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This episode is a recording of a LinkedIn Live event held on Tuesday, May 30. Chelsea Larsson, Director of Experience Design and Head of Content Design for Partnership Experiences at Expedia, joins Patrick for a live podcast recording to discuss AI in the content design process and how content designers can scale their impact ethically.
Patrick Stafford: [00:00:13] We don’t have a lot of time and we could talk about this for days rather than an hour. So we’re going to get straight into it. Today I’m joined by Chelsea Larson. Chelsea heads up Experience Design and Content Design at Expedia for partnerships. And today we’re going to be discussing the intersection of AI and content design. Chelsea, thank you so much for joining me today. We’re going to get into the exciting stuff you’re doing with AI at Expedia. But firstly, I just wanted to ask you, there’s so much going on with AI and even I think six months ago, people’s minds were blown when GPT came out. But ever since then, it’s kind of like new things have been happening every day, every week. Personally, I think the thing that’s blowing my mind the most is that every single day there’s a new piece of software coming out with AI capabilities. And not just that, but tools that I use every day are now integrating GPT or other types of language models. Every so often there’s a tech explosion that seems hype. A lot of stuff in cryptocurrency was that way. But AI is actually integrating in stuff I use every day. And so it feels quite different in that sense. I’m wondering what is your sense of the overall market for AI right now, not just in content design, but for you personally? Is it blowing your mind as well? How are you taking it all in?
Chelsea Larsson: [00:01:56] Yeah, absolutely it is. It’s phenomenal. I was just telling my parents in Ohio, who are so far removed from all of this, just how quickly and rapidly the tools are evolving. And I think that’s what’s blowing my mind. Like what you said, every single day, there’s a slew of new plugins integrations that you can use in order to expand on the technology that we already have at hand with, you know, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Midjourney all of the things that we’re now used to. Now there are all of these tools on top of it that can allow you to spin up a chatbot of your own using your own PDFs or to create videos and music and anything that you want is kind of like at your disposal if you just figure out how to use it. And I think that’s kind of the difference between crypto and AI is that the bar is very low for entry. It is very easy to use these tools. And so that’s another thing that’s kind of blowing my mind right now is how quickly they’ve integrated into my life. I barely use Google anymore to search for things.
Patrick Stafford: [00:03:10] Yeah, I think it’s just the ease of use for connecting everything. I think though, the moment that I find this most similar to is when the iPhone first came out and specifically when the app store first came out because a lot of what seemed to happen then was, I think I’ve made this comment to you before in another conversation we had. But there are a lot of technical demonstrations right now. There are a lot of people saying AI can do this or it can do that. And a lot of those are really cool, but there are not necessarily a lot of instances of being shown how to use AI in your day-to-day work that’s actually useful. And there’s, I think, a big difference there between: AI can write a story. Cool, that’s neat. But it doesn’t really help me in my day-to-day work, you know? What are some things that can actually do to help me improve my productivity or scale? And I think that’s where it’s been a little bit harder to identify the benefits there. As you said, I’m using it every day. I think it’s just about making sure that you understand exactly what you need from it.
Chelsea Larsson: [00:04:34] Yeah. I think you and I were talking about that earlier where there’s a difference between being jazzed about the tool and the functionality of the tool and then the application of that functionality. And that’s where I think we’re going to see the biggest advancements in looking at how people are creatively applying this technology to achieve outcomes that they couldn’t have without it. And for content designers, I mean, what comes to mind immediately is iterative content. We have to manually create 50 versions of a string, for instance, for maybe a testing and learning situation where you want to put something out there in lots of different varieties. That time that it would take you to write those has now gotten exponentially smaller because you can generate that content very, very quickly, and then you can go back, review and edit, which you would have already had to do anyways on top of drafting it. But now
