[00:00:00] Stephanie: Remember our, uh, your first cell phone. Remember the ones that were like in a bag in your car? There were car phones. They didn't even leave the car. And then you had the big, huge bricks that you were like a baller if you had those. And how we look back on those and are like, oh my gosh. Or dial up internet, like in, that's 25 years ago, but like within the next five years, we're gonna look back on us with Chad g p t right now and be like, oh my gosh, we thought that was so cool.
[00:00:26] Josh: Great to have you here friend. In this episode where we're gonna dive into a subject that is just not talked about much these days, and that is ai.
[00:00:36] Josh: Yes. Artificial intelligence. I know it's probably something that you just, you know, it's, it's been a bit hidden. People aren't talking about it. It's not on your social media feeds. Every three or four posts. No, of course it is nonstop, and I don't want to just add to the mix of ai, but the reality is AI is a very, very interesting and must needed conversation in the context of web design.
[00:01:02] Josh: Is it going to replace us? Is it a friend or is it a foe? All of the questions that I'm sure you have, and it's tough to stay up and up on this with all the technologies that are implementing it. Uh, but what I wanted to do in this episode is bring somebody on who is very deep into this world. Stephanie Hudson, who is my good colleague and friend from Focus wp.co.
[00:01:24] Josh: You'll find out she's also got a couple other things in the works that she will explain in this interview, but Steph is a futurist, a visionary, and somebody who is very open to the possibilities and current integrations of ai, whereas, As you'll probably find out in this episode, I'm a little more late adopter and hesitant towards ai, and I'm not honestly too worried about it replacing web designers whatsoever.
[00:01:48] Josh: However, there are some things that are going on that it's like, wow, this changes the game. So we need to stay sharp web designer friends. And in this episode we are gonna dive into whether AI is truly a friend or a foe. Without further ado, here's Stephanie. I'm gonna follow up at the end of this episode with some links on where to head to.
[00:02:06] Josh: But before we do, make sure to go check out stephanie@focuswp.co. If you would like some help with white labeling your services for maintenance hosting and just development work. She also has an amazing free Facebook group called Focus On Your Biz. I can't recommend enough that you go check that out. If like my community web designer pro, it's, it's a paid community.
[00:02:27] Josh: If you're not ready for that, a great entry gate to that. Like a, a great place to start would be focused on your biz. It's an amazing Facebook group. Check that out. Here's Steph ai, friend or foe. Let's go.
[00:02:43] Josh: Steph, welcome back. Second time, right? Second round
[00:02:48] Stephanie: number three, Josh. Oh, this is the third round. I'm in the three timers club. How many
[00:02:53] Josh: are they? Hot dogs. See that's why now it's getting into like year four of the podcast, so I'm forgetting who's been on twice or three times. Um, so yeah, four
[00:03:02] Stephanie: years. I mean, that's impressive,
[00:03:03] Josh: pal.
[00:03:04] Josh: Yeah, we'll be coming up on four this fall. It is kind of wild. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I love the podcast. It's, yeah, it's amazing. It's fun, huh? Uh,
[00:03:12] Stephanie: pod d chat. You're in divvy chat alum. You're a divvy chat alum and regular. Um, revisit. Not as regular as we'd like, but you come when you can. And, uh, that's hit. We hit this spring. We hit um, seven years. Wow.
[00:03:27] Josh: No kidding. Yeah, I think I, I think I
[00:03:30] Stephanie: started, that's like geriatric in tech podcast agents,
[00:03:35] Josh: you know, og Yeah. To do anything these days for seven years is impressive. So that speaks to itself right there. Um, yeah, a lot of changes, lot of changes in the industry of web design, lot of wild things going on, a lot of tech, podcasting, video, podcasting, social media, all things going on.
[00:03:51] Josh: Speaking of big things in tech, ai, AI is the hot new thing. I almost didn't even wanna talk about AI cuz I'm getting so sick of seeing it everywhere. It's funny, I went for a drive recently and the license plate was uh, G P T and I was like, I just can't get away from freaking chat g p t even though I love it. Uh, so that's hilarious. I figured you and I could have, uh, a talk about AI today, if that sounds
[00:04:14] Stephanie: good. I am here for it. Like I love all the AI stuff. I can't get enough. My feeds are full, like the algorithms just know me. It's everywhere. You're a little
[00:04:25] Josh: more, um, forward thinking maybe with, with technology I tend to be a late adopter or like a mid to late adopter. I'm always a little hesitant on stuff. So with ai I'm like, ah. Even when I had Andrew on last year, we talked ai, uh, and very much like, yeah, you know, we're gonna build all websites through ai. So let's start off with that, Steph. Do you think Sure. In the near future or anytime in the near future AI are gonna replace web designers?
[00:04:53] Stephanie: Um, well, like, there's no way to actually predict that, but there is human input that is, We're human beings. If we're gonna do things for human beings, there's a human element to all of it, right? And if, if the machines are gonna be doing it, like there still is a, a story I like to tell is, um, it's, it's not my story, it's history.
[00:05:17] Stephanie: Did you ever, um, see that movie, hidden Figures or read the book? It's about, um, the team that launched. One of the first space shuttles into space and there was a, like a labor pool, they were called computers and it was a bunch of women with pencils, like they were the computers. They computed things. And in the course of this movie, they get the big i b m eye frame, eye frame mainframe, what a web design
[00:05:46] Josh: mix
[00:05:47] Stephanie: I know, right? So they get this big, huge mainframe and all, all of the women are panicking because they're gonna lose their job except for one lady. And she goes to the library and gets a book on coding and she goes and sneaks into that room and learns how to use it. And ins like the computer department of humans gets dissolved and that woman gets promoted.
[00:06:08] Stephanie: So that's the illustration that I like to give you can, you can let AI run over you or you can educate yourself and learn how to use this super powerful tool to your own advantage.
[00:06:23] Josh: That's beautifully put, Steph. And it, I honestly, my perspective is AI is great as a tool, like a, a tool in your toolbox. And yeah, it is one thing where I think if you're, if you're not proactive, there are things that people could use it instead of you, particularly when it comes to, uh, potential copywriting things, um, potentially like repeatable tasks, coding, stuff like that.
[00:06:48] Josh: But one thing that AI don't think will ever be able to do, or it'll be very difficult or a long time from now, is to be able to problem solve for clients. Because when we meet a client, there's so many variables that we have to learn about them and add our input in order to help them, like get their messaging out and get their vision out to build them a website that they like and actually work for their business.
[00:07:11] Josh: If you leave it up to a client to tell AI what to do, AI is only gonna do as good as a, uh, a potential client, you know, gives them directions for which I think that's the big problem that AI will face in terms of web design.
[00:07:24] Stephanie: I hate to bring it to you, Josh, but I don't
[00:07:26] Josh: agree. Okay. Hit me. Why and why not?
[00:07:30] Stephanie: Because it's gonna be able to process information with a, well, I imagine if you had unlimited, virtually unlimited knowledge about marketing and an unlimited capacity to remember every possible scenario that has ever happened and to be able to compute and, uh, predict, you know, like run your own algorithms in your brain and say like, if we make this change, what will happen here and run all those things.
[00:07:57] Stephanie: Imagine if you could do that with machine accuracy. Um, like it if it just asks the right questions, it can get the answers it needs to, to, um, to compute that, you know, where we're not at risk though, Josh, you and I are safe because I don't see any jokes coming outta AI that are worth anything, like humor, the human element.
[00:08:24] Stephanie: So like, hilarious people like you and I are gonna still have value, right? Because we can, even though we were just joking about how on the Divvy Chat podcast, nobody laughs at my jokes, but like, I know they're funny. So that's all that matters, right? And so far, AI, like the humor thing just really doesn't, it just doesn't do it yet.
[00:08:43] Stephanie: So I don't know, maybe that'll be something down the road, but that's one thing that I think like, uh, standup comedians are safe. Mark them safe on Facebook from ai. Okay, so I'll
[00:08:50] Josh: start working on the comedic element for all my information. But I have to go back to this, this topic of like being ai, being better at figuring and problem solving essentially for clients.
[00:09:02] Josh: Because what you still got down to there is asking the right questions. So I would still probably challenge you and, and, and saying that like a lot of times I could see that working, but the question would be, can it ever get down to the right question for clients? Like for example, earlier today I researched some, um, titles for beginning web designers.
[00:09:24] Josh: I was trying to think of like, what's the best term for beginner web designers? Is it like junior web designer, beginner starter? Like what are the best terms? And when I, my first search in Sha Gtp, J G P T, excuse me, was, um, beginner web designer terms. And it kicked out html css, like terms that I should know as a web designer.
[00:09:47] Josh: Well, what I actually meant was like, no, what is a beginning web designer titled, so I was able to figure out a better second question. So to that point, do you think AI will help clients get to the right question or do you still I don't know. I still wonder like, how is AI gonna be able to help the, the, uh, auto automotive guy who is just, he really needs some, some help and somebody who understands his business to
[00:10:10] Stephanie: get there.
[00:10:11] Stephanie: For sure. That's, that's a consultant. Uh, I mean the, the thing is that, The, the AI can do a lot of the stuff. If you can still be a guide, and I don't, I don't think like this stuff's gonna happen in the next week or whatever. Like we're, our jobs are not at risk right now. They're not. There is a few like, because there's gonna be a, there is an absolute exponential growth in like the progress that these tools are making like in the past six months.
[00:10:43] Stephanie: It is just mind blowing is the phrase that you see everywhere when it comes to ai, right? They say, uh, my was mind-blown. And it really is astonishing. The rate of increase, like there's some, uh, oh, I can't remember the name of it. There's some sort of term for the rate of progress and it's like, uh, every three years technology kind of supersedes itself or something like that.
[00:11:08] Stephanie: I'm saying this terribly, but, but with ai it's happening like, Every week and a half minutes, something like that. Ridiculous. Yeah. It's like, it's just so exponential. The, the growth that it's having and the improvements on things. That being said, that doesn't mean that the general population is going to accept it or that it's even going to be publicly available to those folks.
[00:11:30] Stephanie: I mean, we, like self-driving cars exist. They exist. It happened, they did it. It's done. It's, it's a, it's a thing, but how many people do you know that have one? Like even electric vehicles, there's not that many of those. And that's, you know, that's a computer car. But still it's like, you know, you start to talk about things like that.
[00:11:49] Stephanie: Um, however, you know, like there's so many comparisons. Like when you're, when you're in a place, you think that you're unique in a point in history. And, and we, while there are unique elements of this, there's so many patterns. So, you know, like when. Typewriters came out Well, was that gonna ruin handwriting?
[00:12:09] Stephanie: Or, you know what I mean? Or things like that. Photography came and they thought that like, painters were gonna go out of business, like artists and stuff, you know? So there's all these different levels and like, we don't even realize, like, I mean, how, how's your spelling these days compared to when you were eight?
[00:12:26] Stephanie: Cuz mine's horrible. I used to be like, I used to win spelling bees and now I have to like voice, speak words to Siri all the time to have an AI help me figure out how to spell things. When we do autocorrect, like autocorrect is turning our brains into mush, but we rely on that tool and we use our brains for other things, you know?
[00:12:43] Stephanie: So it's like we do have AI elements all around us right now. Like if you ask Siri or Alexa for things, you know, like you're interacting with artificial intelligent assistance, they're, they're really, really simple versions. Like, I don't wanna. They're not simple, but compared to some of these other things that we have coming.
[00:13:02] Stephanie: Yeah. So it's all still there, but it's, it's a matter of like how like humans aren't going extinct. I know there's all these like, scary things and who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Terminator story will come true and whatever. But, but like, if, if it's not apocalyptic, then these things are tools that human beings can use.
[00:13:20] Stephanie: And there there's all kind of crazy things about like that, that AI's gonna take over all the jobs, in which case we will then all go to like universal basic income and we all just have money automatically and we can do what we want with our days. I don't know, may maybe, I don't know about all that, but like that's a thing that people talk about a lot right now as like, so if that happened, is that a good thing or a bad?
[00:13:44] Stephanie: Like if we get, if our jobs get taken, but we just get to have money and live without working. Is that a bad thing? I, my
[00:13:52] Josh: chips down, I'm not making for sure. Yeah.
[00:13:55] Stephanie: I'm not making a political statement on that either. Yeah, I'm just saying like right now at the point we're at with ai, I think that the questions that we're asking are, are sort of small minded because we don't even
[00:14:07] Josh: know what we don't, we immediately, we immediately go to like worst case scenarios. Yeah. Terminators coming. All websites are built with ai and yeah, I have nothing to do. I definitely do not fall into that camp. I'm a late adopter of AI in, in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I'm not doing,
[00:14:24] Stephanie: you can't be late. It's still early.
[00:14:26] Josh: Well, that's true. I guess. Yeah. I guess I just mean like, uh, even chat, G P T I, I didn't really start using it until even just a few weeks ago is when I really started taking it more seriously. And it is, it is mind blowing. It really is. It's like, oh my gosh, that's
[00:14:38] Stephanie: the word. You can't help but use that. Uh, what Amazon, here's the thing for you, Josh. Like if you've got, uh, you know, like we used to hand code H T M L, and I used to, I'm, I'm a geezer, I'm a web geezer. Like, I started in 1996 making websites on Dialup.
[00:14:53] Stephanie: Yeah. All the coding. So coding stuff, it was, I had Notepad and I was just type in, like, nobody even uses Notepad for notes anymore, let alone to build a freaking website. Right. So I would type and we had to use tables to get to move things around and all this stuff, right? And so it's like, okay, well then WordPress comes along.
[00:15:12] Stephanie: Oh no, it's gonna take my job. No. Made it easier. Okay, so now we're building WordPress sites and all this stuff, and then like, oh, divvy comes along. No, that's gonna take our job. What about the, like, it's all this stuff, but it's like, instead I can now make a lot more sites, a lot better, a lot faster, so, Did it take my job or did it, uh, make it make me more productive at
[00:15:38] Josh: my job, basically?
[00:15:39] Josh: Yeah. No, I, that is such a great point. That is a very articulate way to express what, how I feel about it. Yeah. It makes things easier. It makes you better because literally the coding aspect of chat g p t in particular is incredible. Like if you, everyone listening and watching right now, if you're not using chat g p t to check your code into code for you, do it today and watch how much more powerful you would be.
[00:16:04] Josh: Cuz yeah, you don't, and you don't even need to be like, you don't have it to have a developer friend. And in some cases you may need additional help or to know what the right question to ask or the white, the right prompts to give it. But my goodness, is it awesome to step in and be like, here's all the code that's gonna work best.
[00:16:19] Josh: Boom, there you go. Copy and paste. That is an incredible. Aspect of ai, which I'm very excited about because it really gets into like the, um, I mean certain repetitive tasks, but just stuff that is more knowledge based that are almost like right or wrong things like, like there is CSS that is right or wrong in the way that if you have something messed up, it'll break sy.
[00:16:40] Josh: It's not, there's no ambiguity there. It doesn't like there is right or wrong ways to code certain things. There's different ways to go about it, but that helps where I'm still wondering like, Where ai, I think it's fuzzy to me, is kind of what you touched on earlier, you said consultants, strategy type things.
[00:16:56] Josh: Those are still in place. Like that's where I feel like, I don't know how AI is gonna, I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of ways for it to integrate with strategy and stuff like that, but yeah, as a web designer, you are about 50% a consultant for your client to figure everything out. So I just kinda wonder, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
[00:17:12] Josh: I don't
[00:17:12] Stephanie: know if, uh, the service that you're offering your clients, you know, Josh, you and I do a little bit of coaching now, when we help our, these web designers to grow their businesses and they're putting a proposal together and, and they have their proposal that says, I'm gonna build your site and WordPress and I'm gonna use these plugins and it's gonna have these many pages and it's gonna have the fava con and the this and the that.
[00:17:34] Stephanie: What do we tell them? We say they don't care about those things. They care about the results. So, That's not gonna change. Like the clients still just like, are we web developers or are we like, I'm gonna get corny here, but we're like results bringers, right? We bring people, yeah. More customers. We bring them more revenue into their business.
[00:17:53] Stephanie: We're marketers. If we focus on those elements, like, you know, you can be a code monkey all day long. The Code monkeys jobs are gonna be more at risk than those who are coming in with a consultative attitude and like coming in and saying like, how do I help you, my customer, achieve your goals by using the tools that are available to me?
[00:18:17] Stephanie: So how
[00:18:17] Josh: do you think ai, I mean, can AI right now from, I mean, you're deeper into that world than I am right now. Do you feel like AI right now can be a consultant and strategist for web design clients? Or is that still a very muddy area for
[00:18:33] Stephanie: ai? It's not. It's not there yet. Like as. Technologists, and I might use that term a little loosely, but uh, the more colloquial word that I would prefer actually is geeks.
[00:18:45] Stephanie: We're geeks, right? We like tech. We, we can adopt tech, we can handle it more so than in some other industries or some other, you know, personality or brain types, whatever. And so if we can start to learn this and use it, then we become more familiar with it and we're the ones that are able to be sort of the practitioners with it.
[00:19:07] Stephanie: So we're gonna be the ones asking it the questions for now, but I had a conversation today with our good friend Michelle Bour Bonner, and we're talking about copywriting and SEO and things like that. And I said, gosh, I would love to have a tool that, um, I said maybe we should make a, an onboarding form for, cuz there's a, when you do some copywriting for a customer, you need to have their tone of voice, you need to hear their words, you need to learn about their customers.
[00:19:38] Stephanie: There's a lot of things about their services that you just don't know. So you have to get that information from them. And there's a series of questions that you might ask, but it would be a conversation that might meander and not be exactly the same every time. Right. And I had initially said like, what if we built a form?
[00:19:54] Stephanie: You know, cuz that's how we think. We think about a website. And I say like, well what if we had an intake form that we really customized, maybe we had some, um, conditional fields. Like, if you think this, then let's go into these questions. Or if you have that, then we go this way. You know, like a choose your own ending.
[00:20:08] Stephanie: We can make some really complicated and awesome forms using gravity forms or WS form or whatever it is. And uh, so I was thinking that and then I was like, I'm thinking small minded, like we need to integrate. A chat bot into this so that the chat bot understands the end goal, which is to increase revenue to this business.
[00:20:31] Stephanie: And you can give an AI those kind of guidelines, and then you can teach them through prompting and engineering and like you put the confines on it, which is different than like, you know, so chatty PT has been trained to respond in certain ways and to not say certain things. Other tools that are out there, Bertha and all the other ones, they have different prompts that are set up where you will respond in a certain way.
[00:20:54] Stephanie: So if you go in and say, like, I wanna, um, you go into like Unha do like a, an outline, you know, prompt and you say like what your topic is, it'll deliver an outline. So it knows to format that prompt in that way. Cause it's been programmed to do that. And the same goes for something like this, like you could say, like, come up with a goal.
[00:21:12] Stephanie: And it can then, I mean, we give you a goal and you come up with a plan and then go back in and go into each of those steps and say what's needed for each of those things that can be done today, like to now, right now, we could go do that and we could come up with great things for, uh, for our customers utilizing those things.
[00:21:34] Stephanie: And it would be taking its information for the most part on like all the infor, like billions and billions of lines of code, I mean lines of text from the internet up until 2021 ish. Uh, some of them now have internet access so they can get current, like to the minute they can give you things. There's um, there's one, have you heard of auto G P T?
[00:21:59] Stephanie: No. This is a thing that you can kind of install locally. It's a little bit complicated. You have to do like a GitHub thing and all that, but you can set it up and there's a few different ones like this, but you run it on your computer and you say like, Uh, I'd like to do some, an analysis of this or that and improve whatever on my website, or I wanna do this home improvement project or whatever.
[00:22:20] Stephanie: And it will like, like let's say I wanted to, uh, build a shelf or something. I'd say, I have this space of a wall. I have this, this is the things I wanna put on it. They, you know, figure out the weight load balance and what I would need and blah, blah, blah. It can literally go like, map out a shelf, design it for you, like go look at Lowe's and Home Depot and give you prices on like the things that, like it can map out the steps that you would need to take.
[00:22:44] Stephanie: And it can say like, then you go do this, and then you have to go buy this many things and cut them to these pieces. And then you build, like, it can map that whole process out for you. Which, you know, does that mean that a carpenter's gonna go business? You know, I don't know. I'm still probably gonna hire somebody to do a for.
[00:23:01] Stephanie: I was gonna say people,
[00:23:02] Josh: yeah. There's plenty of people who are still gonna hire. I mean, gosh, those people are so high in demand. If anything, it might be the opposite. It might be like, Yeah, might be an assistant, but yeah. How so that, that's a good point too. It's like, well, yeah, you, AI could empower everything for clients as much as possible, but.
[00:23:18] Josh: The client still has to do a lot of stuff, which is where even, even just knowing prompts, knowing questions, getting their mind around like how to respond with any ai, like that is work. Yeah. That is all of work. Like, it's actually, I think, I think, um, one of the creators at Base camp years ago when AI was really starting to get more talked about as far as like, uh, building technology and sites for, for people, when he was talking about Basecamp, he's like, would've been really difficult for AI to build Basecamp as the way we have it now because there's so many iterations.
[00:23:49] Josh: So much went into it. A lot of was new. Like it wasn't necessarily all existing things. And that's one thing to remember too, is like AI is based off of existing stuff on the internet, so anything that is new, AI's not gonna, I mean, I guess it could put things together potentially, but, uh, I don't know if it would necessarily come up with new ideas.
[00:24:08] Josh: So I, I feel like there's a big risk to run too with ai, with things just being almost carbon copies of each other. Yeah. Case in point. I love using chat G p t for, uh, pod podcast titles now. I put a lot of thought into the titles to make sure they're grabby and for sure. The last episode, actually, the episode that just went out this week at the time of you and me recording was James Bernard, who, uh, we ended up titling it from likes to clients, how to use social media to, to get clients.
[00:24:34] Josh: And I had like eight different titles before that. And then I used Chat G P T and I was like, that's a great title. That's it. That explains it. But, um, Yeah, the new thing, like the, the, well,
[00:24:46] Stephanie: how did it come up with that too? Like, did you, um, what you typed in words, so now what you can do is like live case.
[00:24:52] Stephanie: There's no, no, what I'm gonna tell you is there's like, um, you could just click a button and get a transcript of your, or a AI summary of the video you just recorded. There's tools that are doing this right now. Like you just, while you're recording, it's got, uh, AI analyzing it and you can just get it and then just say like, gimme a title for this.
[00:25:13] Stephanie: And it'll just grab like, based on what you said in the thing, it'll give you a title for it too, so you can like, you can take it to the next level even. Gotcha. With all of that. Gotcha. Now is, uh, isn't AI gonna take over a podcast interview? I mean that's kind of boring.
[00:25:29] Josh: Well that's where the human element thing really Exactly. Listen to because there's also experience, like I think what we're, and one thing I meant to say too is, and I don't know what your take on this, but is the duplicate content stuff. Like I do worry about that with ai cuz if you use AI for blog posts and even, even in this case for podcast titles, I am a little cognizant of that. I try not to take the exact title every time. I might customize it, but what's your thoughts on that with like, it's a non issue.
[00:25:55] Stephanie: Uh, it's a non-issue. Not because duplicate content isn't a thing, but because if you're doing your actual due diligence and using these tools in the most effective way, you're doing it you're just, it's just that it's a tool. So you use it to generate stuff and then you have to go back through and make it human. you know, you add your own stuff, you change things, you tweak it, use it as, um, you know, you can use it as in multiple steps of the process. You know, help you figure out what to write about, help you get an outline for that topic, help you do, um, you know, any kind of research for it or things like that.
[00:26:31] Stephanie: Then it can write content for you. You go in and, and input, you know, say like, oh, I'd rather go this direction or that direction. You can tell it. Gimme something a little bit different here. That, right? So if you're working with it, rather than just giving it a task and just taking it as is, then you're not gonna run into that issue.
[00:26:48] Stephanie: Uh, but I mean, like, if you're gonna write a blog post on something like, um, how to Speed Up Your Divvy website, like how, or your WordPress website, how many posts exist about that? Like if an AI writes it, okay, well let's put that aside. Like if, if you or I write it, we're gonna have a lot of overlap.
[00:27:08] Stephanie: Like, there's gonna be a lot of similar things. That doesn't mean it's duplicate content that is like, that just means that's the, the things that this is about. So, so sure there's elements like that. But then, you know, I mean, and you, plagiarism is a thing with humans and with robots and the ethics of AI are very complicated.
[00:27:27] Stephanie: Like,
[00:27:28] Josh: Okay. Hold that silly. I wanna get to ethics with ai, but I have to say too, what you just laid out there was somebody who is doing the due diligence and who is thoughtful in their work. But let's be honest, Steph, the majority of the world are, most people are lazy and they're gonna wanna do AI to like just.
[00:27:47] Josh: Like, oh, I'll just take the first thing it gives me just to populate a bunch of content. That's what, where I'm, I'm, I'm thrilled. I'm not worried about you, me and everyone listening, but No. Yeah, I'm worried about like the DPL and not worried about it, but I'm just saying That's fine. I could see, no, it's fine.
[00:27:57] Stephanie: Duplicate. Let 'em do it. Like Google has been in ai. You think Google No for, so,
[00:28:01] Josh: yeah. Do you think
[00:28:02] Stephanie: Google, Google's been in AI for so long? Like it's, it favors high quality content. Their ai, like, I'm not even talking about like Bard. I'm talking about like the AI systems and algorithms that they use are so advanced and so robust that like, it doesn't, even if it's not useful to somebody, it's not gonna get push up, it's gonna get pushed down.
[00:28:25] Stephanie: So it's, that's a self solving problem. As long as we're doing it's the right point way, that's a, then we don't have to worry about that. I mean, there's hacks out there right now doing things in, uh, you know, they're copying and pacing from other people, or they're, you know, whatever.
[00:28:40] Stephanie: They're, they're doing things that are not useful. I mean, you've gone out and read articles where you like click on something and you, you got sucked into a clickbait and then this doesn't even mention the thing the title was about or something. Right? Yeah. So what's gonna happen to them? It's, it's
[00:28:52] Josh: say, yeah, we're have a couple people, yeah, a couple people have ripped off my manually migrating WordPress tutorial like the thumbnail used to look exactly like my old one, and the steps were exactly the same. It's like, oh, interesting. So, but mine was still prioritized. So it's a good point that even if terms or the internet gets loaded with duplicate or ripped off content, Google, I'm gonna search and do, tend to prioritize and know good quality human to human content.
[00:29:19] Josh: So that's good to know. So yeah, the ethics thing, the ethics is really interesting. Uh, I don't know where you want to take it, where you had in mind with that, but hit me. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on the ethics of it. Uh, well, the, it's a And what, and what do you mean by ethics? Like, you know, like taking care of a robot or, or the ethics if working with humans, what do you
[00:29:36] Stephanie: think?
[00:29:37] Stephanie: No, I think, um, when you're giving. Power to machines. Like what is, uh, what's ethical behavior? What should be legal or illegal? Who should be in charge of determining what these machines can and cannot do? You know, like if we, if I ask you or I, um, you know, sh should an AI be able to, you know, like a generative ai, um, art tool?
[00:30:05] Stephanie: Should it be able to generate pornographic images? Well, you could say no, but like somebody else who runs a, like PornHub might say like, no, that's the best thing that's ever happened to my business. So who's in charge of that decision? Where, to us, that seems like a no-brainer, but in a world of however many billion peop, 7 billion people or whatever it is, like, you're gonna have, you know, so who gets, who gets to say, yeah. That's the thing that is of interest to me when it
[00:30:32] Josh: comes to Yeah, the rule keep, that's, yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:34] Stephanie: It's not because it's not a local or a national or a continental, it's a global situation that we're in. And so, you know, the rules and the laws that apply to us in our country or our city are, are one thing, but like, when it's something that's like transcends all of those things in availability and in its use cases, who, who's in charge of determining that?
[00:31:01] Josh: The other aspect, I don't know if this grows outside of ethics, but I'm curious about like, liabilities. So if I use an AI tool to help out with content and it plagiarizes something that was trademarked or copy written copyrighted, excuse me. Is that the right? Yeah. Copyrighted. Um, the question would be, am I liable?
[00:31:19] Josh: See, or what, what have you seen anything like that as far as like content that's ripped off or anything like that?
[00:31:25] Stephanie: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't, I don't know one thing that is, uh, I'm, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if it's the, is the AI responsible? I would assume it would fall onto the human, but I don't know.
[00:31:37] Stephanie: The sue, the robots, maybe it's the legal stuff that I don't know, right? Yeah. But, um, an interesting thing is that if you go into this, is, this falls more so under the, where it's been more of an interesting topic to me anyway, is in the art generation that, um, nothing generated. I have no
[00:31:55] Josh: familiar with that. I have no familiarity with that, by the way, I've never used an art tool generator or anything. I've seen 'em, obviously, but
[00:32:02] Stephanie: they're fun, they're fun to play with and they are improving. And it is definitely a skill that you need to develop and learn how to use these tools to get what you want out of them.
[00:32:13] Stephanie: However, uh, if you, no matter what you generate, like what an AI generates, it cannot be copywritten, copyrighted. Because in order to possess a copyright, uh, a copyright in and of itself requires personhood. Like it needs a human, a person, a sentient being. And because the AI are not human, they're not, they're not a person.
[00:32:37] Stephanie: They cannot possess a copyright. So if you use those tools and have them create something for you, then it is free to use. So, gotcha. That's a cool
[00:32:46] Josh: thing. That answer the question I had about like the text plagiarism, like who's responsible? Yeah. Yeah. So that's how the Terminator toy will actually, the st the Terminator story will actually start is a robot, uh, gets ripped off and plagiarized and it wants to sue and it can't, so it just goes on a freaking rampage and Yeah. Makes a chat. G p t, you know, mega droid. That destroys everybody. So there it is.
[00:33:11] Stephanie: Yeah, they might, Hey, it might, uh, there's, there's a lot of talk and a lot of people high up that are concerned about where things are going. There's no denying it. And um, and there is a lot happening behind the scenes and a little bit in front of the scenes about the concept of it.
[00:33:28] Stephanie: So OpenAI is the company that makes chat, c p t, and they started off like, as the name implies, to be open. They saw the potential and the power of this technology and they thought the only way to keep it safe was to have it be open and so that it wouldn't just end up being controlled by the powerful few or something like that.
[00:33:51] Stephanie: And I think that's kind of a brilliant and cool attitude now then, Then the money starts to be a thing, and now open AI is for profit and, and then other companies are springing up and all that stuff. But there are still initiatives. And some of these big players, a lot of them actually are making sure that the tech is, um, if it's not completely open source, that it is available and tools are available globally and to many different types of people and all of that.
[00:34:20] Stephanie: Because having that availability, it's, you know, it's like with WordPress being open source, right? It, it keeps it to a certain point and there's so many people involved that it keeps it at a certain, it keeps it from being locked down and only controlled by certain people. It keeps all this stuff, right. So it's, it's available. It's k it's AI for all. Yeah. It's available for everybody. And so it's, yeah.
[00:34:44] Josh: Yeah. What a beautiful initiative. So what are like. Being that you are a little further into this world, Steph, what are, I guess, a simple question be like what are some of the top tools for web designers that we should either be using or maybe think about?
[00:34:59] Josh: Including in our, our toolbox
[00:35:00] Stephanie: for ai. Oh man. There's a lot of fun things. So, um, I am affiliated with Bertha, but I love Bertha. It's, it's a great tool and, um, but there's, there's many different, um, content generation tools. So you can have tools like Bertha that write copy for you. You can have, uh, Bertha also does some image generation, but there's lots of, um, tools out there like Dolly or Mid Journey that do, um, image generation really powerfully.
[00:35:28] Stephanie: Um, and those are two that of the things that really come up a lot. Those are the main things, cuz that was like chat. G P T does text generation, right? So, uh, code is a new thing and a lot of these chatbots or some of the tools can also do that. And you can, like I saw somebody said, um, you know, they're not real savvy with.
[00:35:49] Stephanie: Code and they wanted a plugin that did a certain thing, so they asked it to write a WordPress plugin that did a simple task and, and it generated it and it took a few iterations and tweaks and things like that. And they had a plugin that did the thing they wanted. You know, so, so there's things like that that, like how many times as maybe we're, we're web designers, maybe we're not hardcore devs or coders, and we think like, gosh, I wish I had this, but maybe it's not quite in the budget to hire somebody to develop a plugin for us or to, you know, something like that.
[00:36:21] Stephanie: Or maybe we're gonna go buy a tool, but it's just not quite right, you know? But what if you could just use what you know already to ask the right questions to get something spit out? So that's useful. There's a tool I
[00:36:32] Josh: remember that's just, yeah, it makes, it makes me think of when I first got into css. Oh gosh.
[00:36:38] Josh: I spent hours and hours trying to figure out, I had an error somewhere in my css, and I literally spent hours going line by line in the code, finally found and missed the semicolon. A semicolon or something that was off. And that was it. Now I would just put it in chat, g p t and say, Hey, where's the error?
[00:36:53] Stephanie: What's wrong in this? Yeah. Why wasn't this working? Yeah. What's wrong with this? Yeah. Um, so there's a tool, um, called,
[00:37:00] Josh: so Bertha, which by the way, Andrew Palmer, uh, was on, on episode 2 0 7, where we talked a little bit more about Bertha for those interested in that Yeah. Content generation, all sorts of stuff that can do well. How does Bertha, uh, what's the, I guess for those who don't know, what's the difference between Bertha and chat G
[00:37:15] Stephanie: P T then? Oh, I love this question. Okay. So I was actually hoping we could talk about something like this. So Chat, G P T is a tool that uses AI and they have an api, which we understand as web geeks, right?
[00:37:30] Stephanie: That means you can connect and you can hook in to the tech behind it. And so, You take that and you use something like, so Bertha, for example, and there are many of these tools, like literally thousands of them now, uh, happening. Bertha is interesting to us because it's, it can be used as a WordPress plugin.
[00:37:50] Stephanie: So you add it to your site and then it shows up in each of the text fields and you can use special prompts that are made to help you. And the prompts do, do you understand prompting, Josh, should we take a pause and uh, explain that? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Okay. Can you keep my, put a bookmark here cause I will forget what we were just talking about.
[00:38:11] Josh: Chad.
[00:38:12] Stephanie: Got it. Okay. So a prompt, uh, I actually just posted on Twitter about this the other day. I actually wish they were called briefs. It's a little bit like that. Like sometimes it's just asking it a question and getting an answer similar to how you would do with a smart speaker, you know, what's the, What's the altitude of Mount Fuji or like, you know, stuff like that.
[00:38:34] Stephanie: You can just ask and get an answer. But if you wanna have it do something for you, uh, it's, you put in a prompt. But it's really, if you think about it in your brain, like a project brief, that can really help you to improve. Because what you're doing is you're giving it all of the parameters that it needs in order to accomplish that task and deliver results that are gonna make you happy.
[00:38:57] Stephanie: So, uh, so that's what prompting is. Now, you can have, uh, some of these tools like birth and does that make sense? Do you follow that?
[00:39:07] Josh: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense for sure. I mean, I, I don't know if I would say brief, I guess, I guess depends on the context. Um, it
[00:39:15] Stephanie: does depend on the context and it's just called prompts, so that's fine.
[00:39:18] Stephanie: It doesn't matter what I think it should be called or is called or whatever, but, um, yeah, so if you, that they talk a lot about prompt engineering. Okay, so what does that mean? That means getting better and better at, at creating prompts in such a way that they deliver the desired results.
[00:39:38] Josh: So, so that makes sense by so many social media posts about AI are like, take this spreadsheet of prompts that I've come up with that help lay out such and such and whatever, depending on the industry,
[00:39:47] Stephanie: uhhuh and some of those are useful, some are absolute trash.
[00:39:50] Stephanie: Sure. Uh, there's, but it's, it's useful to get in there and play around with some of those. And so there's some interesting things like, um, you can help. It's got, remember, it's got all the world of knowledge basically. Right. So if you, if you wanted to find out something about, um, let's see, what's a particular scenario on a website that we might be dealing with?
[00:40:15] Stephanie: Uh, I'm trying to think of like, what about
[00:40:17] Josh: like a hack or malware or something like that?
[00:40:20] Stephanie: Oh, okay. So if you wanted to find out the best way to clean, um, a hack on a specific infected site, um, Who, who would you ask for that? Like you, like if you asked, if you asked somebody who's a really talented web developer, they might have a lot of information and they might give you, they might suggest, like if it's somebody who, the guy who created a blog vault, he might give you one way of doing things.
[00:40:46] Stephanie: If you ask somebody else, they might give you a slightly different way. If you're dealing with a front end person, they might, uh, tell you, go use this tool instead. Or go, you know, like you might get different answers based on people's perspective. Well, the ai, like, it knows all of those perspectives. So if you have something specific that you want out of it, you have to guide it so that you get what it wants.
[00:41:06] Stephanie: Cuz it's got so many things it could tell you. So sometimes people will say like, act as a marketing director and tell me how to increase traffic on this side, or whatever, you know, like, act like a, a more descriptive, a WordPress security specialist and explain how to clean this malware file from this website.
[00:41:28] Stephanie: You know? Gotcha. Like, if you, gotcha. So you can say, act like, or you are a
[00:41:33] Josh: are this, so you can put it, you can put and then gimme AI in like a role or in Yeah, it's a good point. Because if, so as a, if a novice says, how do I clean up this hack website, it may spit out a bunch of stuff and you're like, I have no idea what that said, but, oh, so that's the second part of
[00:41:46] Stephanie: it.
[00:41:47] Stephanie: Yeah. What you're doing is framing the type of information that you want it to collect for you, or, you know, give you the next thing that you're saying is how to present it. Like you're describing yourself, right? So you describe it first. Yeah. And then you describe yourself. So if you say like, right. Act as a, an SEO expert and tell me how to do keyword research as if I'm a fifth grader.
[00:42:13] Stephanie: Right?
[00:42:14] Josh: Yeah.
[00:42:14] Stephanie: Or talk to me like, yeah, explain it like a fifth grader. Or explain this for a non-tech savvy person. Or explain, uh, FaceTime to a senior citizen, or, you know, like, whatever you can, you can do it in that way. And it's remarkably good at, at changing. So you can see how, like if you said like, how do I remove malware?
[00:42:36] Stephanie: And you think about all the different people that could answer that question in various ways and all the different recipients of that information and what they would comprehend. You can start to see like, okay, depending on who I am, my knowledge level, my experience, all that, so you can start to see how you can engineer these prompts so that you are getting what you need out of it more effectively and more efficiently as you get better at it, to your point.
[00:42:58] Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So all of that being said, a lot of the tools, so like we could just talk about Bertha for example, since we are, it's got prompts built into it, which are basically little fields that come up and say, you know, like you select what they're called and then you put in information and so you, it could say like, um, create an outline for a blog post.
[00:43:20] Stephanie: That's something we just sort of mentioned. And the engineering part of it is already largely being done. It's already saying like, take the. You know, act, it's already basically saying like, act as a marketer or whatever, uh, or a copywriter or whatever the thing is. And then, and then it's, uh, saying, deliver in this format and be, it grabs from the settings like your tone that you want and your company name and other information about you and your audience.
[00:43:50] Stephanie: So that's like, you don't have to type that in every time. Like, give me the answer to this question as if you are a, an Im a, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just go to this prompt that says, uh, and you just type in the topic of the article you want and it already knows to deliver in an outline format and all that stuff.
[00:44:06] Stephanie: So a lot of those tools, they're prompt shortcuts. So in the example of Bertha and a lot of them, there's also the chat component, which is what chat c p t made super famous because it's more. Natural. So Bertha existed before chat, G B T. Yeah. And then chat, g b T land launched and it's, um, you know, it has this conversational method and the, the thing that is key about that is that it has memory, so, well
[00:44:32] Josh: Is Bertha also just WordPress?
[00:44:35] Stephanie: No, it has a Chrome extension as well, so you can use it everywhere. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. And so it, so the chat element, which is built into Bertha, like I said, and others as well, is the, the cool thing about that is that it has memory, basically. So it's like if you were, if you're talking to a computer and you're thinking programming wise and you say, like, I just did this the other day.
[00:44:59] Stephanie: I was writing up a little blurb for, um, a podcast episode and I said, but I, it was, it was just clunky and I just said, rewrite this, and I put the text. I didn't give it any more specific than that, and it rewrote it. And then that made me think, like I said, rewrite this in a. Lighthearted and fun tone or no, I didn't say write that.
[00:45:20] Stephanie: I said rewrite it again in a lighthearted and fun tone and then I don't have to paste what I wrote into it again. It knows what we're talking about. I can say Gotcha, that's good. But re like replace this word with something else and it'll take the same thing and do what I said and, and then I can, I might
[00:45:36] Josh: do the intro to this episode where, cuz I write all the intros to every episode. Totally. I might try, I might try using an AI tool totally to do the intro,
[00:45:45] Stephanie: but it's just like, maybe you try this too. So Bertha also has a feature that has been released by, uh, OP called Whisper and Whisper is audio transcription. So you can yeah, you can give it a link or upload file and it will transcribe and then it has all of that information and then it can act on that information.
[00:46:05] Stephanie: There's lots of them out there that you can give it a link to a YouTube video and say, write me a summary of this, or write me up. You know, a blurb about this or something, or gimme five bullet points from this video or from that thing, you know, like you could do all that kind of stuff too. But again, this is all in how you ask the question, like what do you wanna get out of it and in what format and all that stuff.
[00:46:26] Stephanie: So if you use one of those tools where it's like you're not sure where to start, so you can open up a tool to say like, how didn't think about bias.
[00:46:32] Josh: Sorry, that cut you off. I, I didn't think about using that for timestamps. I'd imagine it could work for timestamps,
[00:46:37] Stephanie: right? So good. Oh shoot. There's one we just used. Um, We're just trying out for divvy chat. Oh, I can't think of the name of it. If I think of it, I'll give it to you in
[00:46:48] Josh: a well, at the time of recording this, I'm, I'm re, I'm revamping my business course and working on 2.0. I think by the time your interview comes out, I think that course will just have relaunched, but I'm thinking, I might go do, I might do timestamps for every
[00:47:04] Stephanie: video's so easy and it, it's so good for Sseo and all that stuff. Yes. Somebody had come to us a while ago and said like, well,
[00:47:11] Josh: this would be really helpful. Be gated. So I don't want it, I don't want that to be public or for seo, but just for like, really just for student results. Like it's really handy to be able to skim through a video, especially if you already kind of know something, but you want to get the highlight, the highlights. So I might consider doing something like that. Yeah, that's a great for that.
[00:47:27] Stephanie: But
[00:47:27] Josh: also for org chat, GT work for timestamps.
[00:47:31] Stephanie: Yeah, I think, yeah, the, the one that we just were playing around with, um, Mike Devit and I, is called Cast Magic. Again, I'm not like vouching for it. I've only used it once. And, and Mike used it once too, and it, um, you just put the link of the episode in and it pulled up like an overview of it.
[00:47:50] Stephanie: It had like all the timestamps. It wasn't perfect. Okay. But it had like, in one, like it, it did all of our intros. It showed like the name and the intro and it missed mine for some reason. I guess mine wasn't interesting enough, but I was hosting and so I think I was responding to somebody and then I just bled into my intro, so it wasn't as like, Sarah, please
[00:48:10] Josh: introduce yourself. The AI was like, Steph is not professional enough. I cannot understand her exactly. She's being too funny. Yeah. Uh, cast smash,
[00:48:21] Stephanie: like, okay, cool. So that's just, that's another one that's like you could play around with and they have a free version of free trial or something like that. So, yeah, I was hoping
[00:48:29] Josh: we'd get into some additional tools.
[00:48:30] Josh: There's, I've got these pulled
[00:48:31] Stephanie: up. Make sure we link. Yeah. There's this one called Wizard. The web geeks here are gonna love, but it's spelled U I Z A R D, which is annoying, but it's, as you might guess, it's about, it's like a user interface. You can, um, take a picture, like do a screen grab of a website a or do a sketch like you could just draw squares in rectangles and squiggles on a piece of paper and take a picture of it and upload it and it will create a website mockup for you.
[00:49:03] Josh: Oh man. That would've been so great with how I would do, cuz I always use paper for just a basic mockup.
[00:49:07] Stephanie: I know right. Website. And I do too. I like to do that too, to just like get it outta my head. Uh, so you can just upload that and it will create the mockup. I, I can't remember how detailed that one goes. There's some that will then take it from there and actually give you a Figma type. Like where you can move the pieces around in it. Like it's not just taking a picture of
[00:49:26] Josh: it to make this practical. Here is a way after this entire conversation at this point, I see how web designers can be so powerful with ai.
[00:49:34] Josh: But still be the lead on a project and still, you know, get the business. You could talk with a client and figure out probably what their major needs are and questions are. And then you could even live with a client in a coffee shop. Use chat g p t to figure out some of the best content messaging and, and main things that we need to address.
[00:49:53] Josh: Then you could sketch out on a piece of paper what you have in mind and use this wizard site, the U I Z a r d i io io and then you could mock something up using AI and you would look like a total boss because, and you're just using some, some AI stuff along with it and you
[00:50:11] Stephanie: could do that. We don't make it look too easy guys.
[00:50:14] Josh: Well, that's true. It'd be, I'm just joking. But we're still on the, I mean, they're not making a website yet. We're just, we're still in the like, planning and, and strategy phase, but Okay. So good point. Well imagine if you did
[00:50:23] Stephanie: that for just for your proposal.
[00:50:26] Josh: Yeah. So I was just gonna say, what if you get the details from the client and then you go off, do all details, and then a day or two later you come up with a proposal and they're like, holy crap.
[00:50:37] Josh: Josh and his team came up with all these messaging and copy titles and all these blog ideas, and then they came in with this mockup. That's amazing. You must have worked for 48 hours straight and then you can be like, Hey, you know, what can I say? They don't know. It only took eight minutes, right.
[00:50:52] Josh: With these tools. But that's a honestly, a great case study example of how to do this, right. Integrate s uh, AI with you to the
[00:50:59] Stephanie: business. Totally. Um, now there's something I wanna say about what you just said. Open ai. Uh, we. We wanna make sure that we are as, as much as I like to geek out and get excited about things, we do have to still use our heads.
[00:51:15] Stephanie: And remember that privacy is a thing if we wanna pump all of our own personal data. And so social security numbers out onto the web, that's our business. But when we're talking about customers in particular, we need to use caution. So you have to Oh, great point. Make sure you read the terms and conditions on things.
[00:51:34] Stephanie: So, uh, open ai, uh, I mean chat, G P T for example, if you put information in, They have in their terms and conditions that that's now their information and they can grade point and don't use that. So there was a big, I'm so glad, glad to mention that. Yeah, there was a big breach with Ave with a large company.
[00:51:53] Stephanie: I forget who it was. It was a big tech, uh, big um, manufacturing company or something. And um, they had put stuff that included like patents and other things like that. And then there was this big breach and it, because then the AI is using that information so somebody else could be saying something and that information could get utilized cuz it's now in their knowledge base.
[00:52:13] Josh: I'm so glad you mentioned that stuff. Yeah, I, and I have a solution for Okay. I wanna hear the solution. I was just gonna say, I did some work for a, uh, cleaning solution, speaking of solution. Years ago. And they were so secretive because it was a proprietary mixture for like restaurants and stuff.
[00:52:28] Josh: And, um, I don't even know if I'm supposed to say the name technically, but I did some work for them, so I won't, but I did some work for them and yeah, like even when we did mockups and stuff, it was all password protected and, and quite secure. Not like super uber secure. But, uh, I was just thinking like, yeah, if I were to take that company's information and then put it in a jet G p t for just ideas on prompts and headaches and stuff like that, you're, this is breaching what we're just talking about, so yeah.
[00:52:54] Josh: What's
[00:52:54] Stephanie: the solution? Okay. So read your terms and conditions and your privacy policies, the terms and conditions on which I
[00:53:00] Josh: would put into Jet G P T to summarize for me. Yeah,
[00:53:03] Stephanie: exactly the. In terms of conditions on chat for chat, g p t, when you go and sign up for a free account or a paid account with them, they own your stuff.
[00:53:13] Stephanie: Now, the way that tools like Bertha and oth all the other ones, you know, the, they use the open ai, A p I, the API has different privacy and different rules around all that. So it's then they don't take any of the data that's used through an a p I channel that they don't own. They don't, they don't keep that, they don't monitor it.
[00:53:38] Stephanie: Nothing. So if somebody's using the a p i, like a Bertha, for example. Uh, in, in, I'll just speak specifically ber cause that's the only one I know specifically about. But your data is filtered through it's, it goes through some filters so that there's no abusive things, you know. Like pornographic or hateful or things like that.
[00:54:00] Stephanie: There's certain flags, but it is only monitored for those specific things. It is not kept at all. Gotcha. The only in information that is kept is the, You know, the personal information for your account, your contact information and all that for your logins and such. But there's none of that other information that is kept or stored or used in any other way.
[00:54:20] Stephanie: So if you have a concern about privacy, which we all should really, cuz this is unknown territory. I'm not an overly paranoid person, like I'm on grid, you know what I mean? Josh, like, yeah, right. I couldn't go off grid if I wanted to. Right? Like, I can't even like, uh, like I'm just out there and I just use it as like, I'm, a lot of people don't agree with this, but I'm like, I am paying for lots of services with my data.
[00:54:46] Stephanie: So, you know, it is what it is. And, but, uh, but. This whole thing with AI is new and it's big and we don't know the full extent of its capabilities or its risks. Yeah. Or any of that. So to just use very, like, really be cautious and be cognizant in what you're doing for yourself and your customers. And you guys can go out there and help other people to be aware of that too.
[00:55:09] Stephanie: And so, like Bertha has for 10 bucks a month, you can get like a simple version of it, which is the chat and whisper, which are very similar to chat, G P T A. And um, and then it's the audio transcription. It's 10 bucks a month. Like if you're really gonna use this for your business, like just for that layer of, of privacy right.
[00:55:31] Stephanie: Alone. Yeah. You know, regardless of other things. That's awesome. And if you're gonna use these other tools like Wizard or, or whatever, uh, Read the fine print.
[00:55:40] Josh: Read the fine print. Interesting. So that's where things could get very, very tricky from a liability and legal standpoint. Yeah. So, short answer, Steph. AI friend or foe, what do
[00:55:52] Stephanie: you think? Oh man, it's, it's my best friend. And it is, I'm telling you, Josh, it's not just gonna affect friend
[00:56:01] Josh: foe or lover. What will it be?
[00:56:04] Stephanie: There we go. Yeah. It's, um, it's going to be friends with benefits. How about that?
[00:56:11] Josh: Nice. Of course, you and I are gonna take this conversation.
[00:56:14] Josh: Of course,
[00:56:14] Stephanie: of course, of course. We're the PG 13. Yeah. So, um, it like, it's gonna change our. Businesses, it's gonna change our relationships with our customers. It's gonna change our tech stack. Yeah. Uh, it's also gonna change our lives profoundly outside of our work. So there's lots of things to come. Imagine.
[00:56:34] Stephanie: Um, you know, if you, if you went to an attorney to ask a question or to get a contract written or something, uh, how much does that cost? You know, 2, 3, 400 bucks an hour for a human being with an infallible mind, what if you could go and consult with a computer that has every legal book ever written in its memory that it can access in milliseconds?
[00:56:58] Stephanie: And you can ask it for legal advice on a specific scenario. What if you could go to a doctor and that one starts to sound like, I don't want a robot doctor. Well, what if your doctor could actually keep all of your whole entire lives? Me medical records? At the tip of its time, right? It's got 'em all right there.
[00:57:17] Stephanie: It understands how every single medication would interact with itself based on an algorithm like you could be taking a union. You
[00:57:24] Josh: uh, yeah, good point. Do you know if Hans and Donato would term mageddon are using AI for privacy stuff? No, I was just wondering, like, I mean, I know Donata is such a great mind with, uh, the privacy policy things, but I imagine those are changing at such a rate that I would imagine you could use AI to keep up to date on privacy policies and all
[00:57:42] Stephanie: kinds of stuff.
[00:57:42] Stephanie: I have no, I, I've, I just wouldn't know about that, what they're doing, but, um, but yeah, I mean, if you could think about that, like any of those kind of things where it's, where, why are we going to those experts? Are we going for a creative solution or are we going because we don't have the knowledge that they have.
[00:58:00] Stephanie: You know, if you're going to a medical professional to say like, I've got this symptom and that symptom, and I take these medications and I have a, my entire dna n a could be sequenced. So, you know, all of my possible hu like family history and everything to be able to say like, this is, this is what that equals out to.
[00:58:18] Stephanie: You know, like that's really powerful. Uh, and you know, I've, you know, you go to a doctor and you've got a weird thing happening. Uh, you got that rash. Remember that one you were talking about, Josh, that weird rash you have. And, and, uh, you go to a doctor, well, maybe she did I really tell you about
[00:58:34] Josh: one or this is a joke. Cause now I'm like, did teasing? I did get poison ivy really bad last year, so maybe,
[00:58:40] Stephanie: no, I'm just joking. But, uh, may, but you know, you go to a doctor and like, maybe they, their kid kept him up all night or maybe they skipped lunch and they're not thinking clearly. You know, like we all have good days and bad days. Right. So like, how's that gonna impact your diagnosis or your treatment versus,
[00:58:58] Josh: you know, you know, who doesn't have a good day or a bad day? AI tools. It's on all the time. Oh, fascinating stuff, Steph. Well, I know. Yeah. Oh,
[00:59:07] Stephanie: good. Go. I wanna tell you one more thing. Sure, because clearly I like to talk about this stuff and there's a, there's a lot of content out there and there's a lot of very technical things out there.
[00:59:19] Stephanie: And I like talking about this to people who might be overwhelmed or like intimidated by it. And I, I started a newsletter, but I turns out I suck at newsletters. I am much better talking. I don't know if you noticed this about me or not. I'm a little chatty and, uh, but you
[00:59:37] Josh: can take that and take the a, take the audio and
[00:59:40] Stephanie: make it written for exactly right. So I, um, decided I wanted to do a podcast and talk about this, and I wanted to explain it. I, I just, I, I figured like, My, there's enough people talking about like large language models and this computer processor and those number of levels, all the tech stuff. And that kind of overwhelms me. I like talking about like the practical applications like we're talking about here and like what So simplify it.
[01:00:04] Stephanie: Yeah. And uh, I thought like, if I could explain it like to my dad, that was sort of my mentality of thinking about like, cuz he's interested in tech, but he's in his late sixties. Like he's not cutting edge with stuff, but he cares what's coming. And so I was like trying to figure this out and I was trying to find somebody to do the podcast with me and I was like, why don't I just have my dad do it?
[01:00:25] Stephanie: So me and my dad are doing a podcast together. That's awesome. And we just talk about AI and explain it in ways like this that's easy to understand. It's accessible rather than being overly technical or intimidating. And, um, we just give our hot takes on things and define stuff and everything. So if you're interested it's called, yeah.
[01:00:43] Stephanie: What's it called? Sizzle. The sizzle. The sizzle, yeah. Do you, do you hear that? It is not, do you hear that John? For old people. That's the future cooking.
[01:00:52] Josh: That's what we're talking about. That's the future. The sizzle. Do you have a domain up in everything yet? Or the
[01:00:56] Stephanie: sizzle.ai? You can go sign up for the newsletter and then you'll get an email about the podcast, which is probably just launching as we're, cuz it's just about to launch while we're recording.
[01:01:05] Stephanie: So it'll probably be up on the podcast apps. So I'm super excited. It's, it's nerdy and hilarious. Like me and my dad are corny.
[01:01:14] Josh: Well, if you want to, you're welcome to repurpose this episode for, because I've asked a lot of 1 0 1 questions because this is not an area that I, you know, I, I have interest in ai, I'm using it more and more, but, uh, I'm definitely not doomsayer, but yeah, I'm like, I didn't know about half of these tools that you said today or what Bertha could do.
[01:01:31] Josh: Oh gosh, necessarily. There's so many still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just such a wild world. Uh, I do like that though. I like that you're focusing on. Simplifying it and making it practical and actionable, which a lot of the stuff we did today I think was, was a good example of that. Particularly like how to use some of these tools in a sales sequence, in a proposal, et cetera.
[01:01:50] Josh: For sure. Um, last question for you, cuz I gotta get rolling here. What, okay, final question for you, Steph. How do we humanize, like what are some things we can do to humanize. Are AI content, like what are, I guess, what are the human traits that are, like, you talked about comment, like, humor. What are, is there any other like human element that we can be cognizant of when we're using AI for content, images, whatever?
[01:02:16] Stephanie: Oh man, that's a good question. I think, um, I. And I've done it twice. I hate when people say, that's a good question. Story stories. I always feel like that's people stalling. Uh, no AI can write stories like you wouldn't believe. There's all kind of things with like people writing stories for their kids bedtime stories and stuff.
[01:02:33] Stephanie: They just, they ask their kid a couple questions for a character or something and then just pop it in and then it's a bedtime story right there. So it's doing stories. Side note. Uh,
[01:02:40] Josh: I side as a podcaster, I will say I like when people say that's a good story or a good question because usually that means, oh, I didn't know that was coming.
[01:02:49] Josh: Or kind. It's more of a surprise. It makes you think, cuz yeah, not too many people are like, that's a great question, I've got a plan answer. It's like, oh, that's a good question. I didn't think about that. And it does, yeah, it is kind of stalling, but that feel tells me like
[01:03:01] Stephanie: you have to think about. Yeah, and I just was thinking about the other day and that I've said it twice already, but I guess you're just asking good questions, you know? That's why you're a good here. Well I've been doing this for four years. It's about time. You better Good at asking
[01:03:10] Josh: questions. Questions? Yeah. Otherwise I'm gonna start using freaking chat g p t for my questions here. I gotta say so. So I
[01:03:15] Stephanie: think the word I would choose is empathy. Because we can, like, that's different than sympathy. I think an AI can have sympathy where it can calculate how it might make somebody feel. But if we have true empathy, that's that we're feeling something for another human being that we like, we're feeling it, we're not thinking about how they're feeling. And I think that's something that requires sentient.
[01:03:44] Stephanie: So I, I don't know. That's w uh, maybe if you ask me in a week, I would have time to think about this more and have a different answer. But I don't know. That's, that's, that's a good
[01:03:53] Josh: point. As a practical example that I think about often, I, I don't use this as a sales pitch, but with maintenance plans, I'm, I'm known for that.
[01:04:02] Josh: It's my first course. I'm so passionate about maintenance plans, as are you. I talk about the fact that that's what helped get me and my family through a two month NICU experience with my daughter. Uh, that is not something that AI is gonna. Likely come up with, I mean, maybe it would share some examples of how recurring income could help in family situations, but it doesn't have a personal situation like that.
[01:04:22] Josh: Sure. That connects on a human to human level like that did, I mean, a lot of people go through that course and they say like, oh my gosh, your story about how you, you know, went through that really, really, uh, not got me, but, you know, piqued my interest and made me realize like, yeah, what if something happens in my life
[01:04:37] Stephanie: like that?
[01:04:37] Stephanie: So, yeah. And that's where you become relatable. So relatable. Yeah. You know, can you fake that? I mean, sometimes and to some extent, but that's, you know, what's the goal of what you're doing too? I mean, that always, like, if you're, you're, when you were doing that, what were you doing? Were you selling a course?
[01:04:54] Stephanie: Yeah. You were selling a course with that story, but what you were really doing was building a tribe and attracting people who have been through similar experiences, who have similar life. Stories and, and worldviews and, you know, family is a priority and you're a father, you know, you're a parent, you're a this and that, you know, like all of those things.
[01:05:14] Stephanie: So by doing that, you are, you're, you're attracting, you know, your vibe attracts your tribe, Josh. Yeah. And, but you know, you're, you're doing that. And so a robot, you could tell it. That to do that, but that's, that's never gonna be the true life experience.
[01:05:33] Josh: Yeah. I think you're, you hit the nail on the head a little bit ago, the sympathy versus sympathy thing. It's like an AI tool could say like, what if bad things happen in your life or you have to take a break, this can help. Versus like, I went through that. We experience that.
[01:05:46] Josh: So anyone else who is going through any sort of traumatic experience or a really hard time in life, no matter what it is, and you're trying to keep your business going and you need your current income, I get it. Like I was right there. And that's very different than an AI tool who's like looking at different, right. Yeah. Sympathetic sympathy
[01:06:03] Stephanie: versus empathy, I guess would be kind of my way of saying it. So that, um, you know, we can think about our audience when we are generating content or building a website and trying to get, you can think about.
[01:06:15] Stephanie: Your experiences and how that can relate to somebody else or how their experiences relate to you. And that just puts a different element into it. So I guess that's what I would say. But the other thing is, whatever we think AI can do is doing it's tip of the iceberg right now. These amazing tools that blowing our minds are just, they're like, we're gonna look back.
[01:06:38] Stephanie: Remember our, uh, your first cell phone? Remember the ones that were like in a bag in your car? There were car phones. They didn't even leave the car. And then you had the big, huge bricks that you were like a baller if you had those. And how we look back on those and are like, oh my gosh. Or dial up internet, like in.
[01:06:53] Stephanie: That's 25 years ago, but like within the next five years, we're gonna look back on us with Chad g p t right now and be like, oh my gosh, we thought that was so cool.
[01:07:02] Josh: Great point Steph, what a great way to put a cap on this convo. Super fun. Um, we'll have everything links. I got a lot of bookmarks open that I'll make sure we put in there.
[01:07:12] Josh: But Bertha focus wp.co is what you're still most known for, I think in my circles. We'll make sure we link the sizzle when that comes out. I'm excited to, uh, hear you and your dad's back and forth on AI for right now. Steph, thank you so much for your time and maybe we will, uh, maybe we'll have a robot do the interview for both of us the next time you're on the show.
[01:07:33] Stephanie: We should, we should try that. Yeah, we'll have birthday by next
[01:07:36] Josh: birthday interview later. That would be a very interesting case study. I literally think we should do that on the next one. That would be great. I
[01:07:42] Stephanie: love it. Thanks so much, Josh. All right. And uh, thanks for having me in the three timers club.
[01:07:47] Josh: Three timers. Can't believe I forgot about your second episode. It's It's Elite. Yep, it's elite baby. I mean, that's, you know, that's what an honor. What an honor. The three timers club, my goodness. No, thank you again. I always appreciate your transparent, real thoughts, and you're on the cutting edge, so I always appreciate getting to hear from somebody who's right in it.
[01:08:04] Josh: So thanks. Super fun
[01:08:05] Stephanie: hanging out.
[01:08:09] Josh: So take a minute my friend. Ask yourself, where do you stand? Where do you stand in the AI conversation right now? Are you all in? Are you pumped? Are you, uh, petrified and terrified that AI is gonna turn into the Terminator? That's gonna take us out one website at a time? I would love to hear your thoughts.
[01:08:27] Josh: You can actually leave a comment on the show notes for this episode@joshhall.co slash 2 65. I do read all the podcast comments that come in and I try to respond to those. So feel free to share your insight and takeaways from this episode. I would be happy to get a conversation going on there. Again, Josh hall.co/ 2 65.
[01:08:45] Josh: Some other notable links here, again, like we mentioned, Stephs company Focus wp.co. They are a white label WordPress maintenance company for agencies. Definitely recommend utilizing them if, if for some reason maintenance and ongoing development work is not something you want to do. Uh, and again, I mentioned the intro, but Steph's group, focus on your biz free Facebook group of you're on Facebook.
[01:09:08] Josh: Really great resource for you. We also are gonna have all the links that we talked about in the episode linked at the show notes, josh hall.co/ 2 65, which are gonna include Bertha, which is the AI tool that I actually really recommend to help you with getting content started. Josh hall.co/bertha, we'll take you over there.
[01:09:26] Josh: We talk Cast Magic Wizard, the sizzle, all are gonna be linked over at the Post, so I'll see you over there next. But I hope this helps. I hope this gives you some context and maybe, uh, broadens your horizons and makes you think about AI and maybe a different way. I know for me, this conversation really made me not take it more seriously, but be a little more open to how prevalent things are right now and how fast things are happening because whether you like it or not, We gotta keep on the up and up on ai, so I'm sure this will not be the last ai convers, uh, conversation on the podcast in the near future.
[01:09:58] Josh: Uh, but what a great time with Steph. Thank you to Steph for taking the time to chat today and just being so open and transparent. All right, friend. I'll see you on the next episode, and for right now, I'll see you over@joshhall.host slash 2 65.