AI Was Focus of Westhampton Beach Tech & Networking Event 

At a June 24 event at Jack’s House in Westhampton Beach, attendees got a chance to nosh, network and soak up some knowledge about artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency investing and digital asset security.

Jack’s House, a stunning space operated by the nearby Hampton Synagogue, provided a fittingly contemporary setting for the event, which was part of the CryptoMonday series of pop-up tech seminars organized by Julie Lamb of NFTVIP and Cherie Christmas of Hamptons Masterminds.

The event, which was co-sponsored by Dan’s Papers, featured a discussion with crypto mavens Wasim Ahmad, CCO of Vault12, and Jim Hwang, a founding partner of Firinne Capital. The AI portion of the evening was helmed by Pete Pachal, editor-in-chief of The Media Copilot.

Pachal, a longtime tech journalist who specializes in AI these days, notes matter-of-factly in his bio that “generative AI is changing journalism, the media and creative fields” — which is a bit of an understatement given the seismic shift AI is engendering across the metaverse and around the world.

In deference to the varying knowledge levels of the event attendees, Pachal’s presentation kept things streamlined and accessible. Rather than diving too deeply into the tech weeds, Pachal stayed tightly focused on ChatGPT, a leading AI content creation tool. He detailed ChatGPT’s capabilities and offered salient tips on how to improve an AI-generated piece of writing.

Pachal began his discussion with something of a provocative question: Can AI Writing Be as Good as Human Writing?

While he didn’t attempt to directly answer the question, he did run through some of the tech’s perceived shortcomings before offering ways to make it better.

He noted that AI-written content, fairly or not, suffers from something of an image problem — that it’s often associated with poor quality and/or cheating or laziness (think of a college student using ChatGPT to write a term paper.)

Pachal also drew a parallel between AI writing and the world of robotics, which uses AI tech in a different, but related, way.

Coined by Masahiro Mori in the 1970s, the “uncanny valley” concept posits that as a robot begins to look at least somewhat human and less like an alien object, it initially elicits a positive response from most people. But when a robot’s creators start to make it look too much like a person (i.e., almost human) “people get very freaked out by it,” Pachal says. “There’s a curve in your attitude toward it that takes a sudden dip as soon as it gets close to human — because we start to notice the differences more than we notice the similarities.”

Pachal argues that it’s easy to apply the uncanny valley model to a piece of writing generated by ChatGPT. “Now that we’re noticing that it’s not quite human writing, we’re really focused on those differences,” he says.

So how do you turn a piece of AI writing that sounds vaguely robotic or artificial into something more human; something that sounds more like you?

To humanize a chunk of AI-written content, Pachal lays out a series of logical steps almost anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of AI in general, and ChatGPT in particular, should be able to follow.

First, make sure you input as many samples of your own writing into the program as you can. The more ChatGPT can scrape your own original content, the more its AI brain can emulate your style.

Second, ask it to analyze your writing style. (Whether you choose to do anything with it or not, you’ll probably find ChatGPT’s analysis at least semi-interesting.)

Third, tell it to remember the analysis, and give the analysis a specific filename that you can reference when you’re prompting ChatGPT to create a new piece of writing.

As proof of concept, Pachal shared a short description of Tesla’s Cybertruck, first as cold-written by ChatGPT, then as rewritten in Pachal’s style using the techniques described above.

The edited piece, though written entirely by an AI engine, sounded more conversational, more like Pachal, and, yes, more human.

Before the event turned to deconstructing AI, things got started with a “fireside chat” featuring Wasim Ahmad of Vault12 and Jim Hwang of Firinne Capital.

Hwang focused on basic digital investment strategies, noting that the mechanisms for buying and selling digital assets like Bitcoin or NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) differ somewhat from, say, stock market or real estate investing. But at its core, “investing in crypto is no different than valuing a (more traditional) company.”

Doing your research and having a clear investment timeline with well defined goals is a constant, Hwang explains, whether you’re buying shares of General Motors or holding a digital wallet full of Bitcoin, Ether and Solana.

Ahmad’s side of the discussion centered around how to protect the digital assets you may already own — and how to make sure those assets can be transferred to your heirs.

“Are the people who might inherit your assets tech-savvy enough to manage them?” he asks.

While it’s becoming more and more possible to invest in blockchain technology directly through large institutions like Fidelity or BlackRock, some investors still prefer to manage their assets in a decentralized digital wallet.

Ahmad points out that, should you, for example, misplace or forget your “seed phrase” (a sequence of 10-12 random words that stores the data required to access or recover cryptocurrency on blockchains or in crypto wallets), it’s almost impossible to recover your decentralized digital assets.

Ahmad, whose company supplies blockchain security solutions, has a vested interest in warning investors about doomsday loss-scenarios. Nevertheless, his seemingly obvious suggestion to keep your seed phrase away from hackable digital storage sites, and to write it down and store it in a safe place — preferably with a trusted attorney — is certainly a fair one.

But be careful.

“If you write your seed phrase on a piece of paper and that piece of paper falls into the wrong hands,” he cautions, “it could wipe you out.”