5 Questions on Deploying AI When Producing Events with Brandt Krueger, Senior Production Manager, EideCom

Brandt Krueger is the Senior Production Manager at EideCom and the Event Technology Correspondent for Smart Meetings Magazine. With over 25 years of experience in the events industry, he has spoken at events and conferences all over the world, has been published in numerous magazines and websites, and is consistently ranked among the most influential people in the events industry.

Fuse: What is ChatGPT and how does it work?
BK: ChatGPT is essentially a chatbot with an enormous volume of information to pull its responses from. While it’s the brand name that has stuck and become shorthand for this type of service, it’s important to note that alternatives are available from a number of different companies, including Google (Bard) and Microsoft (Bing). The “GPT” part stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, meaning it’s been “trained” on millions of pages of data and “generates” completely new responses based on its training.

What are its limitations?
Large language models, and generative AI in general, are limited by their training data sets. ChatGPT 3 was only trained on data up to 2021, so if you ask it about something recent, it’s probably going to either tell you it doesn’t know or, worse, it’ll just make something up. “Hallucinating” is a problem with these chat-based models, and they will confidently tell you things that are completely wrong or fabricated.

Chat GPT is text-based. Are there image-based AI apps as well?
Yep. Dall-E and MidJourney are a couple of the more famous image-generative AI, and many are already working on generative AI video.

Can you share some examples of how event organizers are utilizing ChatGPT for their events?
One of the things that works really well is to give the model your own data, and then use ChatGPT to summarize or analyze the data. This is great for things like website summaries of sessions, writing learning objectives, etc. It’s also great for overcoming “writer’s block.” Ask it to write an article for you, and while it’s not something I would ever turn in, it’s a great way to get ideas and get past staring at a blank page.

OK, here’s a follow-up question: What is the most unique way you’ve seen it used?
Will Curran is using it to auto-generate personalized welcome messages for his Evenprofs Circle community, and we’re using it to get ideas for new stage sets.

As an event producer, how do you deploy Chat GPT?
It’s still mostly in the “playing around” phase, but we’re learning more every day about how to use it. We’re playing around with automation, connecting it to live internet searches to expand its training set, using it to summarize brand voices, generating scenic renders, etc. It’s mostly just fun at this point, which is the best time to experiment!