'Ghostwriter' in the machine: Integrating AI into work and life
GeekWire
GeekWire
4.8 • 127 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
Software developer Patrick Husting is excited about the potential of generative AI to transform daily work and life, but he's also cautious about the role of big tech companies -- and he sees an opportunity for independent operators such as himself to unlock the potential of artificial intelligence for users across different platforms.
Husting is the developer of a new third-party add-in called Ghostwriter that lets users query OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a Word sidebar and watch content generated by the natural language chatbot unfurl directly in the document they’re drafting. It's available for Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, and other Office products coming soon.
Husting, a Seattle-area business leader, serial entrepreneur, and software developer who worked in Microsoft’s consulting business in the late 1990s. He came up with the idea last fall when he was using ChatGPT for writing assistance, and got tired of cutting and pasting, and switching between windows.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What are the implications for the world, for all of us, for human communications? If we essentially |
| 0:08.3 | have ghost writers speaking for us or writing for us, where does humanity go in that? I'm |
| 0:16.0 | wrestling with this question as I'm dealing with all this. I'm writing a LinkedIn article. |
| 0:20.4 | It's going to be like my second one I've ever written on this subject. |
| 0:24.5 | Wait a second. |
| 0:25.4 | Are you writing it? |
| 0:26.4 | Really? |
| 0:27.8 | No. |
| 0:28.6 | 50% of it actually came from Ghost Rider. |
| 0:32.6 | You copy. |
| 0:44.3 | Hi and welcome to Geekwire. I'm Geekwire co-founder Todd Bishop. We're coming to you from Seattle, |
| 0:48.6 | where we get to report each day on what's happening around us in technology, science, and innovation. |
| 0:53.2 | What happens here matters everywhere. And every week on this show, we talk about some of the most interesting stories in the news. |
| 0:55.3 | Lately, it's been a lot about AI, and we're going to keep talking about AI. I'm fascinated by this. |
| 1:01.7 | Our guest is Patrick Houston. He is a serial entrepreneur, software developer, and equestrian, |
| 1:08.5 | who gets to pursue a lot of his passions through software development and technology. |
| 1:13.2 | Patrick, it's great to have you back on the show. I think it's been just about 10 years. |
| 1:17.4 | It has been 10 years almost to this day. It's shocking. I can't even remember what we talked about |
| 1:23.4 | the first time you were on. You were with a company called Extended Results at the time, if I recall correctly. Yeah, that's correct. It was such a meaningful interview. I don't remember |
| 1:33.2 | either. I'm sure it was something very newsy and popular at the time. It was not something called |
| 1:40.5 | Ghost Writer, which we're going to talk about today. This is an add-in that you did |
| 1:44.6 | for Microsoft Office, integrating chat GPT into Microsoft Word. And I want to spend a lot of time |
... |
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