Recommended tools – collated by Kerry Manton (link to Kerry)
Recommended tools flagged to explore further during the session*:
✨ Eleven Labs – https://elevenlabs.io/ – AI voice generator and text to speech.
✨ HeyGen – www.heygen.com – AI Video Generator- AI voice cloning and video generator.
✨ Speechmatics – www.speechmatics.com – Enables accurate transcription, translation and speech intelligence for various uses, including newscasting.
✨ Pi – https://pi.ai – A personal AI assistant for managing tasks and organising information.
✨ Gemini (Google AI) – https://gemini.google.com – Google version of Chat GPT.
✨ Copilot – https://lnkd.in/eFFGRhEK – Microsoft AI tool to assist with tasks and activities that can connect with Chat GPT.
✨ Chat GPT – https://chat.openai.com – Helps develop AI-generated content for various purposes.
✨ Perplexity – https://www.perplexity.ai – Can answer questions and create content.
✨ Claude 3 – https://claude.ai – Used for AI-driven insights and strategies.
✨ Adobe Gen Studio – Leverages AI for creative content production and optimisation. Also provides campaign management and analytics.
✨ Descript – www.descript.com – Simplifies audio, podcast and video editing through AI-driven tools.
✨ Opus Clip – www.opus.pro – Creates music and video content with AI assistance, perfect for platforms like Spotify.
✨ Originality.ai – https://originality.ai – Offers plagiarism detection tools for maintaining content integrity.
✨ Ben’s Bites – www.bensbites.com – Newsletter curating AI news and information.
Transcript (Automatically generated, so may contain some errors)
Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. I hope you’re doing amazing. It’s so lovely to see you here today. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you also to everyone who’s already popped in the chat. A big hi, and where you’re watching from. I’ve seen folks in Ohio. I’ve seen folks in Japan. I’ve seen Joanna in Geneva, George in Carolina, as well as the UK, well represented with Hannah in Nottingham, Robert in Bristol, Chris in London. The list goes on. It’s a real thrill. Thank you all so much for taking the time today. It’s just bloomin’ wicked. It’s lovely to be back after a week’s break as well, so thank you for taking the time. Today we’re going to have a great time, so thank you once again for taking the moment. What you’ll see on your screen right now, it might be quite little, but there’s some instructions on how to change your chat feature, so everyone can see your messages right now. For some folks, you’ll be sending it only to hosts and panelists, so if you head into your chat feature, click the little toggle button that might for you presently say hosts and panelists, and then change that to everyone, then everyone can see your messages. Likewise, after today’s session, if I could ask one thing, is share on social media. It helps the conversation go on afterwards. Simon is saying it’s very blurred. We’ll see how that goes. Anyway, let’s get on with today’s introduction. In fact, before we do, if you could pop in the chat feature where your knowledge level on AI presently, so number 10 is you’re Sam Altman, and number one is you’ve never touched chat GPT before. Let’s see whereabouts your knowledge level is, so we can gauge where the audience is today, and Ross and I can take notes as we go. Today, our guest is the amazing Ross Simmons. He’s the CEO of Foundation, which is an agency for B2B brands, and also a returning speaker, having smashed a talk two years ago out at the park for the marketing meetup. Since then, Ross has been one of my favorite people to follow online, so when I saw that he’s been speaking about AI, I was like, cool, I know the community can benefit from his thoughts. Right there on your screen, you’ve got two resources with QR codes associated with them. The first is Ross’s new book, so Create Once, Build Forever. Build Forever? Distribute Forever. That’s the type on my part. That’s Ross’s new book that came out very recently, and having followed Ross for a long time, then I’d really recommend that book, and likewise, he’s built an AI console with bunches of things which you can take advantage of for AI. That’s a paid product, but well worth it. Ross is an absolute legend. Today, we’re going to investigate the current state of AI and its impact on marketers. Today is a pure interview, so I’ve got some questions loaded up, but going through the feedback forms after our webinars, then one of the things that you’ve asked for more regularly is making more space for the Q&A from the community, and so having listened to that, we’re going to make sure we do that. In the Q&A feature found down below, if you’ve got a question, drop it in there, and we’ll make sure we prioritize those questions. Before we get going, I just want to say a big thank you to our featured sponsor. This week, it’s Frontify. Frontify are a DAM solution, so they help you keep all your digital assets in a single place, which gives you consistency across your brand, and right there with that QR code, they’ve just released a brand new report on creativity in AI. There is no email required to access this. It’s literally, scan the QR code, and you go straight to the report. They’re very lovely people over at Frontify. Also, a big thank you to Exclaimer, Cambridge Marketing College, and Redgate. They’re all legends, so thank you very much. We’ll speak more about those in future weeks. All that said, introduction done. Ross, you’re a hero. Thank you for taking the time, and thank you also to everyone in the chat for just being absolutely heroic. Let’s get going with today’s interview. The first question is inspired by Louis Grenier from Everyone Hates Marketers, a great podcast in itself. Louis asks a version of this question, which is, Ross, you start in a company tomorrow, and you don’t have access to your reputation, but you do have a laptop and an idea. What AI technologies are you incorporating straight off
Speaker 2: the bat to give you the best possible advantage, and why? Yes, so the tools that I would use to get the best possible advantage would be ones that allow me to be in multiple places at once without actually being there. Some of you might be thinking, okay, what’s this? You can’t do telepathy. That’s not AI functionality today. You’re right, but there are tools today that would allow you to create, within the matter of minutes, hundreds of versions of you. In the chat, I’m going to drop a link, and in that link, you’re going to find a deepfake version of me. In this deepfake, I essentially say a bunch of words, but those words never came out of my mouth. I used a tool called Eleven Labs to synthetically create my voice, so I was able to upload every podcast that I’ve done with Create Like The Greats, which is my podcast, and I uploaded these episodes, and it listened to my voice to pick up my tonality, my voice, the inclination of my tone, and all of these things, and it recreated that. Then I took a bunch of videos that I uploaded to YouTube, and I uploaded those, and it created a deepfake of myself. That was done through a tool called DID and Haygen. You combine these two tools, and now I have a deepfake version of me. I go to ChatGPT, and I can say, ChatGPT, I want you to come up with, based off of some ideas that I come up with. Let’s say, again, my knowledge isn’t there. I can go to ChatGPT, and I can brainstorm ideas about things that have nothing to do with marketing, right? Let’s say I went, ChatGPT, I need 20 ideas for topics that I should create to run a new website that is targeting young dads. Cool. All right, let’s do it. ChatGPT then gives me a bunch of ideas. Then I say, ChatGPT, I want you to pretend you’re Mr. Beast. I want you to pretend that you’re some great YouTuber that has millions of followers, and I want you to write a script that I could read as a person running a TikTok account or running shorts on YouTube for this audience, and then it’s going to write it. Then I take those things, I upload them to 11Labs, and 11Labs is going to make me now say all of those words 20 times because I have 20 scripts that I’ve uploaded. Now I can download each of those videos. I can schedule them to go out, and I have 20 days worth of video content that I just produced with me speaking. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing that will replace human to human connection. There’s nothing that will replace a human being on camera, but you took everything away from me. If I had no reputation and I was trying to build up myself, I would take these videos and then I would slide in the DMs of accounts with bigger following than me, and I’d ask them to reshare it. I’d ask them, hey, can I pay you to promote it? Can I pay you to distribute it? They would do that. Then I’ve now reached thousands of people with 20 videos that I didn’t actually talk through. I never actually stood in front of a camera to record it, but those videos are now live. That is where we are today. Where we’re going to be in the future, in like literally two weeks from now, as the technology continues to evolve, is I found this technology within HeyGen. It’s still in beta where you can upload a spreadsheet. Every single person watching this interview right now, I could take a spreadsheet with their first name and their last name. I could take a scrape from all of the chat where it said their location. I can create a video right now where I record a selfie video. I say something like, hey, Joe, thanks so much for joining me with the marketing meetup. I had a blast chatting with you. I hope the weather in London is great, blah. I could record that right now. Then I could upload it to HeyGen, and I could upload that spreadsheet. I could identify the moment where I said Joe and where I said London. The spreadsheet will pick up the names of every single person on this video, and it will replace in my video their name. It will send them an email with a video of me saying, hey, Jack, hey, Laura, hey, Claire, hey, Cicely, hey, Miriam. It will say the names based off of the spreadsheet with my voice. That is possible today. Now, imagine you do that with the sales pitch. Imagine you do that with a bunch of people who you want to sell to at scale. The opportunities there are absolutely ridiculous. With great power folks comes great responsibility. I’m not saying go out and use all of these things immediately. You have to experiment, you have to test, and you have to understand whether or not the laws in your state, country, province, whatever it is, allows for it. That’s where we are today. It’s wild time.
Speaker 1: That’s mad. there’s so many things pinging off of my brain already. it is Joanne sort of saying that’s crazy levels of personalization, but I think it’s, there’s, we had a couple of webinars a couple of weeks ago where we were speaking with Dr. Grace Kite, who’s a big data scientist over here. She was a huge proponent of short form video as a way to build brand and reputation. Likewise, we had Azeem, who I think is in on the chat today, who’s an SEO. Azeem was speaking about the SEO benefits of short form video. Your answer here is just like, you’re doing it in a far more personalized way, but it’s also remarkably consistent with the zeitgeist in marketing, but also everything that has proved to be immensely valuable. Thank you, mate. That’s an interesting answer. Completely unexpected, actually. That’s wicked. That’s absolutely heroic. Thank you very much. That feels like a really wonderful answer. I almost feel comfortable going to the next one, which is what do you wish that more people knew about AI that
Speaker 2: they don’t presently? Yes, I think there’s still a lot of fear in the hearts of many around AI and I get it. I 100% get it. There’s fear that AI is going to take our jobs. There’s fear that AI is going to dilute the quality of the work, that it’s going to reduce the viability of humans. There’s, that is going to lose that authenticity. All of those, all of those things are real fears that people have. What I would encourage people to think about when it comes to AI is less so around the fear of these things, taking our jobs and more about how these things will actually allow us and give us the ability to do more human focused work. The things that make us special, the things that make us unique, the things that have allowed us to evolve over the years and decades to actually be uniquely human. Humans are really good at taking a bunch of different ideas from abstract parts of their life, bringing them together and telling stories that other humans connect with. That is still at the fundamentals of marketing. When you can connect with people, if that is a superpower of yours, guess what you no longer have to do. You no longer have to go through a spreadsheet for six hours, trying to figure out how to fix an Excel, a cell within Excel that is not functioning correctly. That no longer has to happen because you can now upload it to ChatGPT. You can now get an AI assistant to fix it all for you. That is time-saving, life-saving amounts of hours that you are going to now get back. For me, the biggest thing and the biggest lesson that I wish more people realize is AI is not our enemy. AI is an accelerant of human potential, and we should adopt it in the same way that we would have encouraged back in, if you want to put on your comic book Yeekat, like for me, like the same way that Tony Stark puts on the Iron Man suit and has Jarvis, like we need to put on AI like an accelerant of our potential. I was giving a keynote in Brazil and I had no idea where this was going to go. Right before I went on stage, I was like, no one here speaks English. They’re trying to learn it, blah. The vast majority of these people speak Portuguese. I’m going to go to ChatGPT and I’m going to translate all my slides. I did that probably like within an hour. Then I had a video at the end of my slot slides where I talked about how, what the future of AI was, but I was speaking in English and it was a deep fake of myself talking in English. I was like, nah, that’s not going to land either. I used AI to translate my voice into Portuguese. Then I uploaded that in the video and I put that up there. The crowd loved it. They were all like, wow, personalization, right? People loved it. They were happy. They got excited. Cool. A lady came up to me afterwards. She was in tears. She was like, I’m going to have so much more time to hang out with my kids because of the ideas that you shared today. I was like, that’s it. That is the reason why AI is important because people can now spend more time doing the things that people should be doing. That to me is amazing. I can’t get mad at that. I want that, right? That is not something that I can get mad about. I’m excited. I think more people need to put the fear aside, experiment with it and see how much more of your life you can get back because you embrace these tools.
Speaker 1: I love that so much. it, again, without meaning to, make this about, the stuff that we’ve done so far, as you before about, the sessions that we’ve been running these past few weeks with folks like the CCO of men United and, and what the hell, folks like that. It struck me how, positive these folks were and curious, they were about. I think folks are, right to hold, some curiosity about the potentially adverse effects of these things, but also, it feels like the cat’s out of the bag to a certain extent. It’s not going away. It’s not, embrace it whole with every bit of a heart, but, sort of take the good and seek the good and seek where we can, we can, sort of, benefit our lives. We’ve got Andre, saying pre-recorded, in the chat, which I can only assume is down to how wonderful you are as a, as a communicator Russ. I’m curious, because you, you’re clearly a proponent of the tech, which is brilliant. I’m curious, what are the moments that sort of changed your own perception? You’ve spoken through the idea of the talk in Brazil, but what were those moments which like took you on your journey of AI where you’re like, okay, cool. I get this, or my perception has now changed the tech most deeply, because you’re an impressive marketer. It’d be cool to know what’s the things that impressed you.
Speaker 2: Yes. There’s a lot of things that impressed me about AI. the first one would have been back in 2019. In 2019, I was using a tool called Clara. Clara was an AI assistant that I would CC on emails and use Clara to schedule my meetings. This was when I think I had a team of like three people and I didn’t have any, a, there was no human there. Clara was my AI assistant and someone would reach out to schedule coffee and I would reply and I’d say, Hey, Claire’s going to help with this. The moment that Claire jumped into my inbox and responded as Clara, who wasn’t a real person and said, Hey, I can’t wait to connect you and Ross here a few times. It used AI to look at my calendar, blah. Made some recos. That was when the light bulbs went off that this thing was going to fundamentally change the way that we work. Cool. You fast forward a few more years when I opened up chat GPT and started to ask it to write blog posts and they were doing it in the fraction of seconds. I was like, okay, this is game changing. Don’t get me wrong. I still, to this day, don’t believe that chat GPT can write blog posts as good as a great writer. If you can combine chat GPT, which gets you to a good piece and you combine that with a great writer or a great editor, you can get from good to great in a fraction of the amount of time. That was another unlock for me that opened my eyes to the possibility. Then when I started to play with mid journey, my mind completely got blown because I was able to say to mid journey, I want you to take a picture of me and me in a Spider-Man costume. It did it. I was like, okay, this is nuts. This is absolutely nuts. That was when all bets were off for me. I was like, okay, AI is actually going to change everything. I’ve continued to tinker with these tools. Every month now, I’d say every week, I run into something that blows my mind in the world of AI. There’s a new tool. There’s a new moment. There’s a feature that I play with and I’m like, wow, it can do that too now. It just continues to change, which is fascinating. It’s a wild time to be alive.
Speaker 1: I love that so much. The curiosity that goes along with it. There’s a question that’s actually surfaced at the top of the Q&A from Amy here. I’ll integrate this because it feels relevant to the point that you’ve just made. Amy’s asked for someone that were a company who isn’t using AI, although has used it a tiny bit. Where would you suggest starting? Because you’ve spoken through so many examples there of things that you found along the way, but for folks who aren’t familiar, where would you suggest to start? For example, programs, tasks, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Many different things. I want to try to make this super tactical for folks. Do you mind
Speaker 1: if I share my screen? Is it cool if I do that? Oh, of course. Yes. I’ll just make sure that you’ve got permission to do so with Zoom. There you go. Cool. I know I should have asked before
Speaker 2: if I can even ask. No, you’re good. All right. Let’s say I’m a marketing manager and I need help planning a launch. A great place to start is to use ChatGPT as a partner in your creative thinking and in your planning. I’m working on the launch of a new version of my podcast called Marketing Meetup, where I interview exclusively creatives at big agencies. Yes. Create a launch plan for me. You ask ChatGPT these types of things and it goes out and it uses the large language models that it essentially trained on all of the content on the internet. It starts to give you objectives. It starts to figure out all of the things that you need to do as it relates to your target audience. It’s giving you breakdown on students and marketing, how you should do content planning. It’s giving you all of this detail. By collaborating with ChatGPT, you’re able to get additional insight into things that you might want to do. This is a great use case for ChatGPT and for all AI, in my opinion. Now, some folks will get to this and they’ll be like, okay, cool. I’ve got some preliminary planning. Remember, all of this is happening live. Once this is done, which I thought would be a little bit faster, but it’s still going, which is wild on its own. You’re then going to ask it to do some additional tasks. What a lot of people make the mistake of doing when they’re using AI is they ask it one question, they walk away and they say, I’ve got what I need and they call it quits. What you actually want to do is build on top of the prompts and the resources that ChatGPT gave you. It’s already done some of this event. I love your idea about the premier event. It talked about this as something that we should do. Please break down an event plan for that for me. You’ll notice I use please. I’m not letting AI come back and get me someday. I’m trying to be nice to my AIs. Someday when these things become sentient, they’re going to be kind to Ross. I build on top of that one request. As you can see, it’s now developing for me, the agenda is giving me the event objective. It’s talking about the formats that I should use. It’s even recommending some tools. It’s doing the guest coordination, all of these things for me. Now you’ll notice under marketing and promotion, it says to create event graphics and promotional materials. I’m going to build on top of that simple idea by asking ChatGPT to develop for me some event graphics and material. It will, once I ask it for it, go out and actually create those designs. I’ll get this one ready designed for me, the event graphic that you talked about earlier, make it beautiful. ChatGPT is also able to do visual content creation. It has a technology called Dolly, D-A-L-L-E, which will try to create a visual. Now, a lot of people, myself included, used to laugh at AI because they would make pictures of humans and we’d have six fingers. The technology has gotten substantially better over the last few years. I’m not sure that it will get the text right, like where I said, marketing meetup and things like that, but you can now take that and plug it into things like Adobe and get all of that stuff fixed up. We’re going to see how the image turns out, but this is like, just to give you a clear example of the way that I would think about it. The task at hand here would have probably taken an intern or a junior marketer, maybe a day. Holy smokes. It actually did the text, right? That’s cool. That’s the visual. It doesn’t match what you typically would have your aesthetic, but you can tell it, add in some purples, add in some pinks, and it will do that for you as well. My recommendation to folks is that when you are creating this type of content, remember a few things. One, that took me less than four minutes. I have a visual, I have a plan, all of that in a matter of seconds. Now I can see that to my team and tell them to execute. Here’s another great thing that you can do on top of all of what we just did. You can start to say, write the emails, write the social media posts. You want me to do PR outreach, write templates of the emails that I should create. Treat AI like the best colleague that you can have, but remember they are still limited. They are not human. They are not creative to a point in a degree where you’re going to be able to get today, the outputs that you would get from like the best marketer in the world. You might need to augment it and adjust things, but that is
Speaker 1: the opportunity there. Hang on. Love it. Thank you very much for us. people were commenting in the chat, agreeing that please is very important to say. I think it’s also worthy of pointing out that like, so first things first to acknowledge your answer there. First of all, wonderful typing skills, like no errors you went, which was pretty remarkable. Then, exactly to Amy’s question, hopefully Amy, you’ve now got a really good idea of where you could get started with something,
Speaker 2: which is absolutely phenomenal. Can I address one thing, Joe, that I really think, so I seen it in the comments and people say this often is that AI will never give you like unique ideas. Here’s how you get unique ideas. As the human, you combine two things that the internet has never seen. A lot of people think AI is exclusively scraping the internet and only giving you answers based off of things that it’s given. That is true. When you give AI a prompt of two concepts that have never been written about or brought together, that’s where you get magic. For example, I was thinking to myself a few months ago, I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a fusion cuisine between Ethiopian food in Texas food that probably has never happened. I asked chat to BT to come up with the recipe around that. It created a dish and an entire menu that I could then go downstairs and cook for my family. Never happened before that I know of. I tried to find any, like there was no, nothing has existed, at least in Nova Scotia doesn’t exist. I created a bunch of cuisine that was a blend between Ethiopian food and then Texas food. You can do the same thing by saying, Hey, I want a fusion blend between Japanese food and Indian food. I guarantee you, I don’t know if it will taste good, but I guarantee you chat GPT will blend those two things. It will come up with actual recipes for those dishes. When people say chat, GPT will not give you new ideas and novelty. Catchy PT is as good as the person who is putting in the prompts. If you have unique prompts, if you have unique requests, if you can come up with creative ideas that you can blend together and give it to it, you will get ideas that are unique in our one, what is a one of
Speaker 1: one idea? You can get those. Sorry. No, mate, you do not need to apologize ever for anything. In fact, part of your course. I’m doing the part of the course question as a, as a, as a courtesy, rather than sort of anything you’ve asked me to do, but like parts of your course that you put out there or console features, a bunch of prompts to help folks get the most out of chat, GPT and AI based programming. As you’ve just mentioned it there, then I’d love to know how your brain is working when you’re thinking about using these prompts. Folks watching in can sort of like maybe level up the game, like one or 2%, if,
Speaker 2: if you got any tips. I’d love to. I’d love to chat through the way I think about prompts. I’ll send you folks a guide in the chat that gives a better of a rundown on the way that I think about it, but there’s essentially a few key elements versus context. When you are writing a prompt and I didn’t do it in my example, because I’m trying to move fast to give you folks as much value as possible, but I oftentimes will try to give context to the bot to AI around what I’m trying to do. Instead of just saying, write me a blog post, I’m going to say background and context around me. I am working on a blog post or a certain brand that specializes in a certain thing that is targeting a certain customer. I want to create a blog post that is optimized for search engine optimization. I want to ensure that we’re going after keywords that are frequently looked for in by our ideal target audience. That is context. You are giving context to the AI of why you were talking to it. Once you’ve done that, after you’ve given context, the next thing that you want to do is of course, be very specific. You want to be very specific in identifying exactly what you want. I’m going to say, not just create some blog posts for me. I’m going to say, I want you to write five blog posts, titles for me, and I want you to ensure that these titles are catchy and then it’s going to do that. Right? Those are some of the things that I’m thinking about from there. I’m trying to also give it a persona. Rather than just asking for this, sometimes I would say something like chat GPT. I want you to come up with a creative idea, but I don’t just end there. I say, chat GPT. I want you to pretend that you’re Steve Jobs and you just launched a lemonade stand in Alaska. Create a campaign for a lemonade stand as if you were Steve Jobs. It’s going to now pretend that it was Steve Jobs and come up with this idea. By giving your AI a persona, it starts to operate as a certain type of person. If you did that same prompt and you switched out Steve Jobs with Maya Angelou or someone else, you’re going to get vastly different response. You give it a persona to get a certain type of response back. Similarly, if you’re working on a project and you want to allow chat GPT to get wild and out there with its ideas, I oftentimes will say, have some fun with this one. Then chat GPT gets a little bit more flexibility in terms of what it’s called like temperature to be able to do things that are outside of the typical boundaries of what it would believe it is
Speaker 1: required to do. I love that. Thank you very much. That’s endlessly useful. The interesting thing about prompts as you’ve described with the specificity is that quite often when I’ve been using the tools, then it’s actually helped me understand my own brief a little bit better. Because, as someone writing at a hundred miles an hour or trying to do my job at a hundred miles an hour, just sort of sitting down and sort of writing a couple of paragraphs on like a very specific thing has often helped me solidify those ideas in my mind. You showed with your example as well, like to then go, what, that’s actually not quite right. second iteration. Yes. Endlessly interesting. Yes. Folks, I can see that there’s 28 open questions in the Q&A already. I can talk faster. If I can make one request, if a question that you’d like, please give it a thumbs up and that will enable us to prioritize those questions. As promised at the beginning, I’m trying to do my best to make sure we prioritize your questions. We want to make sure that they’re the questions that you want answered as well. With that thought in mind, let’s take one more question from the community who asks, if there are any obvious identifiers for knowing if something is AI versus real? Should videos made with AI be disclosed in advance? That’s actually really relevant because Adobe yesterday released like some mad footage of Premiere Pro only yesterday, I think, which really expanded their AI capabilities. It’s a really interesting question. Curious on your viewpoint around that, but maybe also the wider ethics of… Yes. There’s two points
Speaker 2: there. The first one is what is the dead giveaways? There are a few dead giveaways in ChattyBT written content. When you are seeing these types of words, when a sentence starts with in the ever evolving world of, in the constantly changing world of, in the ever evolving space of, all of those things are ChattyBT generated dead giveaway. If an article in a blog post starts that way today, anyway. There was also a recent study, which I, which is a little bit interesting, but also controversial is that there was a ton of increase in the word Delve. D-E-L-V-E has seen a significant spike in academic papers, as well as in the written content on the internet over the last 24 months. What happened in the last 24 months? AI. A lot of people are saying that the relationship between that word going up is because of ChattyBT. There’s a big controversy around whether or not you should use that word or not, because it’s not something that a lot of people would use in natural language. Okay. That’s the first practice. On the video should it be something that is disclosed? This is a great question. my current belief is that in some cases it should, in some cases it should, if you are creating a deep fake of someone who did not necessarily give their permission, then it 100% needs to be disclosed. I think there’s no question that it should be. If it is me creating a deep fake of me saying things on my behalf, should it be disclosed? I don’t think I have formulated my own opinion on that yet. because why do like, what’s the difference? The difference is whether or not I’m actually using my time or not. I haven’t figured out my own opinion on that yet. I wish I had an answer because I always have answers, but this is one that I don’t think I can actually say what I believe at this moment. I’m still torn. I think it’s complex. It is. It’s an expression of
Speaker 1: probably where the debate is. as Nicole and you have just said, it’s a hundred percent obvious, that if it’s someone else, then, like it’s, you shouldn’t be doing that in the first place. Right. when it, when it comes to yourself, I think it’s probably even though no one asked for my opinion, it’s probably on these things that will change us as we get used to the tech as well. right now, it’s new and it’s different. There’s a lot of, emotions around, this technology, but as we get used to these things and it’s to give the example of what you’ve just given of you expressing yourselves through something, then I personally hold the belief that it will become more normal and therefore disclosing that thing may or may not become relevant. I think we all hold the right to sort of learn and change your opinions and grow over the course of time. Right. It’s a real curiosity. What is for sure though, is that there is a bunch of ethical and, environmental considerations with AI and, we need to be educating ourselves on these things as well. I think that’s, it’s fair. There’s been some folks in the chat who have been speaking to all of that as well. We need to acknowledge these things as part of the conversation. 100%. Yes. I appreciate the question. I think it’s good points that need to
Speaker 2: be raised. The challenge that I think that happens with it is that scale. If you think about the massive amount of content that can be produced using this type of technology, it dilutes the power. If at every point you have to say this video was created by AI or something like that. If that starts every video that has marketers, it’s going to dilute the value. Sure. You could have a, like a watermark that could be a play. if it has to be locally said, I think it’s going to dilute the impact at large. some of the use cases are also going to be diluted.
Speaker 1: A hundred percent. it’s an endlessly fascinating thing. I’m grateful for, folks as well, because like, I agree, we shouldn’t have these debates without, acknowledging both sides of it, but explore it. that being said, the next question, is if you’re going to use top three AI tools, you think folks, should be investigating right now. what would they be and how would you use them? You’ve spoken through a couple already. We’ve got chat GPT. You’ve spoken to, collaboration of technologies, to create, what are the other ones that you think folks, should, be investigating. The top three, so if you have, if you’re in a
Speaker 2: larger company, I think the work that Adobe is doing is mind blowing for marketers. I went down to Adobe summit a few months back and it was a month ago and with their technology, you can literally say, right, five email campaigns, and it will write five email campaigns target within our database. People who live in this region, this region, this region, it will go and do that. You’re not actually moving your most to do this. You’re just talking to the AI and it designs the emails. You can say, make sure that these, emails meet our brand standards. It goes into a database that your team has already uploaded with your brand guidelines. It cross-references that to create visuals that are on brand. To me, I would be looking at, if I’m in from a corporate lens, looking at Adobe, their gen studio, that product at large is mind blowing and game changing. In my opinion, they’re also rolling out like podcasting. I, a lot of the stuff they’re doing is mind blind, mind bending to me. in addition to that, though, for those who are a little bit more scrappy, chat, GPT is at the top. I’m a big fan of 11 labs and the stuff that their technology presents. I published a YouTube video, I think this morning about descript as well. Has anyone heard of descript? If you haven’t heard of descript, it’s pretty wild what you can do with their AI tool, because you can change your voice directly in your transcript. If you’re someone who says, a lot, it will give you the ability to delete your arms directly in the transcript. If you say five, when you meant to say four, you can go in and change the word from five to four, and it will use your voice to change it to four. I’m a big fan of that technology as well.
Speaker 1: Nice descript have the world’s greatest advert, for folks who haven’t seen the descript advert before it came out like three or four years ago, and it remains my favorite advert of all time. I’ll be sure to share that as well, because, the tech that you’re speaking about, I think they call it overdub. it’s fab, really interesting. let’s take this question from Simon, who asks, we’re all busy feeding the AI engines at the moment with converging thinking. How can we use AI to extend and expand our thinking to create those aha moments to do genius things? I feel like I need some violence.
Speaker 2: I’m asking that question as well. Yes, it’s a great question. When you think about AI and you have the mental model less so that we’re giving AI power and instead AI is giving us power. It’s just a mental switch. We can do now things that you couldn’t do before. If you think that you’re a creative genius, you’ve never, it’s never been more possible to unlock your genius than now, because now you have this assistant that gives you the ability to do things that you couldn’t do before. my recommendation to folks is to allow AI to be a partner and leverage it to do more, be more efficient, be faster, be more effective. To tell stories that you didn’t think were possible before. that’s the power of this technology, in my opinion. I think the idea and the viewpoint that we’re just going to feed it so it can be better is, not taking into consideration the fact that every single human’s mental capacity today is limited. We all know what we know, but then we don’t know what we don’t know. Then there’s the things that we don’t even know we don’t know, but because of AI, you should be able to have conversations to access the database of all of the world’s knowledge to improve your way of thinking. Is there possibilities that AI is going to hallucinate and give you wrong data? Sure. Yes. Hopefully you have critical thinking and you can go out and double check and make sure that your facts and figures are right. You should do that. If you can use AI as a thinking partner, it can be a ridiculously powerful thing. I have sat down with AI and I’ve had deep debates over things that I believe that I want to challenge. I believe here’s a belief that I believe. I believe that it is absolutely ridiculous that in 2024, all of our physicians and doctors still have to have paper pieces of paper to give us prescriptions and stuff like that. Why is none of this stuff digital? Why can’t we use it? I had a debate with chat GPT and it helped me figure out some of the holes in my thinking around privacy, around HIPAA and laws and stuff like that. It helped me with some of that. I still think I’m right, but I was able to get better at thinking about this problem because I debated it. Can I have that debate with anybody in my country? Sure. Is everyone going to know as much as chat GPT does about the pros and cons? Not even close. I was able to level up my own thinking. I was able to improve my thinking by having a debate with chat GPT. That’s what I encourage people to do. Don’t just, I 100% believe in using it for accelerating your own business and your growth and capitalism. Yay. A hundred percent. I also believe you can use it to improve your brain. If you can do that, it becomes another superpower for you. I love that. It’s so true.
Speaker 1: I find myself doing a similar thing at the weekend. what I was, I was asking about ghee. Some cooking over the weekend. If no one’s used the voice feature on chat GPT before, you can actually have a conversation with natural language in really quite a mind-blowing way. If you use the phone app, I’m not sure if it’s available on desktop, but you can literally almost have a conversation, which is, it’s a little bit mind-bending, but I went into lots of rabbit holes on monounsaturated fats and ghee and the difference between vegetable ghee and all sorts of other things, as a conversation to, to the point of what you’ve just spoken through. What’s interesting about your answer there is that you spoke about finding out things that you don’t know about, but something a lot about is content marketing and you’ve, you got the book, but you’ve been, that had that catchphrase, sort of create once, distribute forever. Right. I’m really interested as a marketer, as a content marketer, yes. How this technology has sort of impacted your world and how you think about it, because we’re focused on what you don’t know about, but something you have a deeper expertise in
Speaker 2: feels like an interesting conversation, right? Yes. I think for me, the biggest shift that has happened thanks to AI is I feel like the repurposing. The idea of creating once and distributing forever is essentially the philosophy that if you can create content that educates, engages, entertains, or empowers people, you’re probably creating content that’s worth creating. Cool. Let’s make sure that we’re doing that as marketers, let’s create value for the internet. Then if that content is valuable, then you want to distribute it forever. I believe that truly, that if you can create great content, you should distribute it for a long time because on the other end of the keyboard, there’s somebody struggling right now with a, with a problem that your content could have solved and they shouldn’t struggle. You should create and distribute your content so you can help more people. Great. If we’re all in agreement there, we are aligned. Then the number one thing that I oftentimes hear is Ross, who has time to distribute things forever? I agree for the last five years. It has been extremely difficult to distribute things forever, but thanks to AI, you now have the ability to distribute your content at scale much more effectively than ever before. I can take in podcast episode. I can upload it to a tool like Opus clip or some other various tool, and it will identify the key moments within an interview where I said interesting things and it will chop it up. It will put transcriptions on it and it will allow for me to share that content on social. Oh, I don’t have time to come up with a, with my show notes. I don’t have time to turn this transcript into a blog. Okay. Chat GPT. I’m going to upload the transcript and I want you to write a blog post based off of this transcription between interview with me and Joe. Then it goes and do that. You can now say within the matter of seconds, Hey, chat GPT, listen to this content, read this transcript and write me five LinkedIn posts, write me, more stories or more content ideas. You can get all of this stuff done in the fraction of the amount of time that it would take in before. That to me is where all of this comes to life in a very meaningful way, right? You can now take one single asset and create a bunch of new assets in the matter of minutes, which would have taken hours because of AI. That’s the power of this technology. Let me give you another example. That’s a little bit weird. We won’t be able to listen to it, but let’s say I wanted to turn this dialogue into something that was a little bit more fascinating. I could use a tool that I just shared in the chat called Suno and Suno makes music. I went to Suno while we were talking and I said, creative song about Joe and him interviewing Ross Simmons. If you listen to that, I don’t know what it’s going to say, but I feel like it’s going to be pretty good. I would encourage everyone to just like, after this, listen to that, listen to that song that I dropped in the chat. Tell me if it’s good. Tweet at me, tweet at Joe. Joe, you might want to use it yourself, but if you check in that out, if you check that out, that song is going to blow some minds. Let me give you a glimpse into what it’s going to say. It starts by saying marketing meetup where we all converge. Joe Glover’s the host. He’s got the power to search. It literally starts a song. I’m telling everyone, it is a fascinating time to be alive. You can be afraid a hundred percent. You can reject it a hundred percent, or we can accept the fact that AI is going to fundamentally change the way all of us do our work in our business. It is time to level up, improve it, use it, and just win together. Let’s go.
Speaker 3: I’m so nervous. I’m so nervous. It looks like the feedback in the chat is positive.
Speaker 2: I like it. I’m glad that folks are enjoying it. I’m glad because this is where we are, folks. The world is wild. I love that so much. Thank you, mate. That’s so wonderful.
Speaker 1: Folks, we’re coming into the last 12 minutes. I’ve been promising this throughout. The questions in the Q&A, we’re going to prioritize, but there are so many that we want to make sure that we ask the ones that you really want answering. Make sure to give a thumbs up to any questions that you want us to prioritize in these last sort of few minutes. Brian says in the chat, now we need the deep fake of Joe singing it. I can do that. Long as you disclose it. Exactly. Exactly. That’s true. I wouldn’t do that without your
Speaker 3: permission. I love that. Yes, don’t do that. Nobody do that. Right. Let’s get to, well,
Speaker 1: it’s an interesting space given where we’ve just been. Lex, who I think is a pretty amazing marketer in themselves, has said, we’d love to hear about the plagiarism issues with asking ChatGPT to write anything, a blog, a tweet, a long form essay, et cetera. Lex has left it very open, but I would welcome thoughts, Ross. There’s two thoughts on it. One, nothing
Speaker 2: that you create with ChatGPT that is written text shouldn’t go live without first doing a plagiarism check. You have to do it. That’s like the bare minimum. Then the second question that a lot of people get to is like, but Ross, like if it’s using the internet to learn and it’s giving you responses based off of what it’s scraped on the internet, isn’t that plagiarism itself? Okay. Let’s think about humans and how we consume content. We come up with ideas. The person who essentially wrote that blog post that you read yesterday, built the foundation of all of their knowledge off of the people who came before them and consume their content. We, as people can get our ideas based off of the ideas of other people and they become our own. We forget the original source of a lot of our ideas. We forget the grade six teacher who taught us the fundamentals of English, and we don’t source them when they said something brilliant, but it’s stuck in our minds. Right? Oftentimes people go down this path of thinking, oh, but AI is just plagiarizing everybody’s content and our ideas. Everybody is. We all are. We’re all stealing each other’s ideas. That’s literally the way that humans have gotten out of caves is because one generation learned from another generation that if you rub two sticks together, you get fire. Cool. It continued. We stole ideas from each other and then we built on top of it. Now a robot’s doing it to us and we all get in our feelings a bit. I get it. We’re emotional creatures. We should get in our feelings. That’s what we do. At the end of the day, that’s the way we learn too. We learn by consuming content. The only difference is we can’t consume as much content as an AI did. Now we have an accelerant. We have this technology that now we can put in our pocket to use it to win. Let’s do it. there’s a, there’s a
Speaker 1: recommendation. I haven’t checked it out before, but Celia has put original originality.ai just plagiarism tech checks. Has, Claire’s recommended Grammarly and you’re right. one of the points you made in at the beginning of that answer was like, check this stuff, but also I think there’s been a general underpinning of this whole chat, which is like, one should, one should be using these tools, but also have an awareness of when to use them and when to check it and when to let it fly and stuff like that. The point is not to replace this. you’ve said it’s an accelerant for human stuff. You don’t take the human out of this conversation. With everything you’ve spoken about so far, I haven’t heard anything where you’ve gone, cool, don’t copy and paste it, but like use it to be you, but quicker, so we’ve got Lex in the chat saying, thanks for answering the tricky questions as well. Oh, I love the tricky
Speaker 2: questions. It helps me level up my thinking, right? This is what I was saying earlier. It’s to me, it’s all a fun experiment of life. Yes. Throw me all the tricky questions.
Speaker 1: Love that. again, with the optimism, you’re wicked. one of the questions that will definitely be in the Q and a, is about resources or communities that you recommend for folks to check out. Usually that’s the last question. This isn’t the last question, but where do you, where do you go for your learning? yes. Yes. We do a lot of proprietary
Speaker 2: research at foundation and we publish a lot on our site. Foundation inc.co check out our website. We have a bunch of content on AI, but I also rely heavily on, there’s a guy named Ben’s bites. what’s his last name. It’s called Ben’s bites.co. Great newsletter that talks about AI. One thing that you’ll also find, and this gets really geeky. If you’re not geeky and this is going to freak you out, then don’t do it. A lot of these tools have discord channels, mid journey has a discord channel. If you go into these discord channels, what you’re going to find are people who are ridiculously passionate about this stuff. there’s AI tools called crew AI. There’s, 11 labs. There’s Hagen. A lot of these bases have their own discord. If you go into these discords, you’ll find communities of people talking about AI literally every second of every day. You open it up and it’s going to feel like you’re drinking out of a fire hydrant. It’s going to be like, Holy smokes. I can’t keep up. This is overload. 100%. I felt it. You’ll feel it. It is real. If you can just get a taste of the ways these people are thinking, if you can get a taste of the experiments that they’re running, you can get again, inputs for yourself that you can then apply from like two minutes of just scrolling and learning that will fundamentally change the way that you approach this stuff. That’s where I get a lot of value. I’ll pop in. I’ll try to learn. I’ll read through. I’ll try to figure out if they’re talking in English or if it’s code, what is going on? Then I bring it back and I say, okay, how can I apply this to my world and to my life? Get immersed in the communities. I think there’s a lot of value in that. Here’s a final pro tip that I would give people. Don’t be afraid to like, start your own little small community with people, start up a group chat, like five people in your company, five people of your friends, five people that you’re meeting on this webinar and say, folks, let’s just have a group chat where every day we’re going to just like send each other links to things that we’re reading about AI. By doing that, you now create a little bit of an accountability circle where you’re all going to get better together. That could be a great way to go as well.
Speaker 1: I love that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. A really great place to start. To your point, getting immersed in the tools is so important, to give an example as you just have, like just watching folks or other folks use it is so important. I think it’s important to acknowledge, just as we’re coming to a close here on the chat, because there’s been some stuff, placed in the chat from, Gary, Brian, we were sort of speaking about, marketing as an exercise in originality and authenticity. We were speaking about the hard questions a minute ago and it’s important to acknowledge these things. Again, I don’t really feel like anything expressed here has been, against those ideas. It’s about it as an accelerant. I want to perhaps take that into, as we come towards the end of today’s session, if there was like one or two things that you hope people would take away from today’s session, you shared a bunch of tactics, you’ve shown some samples. what would be the one or two things that you want people to take away from a session? We’re looking at the whole landscape.
Speaker 2: The number one thing that I want everyone to understand is that with content in general, you have the most powerful asset in my opinion, in human culture, because all of our beliefs, all of our perspectives over the time of humanity has been shaped by content, whether we’re talking about hieroglyphics, we’re talking about early newspapers, we’re talking about TV, we’re talking about, word of mouth in stories that got passed down from generation. If we’re talking about historic books, like everything is content and those stories shape us as humans. If we as marketers can start with the understanding that the stories that we tell, the messages we put out there have a massive impact on the ability to influence people in the way that they view the world, then you should operate under the first principles of let’s create things that are valuable and that accelerate and improve humanity at large. Cool. Then if you understand that, and we’re on the same page there, we can acknowledge that the power of AI exists to have a better positive impact on culture through content. If we use it for good, if we can use AI to tell better stories, to be more creative, to have more time, to come up with the unique ideas, to come up with the unique thoughts, to come up with the music, the songs, the stories that are going to move people in a way that is positive for them and their surroundings. How can we hate on this technology? We shouldn’t, we can acknowledge that there will be people who do harm with this tech. We can 100% agree that, but if we have more people who try to create content that shapes culture positively, who tries to empower more people, to inspire more people, to educate more people, and to give people the ability to see their own full potential be realized, then we’re going to win in the long term. That’s what I want more marketers to realize. This technology is not going to replace the fundamentals and the core elements that make human storytellers so great. It’s not going to replace any poets. It’s not going to replace a musician. It’s not going to replace you, but here’s what it will do. It will allow you to have a bigger impact. It will allow me to have a bigger impact. Because of that, we should be all in on leveraging these technologies to do more good than we ever had before. I’m just going to let that sit there for a minute.
Speaker 1: Beautiful. We have our clip for social media. Mate, you’re an absolute hero. Thank you. Appreciate you very much for today. We’ve had a lot of proponents in here for part two, like it seems to be, if we do a chat GPT analysis of this session, I’m pretty sure the most common word would be part two. This is actually part three. It’ll be part three.
Speaker 2: Yes. Let’s not make it so long between the next ones.
Speaker 1: You are welcome back whenever you like. In that spirit, check out a couple of Ross’s resources right here with Ross’s AI console, who I know that he’s poured his heart and soul into creating something dead useful with that. Likewise with his new book. Also, to take the time to thank our sponsors because we wouldn’t be able to do it without them. Frontify just released, as I say, this AI report, which is absolutely fab. It’s speaking about AI and creativity. Worth checking them out as well as Exclaimer, Cambridge Martin College and Redgate. As Joe points out, it’s only 79p on Kindle right now, the book. It’s a lie.
Speaker 2: It’s cheap.
Speaker 1: With all that said thank you all so much for today’s session. Thank you to everyone in the chat for contributing and allowing us to pick the good and the challenging questions. That’s what this is all about. Ross, you’re a hero. With all that said, let’s bring today’s session to a close by just saying a big thank you. We’ll see you next week for a discussion about AI and social media. With all that said, have a wicked Tuesday and hopefully see you next week.
Speaker 2: Cheers, Ross. You’re an absolute hero. Thanks everyone. Appreciate you all. Have a great one.