Latest / Randy Unscripted / If You Can Text, You Can Use AI - NaPodPoMo 2025 #14

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If You Can Text, You Can Use AI - NaPodPoMo 2025 #14 · Randy Unscripted

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  Randy Black: Randy Black.
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  Randy Black. Randy Black. Randy Black. Randy Black. Randy Black. Black. Black. Randy Black. He's a troublemaker. Welcome back to Randy Unscripted,
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  and
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  happy napod promo 2025
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  if I haven't said that already. This is our fourteenth episode for November 14 of National
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  Podcast
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  Post Month. Remember, that's 30 episodes in thirty days. That means tomorrow's episode, and we're halfway there.
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  Today here on the show, I wanna be
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  I wanna share with you some takeaways from pod indie twenty twenty five. It's an event I attended this past weekend,
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  and I've got some clips I pulled from doctor Craig Van Slyke.
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  And Craig is a professor at Louisiana Tech University.
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  He's an expert in AI, especially in higher education.
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  And what he talked about was some of the practical uses
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  of AI for creators today.
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  So Craig opened up talking at PodIndy
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  with this line here.
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  Craig Van Slyke: AI is not hard.
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  There are all kinds of people out there telling you this is hard, and there are scary terms, and that the technology is just
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  this shy of magic,
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  but using it is not a difficult thing. How many of you can text?
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  How many of you can text without using voice to text?
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  Not me. If you can text, you can use AI.
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  Randy Black: Wow.
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  That line.
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  If you can text, you can use AI. That reframed
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  the entire day for me.
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  I mean, I've used AI tools before,
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  but suddenly
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  AI and advanced features that Craig Lager talked about felt really approachable.
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  They came across as being really practical,
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  and it was something that I could play with
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  rather than holding on to some fear about it.
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  Craig immediately pivoted, though, to a a core mindset that he kept re he kept returning to throughout the day. And here is an excerpt excerpt from from the talk where
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  he explains what he wants prompting
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  to do
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  for himself and for you.
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  Craig Van Slyke: I'm gonna show you how you can use prompts
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  not to get AI just to do stuff for you,
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  but to unleash and enhance your own creativity.
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  Right? That's the other mindset. How do I get AI to help me be more me,
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  not to replace you? Wow.
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  Randy Black: It's exactly what he said there. How do I get AI to help me be more me, not to replace me, and not to replace you?
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  Phew.
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  The focus is on enhancing
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  the creativity,
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  not outsourcing it, not using AI to generate the content,
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  but to take the content, to take the creative things you've made and then use them to enhance them, to bring them together, to bring them out, to find other ideas.
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  Craig pushed back, though, on the whole idea of,
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  quote, unquote, prompt engineering
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  on that whole phrase. Here's what he had to say about it.
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  Craig Van Slyke: Have you heard of prompt engineering?
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  Forget about it.
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  I mean, it's a ridiculous term for the way 90% of us are going to use AI.
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  Engineering
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  is precise. It's repeatable.
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  You can tell what it's going to do. It's predictable.
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  AI is none of that. The generative AI systems I'm just going to say AI, but technically it's large language models and generative AI.
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  It's just none of that.
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  I want you to think about prompting as design,
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  something that's iterative, messy, where you go down paths that may not go anywhere immediately, but they get you somewhere you wanna be.
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  Randy Black: He reframed
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  prompting
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  as design,
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  making it iterative,
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  making it exploratory.
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  I found that both freeing and practical at the same time,
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  and it's amazing.
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  Craig then introduced
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  a framework
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  for using AI, a framework for prompting AI,
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  and it's very simple
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  and really easy to understand. And here's what he had to say. So I'm gonna create yet another one called roll, goal, input, output.
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  Craig Van Slyke: I liked it because it's got a little rhythm to it. Roll, goal, input, output.
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  All the framework does
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  is gives you some tips about what you might,
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  notice the word might, want to include in your prompts.
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  Right? It's a set of guidelines. It's not a set of laws.
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  Randy Black: That is a extremely concise
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  and usable template.
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  It's extremely clear,
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  and we can apply it immediately in what we do. So if we prompt
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  AI,
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  we can use that very simple model, that framework.
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  What's the role? What's the goal? What's our input? And what should our output be? That's awesome.
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  And Craig also
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  used a little bit of humor
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  to give permission out there for everybody to be able to experiment with AI. And here's here's exactly what he said.
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  Craig Van Slyke: Here's the great thing about AI.
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  I don't know. Let's try it.
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  Right?
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  Say it with me now. If I get it wrong, nobody's gonna punch me in the nose. This is our we have our theme for the day, by the way.
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  Randy Black: That was hilarious. And that's kind of a takeoff of Dave Jackson of the school positing. And Dave was there. Dave has a clip he plays where it says nobody's gonna punch you in the face. You know? And that line, he pulled it out there. That line kinda loosened the room up. It it it made the whole approach to what we were doing feel a little bit less risky because it took the weight off of us that we don't know what it's really gonna do, but we're gonna try it, and we're gonna see. We're gonna we're gonna stick our neck out there and and see what this, this LLM, this AI can produce for us.
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  Then Craig took some time and explained the difference
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  and the creative value of what he calls
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  open prompting
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  versus a a a structured prompting.
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  So here's what he had to say about that.
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  Craig Van Slyke: If you constrain it,
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  it's gonna give you a narrow set of things. If you let it go, it might go down a path
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  that's pretty interesting that you hadn't thought about before.
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  A lot of it may be stuff that's not of any use to you, then you refine it and you go back and forth and you try to narrow it down.
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  But every once in a while,
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  it just gets your creative juices going in a way that you would not have done on your own. That's a huge benefit of these tools.
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  Randy Black: That's the reasoning out there behind letting the system wander sometimes.
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  Let it
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  surface ideas that you might not have otherwise considered.
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  New approaches, new perspectives.
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  You could even in the prompt tell it, give me a new approach to this that may not have been seen before. Offer up suggestions for a new idea based on this content.
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  It's
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  pretty powerful.
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  Open prompting versus structured prompting. Leave it open, and sometimes it can lead you down a path that can lead to something very, very creative.
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  Craig finished this portion of the day by flagging the next level techniques that he calls
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  meta prompting, And here's what he had to share.
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  Craig Van Slyke: How do you get from this open iterative thing to the template?
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  You use something called
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  meta prompting.
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  Meta prompting.
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  This this is gold.
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  This is really, really gold.
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  You ask AI
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  to write the prompt for you.
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  Randy Black: Mind
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  blown.
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  You ask AI
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  to write the prompt for you?
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  And
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  we're gonna dig into that on tomorrow's episode of Randy Unscripted.
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  We're gonna look at how Craig uses meta prompting and deep research to build useful templates and really large reports quickly,
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  and it's gonna blow you away.
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  This has been episode 14 of my napod promo
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  twenty twenty five series for 11/14/2025.
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  If you wanna follow along, find the full blog post about pod indie at randallblack.com,
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  and you can find this episode and more at randallblack.com/unscripted
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  where the show notes are available.
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  Until the next time we're here on Randy Unscripted, remember, these tools are here to help us to think and create,
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  not take away what makes our work
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  ours.
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  I'm Randy Black,
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  and this has been Randy Unscripted.