96: Mind-blowing ways to use AI in your life and small business
Thinking about using AI in your business?
In this episode of ill communication, I’m answering a question I get asked all the time as a copywriter- what I think about AI.
Especially in the last couple of weeks, I have been asked several times if I use it and if I’m scared of it disrupting my industry and taking away my job.
So I’m sharing my honest thoughts on using AI and ChatGPt as well as some mind-blowing ways you can use it to elevate your life and business.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
A sneak peek into how I use ChatGPT to make my business and personal life easier
The one thing you need to do if you want to use ChatGPT in your business
A word of caution about the ethics and the dark side of AI
Seriously cool ways that people are using AI to create efficiency or simplify their lives
So there you have it! My thoughts on AI. Are you using ChatGPT or other AI tools in your business? How about in your life? Shoot me a message with some of the creative ways you use it!
And don't forget to subscribe or follow the podcast and leave a review!
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[00:00:03] Welcome to ill communication, copywriting tips and sales strategies for small business. I'm your host, Kim Keel. I'm a copy coach, sales strategist, and direct response copywriter. It's my mission to help women leaders and change makers amplify their voices through copy. It's why I'm dishing out all the juicy tips, writing prompts, and sales formulas to help you generate more leads, book more calls, and get more high value clients on repeat. Sounds pretty good. It's time to ditch the overwhelm you might be feeling and find confidence in your copywriting so you can get your message out there and attract more soulmate clients. Let's get started. So on a recent trip to Palm Desert, my family and I went on an incredible sightseeing day. We drove from my mom's rented condo in Rancho Mirage to Anza-Borrego, a state park in the Colorado Desert of Southern California. It's known for its vast and deeply wrinkled badland landscape. It's truly nothing like I've seen before. It's also known for its spectacular desert wildflower blooms in the spring. Now, my mom, who regularly snowboards in Palm Springs over the winter, had been once or twice before to Anza-Borrego, so she knew would be a good destination for a day trip. However, on our outing, we came across the most spectacular scenery an incredible artwork installation and a fabulous lunch spot, none of which she'd previously known about. And to be honest, this day trip was the highlight of our week in California. And you may be surprised when I tell you how we discovered all these fabulous stops and treasures on our day trip.
[00:01:58] Hey there! Welcome to this episode of the Yale Communication Podcast. Today I'm answering a question I get asked about a lot as a copywriter, but in particular, in the last two weeks I've been asked this question several times, so I'm gonna answer them. Now. The questions are do you use AI? And as a copywriter, am I scared about AI disrupting my industry and taking away my jobs? Now, before I fully answer that question, I want to get back to the intro to this podcast and to share that the incredible and memorable itinerary for our road trip to Anza-Borrego was courtesy of ChatGPT. A day or two before we set out to Anza-Borrego, I searched Google for fun things to do or see in the region. I discovered the state park website and a few blogs listing activities and things to sightsee in the region, but it was all super disconnected. I had to sift through a lot of information and different websites to get the kind of information I would need to plan an itinerary for our outing. And then I had a brainwave to ask ChatGPT to help me plan. I opened up a fresh chat window and gave the following command. We're planning a day trip to Anza-Borrego on Thursday. We are traveling from Rancho Mirage. We are traveling with a 12 year old and a 16 year old, and a 74 year old and 248 year olds.
[00:03:23] We enjoy interesting sites like Salvation Mountain and the Mud Pots. We love a great meal. We enjoy flowers and non-strenuous hikes. Can you plan three different itineraries? Great for our travel group with a few stops for exploring and eating. Provides stop and start times. It generated three unique itineraries, each with a different snack or lunch recommendation and different activities to see and do along the way. While a couple of the activities, like stopping at the visitor center to pick up maps were similar across all of them, each plan was quite different. There were different restaurants, different stops, different routes to travel. Initially, I thought I would just look at these three itineraries and pick and choose different activities to create my own day trip. But in the end, there was one itinerary that seemed to be a perfect match for us. It included a stop at the Salton Sea and the State Visitor Center, lunch at Carmelita's Mexican Grill, a short hike along the Borrego Palm Canyon Trail, and a stop to explore the giant metal sculptures in Galleta Meadows. The only thing we changed was the order of events. We saw the art sculptures first and finished with the nature hike. Everything was a hit, especially the restaurant recommendation, which I really don't think I would have found in my Google searches. It was kind of off the beaten path. And as a side note, my 12 year old literally just popped into my office and saw me working on this episode.
[00:04:53] He saw the words Anza-Borrego and he said, oh, that was such a fun day. What was that restaurant we went to? It was so good. All of which is to say, ChatGPT created a terrific itinerary for us, and it was much easier to use than Google alone because it created three different plans customized for our family and our interests. So all of that is a long way of saying, no, I'm not afraid of using ChatGPT. And yes, I use it for business and for my personal life too. I use ChatGPT as my brainstorming buddy and kind of an assistant. I use it to suggest content, ideas, and even outlines for this podcast or emails. I'll get it to brainstorm 20 different titles or names to spur my creative juices. I've uploaded survey responses and asked it to analyze and sort the data and share the big insights with me. I especially love using it for analyzing voice of customer data to identify the top five pain points and problems, hesitations, or dreams of my clients customers. It's so handy and time saving for another project. I uploaded a few academic papers and reports and asked it to create three different outlines for articles that would appear in a newsletter. It's significantly cut down my thinking time on a project like that. I've uploaded a wordy email and asked it to shorten it to a certain word count, and just today, I pasted a client's YouTube transcript into ChatGPT and asked it to remove the timestamps for me so I could have a clean transcript of their voice and content.
[00:06:35] In the past, that would have taken me forever to do that painful, tedious task. It took ChatGPT seconds. I find it to be a very handy tool, and I treat it like an assistant or even a junior copywriter. But make no mistake, it is far from perfect. I can spot copy written by ChatGPT a mile away. If you don't know how to prompt it properly, it will spit out copy that sounds like a really bad cheesy marketer wrote it. It'll come up with phrases like bolster your branding brilliance, or go from overlooked to overbooked, or from idea to income, or craft to cash, or from obstacles to opportunities. Do you see the pattern? Chatgpt loves using that kind of formula of 2 or 3 alliterated words, followed by a colon and then a descriptor. When I see copy like this out in the wild, I shake my head because it is lazy and ineffective. So if you're using AI tools to write copy, you must know how to give it the right prompts and the best quality information so it generates better results. You must always review, edit, and fact check the results. And ultimately, I rarely keep any of the copy ChatGPT creates for me. Most often I use it simply for brainstorming, outlining, data mining, and creating a shitty first draft gets me part of the way, and then I can respond, edit, and adapt the copy as needed.
[00:08:13] In general, I think I use it in some capacity for about a quarter or less of the projects or copy I write, so I'm not a total evangelist either. I'm just not afraid of it. I've taken training on it, but I'm by no means an expert. There are a number of copywriters and business owners who are absolute powerhouses at using ChatGPT in their businesses. One of the most impressive things I've seen is a client using ChatGPT to come up. With product and offer ideas. She input her brand information by copy and pasting the copy from her home about and services pages into the chat. She pasted in product descriptions and names. She inputted info about her customers, including testimonials and reviews, and then she asked ChatGPT to create six new product ideas, including names that would be aligned with her brand and her customer. And I have to tell you, the results were pretty friggin brilliant. It understood the assignment. The brainstormed ideas were smart and on brand. So I think AI tools like ChatGPT can be powerful tools for your business, not unlike any other tool that you use in your business. And that tool is only as good as the user and as good as the information you feed it and the prompts you give it. If you want to use ChatGPT or any other AI tool, you must get trained in how to use it properly. Two experts I've enjoyed learning from are Samuel Woods and Amy Williamson.
[00:09:51] Back in the winter of 20 2223, I took a deep dive into using AI when I joined Samuel Woods course on AI and copywriting. He showed how powerful ChatGPT, Jasper, AI, and many other AI tools are. My mind was literally blown. Well, not literally, but my mind was blown by the power and potential of using AI. I am really just barely scratching the surface in how I use it in my business. Another person I follow is Amy Williamson. She has a great newsletter and has recently released a fun, private podcast on how to leverage AI to enhance your creativity. A link to Sam and Amy in the show notes. And of course, there are plenty of other trusted creators out there who can share AI prompts and best practices with you. But it goes without saying. There are downsides and cautions to using AI. There are some pretty significant ethical concerns with how AI is trained on data, how it sources that data, and how that data is managed within the last month. France's competition authority regulator fined Google €250 million for breaching an agreement on using copyrighted content for training its AI service, known as Gemini. And just two days ago, Sony Music, the largest music publisher in the world and home to artists like Adele and Beyonce, demanded that tech giants like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI stop training, developing and making money from AI using their copyrighted songs without permission. And of course, we've all heard of some of the dark, shady blackmailing schemes where AI tools can be used to mimic artists, or even your grandson, or your kid, or your mom or your dad that dupes people and entraps them in complex blackmailing schemes.
[00:11:51] Another big concern is that AIS like ChatGPT were trained on what's publicly available in the public domain and in a patriarchal society dominated by white male voices. The publicly available content skews to white males, and it misses the rich context and content of marginalized voices and diverse communities. Often when I ask ChatGPT to list songs or movies or actors or famous business leaders, the output is largely masculine or male, and rarely includes women or people of color. Unless I specify, I want that in my output. But if users don't know to add those additional qualifiers to the prompt, then the AI tool is going to continue to perpetuate the same bland and boring and biased content. Another thing to keep in mind about using AI generated content is that Google and other search engines prioritize good quality, high value content from reputable sources. However, a lot of the AI generated content is basic or mediocre at best, especially when you haven't vetted it, checked it, or edited it. So if you publish content or copy generated by AI that you haven't optimized or reviewed, your content will be penalized by Google, just as it would be penalized if you share basic, mediocre, or non-factual content that you created on your own. There are also industries and corporations that have very clear rules and regulations that limit or prevent the use of AI.
[00:13:29] So you'd want to make sure you fully understand your field before using or publishing content created with AI. It's really up to you and your discretion to decide how and if you use AI. But with all of that said, I am not afraid of using AI. I'm not afraid it's going to take away my job. There's a quote or a saying I've seen. I can't remember who said it, but it's along the lines of this AI isn't going to replace all copywriters, it's going to replace the mediocre ones. And the copywriters who embrace AI will outperform those who do not. Now, side note I searched LinkedIn and Google to figure out who said that quote or that statement. I couldn't find it, so I asked ChatGPT. It told me that that quote or statement is attributed to Paul Reitzer, founder and CEO of the marketing AI Institute and co-host of the Artificial Intelligence Show podcast. I checked it out and it seems partially true. He is known for saying that artificial intelligence won't replace writers, but writers who use AI will replace writers who don't. He also said on a podcast he recorded with the Copywriter Club, there's going to be a paradigm shift where we're going to have so much AI generated content that people are going to crave authentic human content even more, and they're going to want to know that something truly came from humans, and that it was unscripted and it was uniquely human in terms of the emotions and experiences that went into it, and it shares their points of view.
[00:15:09] So don't hold back on sharing your own voice, your own ideas, your own experiences and expertise, because people are going to crave that. I understand AI is a tool and a pretty frickin disruptive tool at that, not unlike Excel spreadsheets or email or the internet was back in the day. There were a lot of skeptics and late adopters with those technologies as well. And while some jobs may have been lost with those disruptions and evolutions, it also created lots of opportunity for those of us who were willing to learn how to safely and effectively use these tools to our advantage. Now to wrap up this episode, I want to share a few of the cool ways I've seen others using ChatGPT in their lives. If you've been avoiding using AI tools, maybe one of these examples will spark a little curiosity for how you could use it to create more efficiency, or simplify your life in some way. Many of these examples actually came from a single woman in a networking community I'm in, and my mind was blown by how she uses ChatGPT in her everyday life. So here's just a running list. You can tell ChatGPT what's in your fridge and pantry and get it to create a meal plan, or find recipes to use up the food you already have on hand.
[00:16:29] You can ask ChatGPT to help you write an awkward email, maybe where you have to respond to a complaint or reply to a challenging customer. You can give ChatGPT your to do list and errand list, and it will create a daily or weekly schedule for your family. It can suggest movies for family movie night. It'll give you book recommendations based on what you like to read. It can explain things to you you don't understand. You can use it to calculate profit and loss or to help you with resumes. You can ask it to help you plot out your landscaping or garden bed. You can use visualize like Dall-E to create graphics, room layouts or color schemes. You can literally cheat ChatGPT like a search engine where you ask it anything. Now the first time I used ChatGPT was for Christmas back in 2022. I asked it to write a poem in the style of Twas the Night Before Christmas, but to make it a spoof about a hunter named Chad, because I got my hubby a gag gift that year, it wrote an amazing poem that would have taken me ten times longer if I was to write it myself. A few tweaks and improvements and it was exactly what I wanted and the poem was a huge hit. So my friend, are you using ChatGPT or other AI tools in your business? How about in your life? Shoot me a text message with some of the creative ways you use it.
[00:17:58] You'll find the link to send me a text message in the show notes. Just make sure you don't delete any of the identifying numbers that pop up when you click that link. But go ahead and tell me how AI has helped you in your life, or maybe even some things you're cautious about. That's it for me today. And incidentally, I only used ChatGPT twice to create this episode. Once to look back at the travel itinerary I mentioned at the top of the episode, and once to look up the originator of that quote about AI taking over copywriters jobs. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Ill Communication Podcast. If you liked it, if you enjoyed it, please leave a rating in a review, click follow or subscribe and I'll see you next week with another writing tip, a writing hack, or a writing prompt to make your life easier. Bye for now. And that's a wrap on today's episode of Ill Communication. Hey, if you're picking up what I'm putting down, I would love if you would leave a rating and a review to let me know. And don't forget to follow the show so you never miss out on the tips, prompts, and strategies I share in every episode. They're designed to make you an ill communicator too. As always, you can check out all the links and resources from this episode on the web page. Just head over to Khimky compered cast. I'll chat with you again next week.
Resources Mentioned
Follow these experts for advanced AI tips:
Listen to the Copywriter Club podcast featuring Paul Roetzer
Additional Resources
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