How To Avoid Getting Burned By AI-Gen Content Creation

Key Takeaways

[Music] I'll get home [Music] hey everybody my name is Tim this is Ethan uh we got a whole list of stuff to talk about this week what's up man how are you doing good man how you been I'm good I just got out of Muay Thai probably 20 minutes ago and I'm showered and I'm feeling you know that post-workout Buzz where like you're kind of exhausted but you also have like this little rush of energy and you're sort of in a flush State I feel very slow right now I feel like we're gonna have a really great episode you get beat up today a little bit from all the running I used to do I have really like inequalities in my in muscles so some stuff I'm really good at but some stuff I'm really bad at so blocking kicks like hip flexors just standing up and lifting my my legs up without rotating my body I really really struggle at it so my kicks are great but then I'll get reminded by my trainer where when we're sparring or something like that I'll throw a kick and I feel all good about it but then he kicks me right back and I don't have the strength of my hip flexors to block it and so then I'm totally knocked off balance you know so that's what I'm working on right on yeah sometimes it's nice to just kind of uh go and get beat up in the afternoon and then like it's there's a centering quality to it certainly we have to shout out somebody who said some very nice things about us on the podcast this is sort of a mystery person their username is WA Nelson 9282 this is the review that you sent me I'm assuming this is a review on the podcast it's always mwa Nelson yeah it's got to be Wade he follows me on Twitter hold on I mean how many other wa's could there be Wade you know somebody's Instagram actually that's a good question Walter yeah shout it out let me find him so we can put his handle in the show notes but um but yeah he left us a great review let's say w a Nelson 9282 whoever this is thank you very much this is kind words says it's the copywriting podcast you've been looking for I love listening to these dudes talk the subjects Tim and Ethan talk about can run the gamut I didn't know that's how gamut is spelled but I looked it up and it actually is um but it always ties in with copy they also which is weird that I couldn't spell gamut given that we write about writing they also highlight other awesome resources leave links in the show notes so it's easy to find context for what they're discussing I like that they cuss all right he likes the swear words I like that they can cover subjects that make them vulnerable and aren't afraid to share what they've learned from their failures these dudes are honest and it feels like listening to your two smartest friends share their ideas and somehow become smarter just by being in the same room this was awesome man you tweeted this to me it made my day yeah thanks for whoever wrote this if it is Wade or Walter or somebody else w a Nelson 9282 really appreciate you out there yeah it's his handle on Instagram I just found him is Wade nelson0902 and I know we say this every week but when you and I started this podcast we had no expectations and really no clue what we were doing so when when we get these reviews it makes us feel really great I send them to Ethan right away and we like bulk over it for a couple minutes so Wade we appreciate you thank you for the five star reviews and uh we're gonna keep going okay so I've got a couple of things that I want to talk about today first let me I'm going to throw a title by you you tell me if you've heard of this before Goldman's tips on writing never you're gonna like this you're gonna nerd out about this and I and I hope our audience will too we'll get into it in a second but the second thing and I want to throw this out up front so that people know the direction that we're heading I want to talk more about AI generated content we've talked a little bit about it before in the past mostly As It results to or as it um relates to images and maybe some writing and for the most part we've said it's going to be like a net positive but I have a new and somewhat hot take on this entire field and I really want to get this recorded this week so we'll get there in a second but first let me tell you about Gary gulman's writing tips do you know Gary gallman have you ever heard of him okay I know there's like legendary copywriters every time you bring these people up I feel so out of the loop I you know it's people I stumble across and I have never heard of him before either to be to be fair Gary Goldman's a comedian and he's pretty funny I started looking into some of this stuff I only heard about him because he was mentioned on Tom segura's podcast the podcast that he does with his wife they were interviewing Dane Cook I'm listening to a lot of Dane Cook interviews these days and and cook said something interesting about how he thinks about storytelling he laid out this really interesting little framework that he uses to not only develop jokes but also like improv live and as he was saying it Tom Segura says oh this is like we're this is almost like we're talking about Goldman's tips for writing and so I was like what is that I got into it and it turns out here's the deal Gary Goldman's a comedian I had never heard of him but he's he's big he's done I know he's got or he's done uh he looks familiar yeah he's got stuff out there but for whatever reason I had not stumbled across him but the coolest thing is that I apparently he's like made it his task to from time to time share tips on how to write comedy on Twitter and it's taken this like cult following and somebody do I have share access right now because I'll show you yeah we gotta pull up his Twitter now if well I'm still using Twitter I'll show you something even better somebody took it upon themselves to get all of his writing tips into one spot and they shared it in a Google doc and I've got it here it's 75 pages of writing tips from a comedian who's like really good he's very smart I've started getting into some of his stuff and it's all just very I would say like smart comedies witty it's a lot of word play and uh I like it for that reason so I wanted look at this it's 75 pages of just tweets on his thoughts on like how to write comedy joke writing writing in general and I wanted to start here for a couple reasons one obviously to people listening to this like writing and maybe haven't heard of this guy and I always like somebody who shares stuff on the craft of writing but specifically comedy you and I have talked about this off mic a couple of times to me I think comedy is one of the most impressive forms of writing because very often like in order to be truly funny you have to be both honest and you have to be saying something that is not obvious and it's not and then you have to construct it in a way or rather it has to be totally obvious except nobody realizes it's obvious until you get to the end of what you're saying right so it's a very elegant form of writing for people who do it well and so I wanted to go through like two or three of his tips here just from page one get your take on some of them and we'll see what people think of this and if they like it maybe we'll revisit this over the next yeah okay you're into it yes definitely okay okay so like I said there's 75 pages of this but I just looked at page one band I think there's six or seven things that fit on this first page we'll go through two or three of them here's a tip that I like I wanna I'll read the full tip get your take on it and I'll tell you something about what this reminds me of so here's a taste as um write out a favorite joke word for word one sentence at a time after completing each sentence analyze each word why does it work how do the syllables of the words create Rhythm how do these sentences build the punch line and what's the grammar of Comedy you can do this at any stage but it's probably best early in your career if it sounds daunting to write out entire jokes you should know that the immortal Hunter S Thompson transcribed The Great Gatsby word for word for word word for word yeah I love this this is basically something known as copywork yep and I don't know is this is this discussed inside of like the copy blogger ethos I know sampar is big on this I know Neville Midori is big on this is this something that's been on like your radar part of your world or anything never and it should be the how would you call that like the getting the feel for the intonation of the writing our suggestion was always read it backwards not like actual word for word backwards but start at the end and then read the sentence and then go above it and then read a sentence because sometimes when you're reading something you can kind of expect what comes next and so you you miss some of that and so that's always been our suggestion I love this because I loved the line about timing the punch line it makes me think of the English language and how it is specifically not design not intentionally designed but the layout of the English language makes it so that punch Labs can be very effective and I'll give you an example I speak German not totally fluently but I I lived in Germany for a while for a little bit and I took like five five or six years in German so I'd be pretty Rusty right now I haven't spoken a word of German in years but in German the verb is at the end of the sentence and it makes it really really hard to hit the punch line at the right spot of the sentence so I'm not a comedian being on stage as a comic is actually my number one biggest fear and I'm not lying about that but let's just say the punchline was like he punched him in the face right in German it would be he in the face was by him punched it's basically Yoda like Yoda speaks German just with English words and it makes it really really difficult for that like and then he punched him right in the face type thing to get the intonation of the word and uh ever since I I learned about that I've had a much bigger appreciation for the the music of sentences and I think Comics are a master of that that's so interesting I had never thought about how the structure of a language could change the timing on jokes that that's really interesting it makes me wish that I could speak German so that I could do this with German Comedians and yeah figure like do you have any sense for that how German is there such a thing as German comedy and yeah and and do they structure the jokes differently in order yeah I watched a documentary about it once do you remember how you said I can't remember what it was but the reason why some languages get so straight to the point is because in the northern hemisphere they don't have time to mess around because they have a limited window to grow their crops well the part of the reason in my view why Germans have that like Prussian mentality of like manufacturing is because of the way they speak and so it makes it very difficult to have the same kind of humor that we can have because of the sentence structure it's hard to explain and have conversations you know it's you can feel the difference where it's a little bit more difficult to be like a clown because of the intonation of the sentences but yeah I've I've always thought that I was like I think the reason why the German culture is so disciplined with their it's not necessarily rigidness it's just yeah just quality right let's just call it quality I think a lot of it has to do with the way that their language is structured that is so interesting yeah for people listening there's a theory that one of the reasons life seems to slow down when you go to these tropical destinations is because they're this is a theory and I'm paraphrasing too but because the crops grow year round there wasn't the same pressure to be as rigid in terms of like how how you spend your day how you spend your week how you spend your month the the growth cycle isn't the same so you have up in the northern hemispheres uh this very rigid culture around that was very uh time-centric which is sort of that busy New York culture seems to come from and then as you get closer and closer to the Equator all around the world things seem to slow down a little bit and this extends to language which is what Tim was saying as well so there's a lot of languages that you know again very close to the equator then that could just be a core or uh you know a correlation doesn't have to necessarily be the causal feature but but they very often are lacking different tenses that we wouldn't even consider like it possible not to have so they won't have certain future tenses or certain yeah like time sensitive tenses and the again the theory there is just that your environment dictates your culture and your I guess language as well so it's super interesting I love this too I think the thing that comes to mind for me as I mentioned is this concept of copy work there's an idea there which I'll share here briefly and then there's sort of two takes on it I'll give people both of them so that well the one that I mentioned that Neville Medora and Sam Parr are both really big on is what I would call well I think Sam pretty much popularized the term copywork or maybe it was nibble but the idea is like you are looking at a source material and you're literally just copying it straight I'm just writing down on the page exactly by the way yes yeah yeah it for the same reason that you just mentioned going through something line by line you start to pick up the rhythms you start to pick up the voice of something like how it works there's something about that hand writing which is so important then there's another version of this which takes a lot more time but I would definitely recommend people check out if this is something that they're really into if they nerd out on it and I think it was Ben Franklin who used to do this is where I got the idea from but what he would do is he would read something that he admired then put it away and try to recreate it from memory so not your own take you're literally doing everything you can to try to rewrite what you just wrote and you can do this by hand you can do it on a computer whatever you want you're not going to get it anywhere close to right and one of the most important things is that you power through even though you know you're like I'm missing something just keep going create it then what you do is you pull the source material out and you compare what you wrote To The Source material and you rewrite it this time using that copywork mentality so actually looking at it and what that allows you to do is there's a really interesting reflection period that goes on in there where you're like there will be things that you wrote that were wildly different from what the source material was and it gives you this window to be like well why did I go in this direction and they use those words and I think that method for me has been the one that led to the most reflection on like why certain words are used oh I see why he used this word because he's building towards that a little bit later on stuff like that so that one takes way more time I'd say you don't want to sit down with like less than an hour hour and a half to really do that but you can do it in small sips and it's just a huge a very steep uh or very quick learning curve when you take that approach as well it's so effective I I've never done this but it reminds me of when I would learn how to do anything if you learn to play guitar what's the person you do you learn Smells Like Teen Spirit right it's the most easy recognizable song with four power chords that you could play over and over again and then two notes they go ding ding like nobody comes out of the gate with music trying to write their own stuff but with writing we don't do that we don't mimic others we we immediately go straight to trying to create our own work and granted as we do that the stuff that we read like we all have influences you know like my writing is heavily influenced by three or four people but I wonder if there's a science or any kind of proof that shows mimicking the people that you want to be like is a much faster we're not not even mimicking copying them learning their music basically and playing it yourself is a faster way to get good at the skill than trying to to mimic that really is a better representation yeah yeah it's an interesting point why is it that we that we try to learn writing so much differently well apparently too so this is something that Sam talks about he he latches on to the same idea and I guess this actually used to be how they thought write it you know you you would get a copy work book and you would copy by hand just page after page of you know well-known writing and again I think it's so interesting because it works on multiple levels not only you're developing a skill of handwriting yeah but but also that voice the internal voice which can structure so much more about how you think so I actually do this and a quick throwback to another episode that we did if people are interested and want to give this a try what I do is I copy the hey or um meh.com their sales page every morning seriously yeah yeah and it's I mean I have a notebook what's that you really do that yeah give me one second so Ethan's pulling out a notebook like what have you learned from doing this I'm actually not sure I could put it into words very well but my voice has changed writing and the reason I picked math was because we talked about how good that copy was yeah it is quite good I think what's interesting is the more you copy it the more human the copywriters become to you you become kind of familiar with it and then after a few days not just with mad but with any resource that you do for this you'll start to recognize their stronger days versus the weaker days or if you again do this with another resource or something when you when you get closer to a particular writer you start to notice when they're really on a roll versus maybe not so much so what it has allowed me to do is I feel like I can write in their voice or of a voice similar to that a lot quicker it's a lot easier for me to sit down and crank out something that is conversational that has like a good flow to it and specifically what I liked about their voice is that it's like very it's like you're you're on the inside of this community when you're reading it you know and I wanted that for Trends and so I that's why I picked their stuff and I've just been copying it and letting it seep in so I'm not sure I could point to any particular thing that I learned but I will say it definitely works and it's like it gets to a point where it's so much easier to write now that I keep up the Habit just because I don't want this core um yeah part of my job to disappears like it's like working out you know you don't you don't want to get out of shape so it's easier for me to sit down for a half hour in the morning and just write whatever the day's pages and by the way people who haven't read or heard the episode The reason I pick mad.com is because there's their front page updates everything changes every day yeah yeah and it's short one it's I can write the whole thing basically on one page and I'll do that for a while and then I'll pick another source like they're they're the Focus right now I'll probably do I don't know another two or three weeks of them and but then I want I want to start incorporating other other different voices just to get some variety yeah so that's exactly where I was going let's say you do math for another two or three weeks and then you find somebody else when the time comes for you to sit down and write something knowing what you know about the stuff that you've done with math so far and you've gotten to know the personality of whoever the copywriter is it's probably two or three of them right you you can pick them out almost like you can recognize their their brush Strokes in their writing now let's say you do it for somebody else do you think knowing what you know now you'd be able to pull the tools out from the different writers that you've copied over and over again and and like apply them it's a it's a good question I don't I don't know I think there's something that happens there on the human level yeah I can't quite be explained yeah that and you're like ideally you're developing your own style so at a certain point you'll start to create rules for yourself and I'm sure I will have rules and reasons why I do things but um this is actually a perfect question and I think it takes us into the next point and I want to pause on your question because this next one is such a perfect tie-in and I want to get your take on this so just as though as this the flag in the ground you were asking like could you vocalize the rules that make for good writing under certain circumstances for for a particular writer or for yourself and I think the for yourself one is where a lot of people will go with this too because we're all ideally developing our own Styles here's another one I want to get your take on so the quote is words with the Orca sound is this Gary Goldman yes yeah yeah so words with the Orca sound at the beginning especially at the beginning slash end are funnier no one knows why but Buick is funnier than Nissan I learned this early I assumed everyone knew they don't take some soft punch words and replace them with a B P or k sound this to me is an example of like the kind of rule that you could develop for yourself through the course of copywork where you're like oh now you switch that word out because you really want something with with uh more of a Punchy sound at the beginning right like those work better I think you'd come to a rule like this eventually but I wouldn't be able to vocalize it based on where I'm at yet what's your take on this like this this concept that there's something that's objectively funnier than other words you would you buy into that or what of course I do it makes you think the example that I gave was he punched him in the face perfect the first thing I thought of and like even just how I said it like Buick I could say Buick five times in a row and just start laughing at it and I don't know why but I could say Nissan five times in a row and and kind of get annoyed by it like stop saying that right imagine I don't even know why it's so funny this episode is brought to you by yeah yeah it's amazing what's so what interested me about that was this concept that there is something that is objectively funny out there yeah like so much of humor is like observational but then this notion is that well even within your observation there are funny ways to say it and then there are less funny ways to say it I thought that was so unique it's the Enigma of Comedy so there's a couple Idols Heroes I like to call them because you know Idols can let you down but Heroes can't and Jerry Seinfeld is one of them and the reason why I write every day is because Jerry Seinfeld says write jokes every day and never break the chain and so I was like okay I'm just gonna do that and not think about it and I love have you ever watched Comedians in Cars drinking coffee love that show I love it like I'm so sad that he stopped it and I appreciate so much as a writer as and Seinfeld's really a writer like he's got a great delivery and he's got his own gig his own gimmick and it doesn't curse and so he's used the whole package like arguably the greatest community of all time but more than anything he's a writer and he talks about a thing that I relate to so much where writing is so painful and that's why you have to just get through it and that writing is is the differentiator because as a comedian he's really pure where he says the only thing that you care about is making the audience laugh like that's your job and it doesn't matter if it was emotional and if people related to you and you know if you were vulnerable he's like none of that matter sometimes he gets an arguments with people about it and you can feel like the tension because he cares about it so much but to Seinfeld and I guess as a copywriter this is true because it's like did it land did the sale happen did they laugh oh it didn't that means that you're a [ __ ] copywriter like oh they didn't laugh it doesn't mean that like nobody cares that You're vulnerable and relatable like they didn't laugh so you're a [ __ ] comedian and I think the I think the intangible about it whether did the sale happen did the sale not happen did the laugh happen does the laugh not happen and there's like some mystery as to why I think that's why we're so attracted to comedians why we idolize them so much because they do the most daring thing that could possibly be done it's so interesting that you mentioned that um Joe I think it was Joe Rogan who is talking about this where it's like early in his story he went to see a comedian and he noticed this person was just standing on stage with nothing but their words and then like leading a whole bunch of people to have an emotional experience and he says that was just the most incredible thing to him was this observation of seeing somebody with nothing but their words no props no gimmicks no none of that it's just your words and really what that is when you when you dig into it is it's like there's a lot it's it's your understanding of people your understanding of experience but with your point about Jerry is when you can boil it all the way down to did they laugh or not what you're really saying is you're taking away the excuse that the audience doesn't get it right because I think I think about this a lot we've I think maybe I've said on here I think I want to try an open mic next year like I've been starting to write jokes I was like so anxious man I just got so nervous okay so I'm nervous about it too not from the being in front of people part I I kind of love like speaking and stuff like that I'm really nervous for is that the bombing which you you have to do obviously so you're gonna bomb but there's a part of this that's like oh well if I bomb it's because something's wrong with me I'm not funny I don't get it I'm not cool I'm not I'm not like in touch with the rest of these peers in this room and what you're really saying though with Jerry's thing is like nah it's not that it's not that what it is is you've not learn to convey the thing that you've noticed yeah in the in the way that connects with everybody else yeah right it's not that the noticing is wrong necessarily it's that you you have to unlock the language that other people are using to like kind of view their world I think that's so interesting you know interestingly enough it sort of ties into there's only one or two more of these that I wanted to go through today but that concept of unlocking the right language I think ties in with this network I'm sure you've heard this Quirk this quote from Mark Twain now the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug and then uh Goldman goes down to say you've been meaning to do this go through your jokes and add some lightning today and the reason I have you heard that quote before but no about the lightning okay of course so I love that quote but what I really wanted to bring up was this concept of going back through something you've already created and adding lightning to it so like going back through your stuff and being like did I really get the right word here or is this really Landing what do you think about that I'm thinking you could do this with tweets you could do this with blog posts totally a it makes me think of something that has been going through my head a lot recently I think I talked about it before there's a book called Peak and I always forget the guy's name he's got like one of those free word names with the hyphen in it but I'll pull it up I didn't read the whole book honestly because it felt like one of those books that should have been a blog post and it was fascinating but the thing that I got out of the book the most is that there's a huge difference between practice and like intentional Improvement because anybody can show up every day and go through the Reps right but when you truly get to this this Peak Performance it's because you're approaching it with the different mindset you're approaching it with like I'm not here to just do reps there's a specific thing that I want to measurably improve and that sucks like nobody wants to do it it applies to anything it'd be like how many people show up to the gym three days a week and just kind of are the same and then how come there's that one person out of a hundred that over the course of four or five months can totally transform his or her body right and the difference is like extremely intentional Improvement extremely measurable and intentional Improvement and I've I've never done that with my writing I've always just gone on to the next one I've always just put the next rep in and I've been ever since I read that book it makes me think like maybe this Seth Godin approach I've always done we're just like do your job for the day get another one in isn't quite right because there's a there's a a level of like intentional measurable Mastery that I'm not applying that is really interesting it's like the difference between focusing on creation and output versus in this case like Improvement yeah but this is a question that came up with Danny last week was like for a long time he was focused on creation rather than distribution and I think that takes a very purposeful switch in order to change right like you have to decide because I think this is something that a lot of content creators eventually come to this realization which is after a certain point it doesn't matter how good your stuff is if you're not getting it out there right like you have to get it out there yes you have to sit down and create and you have to make that a habit and that's the first place to start but just because you've created a bunch of great writing doesn't mean anyone's ever going to find it especially these days and so there is this purposeful switch from just creation to Creation plus distribution and I think the same thing exists in what you're saying maybe that's you know there's like a level there creation and then creation plus Improvement um on that do you do you watch uh I can never pronounce his name Hassan Hassan I don't know is he a comedian I don't know who the hell that is because you're not pronouncing his name right I think it's just Hassan Minaj he uh he has that show the Patriot Act which is like a it was almost like a Colbert Report kind of show not ever saw it dude okay you've got to watch you have Netflix you Netflix okay watch this tonight there's Jules like comedy she loves it that's why I always end up watching stand-up comedians because yeah she loved comedy and I've always been obsessed with comedians but she really loves watching stand-up comedy so I've been watching a lot of it recently okay so you got to do this and then everybody listening to this go do this too and tweet it Hassan and tell him I sent you and then tell him to come on our podcast you gotta go watch his new special it's called The King's Jester it is one of the most remarkable examples of Storytelling and crowd control I've ever seen he'll take yep the king's Jester you know like the fool of the Court uh it's brand new it's fantastic great storytelling but what's really impressive is if you watch him up there and you listen listen to how he's able to get the crowd way way way way up and then all the way down to like dead silence wow that's just like that masterful crowd work so do that then his other show is also on Netflix the the um the Patriot Act go back and watch season one episode one because what it shows you when I watched his special I was like man what am I even doing with my career dude this is insane I'd never be this good and then I went back and watched the first episode of the show and he was good but when I saw him in the first episode I was much it was much more approachable it was a level of expertise that I feel like a lot of people would feel is manageable right you know basically reading prompters and kind of telling jokes and hitting punch lines not the same level of expertise so it's very cool to see like oh you can start at like a relatively normal presenter and just build that level of Mastery yeah those are the two King's Jester and then this other one the yeah Patriot Act episode one season season one episode one so good all right last thing related to these writing tips and then again if you guys like this let us know and what we'll do is maybe we'll cover like one or two at just in the beginning to warm up each show or something like that because there's I mean I'm looking at 75 pages of the this so there's a lot to go through there's a lot of stuff like this and then shout out to uh Gary Goldman too this is a really cool thing to put all uh to put out into the world and cool of somebody to uh put in one place so the last thing I'll point out which I really love from uh this first page here is uh tip number seven he says fine I'm just gonna read it there's a couple of sentences here find a comic friend to call slash meet and go over jokes premises ideas Etc play play is this funny right be honest but gentle and don't just wait until it's your turn tell them if you've heard similar bits two people is best more is okay it's one of the most fun and helpful exercises even if your partner just gives you more confidence in a new joke idea it's invaluable all in caps a lot of the times they'll suggest excellent tags additions to the joke usually but not limited to the punch line or different angles it also gives you a safe place to say things out loud which you think is so important me too I'm just gonna search the media right now and here's the last part he says you can generally disregard the first idea that pops into your head because it's probably popped into many other heads too obvious punch lines are promiscuous so that's sort of a two-parter for me maybe three parts I really love this concept not just for comedians but also for writers of like really making time to get together with somebody else and just bounce ideas around be like hey should I like should I talk about this uh this is bugging me would this be good for Twitter or something like that I think so many people are just putting stuff out myself included from time to time especially on Twitter this is where I suffer from that the most but if you start from that place of like testing ideas and seeing what works somewhere and then like kind of elevating them up the chain of where you speak I think you're going to see a lot more traction on the things that ultimately make it out into the public than if you do the other way around yeah this is my favorite one that we talked about so far James altitude once wrote you know how he he kind of got his following on quora he was a big writer on quora I found one of his things is how I discovered him actually and it was his writing tips I've tried to find it again and I can't find it and one of them was delete the first sentence of everything that you write and uh when I heard that it's like the first one that pops into your head probably sucks uh where dolman I can't remember the quote yep but where he said that's the first thing that came to my head and it's always true I always write the first sentence and I don't delete it right away because I don't want it to be just sort of a repetitive meaningless thing where I do it automatically like I I really want to make sure that I write and then I come back and I look at the first sentence and every single time it's worth deleting but you need that first sentence to get you to the second sentence you know yep I think that's really important and then I'm very lucky that my wife is like basically really good at everything she's just one of those people and she's a phenomenal phenomenal writer and I read everything I I write on my my blog post on timstize.com because those are long pieces and sometimes you get deep in them and you kind of lose sight of them and she's been so helpful she's just noticed how passionate I am about it and I know sometimes she doesn't want to do it but she always does and I always listen to her papers because she used to write like 10 page papers for her dietetics degree and so we have an exchanged um I should do it with friends my wife is basically my best friend so I think it counts and reading your [ __ ] out loud is is really so critical and so few people do it because one it'll help you spell check it'll help you edit it it'll help you get the flow but more than anything it writing is meant to be spoken you know like writing is a transition to conversation so you understand the conversation of your writing so much better when you say it out loud and I think like Nobody Does it I really do it's just type enter type enter type enter and if if you take a moment to read what you wrote out loud you'll improve your writing by like double instantly that is a great tip and also a great transition into this hot take that I had okay I wanna I'm gonna put a pin in something you said which is very few people are actually taking the time to read their stuff out loud type enter type enter type enter I agree with you and I think what we're going to see is only more of that because it's just gotten easier there's a whole bunch of tools out there where you don't even have to do the typing part anymore you just hit enter enter and it'll write an entire article for you okay let's talk about let's talk about this on this podcast and I said this a little bit earlier we have a stance and I still believe in this that AI generated content creation engines are in general going to be a net positive for the creative Community I think they're going to be an on-ramp you think so yep you agree with me but I was thinking about this recently and I want to add a caveat to this and the reason is a AI generated content has become the new buzzword in startups I'm so bored of it already yeah so bored of it it's the thing like if you want to raise money you better be doing aigen content stuff that you three months ago that was web3 before that it was crypto and blockchain before that it was something else right the Creator before that it was fintech yep fintech we see these terms come and go all the time okay so who cares well here's here's what made me perk my ears up and pay attention to this one in particular somebody made the uh likening between nfts and the excitement around AI generated content about how like it's a lot of a lot of buzzwords a lot of stuff people don't really understand and people are going to start making a lot of money in here these early adopters and when I saw that I was like oh I think this person's right and we're probably because this is sort of a law of physics going to see a very similar crash and when I say crash here's here's my hot take a bunch of people are gonna get burned by these content creation engines who not everybody and this is the reason this is a difficult conversation to have is because there's a level of nuance to it that I think is going to get lost in most conversations some people listening to this are like I think talking about it verbally is going to help me clarify it the people who think aigen is a replacement for human Talent big problem there why I'll get to why in a second but I just want to double down on this stance right because I'm biased I'm a writer so I'm looking at this new technology that's coming out that a lot of people may say has the potential to do with my job so of course I'm gonna sit here and go wow it's not a replacement for human writers let me let me tell you why I think this is dangerous and why you should be very careful with this if you're a business AI generated content it's my my take is that it poses an existential threat to Google as a search engine and the reason for it is simple AI gen like say gpt3 or copy.ai or Lex or all these other cool tools they are very good at creating articles that sound like they're human written and that's an amazing tool if you're a human because now you have help creating the the first draft of the article doing kind of a heavy lifting so that you can go and refine it fact check it all that kind of stuff the issue for companies is going to be if they start to use these as a replacement for people and the reason is the AIS do not understand context and they they they will say things that aren't true so they'll they'll and I've seen this firsthand in my testing they'll report statistics that are under viable they cite sources that don't exist what they're doing is they're creating an article that mimics the look of other articles and people really need to understand what's going on behind the scenes if you ask gpt3 to write an article all about say uh the future of blockchain it will say well blockchain is expected to grow by 20 compounded annual growth rate every single year according to you know investors weekly or something like that it'll say that and that sounds legitimate but if you don't go track that down and make sure it's actually true there's there's a very high likelihood that it's not necessarily pulling on real data so why does that matter I'm getting a little bit verbose here because here's the short of it as soon as Google starts to notice junk articles ranking in the serp they're going to shut this down they are going to start to punish the use of these tools so anybody who buys in early and uses this as the basis for their content marketing strategy that's going to be the nft crash and what happened in the nft crash was and what's happened in crypto crashes and basically every single crash that follows the wide set adoption of a new technology yeah a bunch of people get in early a bunch of money is made by selling all the me too people on the technology and then something happens that just evaporates all that value right crypto pumps their value's not coming back well that's debatable but but a lot of money was taken off the table how can you do that in AI or in uh writing the way you do it is by destroying the business function behind the writing so your content doesn't actually sell anything it's your content's ability to get you noticed on search engines if all of a sudden junk articles are starting to rank on Google people aren't going to use Google as much so Google is going to destroy whatever can create these junk articles and they'll penalize everybody who's using them and can I tell you something Tim I have a perfect example of this would you like to see it [ __ ] yeah I would I love it okay I'm very very convinced that the recent algorithm that Google updated was designed specifically to punish AI content we've seen it I I could give you I mean I'm not going to do it because they're my customers but I could give you a full breakdown on the websites that have gone up in rankings since the recent update and the websites that have gone down in rankings and exactly why we think it is and they we don't we didn't use AI generated content but sometimes with budget restraints you have to get content that you blow through a little bit more it's just the way it is you know and so it's going to be harder and harder to get I don't want to call it filler because it's informative and accurate but non-templated content let's call it it's going to be harder and harder to get templated content to viably bring you inbound search shopping I could do a whole case study on it already we just talked about it today I think that was very well put harder and harder to get templated content to have inbound search traffic I think that's the best way of saying it and again I want to I want to highlight two points for people listening to this I'm not anti-ai gen I think it's going to be a really useful tool in the toolbox of creators but you've got to be careful because there are now a lot of people out there who are going to try to sell you this as a sort of a cure-all for your content creation needs what they are is a great augmentation of whatever humans you're already working with but you need to keep that people uh uh element at some level doesn't have to look the same as it currently is but my stance was Google is incentivized to shut this down and that's like those are some Deep Pockets they're going to be working hard so I said this recently in a group and somebody asked me they said well that's an interesting take they said how do you think Google is going to recognize this and I said you know I'm not really sure but my suspicion is that they'll they will opt for casting a wider net rather than a narrower one right so at first there's going to be some human writers who also get caught up in this because what I suspect is going to happen is Google is going to say something like hey all content that fits this description there's like a high degree of likelihood that it was AI generated and so we're just going to start ranking all this stuff down and so that's kind of where I left it I said I'm not sure what it's going to look like yet but I think early on it's they're going to ding a whole bunch of people and then they'll refine whatever the process is and by the way this is a cat and mouse game that Google's been playing for decades right decades yeah this is not new for them it's new for us as consumers because it used to be hard to get your hands on this but people have been trying to synthetically create content that ranks for Google so since the beginning okay I was thinking about that yesterday like last night after work I was thinking about it again you know and all of a sudden I thought to myself I'm like somebody must have asked the people like Google this like I'm sure they've written about how they're going to handle this okay and this is where the case study comes in so I'm gonna share my screen and I'll describe what's going on for people listening here's what I did I literally just went to Google and I googled how will Google defeat gpt3 right and first result that comes up there's a couple results on the page ppt3 uh quietly damaging Google search 10 ways Google will defeat gpt3 Google's new trillion parameter AI link there's something about that I don't know anyways sure enough I come here and it's like yeah this has been discussed all right so I start clicking on articles and this is the one that I want to show people it's the very top search result 10 ways Google will defeat gpt3 based articles okay this is the uh nope yeah it's this one right here so first thing I see who is the author Samir Shah co-founder at boom and bucket previously head of cat Digital Labs Alum of MIT and this is the part that I keyed in on he's an MIT Alum so I'm like okay this guy's technical right he knows his stuff so he's smarter than us yeah he's definitely smart okay I'm not gonna bury the lead here I'm reading this article and I start to get a little suspicious of it and then sure enough all the way down to the bottom this the top ranking article on Google for how is Google going to defeat gpt3 was written by copy AI so he writes this entire article there's no mention of copy AI anywhere in here at first and you get all the way down to the bottom and it says the above content was generated under one minute using copy.ai's first draft generator tool now let me break this down for a second because I want to reiterate why this helps support what I'm talking about in terms of like the threat that this poses to Google and Google's incentivization to shut this down this is the top ranking result on Google let's like reiterate that a little bit the top ranking result for how Google will defeat gpt3 was written by copy.ai which is it's basically the functionality yeah now why does that matter because this article is shitty and here's the interesting thing about a third of the way through I started to suspect I was reading an AI written article and I'm like yes and I'll show you exactly why there's a few there's two I'll I'll narrow it down to two reasons but the broader Point behind this so what I mentioned is people are going to get burned here's the other thing this is my other the other part of my hot take I think a lot of people who are super excited on aigen they are vastly underestimating how quickly humans are going to learn to tune this out there a lot of people are looking at this and they're looking at AI gen in a few different contexts they're saying well now I can create articles that are going to rank on Google super fast super cheap I got news for you people are not going to read this [ __ ] and if they do read it they're going to not trust your brand over it yeah they're not going to convert over right because that's the real thing by the way I've really tested that you can get stuff to rank and it still doesn't do anything for you it's a real thing people can tell that's I'm so glad you just said that people can tell things so one uh let me give you two other quick examples there's any there is a thing out there now where there's a very uh a niche sales tactic where you'll instead of emailing somebody you send a video message you just say hey Tim that's Ethan I you know I got this uh new drink liquid death I think you might like it um you know just hit me up if you want to chat about it or something like that send that will get like a 70 to 80 percent response rate because most people don't get video messages these days so they look at that they go oh man you took the time to shoot me a video message this guy seems relatable I'll say what's up you know see where it goes well now ai out the name right and then I send it to a bunch of different people yeah yep yeah and then the last one is like Twitter threads so I'll show an example of Twitter from the end anyways people are looking at this with money signs in their eyes and I'm telling you I'm like no dude people people are still smarter than this we are exceptionally well tuned to figure out whether we're talking to a person or not it's like a survival Instinct at the deepest level and my assertion is nobody gives a [ __ ] what an AI thinks not and they won't until we as a society learn to think of AIS as people that might happen and then they become interesting again but for now it's like this is only interesting if you think you're connecting with another person as soon as you get rid of that magic and all of a sudden somebody thinks oh this was just AI they're not going to pay attention anymore they're going to tune it out so fast and so I've said this I'll pause in a second because I've now been talking for like 15 minutes straight but I said this and the question that came back is do you think people will actually be able to tell so how do I mean and I'm going to say yes and I'll show you how I figured that out with this article but you said you just got an AI video how did how were you able to tell and what's your take on this I just knew it was a thing I just knew it was a thing so I agree that it'll be a net positive but it's only going to make real content more valuable and the example that I think in my head is food like McDonald's didn't make restaurants not popular right they didn't close down restaurants they didn't shut down the restaurant industry all it did really is make restaurants more relatable and made it more demand for restaurants that have personality behind it right you go for the experience it's very similar and so there's going to be a market for McDonald's copy there's going to be a market for this maybe it'll be templated emails that I get a gazillion of every single day and I delete right away maybe I mean who knows Google's gonna figure this out really quick I'm telling you like and some will get through for sure it's not going to be perfect and so I don't expect this to totally go away but there's still a huge market for a beautiful restaurant with personal wait staff food that tastes amazing that has a great experience a conversation with people that you enjoy and like and so I I actually my take on this is like okay nobody's gonna get out of the job I'm really bored of it already I'm bored of all the tweets like oh this is all over a second okay whatever I'm gonna keep writing it's not gonna change my life at all and so I that's my comparison but my other comparison is that it's just how we talked about with comedy the joke still has to land and maybe AI can make people laugh I'm sure it can I'm sure the AI is only going to improve and that's a whole other conversation but we're not there right now and the thing is the economics of this stuff always get to a weird Middle Ground where it doesn't make sense to force it to the mass adoption stage because it's solving for a problem that doesn't actually exist and that's always one of these bell curve things collapse it's a cool idea but you know there there actually isn't a huge shortest goal problem right now that Bitcoin needs to come in and solve there's no problem for Bitcoin to solve so it's useful but it's not going to happen there's no actual problem for AI to solve it's useful but it's just not going to happen and so that's my take on it it's McDonald's and people eat at McDonald's every day but people also don't and so it's kind of irrelevant to me that's a really interesting analogy and I I think you're right and and what's interesting too is that I would even say it's not maybe not necessarily a McDonald's but the system or to take it one step further the system that McDonald's pioneered exactly has been able to not like McDonald's yeah and it's like others who have now built businesses all over the place based on the same thing I totally agree and again I'll say it I'll say it again because I'm sure this will be taken out of context I am not anti-ai gen but I do want to caution people against something that most people are not going to say right now which is it's gonna be massively over hyped it should be used definitely leverage this like any other tool but just realize there's a very powerful player out there who by the way I've uh Google has officially categorized this content as spam so they are officially hunting for you um but even beyond that what forgets forget Google for a second I think there's a very human component to this that people aren't talking about which is that when you put forth like I actually think people are playing with fire a little bit with their personal Brands and experimenting with this stuff yeah I because we're early I give people passes all the time because this is super novel it's very interesting and I've done it myself like you wanna you want to create and see what it can do and that's that's super cool but let me let me go back to this example for a second and walk you through the mental experience that you're that people listening to this your customers might be having in some cases right so I came here looking for information on 10 ways that Google is going to defeat gpt3 I find this article by this person who is MIT qualified and I'm like oh great this is probably not a real person oh thank you I'm not sure see I know the I know the co-founder of boom and bucket so I I'm not sure who his co-founder is but I haven't looked him up even if he is a real person here's what I'm assuming just based on what I've seen so far this could be a fake person but I'm kind of guessing it's a real person and he actually is from MIT which is why he was interested in gpt3 in the first place so this was kind of like a tongue-in-cheek developer experiment and the fact that he got it to rank on Google is legendary right so 100 pass on this article but I wanna I wanna use it as an example for what's going to start happening as this proliferates because this isn't going to be a an isolated example very soon it's going to be a recurring problem that users run into so I get here I start reading now I said about a third of the way through this I started to suspect this is what I was going to get this was actually created by an AI and there's a few reasons one I mentioned um your brain's like hyper dialed in for sure you connect with people and I think that while the AIS are good they're they're actually not that great and and so in this case uh there's two things that stood out first the style is like very there's a certain style when these things write they all write the same way it's like a decl a declaration and then like a paragraph or two backing it up but more importantly than that the quality of this article did not match what I was expecting from somebody who has been educated at MIT and so I was reading this and I'm going oh great he gives a quick background of what gpt3 is and I was like a little bit let down by the description it wasn't super clear I was like oh that's okay that's kind of helpful get keep going keep going and then right about here you'll see it it just breaks down so there's this I think this is the third or fourth bullet point the first two or three go like this they say Google will use sentiment analysis to identify weekly written content that's interesting that one pretty much fooled me not a great description on how that works it says Google will not this is the second one Google will not rank any article that takes less than five minutes to write okay interesting but then in the back of my mind I'm like going I'm going how does Google know yeah how do I know well here's the description that the AI wrote it goes however Google has to stay ahead of the curve and deter the algorithm from ranking any article that takes less than five minutes to write Google's AI is already pretty good at detecting this and with Google's vast amount of data it can tell what length content is generating the most traffic and this is where the human side starts to kick in and a little bit of it is experience with these things once you play with them you start to recognize this because you go oh it's saying something without even saying anything yeah that sounds like a good justification for what it asserted up pop until you dig into it and realize there's actually no substance to that description at all so that's where it starts to break down and then right here this fourth one it goes Google will start securing SEO rankings for the first person it was created for I was like that's interesting what is that what does that mean yeah and then literally then I'm just going to read this quote for quote so that people um listen and get it second person but if it doesn't here's why Google's ranking algorithms will continue to favor original content and then there's a colon after that like it's going to list something and then it goes third person the first person to write an article on a gpt3 powered site is more likely to get SEO rankings from Google here's why so there's like there's no connection between these ideas at all right this is what these things are turning out now this would be good if you had a human interacting with it you go oh okay maybe Google will start securing rankings is their history for that has somebody talked about that you go look through interviews like it can be a great groundwork for it but but humans are still able to recognize even with just a little bit of experience like with this or with the video that you saw that they're interacting with something that is not genuine and I think it's gonna be a huge turn off and that's where the the second part of this comes in which is like I said I give this author a huge pass because he's technical this is super new this would piss me off three months from now right and this is a brand burner and I'm going to give you another example of it I don't know this person so I'm sorry if this comes I don't know I have no idea and to some extent I'm sure he is but I and this is another example I give him total pass on this because it's brand new it's just experimenting but I want to call out for people the internal experience that users are going to start to have right so Ali abdall he wrote This Thread and it says in five years or no actually I want to get the follow-up because he followed up this is a he's got a thread here I'll read the headlines it goes in five years of YouTube the most common question I still get from my viewers is how are you so productive here is a thread of 15 actionable tips that help me do more of the things that matter to me without burning out now as everybody can probably guess This Thread was completely written by AI interestingly enough nowhere in the thread does he mention that and this is uh and he did a follow-up where he said he said I just published my most popular thread well let me quote him because I don't wanna I don't want to put I'm already calling him out let me at least let him defend himself with his own words so here's the quote that came this is what came on my radar he said 24 hours ago I tried an experiment I tweeted a thread with 15 productivity hacks it's become one of my highest performing tweets of all time with over a million impressions and 23 648 engagements the truth the entire thread was written by AI let me explain that is cool for now this will piss people off if you and if you play with fire with your personal brand like this you are gonna get burned man trust I mean who is it Monger says it or Buffett says it takes forever to build one second to lose misleading thread like this it's all gone so here's the thing that pisses me off up threat you read this thing as a as a user not as somebody who's observing somebody else experimenting with AI Ollie gets a pass right but let's just pretend it's a few months from now and you're like hey I'm really looking for some helpful information on how to be a good YouTuber item number one set a daily highlight item number two have an hourglass on your desk and and there's descriptions for each of these there's like a one sentence description after each one set of no internet day once a week make a to-do list the the Pomodoro Technique it's it's just all the same LinkedIn dribble that you see everywhere but the problem is you're trusting this person to give you their advice on what they do right and this is not that so again not a knockout Ollie because he's just experimenting but for people who are looking at this and going oh my God this AI just created the most I can finally be popular on Twitter I can finally it's going to be so much easier now exactly yo stay away from that you can use this to generate ideas maybe even to lay tweets out but you've got to put yourself in these because if you just AI gen stuff people are they're gonna be able to notice and it will absolutely burn your brand not that long from now that's my hot take very hot take I loved every second of it and in just 26 minutes yeah I I think it means a lot to us just like it means a lot to everybody that is fearful of not just their livelihood but their identity to an extent being taken away by a robot or AI I feel the same way I always have in that when everything is commoditized then what's left and what's left succeeds and everything that's commoditized is a race to the bottom and somebody wins that race we've talked about this before like Amazon has won that race BuzzFeed has won that race they won the race of the bottom so they own that spot and that's how they well BuzzFeed is actually a terrible example because their business is like completely in samples let's just use Amazon right pretty good business I heard you can't out Amazon Amazon you can't out Ai Ai and so when there's a playing field of Baseline commoditization the best that you're gonna get is like second or third or even 10th place and that's the worst place to be because unless you're you've won the race at the bottom nobody's going to pay for you because they'll just go to the cheapest most commoditized version they'll go to Amazon they'll buy their toilet paper from Amazon and you don't want to be toilet paper content so when everything looks the same like what is left and what's left is the five-star restaurant that sells out every night and I don't know like I don't know restaurants very well but that's the example what's left is the personal trainer that has created like a really great reputation and has built a real following and like helped people and built the testimonials through the gym what's left is going to be the writers that tell stories that's meaningful so in the case of writing like what's in the case of everything actually the thing that's left after commoditation commoditization when's the race to the bottom is connection because people can tell and if you don't have that people are just gonna ignore you and so I'm I'm excited about it because it gives me an opportunity to double down on the thing that makes me a person which is being able to connect with people and so I guess it's really a huge opportunity in my view yeah I think so I think I like I now said this three or four times inside this rant I still think these tools are a net positive and they're going to be really interesting to see what comes out of them I just feel like with all the hype I wanted to share this pretty poignant warning which you probably will not see inside the Twitter scale oh maybe you will but I don't know it was it was it was on my mind and I had to get it off my chest so that's my that's my hot take on this I really like what you said about connection maybe we'll end it here at the end of the day I don't think people care about content at all the only reason content is interesting is because people care about people like at a deep yeah evolutionary biological level we are the deepest level that there is there's nothing deeper for us that is being a person there is no crossover on that to AI people don't care what computers think it's impressive what they can do and it's novel but nobody's gonna sign up to hear what a computer thinks every single day until and unless we get to a point where you start to think of these computers as as people people and then it's interesting again and we might get there and then this whole thing changes but for now just just remember that what we're after here is connection and and yeah connection and authenticity and just be very careful with your personal brands on this stuff that's all I got for today man this is cool man great episode yeah we went through a lot we went through Gary Goldman some great tips there be careful with AI my favorite episode let us know what you think everybody thank you for tuning in thank you for listening be sure to check out the catholicbloggerpod.com uh drop your email get uh the guide that we've got out there what is the guide for again it's called the Killer and the poet it's a beautiful representation about how you can combine technical copywriting with poetry with storytelling so as you can tell stories and you can be technical you're a killer and a poet and that's how you get rich you teach you how to do that all right thanks for tuning in we'll talk to you next week see you guys [Music] foreign [Music]