ESTEPONA – Canadian born, Sonia Ingriselli has lived in Spain for decades and is an experienced SEO specialist. After months of intense study, she can now also call herself a ChatGPT expert. Furthermore, she wrote a book on the power of ChatGPT—and similar chatbots—for your business. InSpain.news spoke with her about the impact of artificial intelligence.
Sonia’s book is titled: “Automate to Elevate: Unleashing the Power of ChatGPT in Your Business”. She wrote it to give freelancers like herself and small businesses insight into how they can deploy AI as their personal assistant to save them a lot of time. We were curious about that too and also wanted to know if we should be afraid of AI, or if the fear for our jobs is unfounded. It resulted in a very enlightening and educational conversation, the insights of which we share here.
Sonia starts our conversation with a revelation: “I am 20% afraid, but 80% very excited about the possibilities of AI”. Later we learn about the nuanced relationship between human and artificial intelligence (AI) and get practical insights on how people can deploy AI. Sonia also provides a glimpse into her future visions concerning AI. Of course, we already had some prior knowledge thanks to reading her book in preparation. Her e-book will soon be available in physical form as well.
Read the book!
After completing her book, we can sincerely recommend it to everyone. It is an extensive, easy-to-understand guide for integrating AI into your life. Specifically, she addresses ChatGPT and how you can deploy this chatbot for various aspects of your business activities, including SEO, coding, marketing, and content creation. Even those who are not working can use AI broadly. Think about writing speeches, tricky letters to municipal bodies, or brainstorming on complex topics. Or ask ChatGPT for a recipe when you lack cooking inspiration!
Valuable asset
In her book, Sonia energetically combines personal anecdotes, technical advice, and clear instructions for building your prompts (more on that later). This quickly makes it clear how AI can be a valuable asset to you, regardless of the purpose for which you use the chatbot. Despite her infectious enthusiasm, both in the book and later in our conversation, about the usefulness of ChatGPT and similar chatbots, Sonia is also transparent about their limitations.
The importance of good prompts
The AI specialist has delved deeply into the concept of ‘prompting’. A prompt is an instruction. “You enter a question and get a human-like answer from the chatbot,” says Sonia. That question is the prompt, and “writing a good prompt is everything”. That’s why Sonia explains extensively how you can formulate prompts for different purposes, no matter which chatbot you use. She also shares how she developed her specific SEO prompts and even coded mini-programs to help her with her specific needs as an SEO and AI specialist. A handy tip, for example, is that if you stay in the same chat window with ChatGPT and provide AI with clear feedback, the bot even starts to get to know you.
AI is here to stay
If one thing becomes clear from both Sonia’s book and the conversation we had with her, it’s that AI is here to stay. She therefore urges everyone to become an ‘early adopter’. Sonia: “Read about it, take a course, a tutorial, and educate yourself.” Because AI will have a far-reaching impact on many aspects of society, whether you like it or not. That impact goes much further than just deploying ChatGPT as your helper. New to us, for example, is how positive the influence of AI can be on the healthcare industry. Artificial Intelligence has great potential to detect diseases such as cancer, dementia, or Parkinson’s at a very early stage and possibly even eradicate them.
AI is not a replacement for human creativity
Sonia argues that AI does not replace people but, with the right training, can actually help people with specialised, repetitive, or time-consuming tasks. For example, in keyword research or direct marketing tasks. “Once you start working with it, like I did from the moment it came out, you can really tell whether something is written with AI. AI lacks the empathetic, humorous, and human elements that add nuance to writing. The content generated by ChatGPT can be structurally sound but lacks the recognisable human flair that engages readers. “You have to infuse yourself so that you add the human aspect and naturally a little bit of fun,” she laughs.
Good results only after clear instructions
Just like a human assistant, AI also needs clear instructions to perform a task to your liking. The person giving the instructions must understand the end task or output. Sonia: “You can’t just say: hey, build a website for me with these elements, that doesn’t work”. “That’s what people are most afraid of but the better and more specific the instructions, the better the output”. That sounds indeed reassuring and logical. If you can’t write a well-structured text, you also less quickly recognise bad text.
Emergency plan
However, Sonia is also sometimes nervous about her career. “I make sure I have a backup plan,” she says about that. That’s why she closely follows all developments, which is “practically impossible, given the speed at which they are happening”. Hundreds of new AI applications appear daily. She also knows that an emergency plan is not for everyone. “But I want to convince them that they can use the damn thing!” The fact that she sometimes convinces even the most sceptical people is evidenced by a seventy-year-old customer of hers, who was terrified of AI. Now that Sonia has taught her the basics, she is addicted to it. The key to survival is still flexibility and adaptability.
Risks
Could AI at some point take over? We all know science fiction films where robots suddenly have a will of their own. Sonia points out that all important figures in the tech world have emergency plans in case AI goes off the rails. Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, for example, always carries a blue backpack. It is a laptop with the ability to immediately shut down ChatGPT if necessary. In this context, she sees the need for collective responsibility in the development and application of AI. Regulatory mechanisms are essential for the safe use of AI. According to her, governments must intervene and guarantee neutral supervision. Although opaque regimes in countries like Russia, China, and Iran do make global AI ethics a bit more complex.
Unprecedented potential
All in all, Sonia is cautiously optimistic, especially about the unprecedented potential of AI to solve significant global problems such as climate change and diseases like cancer. She saw a video, for example, of a woman who could do nothing after a stroke. With the help of AI, she now communicates through her avatar. She even wants to pick up her former profession as a business coach again. And if deploying a chatbot on a small scale can make life considerably easier, what are we waiting for?