually find satisfying not entering in the you know the resolution notes of a case and keeping up with all of the the documentation I like to actually know that I'm helping someone so there's a lot of promise that AI can come in and allow them to focus their full energy on that part of their job D you had mentioned this this idea of of creativity and Concepts and and Humanity working to make this ai go forward because we're the ones driving it and Haley you met you talked about the idea of it's coming up with ways to make work better what are the surprises and the change to work that we're seeing with AI I think one of my favorites that I've heard recently I was on a customer call and we were trying to understand how people our customers people that interface with service now were using AI in any capacity like traditional machine learning models or generative AI in their personal and professional lives and one customer I spoke to was talking about how she was using chat GPT to increase her AI technical literacy to remain Advent agous in her day job and she listed all the aspects of her life what she thinks she doesn't know what she thinks she knows and in an analysis like linked some articles and said okay I need you to create a training program for me almost like a Fitness training program but for my brain and then she said that she was able to apply this to her job she started understanding the terminology she started understanding that the and this was the key key point in conversation that showed the mental shift for me that she really got it is she said it was less like chatting with a friend even though the interface looks like a traditional chat interface and it was more about intentional specific wording in what you are asking the bot and sometimes it's like clever Googling where you know that there's like terms that will yield like things and she's like and that's the thing that made it quickest for me to discover you know but she goes I used it to get better at my job and as a responsible AI person who is constantly like concerned about the future and talking with like don't let Skynet happen people it was such a bright wholesome interesting not overly complex use case that was so relatable because I was like I feel you and yes we've all done that but we never note moments like that as a significant contribution of AI that it like taught me something in a specific way tailored to my learning needs or how I needed to ask it at the pace I needed to ask it you can teach me something and no one knows what I'm going to ask you that's great I can ask dumb questions without yes without fear of judgment yeah D I love the that you shared this example because I feel like I have a mirror image example that I came across in some of my uh user research and I have to say that is probably my favorite part of my job right now is I I try to make a habit of asking all of my participants how they're currently using generative AI what are their sort of use cases so like I said before I mean I work a lot with customer service agents service desk agents it technicians and sort of on the flip side of your example D of instead of someone trying to kind of upskill their own technical knowledge I was having a conversation once with an IT support desk uh worker and they were telling me that they actually use chat GPT to help simplify complex uh demands that they give to people writing into them to help them better understand technical Concepts so they were saying you know sometimes people write will write in and they need to install a piece of software but there's all these really complex technical steps and so they would say explain this to me like I'm a 5-year-old and they would use chat gbt to help them break down these really abstract technical complicated Concepts and then make it easier for them the customer they're supporting to understand so sort of breaking down that barrier or that um I guess that Lost in Translation communication between a really highly technical person and then a non technical person and using chat GPT to sort of be that translator and create meaning between those two worlds I thought that was really interesting so it seems that AI can be our companion tool when we want to help people and not just something we use to create which that's really awesome that said what are some things we should be exploring and paying close attention to going forward I came from a world of human computer interaction Pro user research and um design and suddenly you know there's new roles that didn't exist different types of jobs around monitoring of this technology and distribution of the technology and application and design of the technology that didn't exist so for people that want to get into the industry I think like the hopeful note I want I I'm hoping I can be granted the opportunity to spread forward is that there's an often misconception you need to have a coding or very technical background to enter the AI industry and that couldn't be farthest from the truth the furthest from the truth there's opportunity and rules for really diverse representation types of skill sets and so forth that is needed in this type of an industry and there's still very much opportunity to break ground make your space and do something significant in the AI space I think right now as user researchers and designers we're at such a critical point for being that conduit for being that sort of face that AI has and it's really going to come down to what the interfaces look like and how much control people feel that they have over ai's outputs I mean especially thinking about it in an Enterprise context our responsibility over the next couple of years is really going to just be about making sure that humans stay in the loop that our interface is prioritize people being in the loop and keeping that at the Forefront of how we're we're building out how these tools look and feel to use so there you have it some great inspiration from both di Le and Haley Morton as to where AI is headed and how we can guide the process in a helpful way if you've enjoyed this episode please hit subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on so you never miss an episode and if you have any questions about the service now platform head over to the newly redesigned docs. servicenow.com thanks for [Music] listening