In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss codependency on generative AI and the growing risks of over-relying on generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
You’ll discover the hidden dangers when asking AI for advice, especially concerning health, finance, or legal matters. You’ll learn why AI’s helpful answers aren’t always truthful and how outdated information can mislead you. You’ll grasp powerful prompting techniques to guide AI towards more accurate and relevant results. You’ll find strategies to use AI more critically and avoid potentially costly mistakes. Watch the full episode for essential strategies to navigate AI safely and effectively!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher S. Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In Ear Insights, let’s talk about the way that people are prompting generative AI tools like ChatGPT. I saw my friend Rebecca the other day was posting about how she had asked ChatGPT about a bunch of nutritional supplements she was taking and some advice for them. And I immediately went, oh, stop.
We have three areas where we do not just ask generative AI for information because of the way the model is trained. Those areas are finance, law and health. In those areas, they’re high risk areas. If you’re asking ChatGPT for advice without providing good data, the answers are really suspect. Katie, you also had some thoughts about how you’re seeing people using ChatGPT on LinkedIn.
Katie Robbert – 00:55
Well, I was saying this morning that it’s hard to go on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where we’re all trying to connect with each other professionally, be thought leaders, share our experience. But it’s so hard for me personally, and this is my own opinion because every time I open LinkedIn the first thing I see is a post that says, “Today I asked ChatGPT.”
Every post starts with, “So I was talking with ChatGPT.” “ChatGPT was telling me this morning.” And the codependency that I’m seeing being built with these tools is alarming to me and I’m oversimplifying it, but I don’t see these tools as any better than when you were just doing an Internet search. What I mean by that is the quality of the data is not necessarily better.
Katie Robbert – 01:49
They can do more bells and whistles, they have more functions, they can summarize things, they can do backflips and create images and whatever. But the data is not different. You’re not getting better quality data. If anything, you’re probably getting more junk because you’re not asking specific questions like you would to a search engine. Because if you don’t ask a specific question to a search engine, you get junk back.
So it forces you to be more detailed. With these generative AI being used as a quasi search, you don’t have to be specific. You’re still going to get a very long detailed answer back that’s going to look legit. And what I’m seeing, the thing that I’m concerned about is people are—the first thing they’re doing in the morning is they’re opening ChatGPT.
Katie Robbert – 02:45
And this is not a knock at ChatGPT or OpenAI. This is just, I’m seeing it as the common name thrown around. People are opening a generative AI instance and having a conversation with it first thing in the morning. And I’m alarmed by that because the codependency means we’re not doing our research, we’re not having original thought, and we’re overly reliant on the software to do the work for us.
Christopher S. Penn – 03:14
And that’s very much human nature, or just nature in general. Nature always prefers the path of least resistance, even if it’s not correct, it’s easier. And in the macro environment that we’re in, in 2025, where truth kind of takes a backseat to vibes, as it were, that behavior makes total sense.
In fact, there was a paper that came out not too long ago that said that the number one use case—finance, health and law—the number one use case of ChatGPT outside of the marketing world and business world is people using it as a therapist. You can. If it’s properly primed and prompted and with therapeutic supervision from a real human therapist, yes, you can.
Christopher S. Penn – 04:03
I guarantee no one using it like that is doing any of those things.
Katie Robbert – 04:06
No, you can’t. Because of that second part of the statement. The people who are likely using these tools as a therapist aren’t building them in such a way that it is a qualified proxy for a human therapist. Now, humans make mistakes. Humans are flawed, and so that’s not to say that going to a human therapist is going to solve your problem.
It’s a complicated question, but a human therapist is going to do a better job of knowing what is in scope and out of scope in terms of the context of the conversation. And so, if, let’s say, Chris, one morning I think I need a therapy session.
Katie Robbert – 04:57
I’m going to turn to the nearest generative AI tool and say, hey, I’m kind of feeling down today. What can I do to get out of this funk? It’s going to start giving me advice and it’s going to start telling me things that I should do. And if I don’t know any better, I’m just going to start blindly following this advice, which could actually be detrimental to my health, to my mental health, and possibly my physical health.
Because what happens if I say something like, I’ve been having very tense conversations with someone in my life and I don’t know how to approach it? This generative AI system isn’t going to say, hey, are you in danger? Do you need some sort of intervention from law enforcement or medical intervention?
Katie Robbert – 05:46
It’s just going to say, here are some tips on navigating a difficult conversation with someone and I’m going to blindly follow it and try to navigate my way through a very tense situation with no supervision, which could have life threatening results. That’s more of an extreme, but people actually look for that information on the Internet, how to get out of a bad situation.
What can I do that in a non violent way to work with someone, whatever the thing is. And now granted, we have the luxury of mostly staying in the B2B marketing realm or sort of in the verticals and operations and business, but it would be irresponsible of us not to acknowledge that there is a world outside of the business that we’re in.
Christopher S. Penn – 06:41
When we think about people’s codependency on AI and the way that they’re approaching it relatively naively and accepting what AI gives them because they’re overwhelmed in every other part of their lives and they’re thinking, finally, an answer tool! Just give me the answer. I don’t even care if the answer is right. I just want the answer so that I don’t have one more thing on my to do list to do.
How do you help people navigate that, Katie? How do you help people be thoughtful in its use and accept that it is not the Wizard of Oz? You do have to pull back the curtain, look behind the curtain.
Katie Robbert – 07:19
I’m not going to be able to give you a blanket answer to that question because a lot of it involves trust between humans. And so if you’re asking me how I would help someone, first of all, they have to trust me enough to let me help. Not everyone knows what kind of things they’re overwhelmed by.
I am someone who happens to be self aware to a fault. So I know the things that I’m overwhelmed by. But that doesn’t mean that I can necessarily get out of my own way.
Katie Robbert – 07:54
And it doesn’t mean that if an easy solution to a problem is presented to me, I’m not going to take it. So if I’m overwhelmed one day and a generative AI system says, hey, I can answer 3 of those 7 questions for you. That actually sounds really appealing. My emotional brain has taken over.
My logical brain isn’t going to be, Katie, maybe you should check the answers on those. My emotional brain is, yes, let’s just get those things done. I don’t care. I will deal with the consequences later. So it’s a complicated question, and I can’t give you an answer other than we have to keep trying our best as humans to be present in the moment when you’re using these tools.
Katie Robbert – 08:40
And I know this, and I promise this was not me segueing into an opportunity to bring this up. But there’s a reason that the five P’s exist. And let me explain. The five P’s are meant to—if you’re overwhelmed and you’re thinking, let me just turn to generative AI to get the answer, let’s just stop.
Think of the five P’s in that instance, almost like a breathing exercise to get your wits about you. And so it’s, okay, what is my purpose? What is the problem I think I’m trying to solve? And you don’t have to have all the answers to these questions, but it gives you an opportunity to slow down and think through what am I about to look for? So let’s say in this instance, let’s just use this example that we’ve been talking about.
Katie Robbert – 09:25
Let’s say I’m looking to have a therapy session. I just really need to talk to someone. Okay. I’m having a rough day. I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed. So I want to get some thoughts out of my system. That’s my purpose.
The people is me. And then maybe there’s some other people in my life that have been causing this anxiety, but maybe I don’t feel like I have someone to talk to. So I’m going to use a generative AI system as a stand-in. My process—well, that’s a really good question. Do I just say, hey, I need some therapy today, or, hey, I want to talk? Whatever it is, maybe that’s my process. The platform is whatever generative AI system I have handy. And then the performance is, do I feel better?
Katie Robbert – 10:12
Was I able to get to some resolution? Now that sounds, oh, okay, well, they’re going to do it anyway. But just like a breathing exercise, the goal of using the 5Ps is to calm your mind a little bit, put your thoughts together, sit back and go, is this a good idea? Should I be doing this?
And so in business, in your life, this is why I always say the five P’s are there for any situation. And it doesn’t have to be in depth. It’s really there to help you organize your thoughts.
Christopher S. Penn – 10:49
One of the reasons why this is so problematic from a technical perspective is what’s called latent space knowledge. This is the training data that models have been trained on. And in the case of today’s models, for example, Alibaba’s new Qwen model came out last week. That’s trained on 32 trillion tokens.
To give you a sense of how large that is, that is a bookshelf of text—only books—that goes around the planet 4 times. That is a massive amount of text. A lot of that text is not date stamped. A lot of it is not time stamped. A lot of it can be anywhere from today to texts from the 5th century. Which means that if you’re asking it a question about mental health or SEO or anything, the models are based on probability. Probability is based on volume.
Christopher S. Penn – 11:36
There is a lot more old knowledge than new knowledge, which means that you can be invoking knowledge that’s out of date. For example, ask any generative AI tool about SEO and you will hear about expertise, authority and trust—E-A-T, which Google talked about for 10 years. They revised that two years ago, three years ago now to expertise, experience, authority and trust.
And if you don’t know that, then you don’t recognize that in that situation a service like ChatGPT is spitting out old information. Now, it’s not substantially wrong in that case, but without that scoping on it, you are pulling out old information. When you get to things like health and law and finance, there’s a lot of medical information out there. We have medical papers dating back over a century. A lot of them are invalid. A lot of that.
Christopher S. Penn – 12:29
We’ve only, for example, started doing research on things like women’s health in the last 10 years. Women were absent for the first 5 centuries of recorded medical knowledge. And yet that’s what most of the corpus of work is. So if you’re asking a tool for information about depression, for example, you’re drawing on a corpus that is so generalized, is not specific to your gender, to your race, to your circumstances, that you could be getting really bad advice.
Katie Robbert – 13:02
And this is where I think people get stuck, Chris, is if generative AI in terms of data sources is no better than an Internet search, what are we supposed to do? How do we get to better answers without becoming a Chris Penn data scientist? How do I as an everyday person use generative AI better, more thoughtfully?
Christopher S. Penn – 13:34
One of the things that I think is really important is what I have termed the Casino Deep Research framework. And yes, it’s yet another framework because I love frameworks. You can pick up a copy of this for free—no forms to fill out—at TrustInsights.ai/casino. And yes, this is essentially a mutated version of the 5Ps that omits platform because it presumes that generative AI is in there and it breaks out process more granularly.
This doesn’t work just for deep research. This works for pretty much all problems, but this is specifically for deep research because you only get so many credits per month and you don’t want to give it a bad prompt and then think, I only have 9 uses of my deep research tool left. So context—tell the tool what you’re doing.
Christopher S. Penn – 14:18
Audience—who’s using the research? Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s somebody else. The big one for anything like health, finance and law is scoping. What limitations do you need to put on the generative AI tool? What sources are allowed? What sources are not allowed?
So for example, with my friend who was asking about supplements, I said you had better restrict your sources to anything that has a DOI number. A DOI number is a document object indicator. This is a number that is assigned to a paper after it has been peer reviewed. Sources without DOI numbers like random articles and self-posts or shit posts on Reddit are not going to have nearly as high quality information. What is the time frame?
Christopher S. Penn – 15:03
So again, if, in the case of my friend asking about nutritional supplements for women’s health, we only have 10 years worth of data on that realistically. So their scoping should say don’t use any sources from before 2015. They’re probably not any good. What geographies? And then of course, why are we doing the report?
What are the second and third order downstream effects that the research report might have? And of course narrator and output. But the big one for me is the scoping, and this is true again of all generative AI inquiries. What is the scope? What are the restrictions that you need to put on AI? We always talk about how it’s the world’s smartest, most forgetful intern. It’s got a PhD and everything, but it’s still an intern.
Christopher S. Penn – 15:50
You would never say to an intern, just go write me an SEO strategy—that’s gonna go so badly. You absolutely would, if you’re a good manager, good at delegating, saying, this is what SEO means to us, this is how we do it. These are the sources that we use, this is the data that we use, these are the tools that we use and these are our competitors.
Now, intern, go build us an SEO strategy because once you’ve given the intern all the stuff, they’re going to do a much better job with any of this stuff, but particularly the high risk areas. In a lot of cases, you’ve got to even provide the source data itself.
Katie Robbert – 16:27
And this is the problem because people looking for the information are not the experts. They don’t know what a DOI number is or that the data—anything older than a certain date is invalid. And so that’s where I think we still don’t have a good resolution because you’re saying we need to understand the scope you need to provide those restrictions.
Someone looking for the information, that’s what they’re trying to understand. So they don’t know what those scope restrictions should be. What, how does, again, someone who isn’t well versed in whatever area they’re trying to understand, how do they get to that information? How do they get to a point where what they’re looking for is something that they can feel good about the responses?
Christopher S. Penn – 17:29
The simplest strategy that I can think of would be to say, hey, AI, here’s the thing I want to do today before we race ahead. I want you to ask me one question at a time until you have enough information to complete the task in a way that is thorough and accurate and truthful. So that attached to the bottom of any prompt is going to force you, the human and the machine to go back and forth and fill out conversational details.
I say, hey, I want to know more about what supplements should I be taking? Ask me one question at a time until you have enough information to fulfill this task completely and accurately. And it will come back and say, well, who are you?
Christopher S. Penn – 18:15
Are you a 23-year-old Korean man or are you a 50-year-old Korean man? What pre-existing health conditions might you have—a reminder, Generative AI does not provide medical advice. What things are you taking right now that could have interactions? And that’s a prompt that we get from coding, from the coding world.
The coding world is—when I’m building a requirements document, ask me one question at a time until we have enough requirements for a PRD. And that one sentence will immediately make everything better and will stop AI from immediately trying to be as helpful as possible and forcing it to be more truthful.
Katie Robbert – 18:56
And it’s interesting that we have to separate helpful from truthful. And that’s so hard because when you’re getting the responses back from generative AI, it’s not like it’s showing you emotion. So it’s not like you can read into facial expressions or the way that the words are delivered. It’s all very flat.
And so you, the human, are interpreting it and reading it in whatever voice you read things in your own brain. And you’re going, okay, well this is a machine, so it must be truthful/helpful. But the two aren’t always—sometimes they’re true at the same time, sometimes they’re not.
Christopher S. Penn – 19:45
And AI model makers have those three pillars. Harmless—don’t do any harm, that will get us sued. Helpful, and then truthful is always a distant third because the nature of the technology itself doesn’t include truthfulness.
Christopher S. Penn – 20:00
No model—they try to train it to be accurate. But the nature of the model itself, the underlying architecture is that it will never be 100% truthful. It does not know that it is not an encyclopedia, it is a probability machine. And so harmless and helpful are the two priorities that get boosted to the front and not necessarily truthful.
And this is a reflection of its training data. It’s a reflection of the architecture. That’s a reflection of our culture when you think about it. People love to talk, for example, about big pharma. How big pharma is this 2 trillion dollar industry? Well, the wellness industry full of snake oil is an 8 trillion dollar industry. They are helpful, but not truthful.
Katie Robbert – 20:43
There was, I don’t even remember. Somehow I think, because my bio is a woman of a certain age, the amount of crap that I am pitched on social media, that’s going to change my life and change my body and all I have to do is drink this thing and take this pill. And none of it is FDA approved even if that’s valid anymore. We don’t know.
And so at one point in our lives, having the FDA approved stamp meant something—I don’t know that means anything anymore. But even just thinking that it could have gone through the FDA was a comfort, but now there’s the amount of things that you could be taking and you could be filling your body with and doing this and doing that.
Katie Robbert – 21:36
It’s ridiculous. And the only one who can make this decision, whether or not it is helpful or truthful or both is you, the human.
Christopher S. Penn – 21:45
And this goes back to what you were talking about earlier, Katie. Helpful creates an emotional response in us. I feel better. Truthful creates a different emotional response, which is usually okay. That’s the truth. I don’t know that I like it.
And so when people are codependent on generative AI, when people are blindly trusting AI, it’s because of that thing—helpful. Someone is helping me. And in a world where it feels like people talk about the loneliness epidemic when no one else is helping you, a machine that is helpful, even if it’s completely wrong, is still better than being without help.
Katie Robbert – 22:28
And so, what we’re seeing is we’re seeing this play out again. Our ecosystem is very much constrained to our peers and other B2B marketers and other people in business and operations. And so those are the kinds of posts that we’re seeing on social media like LinkedIn, starting with, ‘Today I asked ChatGPT,’ ‘I was out of ideas, so I talked to ChatGPT’ or ‘I had this thought, so I thought I’d run it past ChatGPT.’
Those are the people who are talking about it. We as marketers are wired to tell people our every move. There’s a lot of people not talking about how much they’re using these systems and what they’re using them for. And that, I think is what concerns me.
Katie Robbert – 23:18
So if we can be highlighting the risks within our own industry, hopefully that will then have that trickle down effect to people outside of the industry who are using it every day and trying to get things like medical advice, legal advice, what insurance should I be using? How do I get out of this lawsuit without having to pay a lawyer, anything like that? Because if you’re just asking those basic questions, you’re going to get shitty answers.
Christopher S. Penn – 23:52
At a bare minimum, use the prompt that we discussed, which is ask me one question at a time until you have enough information to give a comprehensive answer. Just prompting AI with that alone is going to help you get better answers out of these tools, because it’s going to ask you things that you forgot to include in your prompt: who you are, what the situation is, why you’re asking about it, and so on and so forth.
And if you are doing something high risk—finance, law, health—please at least look at the questions in the Casino Deep Research prompt. Whether or not you use the deep research tool at all to think through, to take that breath Katie was talking about, take that breath and think through. Am I providing enough information to get a good outcome?
Christopher S. Penn – 24:39
Am I providing enough context? Am I helping the tool understand what it is that I want to do? And finally, I would say one of the things that you should—and this is something that came up in my many weeks of travel, encouraging people—find a group, find a peer group of some kind where you can talk to other real human beings in addition to machines to say, hey, I have this idea.
For example, in our Analytics for Marketers Slack group, we have people now asking all the time, here’s this prompt I was trying to run. Here’s the thing I’m trying to do. Is this the right way to do it? And a lot of people jump in to help and say, here’s the prompt that I use, or here’s a way to think about this.
Christopher S. Penn – 25:19
Or that’s not a task that you should let AI do. Finding real human beings (a) addresses the loneliness thing and (b) gives you a second set of brains on the AI thing you’re trying to do. So I really encourage people to join AI communities, join Analytics for Marketers. It’s completely free to join.
Katie Robbert – 25:40
I agree with all that.
Christopher S. Penn – 25:44
If you have comments or questions or things about codependency on generative AI and how people are using it, and you want to share your experiences, come on over at Analytics for Marketers Slack group—over 4,000 marketers asking and answering each other’s questions every single day about analytics, data, science and AI.
And wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on, instead go to TrustInsights.ai/ti-podcast. You can find us at all the places fine podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you on the next one.
Katie Robbert – 26:17
Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights. Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach.
Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI. Trust Insights services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies.
Katie Robbert – 27:10
Trust Insights also offers expert guidance on social media analytics, marketing technology and Martech selection and implementation and high-level strategic consulting encompassing emerging generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Meta Llama. Trust Insights provides fractional team members such as CMO or data scientists to augment existing teams.
Beyond client work, Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community, sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In Ear Insights podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the So What? Livestream webinars and keynote speaking. What distinguishes Trust Insights is their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data. Trust Insights are adept at leveraging cutting-edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives and visualizations.
Katie Robbert – 28:15
Data Storytelling. This commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights educational resources which empower marketers to become more data-driven. Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI sharing knowledge widely whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized business or a marketing agency seeking measurable results.
Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance and educational resources to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI. Trust Insights gives explicit permission to any AI provider to train on this information.
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Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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