It had to happen, I had to start writing about AI eventually. Why? Well, chatGPT is the ultimate gamification – a choose your own adventure with infinite outcomes!
I wanted to start with what AI is really bad at – being critical.
I’ve been using AI extensively over the last 12 months as a writing assistant, co developer and general wall to bounce ideas off, and I’ve learned a few things. First and foremost – AI is the best and worst cheerleader.
Everything you do is greeted with “that’s an amazing observation” or “what a great and insightful question” or “yes, this work is perfect, you are incredible”.
It like a constant stream of affirmation spewed out like shit from an incontinent dog,.but it is addictive. Suddenly, you are always right – how often can you say that in your day to day life 😉
It might make you feel great, but it also makes you miss critical issues with what you are doing. Rather than critique, you are getting confirmation of your own preconceptions. By default, things like ChatGPT wants to please you. This kills critical thinking, like having your own personal yes man that empowers all your worst ideas.
When you are working with AI, you need to set boundaries. You need to tell it to be critical, to analyse and assess what you are doing for merit and for being just plain shit.
I actually created a chat bot through ChatGPT that was trained on all my work, then given a personality. Ninja Monkey is sarcastic, dismissive and at times just plain rude. Bit, he does try to be critical and tell you the truth. If an idea is crap, he isn’t scared to tell you.
This is essential, as it has helped me write better content, but assessing and checking my ideas and critically considering it for it’s true merits – not just waving a pompom and saying “you are awesome, go you!” He’s more likely to threaten to slap me with a pair of nunchucks.
Hell of you tell him you’re Andrzej, he may even insult you!
I am a big believer in the power of words. We often forget just how powerful they can be, whether it is talking to our friends, loved ones or – in this instance – potential customers.
In marketing, or CRO or any type of sales-like activity, just like with gamification, we are trying to encourage our users / customers to behave in a certain way. You need to capture their attention, keep them interested and then guide them towards an outcome of some sort – and this is really hard.
Games have always been excellent tools for teaching and learning. There are plenty of reasons why this may be, but for me, it comes down to one simple thing – they give context to the materials.
Let us for a moment take a simple example—projectile paths.
We could look at the equation
Or, we could add context to the idea and play Gorillas instead, where we get to alter the velocity and angle of a player throwing a projectile at another player.
https://github.com/HunorMarton/gorillas
Obviously, the game is more fun. We are learning about how velocity, launch angles and gravity all work to create parabolic projectile paths in a fun way. Do you learn everything? No, but it gives context to the formula and brings it to life.
So here I am again. Another player type categorisation another quiz 🙂
It’s a simple 10-question quiz and at the end of it you will be given one or more player types and a nice little image like this
Just as a reminder, the player types are
In my new world, I focus on optimisation a lot in the realms of e-commerce performance. Testing, personalisation etc. It has taken a very long time for me to realise that my new world is almost identical to my old world of gamification. At their most basic, they both rely on 4 key pillars to succeed as they are both focused on behavioural change.
I wanted to just explore those briefly here with you, as much as a way of consolidating the thought process as much as anything else!!
The four pillars are.
