SPEAKER_01 0:34

If you've been using AI to write captions, draft emails, and just knock out content faster, that's not a bad place to start. However, the rush to use AI for those quick tasks is the very reason why we're using AI wrong. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. We're going to talk about the ethical way to use AI in this week's podcast episode. Stay tuned.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

From burnout to breakthrough.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Welcome to the Amplify Your Authority podcast. I'm your host, Marissa Shadrick, and today we're going to talk about a loaded topic, and that is AI use. So we see a lot of different views, different perspectives. Some people love AI and other people hate it. And what I'm going to share today is just what I've seen evolve in the last few years, especially last year with the adoption of AI. We had a lot of people dig their heels in the ground in 2024, don't want to use it. And there was resistance. And all of a sudden they started experimenting and testing, going, oh wow, I can really produce some things pretty quickly. And 2025 was really the year of testing and playing kind of in the sandbox. And what did it produce? Well, it helped us do a lot of things faster, but there was a consequence to that. And now we have to look at AI differently and see how we can use it to improve the bottom line. And that's create more clients. So how do we do that? So in this podcast episode, let's see where AI has taken us, how we can improve so that we can begin to serve our clients better and get more clients and not burn out and use it in a way that's going to support us and not hinder us. So we see the promise of saving time. That was the big attraction, but AI isn't really a productivity tool. It sort of felt that way in the beginning because we were cranking out things much faster and we saw the magic of words appear on our screen. And that was kind of compelling and fun. But we soon realized that the output wasn't the greatest, that it was just taking things from the internet and mixing it up and giving it to us. And chances are somebody else said the same thing on some other post. And so we saw a lot of m-dashes, we saw a lot of delve and dive and a lot of adjectives in a lot of posts. And it began to create this similar rhythm on posts. So that's why I mentioned in the beginning, once you see it, you can't unsee it. You kind of notice these things and you saw the repetition. But AI isn't really a productivity tool. It's not about how fast we can crank things out, it's how efficiently we can do what we're already doing in our business and how we can use artificial intelligence, technology to improve, to analyze, to work with us. So it's not a matter of no, don't use it or yes, use it for everything. How do we coexist with AI? Because it's here to stay and it's not going away. And every industry is implementing some form of AI integration. So this is something we're going to adapt, pivot, adjust to, but we can decide for ourselves and for our business how we're going to use it. And we're going to use it with integrity and how we're going to be able to be responsible content creators and use AI in a way that is not sloppy. So the problem isn't really the tool, it's our focus. I think this pressure to crank out more and do more is always there. But do we need to lean into that? Do we have to lean into the pressure of more? Can we lean into quality? Can we lean into a perspective that you have and support it with your experience, with your skills, with your background, all of those things that bring insight? People sometimes always say there has to be a human in the loop. Well, I think the human is always in the loop. We bring AI to support what the human is doing. It's not like AI has taken over our business and we have to put a human in the loop to figure out if it's doing it correctly. We are the human. We are the person that is making the decisions and we're seeing which AI tool is going to help and support on particular goals or things that we're trying to create. So let's see what created this controversy that we have now. AI made things easier, so it lowered the bar of entry. It became easier to crank out more content. And that's why we see a lot of books being created. There's a lot of controversy around that too. But people all of a sudden realize, oh wow, I can create all these books using AI. And again, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's really up to the user and how they use AI. It's not the fact that they're using it, it's how people use it. So there could be people that use it with integrity and they use it to help them communicate a little clearer, to help them find maybe places where they were ranting or maybe didn't explain something well, or maybe repeated something they said before. And technology can help us find those things. So in a situation like a book, it helps to edit it much, much better than if we were trying to read it through over and over again. So it sped up a lot of uh production, but it also slowed down connection because we got so busy with AI tools that, you know, it takes time before it can effectively save you time. It does take time to learn and experiment and to verify that what it's giving you is correct. So there's a little bit of learning, but thing is, everybody is learning. So you're not alone. Everybody's learning, everybody's slowing down a little bit before they can speed up. So it was interesting to see that Marion Webster, the 2025 word of the year, was slop. S L O P Slop. Low quality content produced in quantity by AI. I'm gonna read just a little bit of that because I thought that was really interesting. It said Marion Webster's human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 award of the year. We define slop as digital content of low quality that is produced, usually in quantity, by means of artificial intelligence. All that stuff dumped out on our screens, captured in just four letters, slop. So it's interesting to see how we've come from trying to be more productive to producing slop. And the thing is, your audience is pretty savvy. They can tell now when it is slop. So if you put a minimum prompt and you put junk in, you're gonna get junk out. So now there's kind of like a call for accountability. And I think that's a good thing. I think we always have to be careful about the information that we put out there because it's going on the internet, it'll be everywhere. So we're producing more, enjoying it less in some cases, and the audience is noticing. So AI, again, is not the problem. It's not about bringing the human in the loop. The human should be in control all the time. You have to stick to the absolutes. Whenever you integrate anything, does it align with your brand? Does it align with your values? Does it align with integrity? Does it align so that you don't compromise your brand voice and you're able to be consistent across any type of communication or medium that you use? So you have to consider what are the absolutes, like what are the things you will not compromise on? Consider it, in other words, like constraints, right? And figure out what are those things. And I think AI has given us an opportunity to really dig deep because in order to produce good content, it wants to know a lot about your business. It wants to know about you, your business, your audience, your products. And that has forced many solopreneurs to go, wait a minute, I'm not that clear about it. What is the transformation you produce? You know, you have to answer a lot of questions to be able to have AI understand your business right down to your workflow and your lead generation strategy, all of those things so it can help and assist you. And I think in some ways, AI has caused us to pause and consider the foundations that need to be maybe tweaked and refined. And so the reframe for us would be not so much what can AI write for me, or what can AI do for me, or what tool do I need now, or this tool looks pretty fun, pretty interesting. Maybe I'll try this, maybe I'll be surprised, it'll do some magic for me. Instead of pursuing the tool, instead, a better question would be what can help me with the task at hand, with the goal I'm trying to reach? What's a simple way of doing this? Maybe I have not thought of the easiest path. Where could the bottlenecks possibly be? What resources or tools will I need to be able to make this happen? AI can help you analyze all that. When you begin to work with AI and just talk to it. And by AI, I mean you could do this with any of your tools. You could do it with Perplexity, you could do it with ChatGPT, you could do it with Claude, you could do it with Gemini. Just begin to paint the scenario. And nowadays, you know, you have the microphone. It's not always available on desktop, but most of them on the phone app, they have a little microphone. And you can begin to paint the picture of the outcome you'd like to see, the idea that you have, but you want to see your blind spots. Help me see the blind spots. Help me see, do I have to have something in place already to make this work correctly? Or if you have a course, for example, you could look at the course, and if you have modules or videos or you have structure and outline, you can ask AI, analyze what I have here in this draft mode and help me see have I left anything out? Is there something that my audience, based on the information you give AI, would need first before they can implement this? Would this provide me a satisfied customer? Or the same way with a lead magnet? You know, you can align your lead magnet based on pain and struggle of your audience. You do a little bit of research with AI and you can ask it, why is this lead magnet not converting? What am I not seeing? Is this lead magnet, is it the title? Is it the resource itself? Is it perhaps their level of awareness? Is this something that they'll need maybe down the road, but right now they need something else that is more of an immediate value for them? You you have to use AI to help you audit, if you will, things that you're doing that perhaps are not performing very well, or maybe they're performing well, but you're exhausted and you're ready to burn out. Can AI help you figure out a better way of doing it so that you have more margin? I think AI, the more I use it, I notice that it's more helpful on back-end systems than front-end content. So I'll say that again. I have found that AI is more useful on back-end systems than front-end content. Now I use it for front-end content and I do the research first, and then I create one topic that's well researched for the week, and I create different types of content, whether it's video in written form or a newsletter, and I create it for the week. But it's all the same topic, it just builds depending on which platform I'm putting it on. So I do have that audience-facing content, but where AI could really help us is in the back-end systems because it is technology, it is artificial intelligence, it can analyze, it can do deep research, it can look at what you have and give you an honest audit or critique or suggestions on how to improve something. So I think that is where the value could be, especially for coaches and consultants, for solopreneurs, because you wear so many hats, you do so much, you are everything, you are the salesperson, you are maybe the face of your brand, you are the writer, you are the content creator, you are the social media person, you're everything. And so for a solopreneur, those back-end systems are so, so important. So when you think of AI as a tool to help you analyze, improve, systematize, that is where the power really is. Because the bottom line is we want to use these new technologies to help us get more leads and get more clients and improve revenue without compromising our values and serving our audience in a way that will support them. So we're using the same tool, but we're getting different results now because we're working on the systems, we're working on the back end, we're trying to figure out what's the shortest path to this goal I have, what's the best thing that I can do with the resources I have and list the resources. If you have a tech stack, give it the tech stack and say, audit this. Is this the best way to do this? Or am I doubling somewhere? Is there a shortcut that's not going to compromise the quality? This is where technology can really help us. So organizations using AI only for surface tasks can access about 5% of what AI can really do. I mean, they're only using a little bit, right? And that's kind of where I see solopreneurs, they're using it just to create a bunch of social media stuff. And that's time that is absorbed in the week where they could be doing something else to generate revenue. So we have to assess these things and see if we can track in some way where are we spending our time? Where's the bottleneck? Are we spending too much time on social media for vanity numbers? Or are you converting and getting people to download your resource and adding them to your email list? If so, that's great. Keep doing it. You have to assess where is your time spent and is it producing something? If it isn't, you can ask AI to help you and audit and see how you can maybe do a tiny little shift. Sometimes the biggest outcomes is just adjusting something by just a little bit, and all of a sudden you get a different result. So most of us, I would say, we're not using at least 95% of the features or the power or the muscle that artificial intelligence can provide for us. We're doing surface level stuff. And this year in 2026, I feel like this is the year of systems. This is the year when people are really trying to figure out how to leverage AI so that it improves our return on investment. And that could be money or that could be your time, right? And so we need to focus on this this year. This is where I feel people are at. They're focusing on the back-end systems because they saw what happened last year, right? And engagement went down because people, once they see it, you can't unsee it. They start realizing, oh, this is just fake stuff. This was just cranked out through some AI tool. It's really up to the user. It's up to the user. It's not AI, it's not the tool, it's the user. So we have to make those decisions for our business how we're gonna use AI. And I even have on my website in the bottom, you know, where you have policy, disclaimer, terms of service, terms and conditions. I have an AI section too on how I use AI, full disclosure. So this is what's really gonna think shape 2026 when we start looking at how to use technology for the back end, not so much the front end. So the deeper question is what can we analyze? Well, let me give you an example. I have a template for my email newsletter. It's the Monday Marketing Memo. And I have a template that I use, and I created a template inside my email service provider that's kind of the skeleton. So everything has a template. And I would take a topic that I would be using probably for the podcast and other things, and I would create a little preview, a short newsletter on that topic. Now I had templates and I was using Chat GPT, and I decided to pull the actual newsletter since January. So we are in March now, so about three months worth of newsletter. I pulled the analytics for each one as well, and I loaded ChatGPT with it and I said, analyze this, and I think I might have added it in Claude as well, and tell me what's working well as far as the open rate, click-through rate, all of that, and tell me how I can improve it or what's missing so that I can have not only a better open rate, although the open rate was pretty good. Click-through rate wasn't so great because I really didn't have too many things I was having them click to go to. Most of the time, everything is right there on the newsletter, but I did want to do that. I did want my readers to begin to click through and read content maybe on a LinkedIn newsletter or maybe listen to a podcast. So it gave me suggestions and I reviewed that and I said, this is doable and this is actually a good idea. And so I took AI and I said, knowing what you know now, here's the template I had before. Help me improve this template so that I make sure I include these suggestions for newsletters moving forward. And that's when I took it into Claude and it gave me a template that I could use as a skill inside of Claude. Now, skill is like an expert. It's an expert that you create and you can call upon it, so to speak, right? You don't really call it, but it is very intuitive to know what it is you want. So when I have research and I put it into Claude, I can say I want to create my weekly newsletter. And once I just say that, it knows from context to use that expert, that expert I already created. And then it will generate the newsletter with my point of view, my perspective based on research on what I wanted to share for the topic of the week. And so this is where you begin to leverage AI. It did a couple of things. It analyzed what I had before, it suggested improvements, it recreated the template, and I was able to take the template and create a skill inside of Claude. So now this expert, which is called Skill, can now take the information I give it every week and give me a draft for the weekly newsletter. So this is where the AI can begin to help you, but the topic needs to originate with you. The research needs to be done, the perspective needs to be there. Not everything that I find on research do I want to talk about because I'm going, ah, that doesn't apply to my audience. They're not going to care about that. So I have to filter through some things. And one thing I will say about research, make sure it's current research. Just ask it to give you research from within the last three months to six months because you might end up with something that's really old. And right now, old can be a year because things are moving so fast. So that's one of the things that I did recently, and it improved everything. So that's what I'm talking about improving. So here's three ways to use AI to analyze, right? To give you data or ask you questions so it can improve what you're doing. Systematize. This is where you begin to systematize and you ask it to build a process or a template that you can reuse. And then it gives you the opportunity to decide, to use it to think through some problems, or maybe not even a problem. Maybe you're at a crossroads, you're not sure which way to go, and you need kind of the pros and cons. Both sides. So you can use AI as a thinking partner, as they say, and think through the pros and cons. Give it, you know, a little bit of background, context so it understands. And when you use Claude, it will ask you lots of questions before it produces content. So it will almost to an annoying point ask you tons of questions, but that's a good thing. But if you're on something like Chat GBT, you got to give it some pushback. And you got to say, well, why did you say that? Where did that come from? So it just depends on which tool you're using, how you're going to interact with it. But they're very, very similar. And so you don't really need more tools at this point as a solopreneur. You need to figure out which tools work best for you for your business, depending on what it is that you do, right? And the bigger question is always is this the best way to do it? Can you analyze? Can you audit? Can you help me research this? Can you suggest maybe even maybe even a different tool that I can use for this? And even within a tool, you have options and features that you might want to ask an AI, which one of these should I use of these features? So there's a lot that you can do on the back end. So why does this matter? Okay, very quickly, I'm going to share why this matters. Why should we go to all this trouble? It's been going okay. Do I really have to do an audit? This feels like a lot of work. Well, you know, we can we can do the work when we know it's going to improve something. And I think last year we were able to see the potential of what AI could do so that it will give us the tenacity or at least the want to to go through those seasons when it's a little bit hard to get things really clear with the tool that you're using, because we saw last year the potential of what AI can do. And so that belief that it will be better can carry us through maybe something that you're working through or some frustration you're going through, because it's not always smooth sailing. Sometimes you get frustrated because it's not the output you wanted. And so you go back and you try to tweak things, especially if you're creating templates and things like that. But you know that in the end, it's going to be stronger, it's going to be better, and you're going to serve people well. So while this matters, your audience is developing what researchers call AI suspicion penalty, right? They're disengaging from anything that feels automated. Example, LinkedIn. You make a connection or someone invites you to connect with them, and immediately you get a DM with a pitch that is automated. They just sent you a connection request, and as soon as you accept it, you get a DM with a pitch. So that is automated. And so that's something that as soon as I see that, I unfollow them or I unconnect because they don't even have a relationship with me yet. I don't even know who they are and they're already pitching. That's what I mean. That kind of stuff. I know you're not doing that, but I'm giving you an example. And another reason is because it reduces engagement. We already know that across the board. Everybody says that it reduces engagement. The percentages are all different. So I'm not going to give you exact percentages, but we do know it does reduce engagement when people suspect something was generated by AI. Trust is something that we're trying to develop. We don't need anything that's going to break trust. So trust is an asset, especially if you're a personal brand and a coach and consultant. It's really important. And speed can't replace that. It can't. So trust is important. So for solopreneurs who are the brand, it's a personal journey between you and your audience. So we need to maintain that integrity with them. Your audience doesn't need more content from you necessarily. They need you, they need your voice, they need your perspective. So you can show up and share it. They might not agree with it, but they know it's you. Just like this is me. This is not an AI simulation or a clone. This is me. And you can tell because sometimes I'll make a mistake or I'll say something twice or whatever. If it's AI, I probably would say it smoothly and perfectly, but it would not be me, but it's me. And this is my hair, and these are not my lashes. So whatever's fake here is just my lashes. The rest is real. So what to do differently? Stop using AI to produce more of the same faster because it may not be the right path for you. If you're trying to get organic reach, that might not be what's going to work. So is it producing something? Is it working for you? Then maybe yes. But if it isn't, see if AI can help you analyze that and see if there's a better way for lead generation. And then start using AI to help you make better decisions and to systematize some of the things that you're doing. And remember, your audience wants you. So whenever you create content, they want to hear your voice, they want to hear your stories, they want to see you on video, they want your point of view. So it's totally okay to show up real, raw, and just be yourself. And it's fine. So one action you can take this week is find one thing that you're doing on the back end or something maybe that you're working on right now, and just ask AI: is there a better way to do this? Is this the best use of my time? Is it producing something for my business? Is it generating leads? And really analyze one thing that you're doing and see what AI can come up with. I want to just share that I do have a private membership. It's called AI Lab for Solopreneurs, and we use AI in an ethical way. And I show people how to use AI, whether it's Claude or whether it's Gemini or Chat GPT. It really is how to communicate with artificial intelligence, but to grow your business. So it comes from a solopreneur for solopreneurs. I have a marketing background, copywriting background. And so we focus on strategy and some of the ways that you can use AI to yes, help you with those things that are taking a lot of time, but also strategically as well. So if you want to check that out, you can go to marissashatter.com forward slash community. I will say the price will be going up in April. Right now it's like $37, pretty sure, $37 a month. In April, it will go up to $49. And then later in the fall, it'll bump up again because we're doing more things. I'm giving them more prompts. There are custom GPTs, there's graphic templates, there's mini courses, there's a lot there that you can access. And you can come to the live coaching calls or you can watch replays. But it's great to just come as a community and you can ask questions and I can look at what you're working on and help you and give you some recommendations as far as what you should do and how you should implement AI. So AI is only as strategic as the person directing it. Pointed at captions and it writes captions. Pointed at your business and it builds systems. The tool hasn't changed, but the question you bring to it can change everything. So if you like this podcast episode, I would love it if you would rate and review it. And if you're watching on YouTube, I would love it if you would subscribe. Until next time, take care and I'll talk to you soon. Bye bye.