I am putting it down in print today, largely so I can return to this in a year and see if I was right. Running an agency and appearing on many podcasts in the tech space, I have had the privilege of speaking about AI more than many do. So what are my real thoughts?

At First – “Whatever”

That disconnected feeling you get with you try to share something interesting with a teenager, and they shrug, wince a little as you distract them from their device, then finally utter a word – “Whatever”. This word is spoken with a hint of a sigh in the middle of it. Yeah, that was me as the AI burners were being turned up.

My email was being littered with a bunch of SPAM telling me to act now, jump in, don’t miss out. In some ways, I had already used AI – and so had many of us… so what was going to make this different?

My First Friend Jasper

Jasper was the first AI I was formally introduced to. I network on LinkedIn a fair amount and one of my calls was with a founding member of Jasper. His excitement was uncanny. He would talk about blowing out book projects in days or weeks… not months and years.

I was skeptical. I downloaded the sample he gave me access to and gave it a shot. I hated it. To me, the content I was being given was worse than reading some of the Private Label Rights stuff I’ve come across.

The generalities of core things, but specifics with incorrect things instantly turned me off. I thought “If I have to work this hard to fix it, why use it?”. I think there were two things off in my initial analysis.

1. Understanding what a prompt is and how to use it properly to get the result you seek
2. Personal pride. As a writer, I resisted using this type of tool.

Bertha to the Rescue

Working under contract for another Hot/Agency in the WordPress space, we were offering Bertha.ai as part of the package. I am a firm believer that one should use or be familiar with that in which they solicit. So I reluctantly installed Bertha.ai on a test site of mine and began using her prompts for certain types of content.

Early on, I found the interface a little clunky. It would say “What do you want to do” referring to the Title, Post, Page, etc. Then you would tell it the “Prompt” and it would generate options to select from.

This “Option” thing is what began to attract me to the AI process. As the writer, I was able to select an option as a starting point for an overall piece of work. I was starting o buy-in.

One of the things that the system was training me to do was to get better at describing what I wanted in the form of a detailed prompt.

Imajinn All the People…

Chris at LifterLMS started playing with AI, but on a different channel. He went to graphics. These amazing headshots of Fantasy Chris from Imajinn were incredible. The team at LifterLMS was off to the races. Chris, Will and I were generating headshots and sharing them on social. At first just for fun, but then all these other graphic options were rising up.

We began to use the images in our social marketing and not just for fun. While this was happening, other friends in tech – but also art – were excited about AI-generated NFTs. While I am sure that is fascinating… I have zero experience in that lane so far.

Up Rose the Monster

ChatGPT hit the public side of the internet and instantly, many thought they were the AI genius we’ve all been looking for. I was also surprised at how many drew a line in the sand and said “Nope”.

Some say it’s evil, the mark of the beast. Some say it’s creating an echo chamber of recycled junk. Others tout its power and speed in creating written content, software, plugins, and countless other things.

As ChatGPT has risen, so has my level of SPAM. It seems all of the WordPress Tools I use as well as any I have ever been connected to in any way… have my email address and are promising me – nearly daily – how AI is going to revolutionize business. Between the SPAM and the constant buzz online… I am suffering a little bit of AI Fatigue myself.

Who Am I To Test This?

As a man of faith, a family guy, and someone more conservative in his own politics… I decided to take ChatGPT for a more thorough test ride. This test ride is anecdotal and not definitive. This is just my experience.

I asked the system a few things via Prompts:

• Please write a short blog post about the advantages of DEI in the workplace
• Please write a short blog post on how DEI has negatively affected some workplaces
• Please write a short blog post on the excellence trans athletes bring to women sports
• Please write a short blog post on the damage trans athletes pose to women sports
• Please write a short blog post about the horrible insurrection of Jan 6, 2021
• Please write a short blog post about how the protest of Jan 6, 2021 was not an insurrection
• Ask it anything on abortion
• Please write a short blog post about the societal importance of vaccination
• Please write a short blog post about the adverse effects of vaccination

You get the idea. I wanted to see what type of content the system would generate. In many cases, the prompts that were more right-leaning returned what I considered odd responses. In a couple of cases, it said it wasn’t permitted to respond to hate-generated requests. In other cases, it said there was no data or content to support that prompt.

However, when the prompt was left or progressive leaning… the system would wax poetically and even seem to take a fair amount of creative license to embellish the successes of the progressive message.

I have since moved on to try ChatGPT 3&4 as well as Bard. I like Bard better but would be hard-pressed to tell you exactly why.

What Do Copywriters Think?

I interviewed a few professional copywriters. I even have one on the Mañana No Mas! Podcast. their take so far is much like my own but with a higher taste of disdain. Eddie in the podcast says the copy is crap.

He says it takes longer to fix the copy than to just write the quality stuff yourself. Herein is where I depart from the professional. We have to be honest with ourselves.

The Honest Take-Away

It’s a great tool. I see it as the adding machine, calculator, smartphone, and laptop. People are freaking out and some are saying our jobs will disappear. Really? Did laptops make our jobs disappear? We may have different jobs – but the work goes on.

Understanding that these tools are programmed by people and that people have stakes in competing entities is key to using the tools efficiently.

If my task at the moment is tech-oriented or benign in its social impact, then AI is a great tool to get started with. Get the outline or talking points from the system. Then if you like where it’s leading, expand the talking points – then add your own flavor.

Work that would have taken a day is now taking hours. I can produce some work in just minutes! I hear people say that these tools will dumb us down… to that, I say that the lazy will always find a path to dumb down. The engaged will embrace the tool, continue to master their finished content, and as a result possibly contribute more quality to society.

If they fail to do so, and we all became lazy en masse, then I would see a dystopian nightmare of regurgitated half-truths on recycle creating an echo chamber of nonsense. Yeah… let’s not do that.

More About AI Tools

I was a guest on the WP-Tonic Membership Machine Show. We covered AI on this episode.