Laura Costantino: Scaling Content Design to Work with LLMs – Episode 12

Laura Costantino Laura Costantino is watching the emergence of AI in content professions from two interesting and valuable perspectives: as a content designer working on LLMs at Google and as an active participant in the social-media communities where content professionals gathers. In their work at Google, they have returned to their roots as a content strategist to manage the challenges that come with designing content at a massive scale. Through their interactions in the community, they have had the chance to hear the concerns of content designers who are navigating the new world of AI - and to inspire them with advice and success stories. We talked about: their work at Google as a senior content designer training LLMs how their content strategy background is helping in their current work the difference in working with content at a huge scale, as is required in their work with large language models how their work is operationalized in the ever-changing workflows at Google the community of knowledge sharing that has arisen organically among a variety of content crafts at Google their advice on how to cope with the rapid pace of change in the world of AI how they works with data scientists, machine-learning engineers, and other AI collaborators their cautiously optimistic view of future of the content-design profession their advice to content designers for taking a proactive and curious approach to new AI technologies and practices Laura's bio Laura Costantino (they/them) is a senior content designer and strategist working on AI and large language models (LLMs) at Google. For the past ten years, they have worked at the intersection of UX, content, and marketing for some of the world's largest tech companies. Laura developed a passion for storytelling early on and received a MA in Cinema Studies in San Francisco, where they worked as a curator for a range of film festivals and cultural institutions around the Bay Area. Outside of work, Laura is committed to mentoring people transitioning into UX and tech, advocating for content, and sharing advice on LinkedIn. They currently live in NYC, were born in Southern Italy, and speak both English and Italian fluently. Connect with Laura online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/EdgyXGC3xlI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 12. The arrival of large language models and chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Bard is creating both existential concerns and new opportunities for content professionals. In their work as a content designer at Google and through their extensive professional networking, Laura Costantino has the chance to witness the full range of work experiences and personal emotions that come with the rapid adoption of new artificial intelligence practices. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 12 of the Content and AI podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show Laura Costantino. Laura is a Senior Content Designer at Google, doing really interesting work around AI and content stuff. So welcome Laura. Tell the folks a little bit about your role there at Google? Laura: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. It's so nice to be here. Yeah, so I've been at Google for about a year and a half, but somewhat recently, maybe three and a half, four months ago, I moved from my previous team to my current team, and I am at the moment working as a senior content designer, training large language models. So that's my new job. Larry: Well, training large language models at one of the biggest tech companies in the world, that's pretty interesting, especially for folks in the content world. There's so much to ask about that. I guess the first thing I'd ask is what's the biggest change? What's the biggest difference in training a language model versus the content design work ...