With today's episode, we are talking about a Hot Topic right now, which is AI if you haven't heard about AI where have you been, have you been living under a rock because AI is taking over to the point that everyone's a little bit worried about it but in the marketing world and in the business world, it is going to be invaluable as the years progress. Already we are seeing integration of AI tools into businesses, into content creation, into marketing, and let me just be clear on what AI is in case you've never heard of it, and that is artificial intelligence. Don't worry, we're not talking about the level of I Robot yet or anything like that where we've got robots but we are talking about tools, algorithms, programmed things that help us to do jobs. It's not in the form of a humanoid robot or anything like that; it's just as a website, and it is a learning model so it will learn from the stuff that you input into it, what it turns out, and the feedback that it receives from it, and one of the most well-known tools right now is Chat GPT. There's been also a bit of controversy within their business about who's running it and who's not, but that's one of the biggest tools that there is. And what you do is you would log on to the website open.com or something along those lines, and you type in a prompt for that AI, and you say, "Give me 10 ideas for my next podcast episode," which is a very poor prompt, and we will get on to how we use AI in the right way in business because there's a lot going on.
Now I've been using AI for the past 2 years in different ways, and not Chat GPT. I've probably been using that I would guess about a year; it took off at some point last year significantly so, and there was the point where nearly everyone was trying to use it because it had suddenly become discovered. I've been using it before that, and the servers were always down. They now have a paid version as well which gives you priority if the servers are ever busy, but there have been some other ones. The ones I've used I've written down are Simplified AI, and that's all the copywriting, copy.ai as well, all for coming up with titles, descriptions, etc. Repurpose.do is another one; there's an element of the automation side to it, so it takes things and reposts things for you. And then from a podcasting point of view, I use Magic Mastery and Co-host, which are tools that improve the audio, so Magic Mastery does a lot of the mastering, it evens out the volumes. Co-host is really the Buzzsprout AI, which is it listens to the whole thing, transcribes it, and then from listening and transcribing, it gives you five topic titles for your episode, it gives you the description as well, and it gives you some little tweets, which I'm not a fan of. Like man, the show notes are not all that either. The transcript's great, and it gives you ideas for the titles, and I'll talk about how I've used AI because there are various ways. I got featured on startups talking about this as well and how it is useful in your business, but I'll be fully transparent when I first started doing a podcast. I was a full-time math teacher, and I used a blend of humans and AI.
I knew, and I had the funds to do it because I was a teacher at the time. I knew I needed people to do some stuff for me, so shout out to Lauren Wigmore who was one of the earliest editors of the podcast. It was Audio Only initially from what I remember, and she edited that before after I did it initially, but I was like, "Oh, I'm never going to be able to do this every week and do a full-time job," so she used to do that. And then once I quit my job, I was like, "I'm going to have to take that back on." Started doing that myself, but then knew I needed a little bit of assistance with the repurposing side. So shout out to Socials by Nao there who used to bless us, listen to every podcast episode, and then turn it into some great graphics. If you ever need anything like that from her template-wise, she's fabulous. But alongside that, I was still having to do everything, as you are in business, and if there's one thing that AI is invaluable for is saving you time because we are all time-strapped, whether you are running a job alongside building a business, whether you have a family life, whether you just want a bit of balance and don't want to be working all the time, AI saves you time. And this is one of the most important things that it does because it does some of the basic stuff so quickly. And I've just started using Opus, let me double-check that. Oh, it's not. It's just opos, Opus Dopro, and whatever it uses. It takes our full podcast episode and extracts clips from it. Now we're currently in the phase where we're deciding if it's strong enough to give us short clips, long clips, etc. We're sort of testing that model out really going in on that. But for now, the idea of going through and editing the podcast is one thing, and what we often do is mark it as we go to be able to then pick out points that we think are really good to have a tool do that and then do the hard work of it's already cut it for us, it's put captions over the top, and it's ready to basically download and go.
And I can go in and change it slightly if the caption is wrong or if I want to just delay or extend the start or end. It's magical, and that's the kind of marginal gains that we're talking about in terms of gaining time. I'm not just going through this podcast episode thinking can I get eight clips out of it, I'm being given. The latest one has generated 23; it's given me a score from 0 to 100 to tell me how good it thinks it is and what it thinks is missing. And quite often, it will say you don't have a call to action. Well, no, I don't because I'm in the middle of a podcast episode, but it will tell me exactly what's been said and why it's good, and it will give me the transcript of that bit too. So I could take that and make that a carousel just like Nao was doing for me initially. So I've moved the needle; I've still got plenty of work to do. It's just different work, and instead of being the person to go through and go well, I think we need that, that, and that, it gives me some options. I just click them and play them and go, yeah, I like that, and I'm using it scoring. So I'm going from top to bottom now what eight clips am I using? What am I doing to make that visually more interesting? How am I going to post that? When am I going to post that, etc. Now, AI doesn't just save you time. I know that you will be spending some of this experience on your own, especially when you're starting out, and I don't have to tell you how hard it is to come up with ideas on a regular basis for your content because you already know it. You've already had that moment where you have been thinking, oh god, I've got to come up with something else. What am I going to do here? How do I make it any good?
And the beautiful thing about these AI tools is that they give you ideas when you don't have any more to give. And quite often, you do want to create your own content; you want to come up with your own ideas because one of the drawbacks of AI is that we're all going to start to sound the same. I can sniff out a caption on Instagram that's been written by AI because it's so obvious; they love a semicolon. And you can see the structures the more you use AI tools, the more you become accustomed to what an AI structure is. So I don't tend to use it for copy so much anymore. Specifically, what I will do is use it to give me ideas for maybe an episode. So I'll be like let's go with this; right, I did put this through. No, I didn't. I could have put my ideas through Chat GPT. I'm doing an episode on AI; tell me what role it can play in the business, the problems with AI, and the way to use it correctly. And I've got mine written down there, and I think it's fleshed out enough that I don't need its help. But say I was thinking I need like one more or just for quality assurance, I could have put it through and just seen what it said. Been like, haven't included that, haven't really thought about that; maybe I'll add that in because I do have something to say on it; I just didn't remember. Or if you don't understand what it's given you, you can go explain that and see what it thinks about that. Another thing it can do is fact-check your work, but you have to be careful because it doesn't always do the best job. You almost have to fact-check its work. So come see Kamar on that one. One good thing that it can do is that when you are writing copy, we all have a tendency to write in the style that we write in, and that can come from our personality type; mine is red, which is very direct. And that's going to be helpful if I want to address red people, people that like the information to the point. But other people need other stuff; yellow people need stuff that's going to inspire them and motivate them.
And allow them to see the end goal and what that means for them whereas your blue people are going to want the detail. They want to know what they get as part of the program, and they want to know all of that. And then green people want to know how it's going to help other people and where they fit in the jigsaw puzzle piece. Now, I know that from doing marketing a lot, but if you're early in writing copy, you can ask it to improve it to be more aligned to this type of person if you want to use this profiling, and you might have other personality traits. You might say write this in a softer tone, write this in a less direct way, write this in a more direct way. Maybe you're a person that waffles; I waffle a lot. You might have noticed sometimes on the podcast I have to rein myself in. So when it comes to copy, I ask to do the same: make this more concise while maintaining the tone. It's really important to me that my voice doesn't get taken. Now, I don't just take what it gives me and then copy and paste it. I look at what I've written; I compare what it's come up with. I go, 'Oh, that's a better paragraph. Swap it across, swap it across.' So there are these beautiful things that it can do. We've also got things I don't use, but I know that people use them for. So we've got chatbots, so like pops up in the corner, you know, loads of service companies have been using those for a long time. Well, now that's there. You got booking options; you got automations, and there HR processes too, stuff that I don't know about. But AI is coming in, and from a marketing perspective, it's a no-brainer to get involved because of the time it saves.
But with every good thing that comes, there are problems, and I've already touched on one, and it's this idea—I mean, I talk about the copycat method sometimes, which is when you see something being done online and you copy it. Now, AI only learns from the information that's been put into it. It doesn't think for itself; it doesn't have opinions. It can't generate new ideas on its own at this point. It can only give you what has already been inputted to it. It has to be getting its information from somewhere. So my fear and my worry and the problem with using AI can be that you end up looking like a copycat because it only knows what it's been given, and that idea had to come from somewhere. So if you use AI and don't apply your own personality and techniques to it, then you are in danger of creating content that just blends in with everybody else, which is why I don't use AI at the top of my content creation process. I am at the top of my content creation process. I make the decisions about what goes in; I make the decisions about what we're doing, and I then create the outlines and then ask for some assistance because AI is your intern. It is not the expert. You will always remain the expert in your business, while AI remains an apprentice, an intern, someone that is learning on the job and wanting to move forward but ultimately needs their work checked, needs a review. You can't just take everything that they say."
"Some of you want to use AI, but you understand the benefits. Maybe some of you didn't even realize it was a possibility, and that's how I do things a lot quicker in my business by saving myself some time. But others of you don't know how to use it in the first place, and that's understandable, right? Because all these conversations are going on whether we should be limiting AI, whether there should be regulations, and that is realistically for the wider application of it. There are big concerns about AI-generated content that could appear to make public figures say things that they're not saying. And if you think about the sheer amount of content I have put out in my life from all the podcast episodes, I imagine that in the wrong hands alongside an AI tool, it could troll through all of my videos, hear my voice, and basically make, like they have with Taylor Swift's voice and Harry star's voice and made songs with their voice. I imagine it could basically get me to say anything it wanted because it has so much data to work with, over 110 podcast episodes of St description plus I imagine the thousands now of short videos. And they're the same clips sometimes, or they're me talking. Like what if it got hold of all of my Instagram stories? Therefore, it could take all of that and basically make me say something that I've never said in my life before.
And they are worried about that from a general election point of view and false information and literally fake deep fake, I think is what they call it, fake stuff going out there. So there is a weariness to be had around it, but at the end of the day, this is the way the world's going. This is what they talk about regulations. Now, we're working within those regulations. There's nothing at this point that we can do to stop it. Using an AI tool is not going to stop people from taking any of our content online. Those AI tools are out there, and that bit actually doesn't affect us. What we have to think about is something to consider. But every time you're putting content out there and data out there that could be picked up by AI, even if you never use an AI at all, AI is a learning model. So whatever you're going to enter in on an AI system, it can use to its own benefit. Now, it's not going to take personal details and do stuff with it. Though I would hesitate from putting any personal identifiable details on there. But what you want to think about is all the information that you put there; it's going to learn from.
And sometimes there are other people using the system, and it's going to learn the wrong thing from them because they're putting incorrect data and information in there. There was the classic account of a lawyer who used Chat GPT to prepare for a case, and it made lots of references to all of these other cases, as you do in a lawyer's case. You have to prove while in this this happened, and so we're following that. And it turned out that all the cases it referred to were fabricated or slightly inaccurate. So there there's always this way to think I do want to use it, but how do I use it the right way without sounding like everyone else? Without thinking that my identity is going to be stolen? Without making incorrect statements online?"
"And then not contributing to the last thing that I think is most important, which is the saturation of content. Somebody said to me, 'Oh yeah, well, now that we've got AI tools, you know, I just put a blog up every time and just throw it from Chat GPT.' And I thought, 'You're not doing good in the world. You're doing the world no good because I could probably type in the exact same thing you have and get the same blog article.' And then what's going to happen? It's not just the copycat thing; you got saturation of content. Where do you think all of your content that gets created gets held? On a server. Servers need to be powered; they're literally a drain on the environment. Climate change, all of that. It sounds extreme, but if you've got thousands of emails in your inbox, think carefully about what drainage that has on the world. You thought you were saving the world by saving the trees by not having it all on paper. If you've got tens of thousands of emails stored on a server, just think about the impact that's having every day that you leave it and all those extra emails that are coming in.
And the same is for content. And what's going to happen is Google's going to get used to this; it's going to go, 'Well, no, that looks the same as that because they both came from Chat GPT.' It won't know that, but it will be able to identify, 'Well, that looks the same as that, which looks very similar to that.' Down the rankings you go, whilst there's me writing my own blog post, putting it through AI to help me out with grammar, with conciseness and improving it. And I'm saying help me with keywords too, which it's not the best at. You still need a bit of manual keyword to make it quite natural. And that's going to see you go into the top. So there's these clever ways to use AI. So I've obviously shared a few as I've gone along. But here's where I use it. I've already mentioned I use it. Now, only really recently, last couple of weeks, I use it to do the clips for me. Wonderful.
I've now shifted where my attention goes. I'm not finding the clips I'm evaluating the clips, that's great, that was A1 pound task going through and finding those clips. Now AI finds me the clips, and I decide if I think they're good enough, and if I do, then how are we going to enhance this video to go out, and when does it go out, who does it go out to, rather than just getting around to cutting it and then going, 'Oh, get it scheduled, just get it out, will you?' I use it for titles. I use it for titles of episodes.
I've mentioned before that I don't have a background in marketing in the sense of a qualification. I didn't go and learn to be a social media manager anywhere. I didn't have that experience. I've done it loosely for two volunteer companies I worked for when I was in my teenagers. So I'm eloquent with the technology. I've always had an interest in marketing, but until I was running my own business, didn't have any experience directly. So I learn everything that I do on the job, and copy is not something that I have experience in either, except for my own experience of doing it. So when I was first starting out, I needed help generating these ideas and titles, and I actually don't love the ones that I come up with. Again, they put a colon or semicolon in them, and they always look a bit generic. They don't do the job well enough, but they do give me some ideas to go, 'Oh, that's an interesting phrasing that they used there, or hmm, I hadn't thought of it quite like that. I quite like that bit.' That gets the attention, and that's what I... So I'll give it the whole transcript and say, 'Give me 10 ideas,' a bit like using Buzz Sprout's co-host. I'll say, 'Give me 10 ideas for the titles of this,' and I'll look through them, and I'll go, 'They're all nah on their own. Like, they don't work, but what I will do is I'm going to take that bit there and that bit there, and I'm going to put 'how to' or 'why I' or whatever it is, and I will use the... They've done the hard work. They've given me some phrases. I am the final. I'm the editor of the newspaper. That's it. I get to decide what goes out and what doesn't, and it's not dictating it to me. It's not telling me what's best. It's giving me its best opinion. It's giving me lots of ideas, and then I go and do it.
The only way I'm going to know if it's right is by testing it and putting it out there. So you could just copy and paste it, and it might work, or you can try your own and you develop your own set of, like, 'Oh, this really works for my audience. My audience does this, this, and this.' Because AI is always going to take averages and general information. It's not going to be your specific example. Like, I know what topics... If I need to record an episode that's going to do well on single girls, guys, life, I know exactly what words need to be in it in the script, in the title, what it needs to do, what it needs to say because I did 100 episodes of... I've got enough data to see what peaks and troughs. Some of them that just... Just having the most popular episode, though, doesn't mean that it's, like, the best episode for selling or converting, by the way. It's not all about numbers. It's about being able to move people through a journey to make decisions themselves, and AI don't get that. AI is not developed enough in that sense. It is, as I said earlier, AI is the intern or the apprentice in your business. It needs training. It needs help. And it needs someone checking its work.
The last thing that I want to just mention is that so many people type in this prompt to Chat GPT, and it will be like, 'Right, my podcast is about podcasting and getting seen online. Give me 15 ideas to talk about.' Great. And it gives you 15. You think, 'Yeah, five of those are no good. Five of them are decent. And I don't know about these five.' What I prefer to do, and I've seen done online, and I literally do now is I go in, and I'm like, 'Okay, I'm going to ask you to give me 15 ideas for my podcast episodes. What questions do you need me to answer so that you can give me the titles that are the most engaging or that will get the audience's attention and rank them from the most search engine optimized down to the least?' And so it then asks you a set of questions which you then answer. Answering those questions is invaluable to getting you to think about your own marketing, the people, the intentions, etc., which ultimately ups your game in terms of you thinking about content. But then it actually answers it, and these 15 then ideas that come through again, you're never going to get perfection, but they are better. They're more specific to you. And in a world that is so crowded with content where everyone's typing, 'Give me 15 ideas,' and then copy and pasting those blogs, you are going to be able to stand out by making your content specific, by making it just that little bit more...
So one of my best-performing blog posts is 'Why You Should Stay Single in Your 20s.' I could have made the title of that episode 'Why You Should Stay Single,' because at the time, I was campaigning for the fact that we shouldn't be rushing to not be single in our lives. I don't believe that you are happier in a relationship than not. There's loads of research about it. Go and listen to the episode if you want my take on that because just coming out of the blue with that is going to seem a little bit odd. But genuinely, anyway, had I not put 'in your 20s,' it wouldn't have been searched for so much in Google. It wouldn't have ranked because I can imagine if I type in, um, 'Why You Should Stay Single,' let's do it right now. 'Why You Should Stay Single.' I'm not there. I'm not there. Oh, I am there. I am there. Let me count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I'm eighth. I'm eighth. Who's clicking on the eighth link on Google? But I am. When I type in 'Why You Should Stay Single in Your 20s,' where am I today? Because it changes. Second one. Second one. One thing has beaten me, and I don't... I don't sit there and try and be the top, but the specificity of it is what raises it. And you're like, 'Yeah, but fewer people are searching for it.' Great. We're trying to talk to a very specific group of people, not to everyone. And that's what we want to be doing, and that's not what AI thinks about initially without the right kind of prompts.
So AI is not something to be scared of. Though there are some concerns around the ethics and what can be done with AI. But really, from our perspective, our ethical responsibility comes from making sure that we don't just create content for the sake of creating content, that we need to make content that still stands out enough that we get seen, that we don't saturate the market and don't send those servers wild and have all of the impacts on the environment occurring. But using it to our advantage because you're on your own or you've got a small team, encourage them to use AI too because it's going to make their processes quicker. They're going to need to learn how to use it, to use it appropriately. And so can you and need to, but it then half makes a big difference to where your attention's going. No longer are you wasting your time on 10-pound tasks.
Suddenly, you're getting AI to do tasks for you while you're then upping your game doing the tasks. And that is going to make all the difference in terms of generating revenue in your business because you're not just doing the basic stuff that drains you. It's the hardest stuff, the 10-pound tasks. It's the stuff that takes the longest. It's the most fiddly and boring, and you get the least reward from it. But now I'm thinking, 'Oh, how can we make this bit of content really... That's a challenge for me. That's getting my creative juices going.' And I'm going right, 'How can we do that?' Rather than thinking, 'Right, what's this going to sound like?' Which is just a process. I'm being challenged to go, 'How can I take that bit of content, make it even better, get more attention on it? How is this piece of content going to be received by my audience? Is it for the unaware audience? Is it for the problem-aware audience? How am I going to really get their attention? And what do I need to be saying in my podcast episodes that I can allow all the AI tools to pick out?' It feeds everything. Now, because I'm going... I have to think carefully because it's going to pick stuff out, and I want to make sure that it can pick stuff out that's going to be good enough to get the attention of people online. It would be amazing to see what you do with AI. If this episode inspires you to go out there and try it, AI is helpful to us. It's not going to go anywhere very quickly, even if it has a regulation around it.
At least that'll make us feel more comfortable using it and the way that it's going to be used in the whole world. But it's not going anywhere, and it's only going to increase even more. So think about how it can benefit you in your business. Get out there and start trying it. And until next time, keep changing the way the world thinks one podcast at a time. See you then.