TCC Podcast #335: Navigating AI in Your Business with Paul Roetzer

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
AI Writer’s Summit
Connect with Paul on LinkedIn
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM

Full Transcript:

Kira Hug:  When it comes to AI, it’s hard not to wonder, as a creative person, if we’re losing something or if we’re unlocking a whole new level of creativity. In today’s podcast episode, we cover the three questions we need to ask ourselves as creatives, and we dive deep into the world of AI and its applications in the business world. Our guest, Paul Roetzer, host of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Show and founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, shares his insights on how AI can be used as a tool to increase efficiency and solve business problems. Paul shares how his business uses AI for podcast transcription, summaries, blog post creation, and social media content. And naturally, it’s impossible not to talk about the importance of responsible AI and how it affects our future and society. We also dive into how we can get excited about AI as creatives and accept it as part of our businesses and our lives. And yes, that intro was written in collaboration with ChatGPT because we’ve got to walk our talk and start experimenting with these tools. Now, let’s get started.

Rob Marsh:  Okay, so this part of the podcast is not written by ChatGPT. It’s just me talking about the Copywriter Think Tank, that’s our mastermind for copywriters and other marketers who want to do more in their business. You’ve heard us talk about this before. If you’ve been thinking about joining a mastermind and in particular, the Think Tank, now is the best time to do it because we have a retreat coming up in the first part of June. We also are planning a retreat overseas in London coming in September. Members have free access to both of those, plus a whole slew of other things that we do, including one-on-one coaching from Kira and myself on how to accomplish bigger things in your business, whether that’s stepping out on stage, creating a new product, building a podcast or video channel, or maybe you’re building an agency, a product company, even if you just want to become the best-known copywriter in your niche. Those are the kinds of things that we do in the Copywriter Think Tank. To find out more, visit copywriterthinktank.com, watch the short video, and then fill out the application so we can just chat and find out if the Think Tank is right for you. Okay, let’s kick off our interview with Paul.

Kira Hug:  All right, so Paul, I think this is a great place to start, just individual conversations the two of us have had with our kids. My son, he just turned eight. When I mentioned to him that a lot of copywriters I know are concerned about chatbots taking over their jobs and that’s why I wanted to start this podcast, he immediately got teary-eyed and said, “What’s going to happen if they don’t have a purpose?” and followed immediately by, “Does this mean I can’t be a writer?” which was really moving because I didn’t even know he wanted to be a writer, so I was like, “That’s a win.” I mean, there was a tear, so I was like, “I was not prepared for this. I don’t really know how to talk about this with him.” I heard you had a similar story with your nine-year-old or a child of a similar age.

Paul Roetzer:  Yeah, my daughter was ten at the time. I actually have a nine-year-old son, he wants to be a video game developer, which is a whole nother story about AI, but my daughter wants to be an artist like her mom because my wife was a painting major and she’s an artist now. And so, in the summer of 2022 when I got access to DALL-E, the image generation tool, I actually debated whether or not to show it to her because I anticipated her reaction to be like the reaction your son had. And so, I decided I was going to show it to her and explain it.

She knows AI. She understands how it works probably better than most business executives. I sat her down     and said, “I want to show you this new AI for artists.” She just gave me that eye roll like, “I don’t really want to see this.” I said, “I think it’s really important that you understand what it’s capable of, and so I just want to show you one time.” She said, “Fine.” I said, “Just give me something you would want to create,” and she said, “A fat fluffy unicorn dancing on rainbows.” And DALL-E in eight seconds, generated six illustrations of unicorns on rainbows. She looked at me and walked out of the room and didn’t want to talk about it.

And so for a month or so, we did not talk about it. And then, I was building the presentation for my Marketing AI Conference keynote that was going to be in August of last year, and she came out and sat on the back patio with me. I said, “Can we talk about what you felt when I showed you that? I’d like to talk about AI and creativity in my keynote.” She said, “That’s fine.” And I said, “Okay, well, what did you feel?” She said, “I don’t like AI like you do.” I said, “I don’t like that it can do art like you and mommy. I don’t like that it can write like me. I’m just trying to figure it out so I can help other people in their careers understand what it means and figure out what to do.” She said, “Okay.”

So then that night we’re laying in bed and she said, “You know what I don’t like about that AI thing is that it’s stealing people’s imaginations. It’s going online and it’s learning from people’s photos and drawings and paintings, and it’s stealing their imagination. I don’t ever want my artwork online because my imagination is what makes me me, and I don’t want it taken from me.” So yeah, that was my tears in the eye moment. You’re like, “My goodness, that is a profound thing to think about.” I think it’s important as we go into this conversation for people to realize I am not an AI researcher, traditionally from a technology standpoint. I’m not a machine learning engineer. I’m a storyteller by trade. I came out of journalism school, and my family is full of artists and want-to-be developers, and so it’s a real impact on my future and my family’s future, and I’m trying to just figure it out and help other people figure it out.

Kira Hug:  What would you say to her or someone like her who feels a similar way in regards to our imagination and how we can still have this imagination and how we can think about it in a new way?

Paul Roetzer:  Where I landed was a couple of things. I wrote a post not too long after that, or right before that I guess, that said, “There’s three main questions we have to answer in our careers, and creatives in particular: what will be lost? What will be gained? And when? So if I’m an artist or if I’m a writer, I’m going to lose something. The AI is going to do parts of what I did before. But I may unlock whole new realms of creativity, whole new realms of the ability to produce things maybe I couldn’t even do before. When is it going to happen is the real key.” I basically accepted that AI was coming for every knowledge and creative worker. All we had to do now was accept this and figure out what it meant and what could become possible with it.

And so that led to us basically saying, “AI isn’t going to replace us as writers, but writers who adopt AI will replace writers who don’t.” And so I think it’s just our guidance and where I’ve landed overall is pretending like this technology isn’t here and isn’t affecting us is not the right path. I understand why there’s fear, and I understand why in some cases there’s anger and denial. I have friends that are like this, I get it, but it’s not going to do you any good. What we’re seeing today is the very, very early versions of what this is going to be capable of doing, and so it’s really important that people just embrace the fact that this is where we are and it’s where we’re going to be going, and we need to figure out ways to enhance what we’re capable of doing as creative professionals with it rather than trying to resist it, it’s not going to work.

Kira Hug:  What did your acceptance process look like? Did you just get it quickly and shift, or was it a gradual process for you over time?

Paul Roetzer:  I mean, I’ve been studying AI for 12 years, so I would say it’s probably been gradual for me, and I would also say it’s probably ongoing. There are some days when I don’t like it. I will say, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of this stuff about how I use it and things, but I don’t actually use AI very much in my writing process. Only time I ever really use these tools, and I have access to six of them, is for ideation and experimentation. When I write stuff on LinkedIn, if I write blog posts or if I write scripts for my presentations, I don’t use AI for any of that. So as a creator, it hasn’t actually changed me that much, and so it doesn’t bother me.

Now, as someone who runs a company with a content team, it has transformed how we create content. We infuse AI into transcriptions, summarization of transcriptions, summarization of posts. It’s everywhere within our content process. But I would say from a writing standpoint, I have very much accepted and it hasn’t been hard. I haven’t figured out the artist’s side of it honestly yet. I don’t know the impact it’ll truly have on people like my wife who don’t really care to use AI. She’s a pure artist, and I don’t know that she’s ever going to want to evolve. I think that’s good. My daughter is absolutely on that path. She has no interest in using these AI tools.

Kira Hug:  She hasn’t come around over time?

Paul Roetzer:  No, and I don’t know that she will. I think that’s okay because I also think that there’s going to be a paradigm shift where we’re going to have so much AI-generated content that people are going to crave… I actually wrote about this on LinkedIn, that I think people are going to crave authentic human content even more, and they’re going to want to know that something truly came from humans and that it was unscripted and it was uniquely human in terms of their emotions and experience that went into it, their points of view. So I think that there’s going to be a place for that, but I think if you’re looking at it from a business perspective and how do we compete, that’s where you’re not going to have a choice. But if you’re looking at it as, “I’m an artist and I’m just going to make my paintings because that’s what I do and that’s what I love, and people will buy them or they won’t,” then you might not need to choose to use AI.

So I think that’s where I’ve landed, as it’s going to be different for different people, but I’m still trying to understand the overall impact it’s going to have.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. Could we talk more about the pace and the speed involved because I feel like that’s something where… I don’t consider myself an early adopter, but especially listening to your podcast and just with ChatGPT recently, I was like, “Okay, get on board. Go full force.” But everyone hits it at a different time. Can you speak to us as service providers and creatives where this is our job, how soon do we need to get on board? Because it feels like we don’t have as much time to just sit here and think about whether or not it’s a good idea. It feels like we just need to jump in, otherwise, I don’t even know what’s going to happen at that point.

Paul Roetzer:  If you get paid to create content, you have a very short window to get on board, I would say. The reason I say that is because before ChatGPT, so November 30th of 2022 when ChatGPT came out, the people that were paying you to create content probably didn’t know what AI was. And so there may have been copywriters who early in 2022 were using Jasper and Grammarly and Writer and all these other tools, and they were being more efficient with what they were doing, and they were still creating great outputs and people were paying them for it. But those people probably didn’t know that you were able to do your job more efficiently. There’s no hiding that now. So if you’re a copywriter and you’re charging, say, by the hour or by the word, I, as the person who might hire you as a VP of marketing, a CMO, a C-whatever, I know for a fact that that content can now be created instantly, versions of it, maybe not as good as what you or I feel we could create.

What I say is it democratized access to the power of words is what happened with ChatGPT. And everyone is aware of that. So everyone now knows that AI has the ability to create at minimum drafts, at best full articles that need light editing. And so if you’re a copywriter being paid to do this, the people paying you are aware that the cost to create that content has plummeted. That’s a challenging model.

For people who don’t know my background, I owned a content agency for 16 years. So not only am I a writer by trade, I owned an agency. I sold it in 2021, but we created content to grow people’s audiences and leads. I look at it now and say, “My gosh, if I still ran a content agency, what would we be doing right now? How would we pivot?” I think if you’re a copywriter as a profession, you have to get in and start playing with these tools yourself right now if you haven’t already. They’re affordable, in some cases they’re free. You got to go experience it. Listening to me talk or you talk isn’t going to do this for anyone. You got to just get in and do it for yourself and then figure out the impact it’s going to have on your career.

Kira Hug:  But what are some things we can do because it sounds like we need to rethink the pricing model and how we’re positioning the pricing? So maybe it’s more about the value we’re providing rather than tracking hourly and even presenting an hourly rate. Is it more about thinking about how we’re positioning ourselves and even calling ourselves AI marketing experts and just owning that title and coming in? What needs to change so that we can stay relevant and attract those clients who do get it and understand the space?

Paul Roetzer:  It could be a mix of all of those things. I would say these are raw thoughts because, again, I don’t sit around analyzing this as a business model all day long like in my previous life. But what I would say is there’s a couple of thoughts here. One is I think proactively addressing the fact that you can now produce more content for the same budget is a starting point. So to just have a conversation with your clients and say, “Listen, these new AI technologies are giving me the capability to do so much more in the same or similar budgets. We’ve had this wishlist of things you’ve wanted to create or things I’ve thought that would be great for us to write for you for months or years, we can do it now. You don’t have to change your budget, we can actually produce more value for you in the same budget.” So almost just proactively address the fact that it costs less to create it, but don’t cut your budget, go do the wishlist of things that have been sitting around there. So that’s one thought.

The other is going back to this idea of more human content. I think brands and marketers, publishers are going to come around very quickly to the fact that everyone can create content with AI. And at the same time, it’s still going to be very hard to create human-driven content, meaning interviews, true points of view, podcasts, live events, newsletters with strong editorials. People are going to want to hear from the people behind the brands more, and so that stuff AI isn’t good at. I would focus on the elements of copywriting and storytelling that the AI cannot do, like go figure out, “Who do I need to interview for this story? We’re writing this article, who are the experts on this topic?” and go out and interview those people and then tell the story with quotes from them. AI’s not doing that.

Again, you have to dive into yourself and see where the limitations of the AI tools are to start realizing like, “Oh, okay, so it still can’t do this part of what I do. How do I accentuate that? How do I create a greater perceived value for that capability with my clients or the company I’m at, or whatever it may be.” Again, just thinking out loud, I guess, in a couple of ways I would approach it if I was doing copywriting for a living.

Kira Hug:  And maybe shifting from, “I’m your content writer” to “I’m more of a content strategist.” Even just changing your title and showing up differently where it’s like, “Let’s talk about the big ideas, and then I have these tools that can actually execute way more than we need.” But I wonder if titles need to change. I think it was on your podcast where you said you wouldn’t even hire someone if they said they weren’t testing tools, if you had an interview with them. You wouldn’t hire a writer if they said, “I haven’t actually tested ChatGPT yet.” So I’m wondering, should I actually just own it and say, “I’m an expert at this,” because no one has gone to school for this, so maybe I can claim it, we can all claim it? I know that also triggers the syndrome for a lot of writers and creatives who are like, “I don’t want to own that,” but it feels like we have to own that and lean into it.

Paul Roetzer:  The way I look at not just copywriting, but advertising, social media, email, whatever the domain is within marketing’s umbrella or communications umbrella, my feeling is the people who are the practitioners are the best people to be testing and learning the technologies, because you know what your process looks like today, what goes into doing that activity, you can test the tools and say, “Okay, wow, once I have this, I can cut out these three steps or these three pieces, become more efficient.” And so I think that writers are the best people to be figuring out what is the impact of these tools. But you have to do it through trial and error yourself and constant experimentation, because as you said, the tools keep getting better and they’re going to get better at a rapid pace, so you have to just stay on the forefront of it.

The brands, the marketers, they’re not going to be able to keep up with every specific aspect of AI’s capabilities. And so if you own, “I’m going to stay close to language models and where these writing tools are at in their capabilities, and I’m going to bring that expertise either through services, through education, through social media shares like on LinkedIn,” just own it. Again, you don’t have to even pretend to be an expert. I’m not an expert on AI. I don’t view myself as an expert in AI. I view myself as someone who is immersed in it and is trying to figure the story out every day, and I’m sharing as I’m going. I think that, again, going back to the more human, this infallible part is “I don’t know exactly where this is going, but here’s what we’re doing to figure it out,” and a lot of people gravitate to that like, “We have no clue. We’ll just listen to what you’re saying.”

I think you can do the same thing in writing. It’s like, “Hey, I haven’t figured this out exactly, but I tried these three tools and here’s what I thought,” or “I did this use case, and here’s how… ” That demonstrates comprehension and confidence over expertise, I would say, and I think that’s what we want to be able to do.

Kira Hug:  You said it’s maybe a short period of time before… I don’t know your exact words, but there’s not a lot of time to make this shift for writers. And so what are some other things they could do other than experiment, get in there, figure these things out, immerse yourself, but if I’m like, “I’m listening, I get that the game has shifted for me,” what else in my business could I do to not survive, because that sounds dramatic, but just to make this shift?

Paul Roetzer:  You got to find the trusted voices to listen to. Even for me, I’m trying to stay at the front edge of where this all goes. In my past 11 years, 12 years of studying this, you had time. You’d read a book, you’d read a paper and be like, “Okay, so in two years maybe we’ll be here.” Now I’ll read something on a Tuesday and be like, “Oh my gosh, this may be out in two months.” And so, there’s this rapid learning, understanding of the application, and then trying to gauge when is this actually going to happen?

I just recently wrote this thing called World of Bits, and it was like I connected some dots and realized what was happening next on a flight to San Francisco. It all came together in my mind. And rather than sitting on it for months and really thinking about it, I just sat down on a Saturday and I was like, “I have to figure this out,” and I just forced myself to write. Zero AI in the process because to me the writing was the critical thinking that required me to figure out where it was going. And so I have to go through that process as a writer. That’s how I figure things out, is I write them. And so I can’t go to the AI and be like, “What’s going to happen with World of Bits and marketing and business?” ChatGPT would maybe give me something, but I wouldn’t have connected the dots myself and seen where it all went. So I think that part of writing is still so critical. But my point is you need to find the people who are the ones out doing this work in copywriting.

They’re the ones that are reading the papers and following the influencers and trying to connect the dots. You need to either be that person yourself or you need to identify who those people are and stay very close to what they’re sharing publicly through Twitter, through LinkedIn, through or wherever they publish their thinking. That’s how I do it now. I mean, it’s just a collection of research papers and influencers and people on Twitter who once you know what they’re doing, you can follow them, and connect dots, but it’s the only way to do it, just continuous learning, I guess.

Kira Hug:  Your podcast is a great resource for that, so you are that for me.

Paul Roetzer:  Thank you.

Kira Hug:  Are there any other resources that are top of mind that you would recommend for copywriters, content writers? I mean, they could just listen to your podcast-

Paul Roetzer:  Yeah, I mean the podcast-

Kira Hug:  … that would be a great place.

Paul Roetzer:  And the Writers Summit, which I know you’re familiar with. But we have a Writers Summit coming up, a virtual one and that actually is the exact reason I created it. December of last year I was thinking about all these questions and I’m having these conversations. I came out of journalism school, so I was having conversations with the journalism school and the heads of communications. I was getting inquiries from friends who are writers and past clients and things. And so I’m thinking, “Wow, I have no idea how to answer this for people. I don’t know what it’s going to do for careers. I don’t know what it’s going to do for editors. I don’t know what the new career paths and titles are going to be.” But no one was asking these questions publicly, and I was like, “We need a format fast to do this. We can’t do an in-person event in nine months and slow play this, we got to go now.”

And so we said, “Let’s just launch a virtual event. We’ll take a risk financially like maybe nobody cares, but maybe it’s going to take off.” I mean, we thought we’d get 500 to 1,000 people. We were at 1,400 already, and there’s still quite a bit of time at the recording of this podcast before the event actually occurs. So I think there are a lot of people with the same questions, and I’m hoping that that will create not only, “Here’s where we’re at,” but my hope is that we’ll get enough people there that can engage and connect with each other and maybe the people to follow will actually emerge out of that community in a way.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, definitely, and I plan on being there. How can we deal with the noise? I’m just thinking about what you said about the pace is so quick now that your podcast comes out once a week and it’s like I almost want more of it because so much is happening in between. I think it feels really easy for me to get lost in the story about searching and falling in love, and all the fun stories that are so fun to talk about with friends, but I feel like it’s really easy to get lost from the big picture and what actually matters and what doesn’t matter. So do you have any advice as far as how we can understand the big picture and not get distracted by all the tools that come and go and all the stories that emerge from those?

Paul Roetzer: I mean, the only thing I can think of is once you have your small group of people you’re going to listen to and follow, and maybe you got a couple of newsletters and a couple of podcasts and then a Twitter feed or something, there’s just, “Okay, here’s how I’m going to stay in the loop,” to me, the ongoing experimentation is the answer. You’ll figure it out for yourself the more you’re in these tools. Let’s say you follow OpenAI and Cohere and Anthropic, and I know there’s a couple of other major players in the language model space that are building the models that are powering all these AI writing tools, you can go to Jasper and Writer; follow those companies and you’re going to hear the updates they’re making, “Oh, we introduced this capability and this capability.” But you are going to actually be able to jump in and test those things and say, “Okay, how’s this make it different?”

To me, that’s going to be the way to stay at the forefront of this, is to continuously test the technology yourself and become comfortable trusting your ability to assess that, I guess. So yeah, I would keep the voices limited. It’s like what I do, everything to me is how well you curate your sources. So Twitter is invaluable to me because it’s where I get 95% of my information-

Kira Hug:  Really? Okay.

Paul Roetzer:  … through curated lists. So I have my news list, my AI list, my sports list, my science list, whatever. I have a politics one that I try and avoid because it just drives me mad. But when I want to understand a topic deeply, I go, “Fine,” and say, “okay, who are the sources I trust?” And then I put them into a private list usually, and then that is it. That is, if something happens in AI and I look and think, “Wow, that’s a big deal,” I’ll go to my AI feed and say, “Do they think it’s a big deal? What are they saying about it?” And then I’ll scan that and be like, “Okay, cool, this validates what I was thinking” or “Wow, I hadn’t thought about that perspective. It actually changes how I’m thinking about it.” That to me is the way to do it, if you find the few sources you trust, curate them however you do it, whether it’s through a collection of emails, newsletters or Twitter, whatever, and then just stick to that.

And then it expands as the people that they talk about expand. So if you find that, let’s say, you follow me and I’m sharing something someone else is saying about copywriting and AI, boom, “Okay, cool, that person influences Paul, I’m going to add that person to my list.” That’s how I do all of my ongoing research and planning.

Kira Hug:  All right, Rob, well, you were not in this interview with me, so why don’t you kick this off. I’m curious to hear what stood out to you.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, a couple of things actually stood out to me. Well, you actually asked a question, you’re like, “Hey, it’s not really kicking out the kind of content that we need to be worried about,” and immediately Paul’s like, “Actually, it is. It is capable of doing emotional content. We can’t assume that ChatGPT in particular, but other AI tools as well, can’t already do it and certainly in the next iteration or two that AIs won’t be able to replicate most of what copywriters are doing.”

We’re seeing a lot of people in our inboxes on the internet talking about things like, “Okay, it is a tool, but it’s not going to replace writers.” Writers using it may replace writers who are not using it. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. But it just hammered home how important it is for us to get to know these tools, what they’re capable of, and how to use them because they are really powerful. Just what we’re seeing over the last few weeks, what Sam talked about in the… Sam Woods did a training for us in the underground, and what he talked about and showed us how to do has really shifted my perspective on the capability of these tools, how important it’s for us to get to know them, to use them, and not necessarily to fear them, but be really aware that if we don’t take them seriously they do have a really good chance of impacting the work that we do, the jobs that we are able to take on.

Kira Hug:  Paul stressed the importance of this change happening. There’s only a short window to get on board, and so I think that we stress that in the conversation. This isn’t something that you could just sit on for a while. If this is a part of your business model and this is how you get paid, you need to really dive in and figure these things out sooner rather than later. But yeah, I was also, I guess, a little surprised because in other conversations, it sounded like the tools weren’t quite ready to tackle persuasion. And even after using the tools more, I’m surprised at how it pulls in pop culture. I was like, “Well, at least we still own pop culture. There’s no way to pull in all these references and make these funny aside comments about movies,” but then recently it’s like the pop culture references are showing up when I use ChatGPT. So definitely more advanced than I think we realize until you start using it regularly.

Rob Marsh:  The conversation that we also had or that you had around art with his daughter using the tool or not using the tool and this fear of art. I’m seeing a difference between what AI does visually, so with things like DALL-E and some of the art generative tools and what it does with words. I think the biggest difference is maybe the story that’s involved. As I was thinking about, “Okay, if I’m going to buy a piece of art, there is art that I’ll buy just because I like it. There’s not necessarily anything super valuable about it.” But then there is a level beyond that where it’s like, “Hey, I really like this particular watercolor because it was painted by an artist who is well known here locally or has done something similar somewhere else.” There’s a story that starts to develop around it.

And then when you think about famous art that collectors are paying millions of dollars for, it’s not because the art is necessarily amazingly beautiful or the best art around, but it’s because it’s got this great story. It’s this piece that could be hanging in the Louvre or it was painted by Van Gogh or somebody else. It’s the story that we start to pay for, and AI art doesn’t seem to have a story to me. Now, that could change, and maybe there are people who value AI art. But it got me thinking, a long time ago, there was art that was painted by gorillas. It sold it. I think you can probably buy it for 20, $30,000 for these paintings. It’s not amazing art, it’s just color smeared on canvas, but there’s this story that it was painted by a gorilla, right? You’re paying for the gorilla story, not the amazing art.

I wonder how that’s going to impact art created by AI. Whereas, words don’t always have the same story. Anne-Laure mentions this when we interviewed her a few weeks ago, about how are humans going to be able to differentiate human-made, handcrafted copy as opposed to AI copy? There’s probably a story to be worked out there that will work for some people, but it’s harder to tell the difference the story that a copywriter wrote it or that an AI wrote it. If the purpose is fulfilled by the copy that’s written, that story’s a little harder to talk about. So anyway, it’s something interesting to think about as I was listening to you guys talk about art, words, all the impacts that it could have in on our business.

Kira Hug:  I think that goes to what Paul is saying about thinking that people are going to crave more authentic human content in art like you said. But even just the written word, will that matter to people just to know that this was not created or this email was not written by ChatGPT, it was written by a human. I was thinking about just The Whale, and I wrote in a recent email how that’s such a moving movie. Would I feel differently if I knew that it was written by AI and ChatGPT? Or compared to knowing that Samuel D. Hunter, this writer, wrote it, would I feel differently about it? I feel like I would, but it’ll be interesting to see how it shows up in the art space. Definitely, in business, I think there is space to show off authentic human content as well, but it is a little bit fuzzier than with fine art.

Rob Marsh:  For sure. I mean, clearly, at least right now, there are things that AI can’t do. It cannot create an actual true personal experience. So if you are showing up as you’re selling something and you’re using your personal stories, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a personal story with all the emotional content, but it’s not necessarily true. You’re basically just telling it to write something, and it might have the truthiness about it, but it’s not an actual true story, so those kinds of things may be different. But it’s doing a really good job mimicking voice, showing up with different emotive words so it can connect in ways that I think a lot of people who are not really using it right or using it as well still haven’t found that yet. And so they’re saying, “Oh, it’s not a threat,” but it is. I think it is something we definitely need to figure out.

Kira Hug:  I love that we kicked off the beginning of the conversation talking about our kids, and I just want to hug Paul’s daughter just hearing her concerns about AI stealing people’s imaginations. I just understand that on a deep level. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that since the conversation and just thinking with my kids about how I can maybe help them tap into their imagination through using these tools. And so, one way… we’re playing with this, it’s still early, but I found this really cool AI tool for creating fashion design. It’s CA-LA, CALA. And really, you have to bring your imagination to the tool. It’s really clear when you’re designing clothes that you can’t just sit there, it’s not going to come up with the idea for you, but it can create anything for you. And so it’s been really fun to inspire my daughter and son to come up with designs and bring something to the table, and then we can use these tools to actually put it into action and create something from nothing. And so I’m just trying to flip it around, especially with kids, to think of the positive sides of using these tools because there are definitely concerns that kids have.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I don’t have little kids who are concerned about it. My kids in high school and college are starting to play around with the tools and chatting back and forth, and they’re finding it fun in ways. We’ll see how they end up using it in their lives and careers. So far, I don’t have any writers that are living with me, but maybe someday one of them will change their minds, so we’ll see.

Kira Hug: Well, they can use it for their essays and homework submissions-

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, we’ll see.

Kira Hug:  … if they wanted to.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. So one other thing that… Well, a couple of things, but one thing that Paul said that I really didn’t like, and I want to mention this, but Paul mentioned that one of the ways to sell our expertise with ChatGPT or AI tools is that we can do more with the same budget. While that may be true, we may be able to produce more volume, more content, more blog posts, whatever, as I think about it, to me that seems like a really bad way to sell our expertise with AI. Of course, there are going to be clients out there looking for volume, but to me, the real power in this is how it’s going to help us do other things in our jobs better. We’ve talked with other people about how it can improve creativity because you can go through a larger number of ideas, you can test different things like that. To me, the way to sell using AI as writers is, again, less about, “Oh, I can do more for you for the same price,” and more about, “I can do better for you for the same price.”

Kira Hug:  Yeah, I mean, I think his point is a good point because this is the way business owners are going to be thinking. He is someone who hires or could hire a copywriter to help support his business, and this is how he’s thinking. You bring up a good point too, like better not more. I think it could be some combination of the two. But if there’s one takeaway of just this is how business owners who are aware of these tools will think, so you will need to be able to address that because they will want more. So how will you position it so it could be better and not necessarily more if you don’t want to deliver more?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I agree with that 100%, they are going to be asking for more. In some uses it can help us produce more, but we’ve got to be able to tell that story in a way that we’re not just turning ourselves into content farms and we’re producing all of this generated content that’s not better than what’s already being produced out there. I mean, today, copywriters complain about content farms. There are writers out there that are not AI that are able to generate blog posts for pennies for the word or $25, $10 whatever for a post. Obviously, ChatGPT and other AI tools take that to an extreme. The problem is still there. It needs to be better and not just more.

Kira Hug:  If you can add more time because you’re able to use these tools and do a little bit more or get the content that you promised completed, you can focus more on thinking strategically for your clients