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Welcome to Amplify Your Authority, the podcast where innovative marketing meets heart-centered entrepreneurship. Join Marissa Shadrick, an award-winning international speaker, Ray Edwards certified copywriter, and personal brand expert. You'll gain insights into the external strategies for business growth and how to navigate the internal journey of entrepreneurship. Now get ready to amplify your authority in a competitive digital world. And now is your host, Marissa Shadrick.

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Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Amplify Your Authority. I'm Marissa Shadrick, your host. I'm an online marketing strategist and certified copywriter. And today we're going to talk about AI, the evolution of AI, and what that means for us as content creators. How is that impacting us? Because it's not going away, and we're going to see how we can coexist with it. So I'm going to give you a little bit of history. I'm going to give you some insights as to how you can use AI, what not to do, and some things on the horizon that you might want to look out for. AI is certainly a hot topic since the end of 2022 when most of us were introduced with ChatGPT. And it's been, believe it or not, at the time of this recording, almost two years. Now it's hard to believe, but artificial intelligence has been in the making for almost 70 years, believe it or not. And it's come to the point where we now, as a consumer, as a public, are using it and we're seeing the potential, and also we're a little nervous about the dangers of AI as well. Everything is still evolving. There's still more to come. What we see today is going to be so primitive to what we're going to see a year from now, five years from now, even 10 years from now, because it continues to evolve almost on a daily basis. You've probably experienced it seeing a lot of tools that are being released. All of the tools that we've been used to and using, they have upgraded them. There's a certain element of AI incorporated in it. This is not going away. So what do we do about AI? How do we coexist with AI as marketers? So let's go back in time. And I want to share with you a little bit about the first artificial intelligence that came out. There was a gentleman by the name of Joseph Weissenbaum, and he was born in 1923 in Berlin, Germany, and he and his family fled from the Nazi Germany in 1936. He was a significant figure in the early days of computer science and specifically in the field of AI. Now he joined MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, and he's best known for developing a program called ELISA. Eliza was a computer program that could mimic human conversation by using pattern matching. Now Eliza's most famous script was Doctor, which would imitate a psychotherapist by reflecting statements back as questions or affirmations. So if someone would say something like, I'm not having a good day, it would reflect back by saying, Why are you not having a good day? If you said I had an argument with my husband, it would say, Why did you have an argument with your husband? Well, he's unreasonable. Being unreasonable can be difficult and it would reflect back and forth, not really giving any new information, but it was able to pattern match and then respond accordingly. Now, moving forward, there was another type of AI that came into the forefront on television. Watson AI became a competitor on the show Jeopardy and was competing against the two champions of Jeopardy. Now, this was a novelty, but what's strange was that this AI program, Watson, actually won. Now, this was a significant milestone because AI was now processing a large amount of information in real time. Now, moving forward in 2016, you might have seen on YouTube or on the news a humanoid robot by the name of Sophia. Sophia was created or developed by Hansen Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company, and Sophia became one of the most advanced and well-known humanoid robots in the world. Now we've been interacting with a type of AI in the writing world. For example, a lot of the writing tools will predict what you're trying to write and fill it in. Or we can do spell check or grammar check. Those tools are there in a lot of the word processors, and we didn't think too much about it. And then of course our phones came out with face recognition and more tools that are amazing that we use every day, but don't think of it as AI. Then came ChatGPT at the end of 2022, and that's when the dam broke. Things have not been the same since 2022. This was really the beginning of the public being aware of the potential of AI, artificial intelligence, with the way ChatGPT was able to output content. So this got everybody excited, and people were using ChatGPT or types like it. There have been many tools out there. It can be overwhelming to try to keep track of all of them. Some of these are going to be obsolete after a certain amount of time because more tools are coming out. So, what does this mean for us as marketers, as content creators, as perhaps authors, podcasters? What does it mean for us? So I'm going to try to break it down for you, and I've got some notes here I'm going to share with you. So I'll first start by saying that artificial intelligence, say ChatGBT, is not just a tool like other tools that we've purchased in the past. It is different. It is artificial intelligence that is continuously learning. It is learning and taking whatever content that you create, the prompts, and trying to understand you and what you're trying to produce. So it is constantly learning. It's constantly evolving. It's not like a static tool that we've used before for productivity. So it's very, very different. One of the things I will say is whatever tool you use, make sure you check the settings and check the privacy status. So whatever you input will stay private and whatever's output will stay private. Many of them are turned on so they continue to do research and understand how people are using them. But if you want to maintain privacy, then I would suggest turning that off so the privacy setting is on. The next thing I will say is do not use AI to produce content 100% generated by artificial intelligence. That content is not yours. You can't claim it as your own content. You don't have the copyright for it. So be very careful in the way that you use AI. Now there's benefits of using AI, and I think we can't have our heads in the sand. We have to see how we can use AI in its present state to improve our productivity without compromising the integrity of the content that we put out. We want to make sure we stay true to our values, true to our mission, but we can use AI tools to shorten the time it takes to produce content that we're already creating. One of the things that I noticed is all of a sudden there's been this like influx of content, people producing stuff more so than before without really thought or strategy behind it, just thinking that more is better. Whatever you were producing before, you can probably do it faster, and that will give you that time for that high touch or that personal touch or more deeper connections and building relationships. So use it as a tool to help you save time. So I have five tips for incorporating artificial intelligence in your everyday workflow. Obviously, the time saver is a huge one. You can streamline your ideation, your content creation, any uh posts like social media posts, your emails, articles, books, but it has to originate from you. So one of the practices that I did early on was collect some of the content that I had already written that was 100% me, and I gave it to AI to be able to analyze my writing, understand my tone and my voice, and I always start with a draft that I've written before I consider any output from AI and use it as a way for it to catch where there's gaps, what you left out. You can go back and then put that in, have it help you to be able to maybe put it in a sequential order, but it all comes from you. So it can save you time in the content creation. Number two, it can simplify repurposing content as well. For example, if I have a podcast that I produced, I can take the transcript and put that into AI and have it help me produce an article based on the content that I already created. So it can help us with our repurposing. Then I can take that and ask it to help me create social snippets to either lead to the blog or the podcast. So I can repurpose much easier now because it has my original content and I can shape it in whatever way I want. I can expand on it or I can make it very succinct and short, even one lines or two liners. Number three, it can analyze your content. So if you're creating something, say you're creating a course, or even website, or any type of project, it can help you improve the quality of it by letting you know what has been omitted or what you need to add, or areas where it's not clear. It can help you by almost critiquing what you're already writing so you can go back and improve it. So it can analyze your content. You can give it more input and give it templates or guides or standards so that it has something to be able to use to critique your information. Number four, it can create content ideas. Now, what I suggest if you have the paid version of Chat GPT, for example, you can start with keywords, which I recommend that. Start with keywords, and then you can literally create a chart with Chat GPT if you have the paid version where it will create topic ideas based on keywords, and it will give you variety. Literally, you can create about 125 ideas with just a click of the button. Now that's a time saver for titles that you can create for either articles or podcasts or social media. That's a huge time saver. And now you can do that. You don't need a large team. So many people that have a large team, they either had content creators or they had graphic designers and you they had website designers and they had all of these things. But now, because of AI, we have a team just by being able to learn how to use AI efficiently, effectively, and ethically. The last point I want to make is that of course AI now generates images. So DALI is one of the ones, but you can also go to ChatGPT and it has other types of tools that you can use. And I tried one of them in ChatGPT. I didn't go to DALI, but I went to this other one in Chat GPT, and I was able to create some designs, not at the first draft at all, because the first one wasn't very good. But I was writing an article and I was telling a story about a farmer buying a pony for his daughter, and it was a copywriting principle in story form. And I wanted to have some illustrations. So the first one was very cartoonish, and then I gave it some more feedback. It got better. The seller of the pony, I wanted to create an image of a woman talking to the farmer about the pony. The first image was okay, but I wanted it a little better. And then the second image was a disaster. It gave me an image of a woman, a real sexy-looking woman that I thought this is inappropriate. I don't need that. And then about the fifth time, it came out with an image that worked for the blog post. And then I wanted an image of the farmer with the little girl, because he was buying this pony for his little girl. And I wanted an image of the three of them: her, the father, and the pony. And I wanted her hugging the pony. Well, the first image it produced, it was the farmer with the little girl with a pony head. I just like I cracked up. It was just so funny. Here's this little girl with a head of a pony. And I thought, no, no, that's not right. So you can see as I'm explaining this that it's still learning that we're still in the infancy of all of this. But we have Dali that also produces text to images. We have Midjourney that does the same thing. And now, if you've been hearing the news, there's the new Grok 2. Now, if you don't know what that is, it's also a way of creating images from text. XAI is the company. This company is led by Elon Musk. You might have seen some news on it, but he is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. So you can see that the race is on. People are trying to develop all these AI tools. What I want you to remember is the goal of your business is to serve people. If you can use an AI tool to help you free up time to serve those people, that's a good use of your time. And I would recommend just focusing on one, maybe two AI tools, no more than that. Don't try to keep up with all of them. It can be so overwhelming. There's so much activity going on now, but it can save you some time. The other thing to keep in mind too is with the use of AI, people are going to want to know what's real and what isn't. Now, if you follow my recommendation and it originates from you, it is your content, but it's helping you shape it and improve it. So you're not getting it from the internet, right? It's your own content. But there's going to be more issues later on where we're going to have to disclose how we create content. It's just coming. I know there was a speaker on social media marketing world that was talking about this. You know how on our website we usually have a disclaimer in privacy and terms of condition. There may come a time where we need to have another tab that explains our disclosure of using AI tools where we share how we use it. So our audience knows and we're totally transparent on how we use AI. That's something that I've been thinking about putting on my website so people know how I use it, especially since I'm a copywriter. So life as we knew it is changing. And to completely say, I don't want to use AI, I think what's going to happen is those that are using it are going to be able to work more efficiently, more effectively, as long as they maintain integrity, that we're going to end up eating their dust. So we need to figure out where and how we can incorporate it in a way that again stays true to our values, serves our community, helps us save time, but without compromising the ethical practices. So these are some of the things to be thinking about. The turn as far as how AI is going to continue to shape our lives, I don't even know if we know in its entirety. I know that every industry is incorporating some form of AI. Even physicians, I mean, it's here. And so there's going to be more programs, more things available for every industry. So this unfortunately is not going away. It is something that's going to continue to evolve. And like I said, by the time someone listens to this podcast episode a year from now or five years from now, this is going to be so out of date. That's why I hesitate to talk a little bit about AI. But I think it's important for you to understand the evolution of it and the impact it has on us as content creators. We can be responsible users. It's no different than money, right? Money is not evil. It's the use of money and how we use money. It's the same thing with these AI tools. If we're going to use it, and chances are most people are using it, maybe in secret, maybe not, but they're using it. How are we going to use it? How are we going to be authentic and share transparency on our website to let people know the practices that we have in our business? So that's what I have for you today. Don't be alarmed by all these AI changes that are going on. It is here. I really think that we can use it in a way that's going to help our business, help those people that we serve without compromising our values or our business standards. So until next time, take care. Bye bye.