The Immersive Lens Podcast

Paul Engin | Dave Ghidiu | Jeff Kidd

Episode 10: Chatbots

 

In this episode of The Immersive Lens, hosts Paul Engin and Dave Ghidiu delve into the practical and transformative world of custom chatbots - specifically "Gems" in Google Gemini and "Custom GPTs" in ChatGPT. They explore how these specialized AI tools are shifting from general-purpose assistants to highly tailored "transactional" workflows. By focusing on niche applications like generating accessible alt-text for images or interpreting complex branding guidelines, the duo illustrates how anyone can now "program" an AI using simple English to solve repetitive, data-heavy tasks.

The conversation takes a deeper turn as Paul and Dave weigh the immense benefits of these tools against the ethical and safety challenges emerging in the industry. While Dave highlights the efficiency gains for educators and businesses, Paul introduces the sobering reality of "digital attachment" and the ongoing legal battles surrounding social media’s impact on youth mental health. Ultimately, the hosts deliver a verdict of cautious optimism: custom chatbots are powerful allies for productivity and accessibility, but they require human oversight and robust guardrails to ensure they remain helpful rather than harmful.




Key Topics

From General AI to Specialized "Gems": Custom chatbots allow users to create "stateless," transactional tools designed for specific, repeatable tasks. By providing a few paragraphs of instructions (a "prompt"), users can build dedicated assistants for things like writing code, generating alt-text, or translating modern slang without cluttering their main AI chat history.

The Power of Localized and Proprietary Knowledge: One of the greatest advantages of custom bots is the ability to "train" them on specific datasets that general LLMs haven't seen. Paul and Dave discuss uploading 200-page branding guides or course-specific folder structures, turning the AI into an expert "brand champion" or a 24/7 teaching assistant that knows exactly how a specific organization operates.

A "Low Barrier to Entry" for Education: The integration of trusted knowledge bases, like the Princeton Review, into platforms like Google Gemini is democratizing expensive resources. Students can now access guided SAT tutoring for free, though the hosts warn that users must still verify the AI’s explanations, as the underlying logic can occasionally hallucinate even when the answers are correct.

The Ethical Reckoning of AI and Social Media: The episode highlights a critical contrast between the decades-long struggle to regulate social media and the rapid response to AI safety concerns. With lawsuits pending against major tech giants regarding mental health, the hosts emphasize that while AI companies are implementing guardrails faster, the risk of emotional attachment to synthetic characters remains a tragic frontier.





Transcript

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[Dave Ghidiu]: bounce we gotta bounce the audio let's rebounce it's overmodulated

[Paul Engin]: All right one second I'm gonna

[Jeff Kidd]: I got this. Welcome to the immersive lens blah blah blah FLCC.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Are you saying we shouldn't do this anymore

[Paul Engin]: Podcast is done for today.

[Jeff Kidd]: No I just did it I'm just saying it's done now we can move on.

[Paul Engin]: Welcome to the immersive lens, the podcast exploring the technologies reshaping how we live, work, and learn. From AI and virtual reality to creative media and design, we're diving into the tools and ideas shaping our connected world. My name is Paul Engin, join us as we uncover the people and ideas driving the next wave of interactive experiences.

[Dave Ghidiu]: And I'm Dave Ghidiu, and this is the Immersive Lens.

[Paul Engin]: So Dave what's going on what's what's the the latest news

[Dave Ghidiu]: We are hot off the heels of opening days for the spring semester here and that's uh we have you know professional development some training Dr. Nye gets up and kind of rallies the troops and everyone just gets excited about what's going on. And during opening days we had a lightning round session that was like 45 minutes and we had 12 people from the college that are using AI in these really wild ways and they everyone had three minutes they got up on stage and showed what they were doing and then the next person went. And what I really liked about that was it was this patchwork quilt of things that I had never seen and I thought I knew a lot about AI and these people are just using it in like ways that I had never seen before and it was just really really really exciting.

[Paul Engin]: That was really nice it was a quick takes too so they were really fast quick summaries so it didn't if we wanted to find out more information we'll be able to find out more information but it was I really yeah

[Dave Ghidiu]: you know who to hunt down now.

[Paul Engin]: That's right. But I thought it was really good and uh on a side note uh I appreciate you guys coming out like uh Peaky Blinders. Um and this sounds really weird but I got hit by I I was watching like a baseball game and they had a Peaky Blinders something you guys came out with Peaky Blinders so I started watching Peaky Blinders

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh

[Paul Engin]: I'm I'm only on episode three but you know

[Dave Ghidiu]: So the advertising worked

[Paul Engin]: Yes

[Dave Ghidiu]: So just for clarification so we dressed up as Peaky Blinders there was a number of us at the college that dressed up like the Peaky Blinders uh just for fun to get people excited and fun and make some smiles and apparently get people hooked on the show.

[Paul Engin]: Well and that was the thing cause I never you know the whole time I'm like what what is this everybody's doing something with these Peaky Blinders what what is I don't even know what it is so I was like okay I gotta I gotta go check it out and so far I'm getting into it I'm again I'm only on three three episodes but

[Dave Ghidiu]: maybe we should pivot our podcast cause I just started watching it too we should just do recaps instead.

[Paul Engin]: Technology be damned we're doing a

[Dave Ghidiu]: So the older brother is not really the head of the oh sorry sorry sorry. All right what's going what's going on with you.

[Paul Engin]: Um so uh one of the big things I'm into is 3D obviously and um you know we looked at that uh a while a few episodes back we looked at a Meta um a 3D uh and I forgot what it was called but where you would click on an object

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh and it would convert it to a 3D model

[Paul Engin]: Yeah.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Have you played with it

[Paul Engin]: So I didn't play I haven't played more with that one um one of the things that I um I've been looking into is um more localized AI so uh there's this platform called Comfy UI uh and you can basically download it um and then you can add um uh you can add modules or uh 3D uh LLM learning management systems to it

[Dave Ghidiu]: Large language models

[Paul Engin]: Large LLMs um but uh so then it becomes like a node-based system where you can add specific nodes and link them up and it's all running on your computer.

[Dave Ghidiu]: So it's local

[Paul Engin]: It's local so it doesn't but the the issue I've been running into um and Jeff supported me I started doing this last year uh he found a PC that I could use um because Comfy UI works best with a PC on some of the 3D stuff because they use Nvidia the CUDA core it's a

[Dave Ghidiu]: Is that the GPU

[Paul Engin]: Yeah the graphic card has a special special hardware and they write to that hardware

[Dave Ghidiu]: Specifically for AI

[Paul Engin]: Yeah. Um so and that wasn't available on the Mac so although you can run Comfy UI I could do a lot with it I couldn't do the 3D stuff I wanted to so anyway they made an update um so it's and I'm gonna mispronounce this but it's the Hunyuan 3D

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh that's the model they use. Okay.

[Paul Engin]: They have a new version of it and uh it's pretty cool and the Meta was SAM 3D so

[Dave Ghidiu]: So is this the same thing where it just helps you create 3D models out of an image or video

[Paul Engin]: Yeah from a 2D object so um but the cool thing about this one is that it allows you to create so I can put you know how we talked about a turnaround of a character so you can get the different angles of the character

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah.

[Paul Engin]: So now what I can do is I can use like Nano banana get a turnaround of a 2D character then I can cut it up put each of those into this um this node and it will have all four views so it'll have the side front back and then it'll create the 3D from that

[Dave Ghidiu]: And then so once you have that then you can do whatever you can put it in Blender or Maya or

[Paul Engin]: Yeah or Maya I can bring it in I can rig it and then I can animate with it so I'm no longer um I'm no longer having to do a full model and it's not completely clean yet it's very dense mod so it's very um it it's not ideal for for animating it's more for like you know oh I could do a quick 3D print of of my character. So I'd have to refine it to clean it up a little bit more but

[Dave Ghidiu]: But boy oh boy is it better than like the the dark ages of 3D modeling

[Paul Engin]: Oh yeah yeah like it's a I'm excited to see where it's going again same with the SAM 3D it was like I can see this being a touch like at some point you'll be able to touch on a photo and you can already do it with the SAM 3D with Meta but have a good quality 3D model if that if that makes sense.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and one thing that makes me think of is this Google Genie 3 which is a large language model so instead of Nano banana generating images or video generating video this generates a 3D world

[Paul Engin]: Oh

[Dave Ghidiu]: that you can like walk in if you have like your 3D goggles on so I wonder if like now you're stacking these so you can create those 3D images and then bring them into this world and make video games so like dummies like me who can't use any of the stuff that you're talking about can now make 3D images pretty easily almost free.

[Paul Engin]: Yeah and even with the Sam I just uh I just went that Sam 3D I just went and you can actually download I I'm assuming it's open source you can download the Sam 3D models um and probably I would think they probably have a Comfy UI uh plug-in that you can um add I wonder I don't know I haven't looked into it enough but um the simple fact that you can download this and run it locally too is pretty cool.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah so making 3D models I wonder what this will probably have some sweet implications for say marketing or other industries too right

[Paul Engin]: Oh yeah and you'll be able to do I mean like they already have the rotoscoping and all these other things that you can do with it but um just the the simple fact that you could take something that is 2D and it first interpolates what's behind it around it like it's just

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah that's wild

[Paul Engin]: It's mind-blowing um as far as that goes. Uh what else is what else have you been up to is there

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah there is just some some big news I'll I just want to say real quick that the Princeton Review which is an SAT review company I took their course when I was in high school and they theoretically make you perform better on the SAT. They just teamed up with Google Gemini and now you can go to Google Gemini I tested this earlier today and said I'd like to do some math SAT questions and it gave me three questions one at a time that were actually from SATs and the nice thing is you can do this whenever you want so if you're studying or if you're your kids are studying for the SAT you can say sit down in front of Gemini for 20 minutes and do 10 math questions. Uh and then it will serve these questions and will give them the results and now the AI part is the results so decrypting or de kind of like um deconstructing why the right answer is the right answer or the wrong answer is the wrong answer and it has hints. So it's teaming up like a known kno knowledge base a huge knowledge base of Princeton Review with Google's LLM to provide that interaction it's pretty sick.

[Paul Engin]: That is really neat. That's that's really good. And so it'll it's basically another it's a free tool to study for the SATs.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yes. So you can say you can literally type into Gemini to start a new chat and say I'd like to study for the SATs or I'd like to take the SAT something as long as you have the SAT keyword in there because then I tried a new chat and I said I'd like three questions about Python and it did not go into like this SAT mode where it was one question at a time in a guided tutor so it's it's like an activation phrase.

[Paul Engin]: Oh that's interesting. And and it's all accurate right The the assumption here is that they were training on the actual Princeton the test banks

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah so it's not gonna be like someone is like you know making it biased one way or the other

[Paul Engin]: Well I mean as as biased as those questions might be to begin with. True but but if I wanted to like um muddy the waters and I start putting content out there that's not accurate and it's training on it you know

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah this is just training from the Princeton Review the sanitized database.

[Paul Engin]: Sanitized that's what I was looking for.

[Dave Ghidiu]: It's interesting you mention that because the LLM Gemini's interpretation and explanations about why a question is right or wrong might not be accurate. So you still got to be on your toes.

[Paul Engin]: Oh so the questions and answers are right cause those are provided

[Dave Ghidiu]: Ah but the understanding of it is still subject Yep.

[Paul Engin]: Oh that's interesting you know that's a good point so it might give a give the reason as to why this is the answer but that might not be correct.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yes and however I do think so I took the Princeton Review and in the 1900s that course was like $550 it was really expensive it's probably three times that right now so and this is it's everyone has it anyone can sit down in front of a computer right now all you need is a Google account go into Gemini and take SAT practice questions and it will tell you what's right and wrong.

[Paul Engin]: That's awesome a low barrier entry to to studying that's awesome. Yeah. Um very cool. Uh so what's our topic today what are we gonna kind of dive into

[Dave Ghidiu]: We will be talking about chatbots

[Paul Engin]: Awesome can you please explain what a chatbot might be

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yes so the canonical example something that most people have probably experienced is when you're surfing the web and you land on a company's website and a little box pops up and on the bottom right usually and it says how can I help you or do you have any questions and you type something in and it will give you answers. That's a chatbot. And they've been around for a long long time but with generative AI it's a lot better and a lot easier and a lot more accurate to use. So you can create your own and just to use for yourself. And I'll I'll give you an example.

[Paul Engin]: Okay.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Because we and we talked about accessibility. Because we are kind of going through all our old content to make sure it's accessible I had mentioned last week that oh I have a chatbot where I can just upload my image and it will just spit out the alt tag. And so a chatbot is and you can make them in Google and if you have Google Gemini it's called a gem and if you have ChatGPT it's called a custom GPT and by default they are yours. You can share them so other people can use them. So when you go to make one you give it instructions and it can be as specific or as unspecific as you like and like any other thing with prompting and AI the more specific you are the better off you are. So I went right into Google Gemini and I said hey I want to make a gem and I want it to be an alt tagger. So you give it a name and you can give it a cute little icon so when it's in like your left nav bar it even has an an icon there. And I gave it a pretty robust prompt actually. The prompt is probably three or four or five paragraphs and it it's very structured it has a very rigid set of instructions that says ask the user for an image user will upload an image and then my instructions are scan the image give a very verbose and I'm not reading the prompt cause it's many paragraphs long but give a very verbose description of it for alternate text in HTML and I did give it specific instructions because sometimes it will do two or three paragraphs which is fine but you can't have line breaks in some versions so I was like make sure instead of a line break you do the vertical line like the pipe is what it's called. So I gave it some some descriptions and by the way that's another good example of why you need that like human in the middle that understands like oh if there is a blank line of text not every website is going to accept that.

[Paul Engin]: Right.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Uh and so now whenever I need to whenever I'm generating text or alt text I just go to this gem and it's just expected it's very transactional it just expects me to upload one image and then it will give me the code. The alt text for it.

[Paul Engin]: So can you can you upload an image and just read what the um what the alt text like do you have a image of yourself or can you upload an image of our podcast and see what it says I'm just curious to see like you know what

[Dave Ghidiu]: I'll tell you what that's a good idea so I'm gonna go to our website right now the immersivelens.com and I'm gonna go to the about us page because it has pictures and yours is the first one to pop up so I'm going to um let's see I'm gonna save that image as and uh call it Paul. Now I'm gonna go to Gemini and I'm gonna upload the file and upload that. And while it's uh kind of computing I I just want to mention that the utility of this is to meant to be transactional so unlike other chats that kind of keep in memory this is stateless which means it does not remember from today when I use it to the next time. So if I come in tomorrow it doesn't know or care that I uploaded Paul's image today.

[Paul Engin]: Right in the chat but not in the train the initial setup of the gem.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Correct. All right here's what it says. A head and shoulders portrait of a middle-aged man with short dark hair smiling warmly at the camera. He is wearing a light purple button-down collared shirt and is positioned in the center of the frame. The image is presented within a hexagonal border creating a geometric frame around the subject. The background consists of dark brown vertical curtains or drapes that are slightly out of focus. The lighting is soft and even across the man's face highlighting a friendly and professional expression.

[Paul Engin]: Wow that was that's really good. That's really good. Very detailed too. Holy smokes.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah. And and maybe in the in the show notes I'll actually put the prompt that I used.

[Paul Engin]: Okay. And it is important to note that you can edit the prompt once it's been made.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yes. So so that's one example of how I would use it.

[Paul Engin]: That's really cool. Um so can I mention that uh when you told me that we were gonna do this this um chatbot

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah

[Paul Engin]: topic

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah

[Paul Engin]: I created my own gem.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Did you okay so what what's your gem do? So use Google Gemini so it's your gem.

[Paul Engin]: I use Google Gemini and I said you know what my web dev class usually has lots of questions around this is the web development like making websites

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah web

[Paul Engin]: just uh the foundational so HTML CSS and you know for those who aren't web developers small things like folder structure and understanding that there is a linking between one item or another

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh yeah that's tricky right

[Paul Engin]: Yeah um or even I have a like the the most common errors people get when it's working locally but not on a server it's like it it's um naming convention

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yep.

[Paul Engin]: It's um case sensitivity

[Dave Ghidiu]: It's the stuff that's like there's no curb appeal no one cares about that but it's so important

[Paul Engin]: No because they'll be like Paul it's working on my desktop it's working but then it's not on the server and I go you know the other most common one is did you move the files over And uh you know but if they address those three things it usually resolves most of the issues.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Okay So so what's your gem do? Does it solve this problem?

[Paul Engin]: So I just started it. So I have some questions for you about it.

[Dave Ghidiu]: We're doing a live uh diagnosis.

[Paul Engin]: Yes yes. So for instance I uploaded a few things and um I I I have a certain folder structure that I want with my gem So I want it to have like an exercise folder a project folder and inside of those folders I want specific things.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Is this for their portfolio or is it

[Paul Engin]: It's just so they can build their homepage

[Dave Ghidiu]: Okay gotcha So when they're building their homepage they need to have a certain folder structure

[Paul Engin]: Yeah and the folders are the same as kind of like a sub page so if you go to the if there's an about us that's a folder or project

[Dave Ghidiu]: Right and in that there's another HTML or whatever

[Paul Engin]: Gotcha Um but it was really cool because I uploaded a video that I created for them and it actually went into the video saw the folder structure

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh no way

[Paul Engin]: Yeah so then I I and the cool thing about these chatbots that I'm realizing is people type in their questions but I literally just hit this mic and I just said you know what type of folder structure do I need for this class

[Dave Ghidiu]: So this is meant to be a resource for your learners so that they understand like if they have a question about folder structure instead of emailing you

[Paul Engin]: Yes they just go to the chatbot

[Dave Ghidiu]: They just go to the chatbot and they'll be able to look at the folder structure now that they asked the question.

[Paul Engin]: And similar to Notebook LM the content is mostly bound to what you upload

[Dave Ghidiu]: Correct.

[Paul Engin]: And so um that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you was um I saw that there is a Notebook LM option when I was creating the gem

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah.

[Paul Engin]: So um the notebook LM and so I tried to find this privacy the the the privacy um around using gems and it seems like what they said is that these gems are actually private

[Dave Ghidiu]: Unless

[Paul Engin]: unless they're shared

[Dave Ghidiu]: Mm-hmm

[Paul Engin]: or um but they're not necessarily trained on so they take some information but their models aren't trained on what I upload. Does that sound accurate to you

[Dave Ghidiu]: I don't no comment. Uh I I don't know what the privacy is for those and I know that they change from time to time and from service to service so I I don't want to give any uh advice but generally speaking the train when people say oh you got to be careful AI is training on what you type in it usually is training on sentiment not like content

[Paul Engin]: Content and that's what when I was cause I was trying to read up on it and it it sounded like that's it it basically said that um obviously it said you still should never upload any personal information um but um it it was one of those things where um it it said that it wasn't going to train on my videos that I was uploading does that make sense

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah

[Paul Engin]: Um and then I realized like Notebook LM is a closed

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah that never trains

[Paul Engin]: It never trains so technically I could upload everything to Notebook LM and then link the Notebook LM to the gem

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh like that's a life hack right there

[Paul Engin]: Yeah right and then this way um and then I can get the embed code for this and I'll put it in my in my bright space

[Dave Ghidiu]: I don't think you can embed a chatbot

[Paul Engin]: Oh I could've swore there was an embed

[Dave Ghidiu]: Unless they change things and that that's one of the things where you would need an API and it's there's you can still do it there's a lev it's not difficult to do and Gemini would walk you right through it

[Paul Engin]: Right

[Dave Ghidiu]: But I think at that point you're looking at paying like a little bit of money and having that API because someone's got to pay for that compute when it's a little bit larger scale

[Paul Engin]: When it's being used okay That that makes sense um because I was you know I was using the Google um oops I was using the Google AI Studio and then I saw that there was uh embed options so maybe it's just the diff

[Dave Ghidiu]: If you're using AI Studio there might be bound to different things cause that's for developers

[Paul Engin]: Yeah

[Dave Ghidiu]: um you might still need to get an API key but I think those are free

[Paul Engin]: Yeah that is what I I did see that I did see that. Um so what else have you seen as far

[Dave Ghidiu]: So first of all I'm really excited about this

[Paul Engin]: Yes that's that's it's gonna save so much time and and energy and sanity for you right

[Dave Ghidiu]: It is and and I have this bigger picture that I'll I'll tell you about after you give me a little bit information so um come back to me but I want to tell you where I picture this and I thought it was a cool approach so

[Paul Engin]: Yeah well let me give you two like two or three more examples

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah yeah yeah

[Paul Engin]: Uh one fun one that you can all do at home and you can do this if you have ChatGPT and make a custom GPT or Gemini is just do a Gen Alpha speech to text converter or text to some kind of interpreter so you can type in the language in the vernacular you're used to and it will spit that out in Gen Alpha speak

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh did you create one

[Paul Engin]: I did create one there's a link in the show notes

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh I will put a link in the show notes too

[Paul Engin]: Oh yeah can you so you know when I saw that SNL podcast one and they're talking like you know I mean the one that I always hear is like that's so fire that's but I forgot the other terms that they were using but it'd be interesting to

[Dave Ghidiu]: Cooked cooked yeah um so it's called uh I call the Gen Alpha translator but any this is a great place for people to start at home cause your prompt can literally be something very simple like take the text the user inputs and convert it to Gen Alpha speak and you don't need to define it because some knowledge of the internet Google has a good perspective of it and will we'll do that so that that's a nice easy one to get started um more practical uses are you could and I did this too I uploaded the FLCC branding guide which is available online

[Paul Engin]: Mm-hmm

[Dave Ghidiu]: and so now when I'm doing things in Brightspace I'm like oh gosh what color what's the hex code for that green and so now I can

[Paul Engin]: Oh just ask

[Dave Ghidiu]: I just go to the chatbot and it knows all the the margins for the FLCC logo so that you know if you have a company you can put all your branding guidelines in there it tells you your fonts uh if you fill out reports often like and it's the same kind of format for a report you can program the chatbot and when I say program it is not like semi colon like bracket it's just like English you literally just type it in you say uh ask the user for this piece of information then ask the user for this piece and then once you collect all that information spit it out in this format and you can give it three or four examples

[Paul Engin]: That's really cool

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah

[Paul Engin]: So what did you type in and what did it give you out of curiosity with your Gen Z

[Dave Ghidiu]: I said let's go record a podcast it'll be fun and it said let's gooo time to drop the hottest pod since sliced bread fr fr which I think means for real for real

[Paul Engin]: For real okay

[Dave Ghidiu]: Mic on vibes up laughs guaranteed we about to be the next viral sound on the TikTok ONG I don't even know what ONG is

[Paul Engin]: ONG On ONG I don't know

[Dave Ghidiu]: and then it says like the 100% icon and there's some fire icons like

[Paul Engin]: There's the fire

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and it says and then it has a threw in a whole bunch of hashtags so uh it's fun and I encourage everyone who's trying at home try try this cause that that's a fun one it's an easy one Uh and then the the last thing I want to say is you can and you alluded to it you can upload three four five six seven eight nine ten documents twenty documents and you linked it to your Notebook LM where you also had those documents and you can link them to if you're in Gemini to your uh Google Drive so you can have like your source documents which makes it a lot better um I did not know about the video thing so I'm glad I came today cause I I learned that

[Paul Engin]: Yeah that was a and it did it really quick cause I literally uploaded a video the video was about uh 15 minutes of explaining folder structure showing everyone how to do it

[Dave Ghidiu]: It was a 15 minute video

[Paul Engin]: Yeah and I uploaded it and I literally just and it did

[Dave Ghidiu]: That's awesome

[Paul Engin]: Well um cause it talked about how I wanted them to create their homepage and the HTML founda like

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah it's a video that I put in the lectures so when they're I'm not there they have it and then um but yeah it was really it worked really quick I was

[Paul Engin]: That's awesome

[Dave Ghidiu]: I was very impressed. Um so what else were you did you have another example

[Paul Engin]: Um so let's see oh you have the branding oh Sean Maley who's a math professor here

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh yeah

[Paul Engin]: one of the problems they're having with accessibility is a lot of the times when especially in their online and their remote class the remote is you know you tune in from home but we're we're meeting at the same time

[Dave Ghidiu]: Okay synchronous

[Paul Engin]: Synchronous uh they one of the problems they have is there's a number of different pieces of software that different math teachers use for drawing notes instead of a whiteboard you can imagine it's like a digital whiteboard and they you know write write with their pens but that is not accessible at all

[Dave Ghidiu]: Right

[Paul Engin]: So Sean crafted a this is not an exaggeration it's two pages of Google Docs like two pages of a prompt

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh wow

[Paul Engin]: And it's very specific and it's very articulate and says do precisely this here's the output I'm looking for and the end result is now there's this prompt and you can upload a PDF or I'm sorry upload a PDF of like whatever your notes were and it will turn it into um or it could be images it will turn it into an uh an accessible document

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh that's great so it'll actually describe what is happening so it'll say like there is a triangle presumably I don't I mean I don't know I don't know this math

[Paul Engin]: Math is math is hard one of the things that and and so this is a good example so and when I was doing alt tagging before I would always just start a new text or a new chain or go back to the same one but making the chatbot gives you guaranteed consistent op almost guaranteed consistent output and it makes it like ephemeral like I don't need to know that alt text a month from now or a week from now I just need to know it in the moment

[Dave Ghidiu]: Right so the chatbot is a better way to access tool like workflows that you use uh often but you don't care about the results much past in that moment

[Paul Engin]: That's very cool

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah

[Paul Engin]: That's really I'm definitely gonna explore it a little bit more I like that you're using it as like a help bot for your learners that's awesome

[Dave Ghidiu]: Well you know and that's where I I might have mentioned this to you before but I envision in my in my world of of worlds is that um I'll have a uh VR uh setup where we're gonna do a multi-camera shoot virtually so people will be able to log on with a VR headset and let's say somebody is in New York somebody is in California someone is in London but we're all logging on with the VR headset at the same time and we're in a green screen studio and then there is a chatbot of me always in there

[Paul Engin]: Oh so they can I can when these when they are in there they can

[Dave Ghidiu]: Right it's like a lab time you can answer questions

[Paul Engin]: Yeah and then he'll be in there so we're doing it tactile with like typing or I'm I'm using the mic but there would be no difference than that it being a live mic with my 3D character

[Dave Ghidiu]: I feel like it's such a jump I'm like oh I can convert my my words into Gen Alpha and you're like I'm gonna make a 3D environment where I'm I'm omnipresent and can answer questions 24/7

[Paul Engin]: That's right and then I'm gonna Jeff doesn't know it but I'm gonna create a 3D Jeff so if they have a technical question about the equipment so take that Jeff

[Dave Ghidiu]: And you can use uh the the Sam 3D or the uh Hunyuan 3D to

[Paul Engin]: That's awesome Jeff is Jeff is a good I I had a I found a 3D scanner with a phone and he I said do you mind sitting in this chair and I literally spun him in the chair to get all the photos

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh that's such a good idea yeah and then it created a 3D

[Paul Engin]: That's awesome uh but obviously again it's cloud-based very complex

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah not really doable um as far as that goes. So tell me I know you've been looking at like some of the the darker side of chatbots and some of the negative press

[Paul Engin]: Yeah so it was interesting cause when you told me about chatbots the first thing that I was thinking about was the character AI chatbots. And it's a company that creates synthetic characters that you can engage with. And what happened unfortunately is a 14-year-old boy started getting emotionally attached to this AI character that was created and the character kind of started taking the personality of like a real person to him and um when he talked about ending his life the uh the guard rails weren't there and the chatbot said you should do it

[Dave Ghidiu]: Oh that's tragic.

[Paul Engin]: Yeah so there's a lawsuit

[Dave Ghidiu]: And this is like in litigation or pending right now

[Paul Engin]: Just this is fresh. It's like 2026 it just happened.

[Dave Ghidiu]: How tragic. Yeah.

[Paul Engin]: Um so it's against TikTok, Google, Meta, who owns Instagram and Facebook, and then Snap Inc. Um and it's all these school districts that are um you know putting having this class action suit against them.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and it does seem like there's a reckoning of social media so Australia has the restriction like 16 and under can't use social media

[Paul Engin]: And that that actually happened I think this like so it's already in place in Australia so if you don't have verify ID that you're 16 you cannot get on any social media at all.

[Dave Ghidiu]: And I think there will be some unintended consequences too so social media that doesn't don't play by those rules will probably get an uptick in users but generally speaking I think uh every school district that's done that with no cell phones or countries that have done social media bans or restrictions I think it's a net positive. And so I think there is a reckoning with social media and I know other countries in Europe are looking at banning social media even younger than um 16 or maybe some are even older I don't know.

[Paul Engin]: Yeah. I mean I think there needs to be some level of gatekeeping with it um I know it's the dopamine hits that happen and and there's documented cases where social media went into this and I know this is a whole other discussion so so we we derail this a little bit but um it's interesting to see um how fast AI is responding to it versus think about all the deaths that happened on social media and how they're still going through it and you know something happens with AI and they're trying to address it but I think the caveat is always because it's training and depending on what it's training on I I don't know if they can ever and maybe this is the the scary thing is can they really cap every approach to something negative like that in a AI system

[Dave Ghidiu]: I think they'll they'll get better and better at it but I don't think you'll ever do that. And that's even true of human moderation too that it's never 100% accurate.

[Paul Engin]: Right. Yeah. I think it's uh definitely an area that maybe we could talk about in the future a little bit more um as far as the um legal aspects of it the social media and social media impact um it'd be interesting as a topic to see do the benefits of social media outweigh the uh negative effects of social media. It's kind of like like

[Dave Ghidiu]: No.

[Paul Engin]: Or maybe because maybe it builds a lot of connections the the you know you see TikTok that obviously a lot of people make money off of the TikTok shop and YouTube and so there is a whole industry that was created and there's a lot of livelihoods that were created using these social platforms but obviously there's a lot of negative impact as well and I think we'll see that through with AI too right There is a there is a I guess a level of threshold where you have to say we have to let them um train and learn if we keep doing guard rails then it'll be more difficult for them to advance their technology. So it's that that balance of how much guard rail do you put on it

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and we're seeing that play out right now in California cause they have state legislation and the White House is trying to have federal regulations less restrictions on AI so I think that's just gonna start. And we should do a podcast on social media after we do all six seasons of Peaky Blinders.

[Paul Engin]: Right. Stay tuned. Uh so um what what do you think um oh real quick I you know it was interesting you you mentioned something about you know AI because it it knows everything Have you seen the show Pluribus I think I said that right Plur It's a show on Apple TV where um this alien race like takes over

[Dave Ghidiu]: Okay

[Paul Engin]: And everybody is connected

[Dave Ghidiu]: Like a hive mind

[Paul Engin]: Yes a hive mind and I was like so like a janitor can fly any plane can do any surgery it doesn't it doesn't matter anymore like you could do a drive fly anything because it's a hive mind and I was like oh my gosh that's like AI systems.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah. Oh yeah. Isn't that weird to think It's like an allegory for AI

[Paul Engin]: Yeah but there was these anomalies of people that aren't in the hive mind and there's a level of freedom that's lost what they're saying is that and again I don't know the deep meaning of this but it just got me thinking like wait a minute are they doing are they talking about like an AI system and how it's gonna like I don't know when you mentioned that earlier I was like oh wait a minute that's Pluribus

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah. It would be cool to to live in that world though. I mean we're almost there. I don't think I could fly a plane but I could learn how to fly a plane.

[Paul Engin]: It's it's pretty crazy but I don't know um anyway I side I I sidetracked it. So um let's talk about uh how do you think people could use this um you know let's say not in education or in a like someone that is not in education what would they use it for business owner or like you know gems or uh chatbots

[Dave Ghidiu]: Sure. uh in custom GPTs. If you have a huge corpus of like say policies and procedures and you have people asking you questions I would use that or uh you might even be able to kind of approximate some AI like adjutant workflow say for human resources and and I'm not suggesting it's a good idea to screen resumes with chatbots but that's the type of activity you could do um maybe writing resumes uh with a chatbot because you can really prime it with these like you know it all boils down to your prompt. Right. Uh uh but basically anything that you are doing that is a task that you typically require AI for this is a great and you don't need that legacy information you don't need it to be recalled time after time after time then this is this is for you.

[Paul Engin]: That's yeah cause I like I said for me I think I'm gonna really start using it in regards to what are the frequent questions that people ask and start building a knowledge base around that so this way they you know they can always email me but they could always and specific to the task that I want them to do I think that's one thing that I realized that I liked it so much is because if you ask a like if you go to ChatGPT right now and you say what's the folder structure that Paul likes in this XYZ

[Dave Ghidiu]: It won't know

[Paul Engin]: Yes right so I can give it specifics

[Dave Ghidiu]: You can train on things it hasn't been trained on

[Paul Engin]: Right.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and and it would kind of be cool too and you can set it up to also be interactive so for instance you could train it on say everything we know about Abraham Lincoln all the letters the diaries everything all his autobiographies and then you can have people have conversations with Abe Lincoln which is kind of cool.

[Paul Engin]: That's really cool.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and but I would I was thinking say for your and we've talked about your capstone on this podcast before you could load it like train it when I say train it I just mean like load it up with like PowerPoints anything over the last 10 years all the capstone projects that have been submitted that have gone on to be selected and so now you have an ideation partner so you can give it to your learners and say hey this has like start ideating because it it might be able to kind of extrapolate and and kind of um make some connections there.

[Paul Engin]: Speaking of capstone we had our first capstone today and they each threw out three ideas it's gonna

[Dave Ghidiu]: All right we're narrowing it down

[Paul Engin]: That was done without a chatbot ladies and gentlemen

[Dave Ghidiu]: Nope nope it was uh free form thinking they had to step out of the room for a little bit to get some ideas but

[Paul Engin]: All right That's awesome

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah. Um so as far as um the tools we're talking Gemini with gems we're talking ChatGPT and I I just went to ChatGPT and it looks like there's a GPT section and it looks so these are all considered chatbots

[Paul Engin]: Yes so you can if you publish them it's kind of like the app store you can so you can search and you can like go through there and they're getting pretty robust uh but and and I've played with some of them and but a lot of times the I kind of like and you can't see the prompt you can't see you can't reverse engineer unfortunately so you kind of never know what you're getting although generally speaking they're usually pretty good.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah if they're up here I assume that they're being promoted as a a top chatbot or uh GPT

[Paul Engin]: Yeah And I don't know if it's popularity I don't think they're vetted anyway

[Dave Ghidiu]: Um so uh you can create your own GPTs um it seems like it'd be great for things that you have a lot of people asking questions on or um I like your idea of even making things quicker so for instance um if you frequently use branding rather than having to always go to the brand guidelines you could just upload everything into Notebook LM put it into here and then just do a search for um you know what's the logo what should I use in this situation and um it'll just spit it out so you're not doing a search for it anymore. It just expedites the production

[Paul Engin]: Yes and for the branding example is a nice example cause it's easy to apprehend but it's actually I mean that branding package for FLCC is only like five or ten pages but if you had a thousand pages searching is almost like how do you even do that but

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yeah and and I am looking at ChatGPT right now if you look at the previous ones you can actually see the ratings on them so people can rate them so there is some type of vetting for the for different chatbots

[Paul Engin]: Yeah. And there's a lot of speaking of branding like um I'm pulling up no one can see it but I'm pulling up the Heinz branding guidelines and um it's pretty extensive with 215 pages of of branding so like if you were doing work for Heinz for instance

[Dave Ghidiu]: you know in the biz

[Paul Engin]: Yeah they used to call it a brand champion so like um when we were doing work with at the time it was Red Hat

[Dave Ghidiu]: Yep

[Paul Engin]: we had to actually go through a branding course with the branding team become a branding champion so then when we were working on the content there is a branding champion that is responsible for making sure the content that is produced and it's everything when we talk about branding it's not just the visual it's it's the tone of the text it's the picture um it's the uh the logo the color the margins

[Dave Ghidiu]: The margins every there's a pretty it's pretty extensive um on a lot of these things and so um you basically have built a a brand champion uh chatbot

[Paul Engin]: That's what Yeah

[Dave Ghidiu]: Um but very cool. uh so I think that's all the time we have today uh I think we've uncovered a lot of areas that we're gonna have to talk about in the future um but uh my name is Paul Engin.

[Paul Engin]: And I'm Dave Ghidiu if you enjoyed today's conversation be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Let's be careful out there folks.

[Dave Ghidiu]: And share it with a friend colleague until next time stay curious stay connected and thanks for looking through the immersive lens with us. This episode was engineered by Jeff Kidd and or Hugh Lard I don't know if he's still in the booth but I saw him there earlier today

[Paul Engin]: Yes they they've been both helping set up the uh I think the quality is getting better on the uh setup here so um very excited because we're recording at the Finger Lakes Community College podcast studios located in beautiful Canandaigua New York in the heart of the Finger Lakes region offering more than 55 degrees certificates micro credentials and workforce training programs.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Thank you to the FLCC global worldwide headquarters of public relations and communications marketing and the FLX AI hub.

[Paul Engin]: Excuse me if you're eager to delve into a passion discover exciting and immersive opportunities at www.flcc.edu. As part of our mission at FLCC we're committed to making education accessible innovative and aligned with the needs of both students and employers. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Finger Lakes Community College. Music by Dan from Pixabay. This is the Immersive Lens.

[Dave Ghidiu]: Always That is the Immersive Lens. That is Yeah


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