People think that a machine's gonna replace them, A machine isn't gonna replace them. Somebody using that machine might though, because somebody might be able to use that machine, get the the information out of it and turn it around and make it look brilliant.
I am Becca Pountney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you are listening to The Wedding Pros who are Ready to Grow podcast. I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies, and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level. If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you're in the right place.
Let's get going with today's episode. Today on the podcast, I don't just have one, but two guests. As I'm joined by the two Lauras, I met these two fabulous ladies as part of a mastermind group that I'm part of with 30 years of marketing experience behind them. They now work with social media managers to build profitable businesses. Inside of our mastermind. Recently, we were chatting about the hot topic of 2023, ai, otherwise known as artificial intelligence.
It was a great conversation and I wanted you to be able to hear it too. So Laura and Laura, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
Hello, hello.
It's so lovely to have you.
I was just gonna say 30 years. Can I just say that is combined, like we're not that old individually.
I dunno. I think, I think we, I actually did start working in marketing 30 years ago.
No you didn't. You'd have been like twelve.
Yes, I did. My very first job was marketing 30 years ago.
Wowzers. Okay. Take it back.
We are, we're so old.
We are old.
Yeah.
You don't look a day over 21, I promise.
There we go. We'll, come on here again, . Becca: You are always welcome. Now, before we dive into this super scary topic that everyone's talking about at the moment of ai, I wanna talk a little bit more generally in the first instance about business, because that's how we met and I tell my wedding professionals.
All of the time that they should be investing in themselves, investing in learning community, and also that I practice what I preach myself, and that's why I'm part of the Business Mastermind where I met you. So I just thought it'd be helpful to hear from you to start with why you joined the Mastermind that we are all part of in the first place, and why you think that it's important for business owners of all varieties to be investing in themselves and why we should be doing it too.
That is an interesting question. We, so we've been in and out of a lot of masterminds and the unique situation that Laura and I are in is that we've got each other and which is, can be a really fortunate position to be in. So we don't need to bounce ideas around loads of other people because we've got each other. But then what we definitely find is that we need to, we need to bounce around ideas with people who are removed from our business, who.
That probably could look at things in a, in a different way, probably honest with us. We want to have those conversations with people who are of a similar level to us. They understand where we're at with our business. They understand the kind of, the frustrations maybe that we're having or, or what they may be. So we dip in and out of masterminds, and every time we're outta them is the times that we are going, ugh. You know, I wish we had someone to ask this, or who could we ask this?
And, and so then it reminds us that we do need them and we cannot just rely on each other. So that was probably the reason why, and hatefully, we won't be kind of dipping out now , I think we're both at peace with the fact that we can't just do this without that kind of external support really.
I think another good thing about being in that sort of environment is that you don't know what you don't know. So when you see other people and they're having problems, That you can help them with, that's great. But also when you see people are doing things differently to you, you can suddenly have these massive light bulb moments where you're like, oh my God, we could totally do that. That would work for our business.
And if you're not in those environments, you miss out on all of those opportunities, don't you?
I definitely agree, and I think it's really important because our worlds can become really small. So whether it's just like me or my own in my business, or even you two together in your business, your world still becomes small and you all look at the same things in the same way. So sometimes having an outside set of eyes or hearing bigger different experiences definitely has an impact.
And I'm glad you're in it because it meant that I got to meet you and now you're here on the podcast to talk with me all about this subject that everyone's talking about right now. AI or artificial intelligence. So let's start at the beginning. For anyone listening and thinking that we're talking about aliens coming to Earth or something like that. What even is this AI thing? What is it?
I think we should start by saying that AI isn't new. We've all been using AI for years and years. If you've got an Alexa in your house, first of all, apologies if I've just set it off. But you know, things like that. They're all based on this artificial intelligence, aren't they? So right now there's, it's this big buzzword and everyone is acting like it's this new thing, but it isn't.
It's something that's been helping us in our businesses for years and years, but we just maybe haven't noticed. So that would be my first thing is to just don't worry that it's this brand new thing you have to get to grips with because it's not, it's a, it's part of all of the tools you are already using. It's just gonna help you to do things better. And ai, it sounds really scary cause it's called artificial intelligence, but it's just machine learning.
It's just like if you are on Instagram or Facebook, they use algorithms to learn what you wanna see. It's just the same thing. It's the machine that you're using is learning. About how you are using it and how it can help you better learning all of the other people who are using it and what they're doing and giving you whatever data it is you want back. So just, yeah, it's not as scary as it sounds.
I think it's just because there's so many big words that people don't understand being banded about, like machine learning, like what even. Is that, but actually when you start talking about things like algorithms, we all become a lot more relaxed and a lot more thinking. Okay. Yeah, I understand. I understand that Instagram has an algorithm. I understand that what I see on Instagram is curated for me, and that makes our lives better rather than worse, doesn't it?
Yeah, definitely.
I think it's worth saying as well that it's only people are only panicking now because it's like the new buzzword to talk about the new sexy thing to waffle away about and try to position, you know, there's loads of people on LinkedIn trying to position themselves as AI experts and, but as Laura says it, it has been around, it has been helping us to do our jobs. It's been helping us with our marketing. A long, long, long, long time.
But yeah, people all jumping on this and all talking about it, and I know we are talking about it now. We've recorded our own podcast about it. Like I know we are kind of part of the problem in many respects, but it's, yeah, it's that, it's, it's like when Clubhouse launched, isn't it? Everyone's suddenly talked about clubhouse. It's just that thing that people are gonna talk about.
But I suspect, and the difference with this compared to Clubhouse, which I know you can't compare the two, they're very different things, but. Clubhouse very quickly went away, and AI isn't going to go away. And this is something that we all need to learn to live with because it can be such a good thing. It's not a bad thing, it's not a negative thing in our lives. It, it should totally be seen as a positive.
So why do we think it is then that suddenly in January, February, 2023, this is on the tip of everyone's tongue? If it's been around for so long, what is it that's different now that's making everyone talk?
It's one thing, it's Chat GPT this new tool called Chat GPT came out. And if you've not heard of Chat GPT before, go Google it. It's a brilliant tool, but you can basically ask it anything and it's like Google on steroids. It will not just feed you a load of results where you have to go and look into all of these results. It will tell you the answer to your question, and that is the one reason that everybody is talking about AI right now. It's a whole different ballgame.
It's a whole different version of what we are used to seeing in ai, and it's scarily brilliant because the results it can give you and the depth of the result is something we are not, we haven't seen before. It's like having a conversation with a human almost, and we're not used to that.
Yeah, so that's what's come up recently. Then Chat GPT. People can go and find that they can just Google it. Is it free? How do you find it? Where do you find it?
When we started using it was free. I think they've just introduced a paid program, but there are other versions now coming out. Bing has just rolled out a new version. Google is rolling out their own version. but the easiest way is to just go on Google and just search for Chat GPT. And and you'll find it come up
if you can get into it. Because there's been many times when I've tried to get into it and it just says, we're too busy right now, come back. So everyone's clearly trying to get on this right now.
Yeah, totally. And that should kind of tell us something that everyone loves it. Everyone wants a piece of the pie and like Google's jumping on the bandwagon, Bing is jumping on the bandwagon. Other platforms are the tools that are gonna do the same. So it is something we need to embrace and understand how it works and how we can use it in our businesses because it isn't gonna go away.
Okay, so we know it's here. We know it's here to stay, and we know people are interested in it. So for those people who are listening to this, they're wedding business owners, photographers, wedding cake makers, florists. They're creating their own content or working with people to create their own content. Is Chat GPT, is this AI stuff, any use to them? And if so, how can they be using it effectively in their business?
That's a difficult question to answer because it could be useful to some people and it might just be a distraction to others. So for example, if you are, if you need to create blog content and you're not a natural writer, and you're not great at thinking of what you should even write in a blog, Then, yeah, these tools could be great.
You could go on and you could just say, I wanna write a blog about how to present your wedding cake and all the, you know, the best wedding cakes for 2023, and you can ask it specific questions and it could spit out a whole blog to you. So that could be really helpful. The downside of that is that it will sound like a machine has given it to you, so you still need to do some work to make sure that it works from an SEO perspective, from a human perspective. So it's just a starting point.
So if you are somebody who struggles with that or you struggling with maybe like what you should write on your LinkedIn post or your Instagram or whatever, that can be a starting point, but it's never gonna give you the end result. It's never, it's never gonna give you the whole package. It's a bit like you could go on there and you could ask it to give you a recipe for a wedding cake. , but it doesn't necessarily know like what, where you are based. Can you go and buy these right ingredients?
You need to keep giving it more and more information and then you might need to tweak it because your oven might be, might work differently to what this machine thinks it works. So you're still gonna need to put that your own spin on it. , Becca: and have we got any thoughts yet around plagiarism? Because one of the things I've been seeing is people talking in groups who probably don't really know exactly what they're talking about, saying, go and use this feature.
It'll write your blog post in 30 seconds, and then you can have blogs going out every week. But what I'm concerned about is that they're gonna end up just generating this content, chucking it up there, and then finding that loads of other people have stuff that sounds the same, looks the same, or it's potentially. Damage their reputation with Google because it is obviously either plagiarized or obviously generated content. Yeah, and that's exactly what will happen.
People just need to use it as a starting off point. It's not the end result.
And it's information that's pulled from various parts of the internet. So if they want to credit a source, if they want to say where they've got this fact from, then they need to ask for that information so they can do that. But as you say, there'd be lots of people, you know, it's like someone saying, go and create me some content about how to choose your wedding flower colors. And it will produce some copy. But then yeah, you will find that loads of people are gonna start asking that.
And like Laura's already touched on, people need to understand how they can use that information. And there's nothing wrong with that in information as long as obviously, It's factually correct from your perspective. You know, if you are, if you strongly believe there's a way that you should choose your colors for your wedding, and the Chat GPT comes out with something different, then don't use that. But equally, you really want to make sure that your tone of voice.
It's true to, to you, you know, it's, I couldn't really see it just being this slippery slope of people going, oh, well, I'm just gonna go and ask it all these questions. It's gonna create all my content. But you'll lose any kind of personality, any kind of brand identity that potentially you've worked a long time to establish. And that what people recognize you for. And like I recognize content all the time by how people write and how people kind of present themselves.
Social media in particular, and I would, I would, not everybody, but I, certain people, I would be able to spot if this, if there was a sudden switch. And obviously yes, you know, you can outsource your content creation to, or your, you know, your content writing or copywriting to a social media manager for example. But they are a human who is able to take on board your, your brand voice and they should be learning your brand voice and then implementing that in your, in your content strategy.
And, Any kind of AI is not going to be able to do that. So it's about learning. Yes, we can use this information and yes, it could be important, but A, we don't wanna sound like everybody else. We want to be different, and it's good to be different. And so how can you take that information and make it your own is what people really need to embrace And. Be, be happy to do. This isn't a quick, a quick cheat. It could be, but it shouldn't be. Especially when it comes to their marketing.
I think that's a really, really important distinction for people to take note of who are listening, that this isn't gonna save you so much time. This is not replacing you. This isn't a form of outsourcing. Yes. It might help you creatively, it might help as a starting point. I'm sure there are ways we can talk about shortly. How we can use it effectively to save us time. But if you are listening to this and thinking, great, this is gonna save me all the time.
It's gonna write my blog post, it's gonna do my social media content, you're actually totally barking up the wrong tree. And if that's what you're thinking, you don't have the time to do this stuff, then actually you should be looking to outsource those tasks to a social media manager, to someone who has that. And a machine is never gonna replace that is it. No.
No. You people think that a machine's gonna replace them. A machine isn't gonna replace them. Somebody using that machine might though, because somebody might be able to use that machine, get the the information out of it and turn it around and make it look brilliant. So you could outsource your content to a social media manager who is using AI as part of their business. But you can't outsource it just to the ai. That's not how it works.
Yeah. I think that's really important for people to realize. The other thing where you talked about briefly a little while ago was how it could actually become a distraction. Now, if anyone has had a go on this, it definitely can become a time suck again in a little parallel to clubhouse where people just wasted so much. In a platform for hours and hours and hours. If you get inside of this and it finally lets you in, you can spend a lot of time on it. It is fun because it's very different.
We haven't seen anything like it before, but for an example, my six-year-old, I was showing it to her. She loved it. We were asking it to write her poems about cheese. We were asking it to write her stories about herself, and we could have spent hours on there. And I can see that could be a problem for some of my business owners who are listening, who love to procrastinate the things they should be doing, like chasing their leads and making their sales by going down these rabbit holes.
So how can we stop ourselves just becoming massively distracted by this shiny new toy?
If we knew the answer!
You're asking the wrong person . Yeah. I, well, to be honest, I'm kind of a bit over it already. So I admit I'm not really the, probably the best person to ask, but at the point that Laura messaged me again, have you heard of this? And I went on there and I was a, I was totally blown away by the answers. I was like, wow. At first I thought, God, what's this random thing she's sharing with me now? And I was totally like, oh my God, this is amazing. In terms of the.
The level of information that I was getting back from it. So I probably did lose a little bit of time then. But then the, you soon learn that you get, you get out of things like Chat GPT, what you put into it, and the better your questions. The more you put into it in terms of what you are asking, the better the response you get. So actually for me, who's someone who would see that maybe it's a good place to go for some content creation kind of inspiration.
By the time I've actually thought of what I wanna ask, by the time I've allowed myself the time to think about the best questions to ask and the the key points I wanna pull out of that, I probably could have just used that time to think of some content myself. , like I kind of. Quickly was excited by it, but very quickly kind of thought, this isn't personally saved me that much time, so I'm probably not the best person to answer because I'm not distracted by it. Are you Laura
? Laura M: Yeah, I think it can be a bit of a fad, like when you first go in there it can be addictive and a bit of a fad, but you do seem soon kind of get over that. And I think also, To, you need to go into it at the right point. So if you are, for example, at that content creation point and you're staring at a blank screen and you cannot even get started cuz you can't think of your first line. That's a great time to go and use Chat GPT.
If you've got content ideas already and you don't need that, that assistance, don't use it. You don't need to. Yeah,
I think you are right. You need to know what you are using it for and then go in for a short period of time to try and get out of it what you want. So that brings us on then to some examples. I would love for us all to share a few examples of how maybe we've used. Feature and how my wedding pros might be able to use it too. So I'll start with an example myself. So I recently had my Pinterest course out for sale. So I thought I'll give this a go and see whether or not it can help me.
So what I did in that instance that I was trying to come up with a. Instagram post. So I asked it. Please, may you, I always like to say, please, I feel like I'm talking to a real person. Please may you create me an Instagram post based around selling my Pinterest course, using the information from, and then I just linked to my sales page and it actually created me a great piece of content.
And I think it's because it was basically just rewriting content I'd already written myself, but in a way that it worked. Instagram post. So that worked really well for me. So if you've got something that you could already plug into it, definitely have a look at that. Yes, I did check it over. Yes, I may be shifted a couple of words for tone of voice, but on the whole, that gave me quite a good result. However, if I just asked it the question, please may give me a post about my Pinterest course.
It was a lot more generic and not very helpful.
Yeah, I think a, a good example of how you could use that is if you were, for example, planning a podcast. Let's say you're planning a podcast, talking about ai, you could go into chat g b t and say, help me map, like map out, plan out a podcast where I'm talking about Chat GPT. And ai, what are the the three tips that I could share with somebody? What are the three mistakes that I need to make people aware of?
And you know, what are the core things that people need to understand in order to get something out of this podcast? And it could give you those bullet points that you could then go and build on. We did try that, didn't we? Did it work? It did work. Did work. We had to build a lot on it, but it gave us the structure.
We've also used it to send it, well we, it was Laura who used it to send an email, didn't we, to introduce our audience to the whole process. So we, we got it to write the email and then we just put the PS at the end to say, look, this was written by Chat GPT. Did you have to tweak that much
only a little bit, cuz it didn't really. I asked it to write an email telling people what chat, chat G p T was, and I said, can you try and make it a bit amusing? Our audience is social media managers. And I, so I gave it some, you know, some of that information and it made it a little bit funny.
It wasn't all that funny, but there was, it was it, the spelling was in American spellings, so I had to change that and there was, I can't remember what the line was in there, but there was a line in there that the robot obviously thought was funny, which wasn't funny. It was a very much a dad joke. Totally took that. So, yeah, it still needed a bit of tweaking.
Yes. Now, the other thing I use it for, because I'm a little bit lazy, and one of the things I hate when I'm posting on social media is thinking of hashtags. So I've started using it to give me hashtags, so I just write, please give me some, please give me some Instagram hashtags around this podcast. Chat G P T, and it just gives me like 15 hashtags and I copy and paste them straight into my connection because I'm too lazy.
And I know there's tools and I know there's better processes than that, but I figure it's better than not having any hashtags. Right.
Oh, that's so interesting. Hadn't thought that
I didn't even know it could do that.
Well, let's do it Laura.
Okay, I'm on it.
There we go. There's one for you to try out. I think that's the interesting thing about it. I think we're gonna learn what it's good for and what it's not good for over the coming months, what it's obviously rubbish at and what it actually is good at. And of course, it's probably gonna be getting better all of the time, isn't it? Because it's learning and the more people that are using it, the more that it's learning.
Yeah, totally. And I think when, when it comes to Chat GPT. Specifically, you need to remember that it's like a language based tool, and if you want like data and numbers, then there'll be other tools out there that are more suitable. So if it is just words and stuff, then that's a great tool. But just I, I don't think many people realize that it can't. Spit out statistics, for example.
Okay, so we're using it for language-based things rather than data-based things. The other thing that I found hilarious about it, and it's a little bit scary when we think about it, my son at the moment is learning at school about digital footprints. He's nine. This wasn't a thing we learn about at school, and he's keeps talking to me about, mommy, your digital footprint is all over the internet. So I asked Chat GPT. Tell me about Becca Pountney in the wedding industry.
I can tell you it gave me the best bio about myself that I've ever read because I hadn't written it myself. And it obviously taken little bits of information from all over the internet and it's kind of scary how much it knows, isn't it?
Oh, we are so dope. Totally gonna do that after this as well. We haven't done that either. ? Laura D: Oh, I dunno. I, I don't think I want to do that. I wanna know what it knows about the two Lauras
I have typed in my name and it just came up with that golfer who's got my name. So maybe I need to give it a bit more information.
Yeah, you need to ask it a little bit more information because as soon as I put wedding industry in it, it knew who I was. Exactly. And again, I think you can use this for your benefit. If you are someone that has to write a bio about yourself for your website or you're about me page. And I know there are lots of people listening to this who hate doing this. They don't like talking about themselves, they don't like putting themselves forward.
It's, again, it's a great starting off point if you can get it to do this. Cause it'll. Bits of information you've already written and put it together and at least give you a place to start. Just don't go and copy and paste it straight into your website. Make sure you check it. First, now we've talked a lot about chat, G P T and these different tools, but there are other bits of AI across the internet as well. And one thing I wanna touch on before we finish is Canva.
Now, I listened to a podcast episode you two put together, and you talked a little bit about this Canva, image generation AI that's inside of Canva now in the wedding industry. As you can imagine, we love Canva. We're a very creative industry. We use it all of the time. and hearing you talk about this blew my mind. So can you explain to me what is this tool inside of Canva? Where can we find it? And is it worth finding?
Currently, I would say it's not really worth finding, but I suspect it will get better. So if you go into Canva and go to the apps section, you can ask Canva to give you a photo or a graphic or whatever based on your description. So if, for example, you couldn't find a photo of purple and black wedding cake in a dark church, That was like the perfect thing for your website that you want on your wedding website.
You could go in Canva and you could say, find me a purple and black wedding cake in a dark church, and it would literally create you this AI photo. Now some of them are terrible, I have to say, some of them are really bad, and you might have seen some photos doing the rounds where people have asked the AI to create photos where there's people in. And these people have come out with like three arms and four legs because they're of how they're generating the photos. So it is very hit and miss.
But I do think it will definitely get better. And I think there is a gap for it. If, if you're a photographer, by the way, you do not need this. But if , if you can't create a photo that you need or you can't find the perfect image and you have to have that image, there is a gap. But you, it takes some hard work to really describe what it is you want.
You really have to go in depth, and if it gives you something that's almost there, you could just tweak that description and be like, okay, maybe it's in a dark gothic church, or it's in a dark. British Church and you can just go in a little bit more detail as to what it is you want.
Well, I'm hoping this feature improves cuz I do think there's a massive gap. I am definitely the person that sits down to write a presentation and has this idea for an image in my mind that I want in that presentation. And I scour the internet, scour all the sites, and nothing exists and I can't get my head around. Earth it works or how it's ever going to happen. But I do believe there will be a time where this works incredibly well and we should be excited about this stuff, not scared about it.
And again, if you are listening to this and you are feeling scared, I just wanna reiterate this is. Gonna happen whether we like it or not. We don't wanna be the people pushing against it. We might as well look into it and not be scared of it.
There was a time when we were having a conversation about whether platforms like iTunes and Amazon Music, were gonna put wedding DJs out of business, but they're never going to because it, it loses that human element and actually that's made your jobs easier rather than made them harder. So if I'm right, we need to just embrace it, don't we? Absolutely. Totally agree. Well, I've absolutely loved chatting with you two about this.
If people wanna find out more about what you do or find your incredible podcast, where's the best places for them to find you?
We are on all the social media platforms ad as at the two Lauras, or you can just go over to the two lauras.com.
Fabulous. I'll make sure that I put the link in the show notes and I'll put the link to that famous chat g p t in the show notes as well. So go and have a look at it. Don't get distracted though, and let us know if you find things that it helps you with in your business that we can pass on to other people.