Is AI Good or Bad? (And the Pros and Cons of AI for Marketing)

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. SUMMARY KEYWORDS ai, artificial intelligence, ai tool, ai tools, ai marketing, legalities of AI, pros and cons of AI, pros and cons of artificial intelligence, ai for copywriting, ai for marketing, deepfakes, Jasper, Grammarly, content production, content creation SPEAKERS Erin Ollila Erin Ollila 00:04 Hey friends, welcome to the Talk Copy to Me podcast. Here we empower small business owners to step into the spotlight with their marketing and messaging. I’m your host, Erin Ollila. Let’s get started and talk coffee. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so that my friends is a direct quote from Shakespeare, which I don’t think you expected to get at the beginning of an episode, where we talked about the merits and the pitfalls of using AI for content creation. But I had a fun story I’d share with you before we start talking about AI. And here we are. So I’m going to repeat the quote one more time from Hamlet, there is nothing either good or bad. But thinking makes it so now let’s rewind the time and imagine Erin as a young, high school senior taking an AP honors English class with probably the hardest teacher she may have ever had. And he demanded great work excellent work from his students. In fact, he would take points off of test if the format of like where you had your name and the time blog, we’re not like accurately aligned. Or, for example, we had a weekly grammar test. And for some reason, I had decided she was me that you spelt the word grammar with an E R. So that would be g r a, m m e r, instead of how it’s correctly spelled, which is gr A M M AR, if you are not aware, trust me, I am super aware of this. Because the first time I get it wrong, I had five points off my my test. And with a note to say this is not how you spell grammar, you should not be in an advanced placement English class, if you do not know how to spell the word grammar. That was my teacher. So the next time I did this wrong, it wasn’t the next week, I promise, I must have kind of just spaced it out a week or two later, I got 10 points taken off of my test with a note that said if it happened again, he would take half of the points off my test. My friends, of course, it did happen again. So instead of getting 100, the highest score I could get was then 50, which is a failing grade to start with. And anything else I got wrong from that, you know, would be subtracted. So let me tell you, I never made that mistake. Again. I now know how to spell grammar perfectly. I don’t mess that up. But I share that as kind of a story. So you could understand my teacher before I explain why this quote is important. In this class, we were reading Hamlet and we had regular mini essays, I would describe them to talk about things that were happening within Shakespeare’s play. And we walked into class one day, there was just the quote on the blackboard or chalkboard, whatever you call these things. And it said, you know, nothing is good or bad. But thinking makes us so. And at the end of the class, someone was like, Well, you know, you didn’t give us our assignment, like, what’s our assignment for the essay that’s due this week. And at the time I mentioned, there are many essays. And I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about this on the podcast before. It’s basically an introduction in which you, you know, you state a thesis, what’s the point of what you’re writing about a few supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion that kind of sums up the whole essay. So they were pretty easy, but that was what was expected, clearly, a minimum of five paragraphs, and he always thought it was kind of like taking the easy way out if you only had a minimum of five paragraphs. So I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write. It was a quote, there was no direction from my teacher as like, the argument that we should be making in regard to a quote, he kind of sprung this on us. And it made me nervous. So I thought to myself, well, this is a challenge, right? Not a challenge as an it’s difficult. This is like a challenge, like the gauntlet has been thrown down. He’s testing us, we need to prove ourselves. So what I decided to do was turn in a quote unquote, essay, that was not a five paragraph essay, it was not a 10 paragraph essay. It was one word. I don’t even know why I’m sharing this story. It popped in my head when I was thinking like, how would I introduce the idea of AI being good or bad? If you weren’t sure what the word is yet, it was the word nothing. Now, when I first turned this into my teacher, he looked at me like utterly flabbergasted and a bit outraged that I had dare have the gall to do this. And he’s like, What is this? So I told him, the quote, nothing is good or bad, but thinking may exit. So this is the word nothing. You have to interpret whether this was good or bad. And I think that about sums up my contrarian pushing the buttons have to kind of like check and see how far I can go attitude that I had as a teenager, respectful, resourceful, yet, I wasn’t going to try and push those buttons. Anyway, the end of the story is that I think my teacher gave me full credit for the essay, I think I probably got 100, which helped balance out those poor grammar grades that I was getting in the beginning of the school year. But what I like about this quote is that I do find it very much thought provoking the idea that nothing is actually inherently good or bad, but the way that we feel or think about something based on the experiences we’ve had, the education that we’ve had, the prejudices that we have, the privilege that we have, all of these outside influences kind of dictate, in our own minds whether something is good or bad, yet, again, it’s really nothing that is good or bad on its own. It is our own belief systems that determine what may be a good thing, or what may be a bad thing. And I promise we’re not going to go into a philosophy discussion here, even though I seriously thought about minoring in philosophy in college. But when we take that idea that it is our own education experience in dress, privilege, prejudices that influence whether one thing is good or bad. I think that’s really interesting when we look at AI and it’s really huge presence in the scene of the world right now. Now let’s you know, jump backward in time here AI is nothing new. AI has been actively used by big brands, businesses, even tiny businesses for years for decades. But with the inception of chat GPT that really hit the sea and I think it was in November of 2022. All of a sudden, AI was put in the hands of the everyday consumer. Sure we had tools that regularly harness the power of aI think of like Jasper as an example. Things like Grammarly that’s been around forever, right? If you don’t know what these two things are, again, Jasper is an AI tool that produces content and other things. Grammarly is a tool that uses AI obviously, it’s not employing 1000s of writers to check our work, but it uses AI to check the the errors like the grammar errors. Haha came full circle here from that story about those grammar tests. Grammarly, which is spelled je r a n n A rly. Thank you very much. Erin Ollila 08:06 Grammarly is also based on AI. So we’re actually using AI banking, for example, if you have like, I know, I think my credit card app or my bank by bank app, one of those things has like a projected savings or a projected spending that I can glance at, maybe move things around play with to make the determinations of how I want to do some final financial decisions. Again, that’s not me chatting with a you know, a finance representative that is immediately answering me when I’m doing this at one o’clock in the morning while like watching TV finishing my work. No, those are tools yet. The end of last year, the everyday consumer, as I mentioned, the everyday ordinary individual was able to tap into a pretty genius AI solution and do almost anything with it. Right? Ask it to create things, ask it to analyze things, ask it for strategy. And honestly, when it first came out? Well, maybe we should start before I say that maybe we should start with my own belief systems about AI, whether I think they are good or bad. And like almost everything in life, I find that I tend to sit in both black and white and the gray areas very firmly. I do think this is part of just my chemical makeup. And you know a similar trait for people who have ADHD. It’s often hard for us to take things like standardized test, because more than one answer feels like it could be correct or sometimes no answers feel like they could be correct. You know, and when it comes to things like AI, I do feel like I have some hard and fast beliefs. But I also feel very wishy washy about other things. That’s what I mean about both being in the gray and the black. can wait. So I guess I can say that pre chat GBT, I was both cautious of AI and underwhelmed with AI. I have friends who use tools like Jasper for example and Grammarly as well. And I just feel like they’re, they’re okay, like, maybe because I have, you know, Master’s degree in writing. I’ll tell you I’ve never been good at grammar. So I’m not going to claim that right now on this podcast as if I were yet I’ve also studied style guides, like I’ve studied the you know, Chicago Style Guide extensively and MLA format, APA format and APA format. Because of the intensive amount of writing I’ve done over the years I’ve had to know how to format things. So I guess when I use a tool like Grammarly as an example, and again, this is actually not a dig at Grammarly. It’s an excellent tool. But I say this with the idea that like, I’m not impressed by it because I can see for example, when it miss correct something or it tries to tell me that a word is a passive verb or, or I’m using too many adverbs or whatever. But yet, I know that there is an actual stylized reason I am doing so or for example, it isn’t actually a passive verb based on the rest of the structure of the sentence. Anyway, example example here, you can tell this is obviously a solo podcast because I’m riffing a lot today. But I was very underwhelmed by these tools. I thought it was silly to pay, you know, large monthly subscriptions for things that if I just put a little bit more time and effort into myself, I would have created way better. I was also pretty cautious of AI. I am absolutely 100% Not a doomsday or yet I worried again, pre chat, GBT that too much. Artificial intelligence is not a good thing for our society. That part of that reason is, I worry that within the past century, we have advanced drastically in terms of industry and capitalism and convenience. And convenience is really the key word. For me personally, I was very fortunate that I was able to grow up with my grandmother in the same house that I was, and I was so fortunate to have her in my life until one week short of her 100 and second birthday. And like I mentioned, she lived in my home. And that meant I was with her all day every day. And because I mentioned all this because I have a pretty good grasp of how much life has changed in her entire lifetime. Because we talked about it right? There were no cars when she was born. There was it was very inconvenient life in 1911, let’s just say. And then everything that happened in the 20th century, changed life drastically. I can even look at my own life as an elder millennial. I was the first group of individuals who didn’t have the internet in our homes, and then suddenly did have the internet in our homes. And friends. Let me tell you, the Internet has changed widely, vastly monstrously since the internet first came into my house. So I have a very clear understanding that life itself has changed so much. And we as a society have been so interested in making our lives more and more and more convenient, that we create products and services and offers and lifestyle changes based on things being more convenient. And where I use my judgment, or where you’ll hear me be negative now is I don’t think we’re we very clearly think of how the convenience factors into our futures, for example, the rise of plastics and households, and I’m saying this, I’m actually as I’m actually looking at a plastic bottle, which I normally don’t drink water out of plastic bottles, but I happen to have one on my desk. So, you know, shame on me. This is not me shaming anyone else, but think about plastics, and how much they rose into everyday use in the past 50 or 60 years. Oh my gosh, I can’t even figure out 50 or 60 years. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Time Time wise, I still kind of feel like it’s like the 1919 99 right now or 2000. But nope, it’s 23 years after that. Anyway, back to the point. We do all of these things. We make life convenient, we develop plastics, and now we can see how well tied plastics can be to certain diseases and cancers. How plastics are even sanely harming the environment. I don’t want to go on a rant here in regard to plastic because again, you know, this is not my battle right now. My battle is that I feel like as a society, we’ve prized the convenience of our of our lives over things that are maybe more important There are things that we don’t understand how the immediate benefits may not be as important when we look at the long term effects. And that is exactly what I’m worried about with AI. Then Chachi GBT, Kim’s and me, the person who rolls her eyes at new AI tools. The person who was very underwhelmed was for the very first time, thrilled, nervous still, of course, but excited because suddenly, I had a smart AI tool that I could play with, like, it wasn’t a stupid AI tool, this was a tool that was intelligent enough to feel like, you were kind of working with someone, which as someone who works, solo, most of the time, was one of the biggest losses, I would say, coming from the traditional work environment. It’s lonely to be by yourself, I sometimes just wish I could brainstorm with someone for a minute or two here or there. And that would, you know, kind of reframe my thinking or get me to maybe go down a different path with Erin Ollila 16:03 how I was approaching something for work. And that’s what chat GPT did for me. I was I was thinking to myself, Hmm, what’s that word, and I’m trying to write a sentence for work, I could go into the tool, describe what I was trying to say. And it would actually tell me the damn word that I couldn’t think of in my mind. Or I could I loved how I could use it for analyzation. For example, if I put in a string of like, 250 keywords, and I wanted to look for a common grouping of those keywords, I could have the tool group it for me without me having to individually look through each and every single keyword and make my own grouping factors. That was thrilling. I could ask it questions to things that I didn’t know the answers to. So I guess what I’m trying to say is I went from being cautious, annoyed and underwhelmed by AI to being incredibly impressed and excited about using it yet, I would say instead of just being apprehensive, the anxiety about how AI will be used in the future data grow. And it grew because I think people How do I say this nicely, it grew because I’m worried in the hands that it falls, you know, even way back in the day before AI was, you know, so presently available to us. I remember learning about someone who I think had done a deep fake on Barack Obama, and made it look as if he said something that he didn’t, or another deep fake, I think was when they had they had dressed him in a certain way, or maybe put like a like a pin on him when he wasn’t actually in fact wearing that thing. And that worried me that made me think like a holy moly, like this is insane. And yes, there are so many tools that I like that allow, let’s say, for example, AI to be edited into a podcast if you need to replace a name, or ways that you could use, excuse me to change pictures, for example, because it’s not just AI with words that has really come out in the past six months. It’s also visually we can create these images of ourselves so we can adjust, we can create images that never existed by describing them to an AI tool. And I think it just worries me of when AI is in the hands of a quote unquote bad person. I say bad here as a joke, obviously, because of the quote in the beginning, but someone who hasn’t, let’s say nefarious thoughts. Oddly enough, nefarious was one of my like, definitions I had to learn in that advanced placement class. So it kind of just made me giggle that I thought of that word right now. But if someone had these like bad intentions, and they now have this tool, I worry about our future. And knowing what we should or should not trust, when it comes to, you know, visuals, audio, video, written content, I want to live in a world where I feel safe, that what I’m viewing is actually in fact real. And I am nervous about how that goes in the future, when it comes to the way that people access and use AI. But earlier, the hope I should probably kind of sum this up the point that I said is I thought it would be most fair to you to describe my personal beliefs of AI before I talk about whether or not it is good or bad. And now that I’ve done that, I feel like I should answer the question. Is AI good or bad? The answer friends is neither. It really truly goes right back to that Hamlet, quote. Nothing is good or bad. But thinking, your experiences, your prejudices, your privilege, your education, all of these influences, and the way that you feel about a thing like aI determines your opinions on them. So I say all this I know we’re like 20 minutes in deep right now. I say all this because I want you to remember that there is nothing inherently bad about AI. There’s nothing inherently good about AI. AI is simply a tool. The good part, the bad part, the pros, the cons, the merits, the pitfalls, that comes with how it is used, who’s using it, why they’re using it in the way that they’re using it. So if you’re on the fence about AI, if you’re anxious about the AI usage you’ve been doing, I challenge you to think about what are your opinions? What are the prejudices that you have about AI? And how did they come apart? Like upon you? How did you create these prejudices? When it comes to things like your excitement about it, your anxieties, like what makes it so exciting? The things that make it exciting, they’re probably shortcuts or conveniences? And again, no judgment here. I use AI for shortcuts probably every single day. And I’ve accustomed myself to that. But the things that excite you think to yourself, like is this a good way to use it? Am I using it ethically, am I using it legally. And I say all that because we have two very exciting episodes that are coming out after this episode about how to use AI for copy and content creation, as well as the legalities of AI. So make sure you come back for the next two weeks to check those out. But I say that though, because it really is on you. It’s on your own usage. It’s the boundaries you create. It’s the exciting, thrilling ways you find to use it, that really give you that good or bad sense. If you don’t feel comfortable using AI in your day to day life, you don’t have to. If you’re thrilled with AI and you find yourself using it for everything, think about the output and make sure that you’re using it in a good way and then celebrate that excitement, right. But remember, it is a tool, there is nothing inherently good about it. Nothing inherently bad about it. But to actually give you something from this episode, other than just my own opinions on AI, and its goodness and badness, I thought I’d do a quick pro and con to AI and AI, I really hope this is helpful for you as you determine how you use it. And in the ways that you’re going to incorporate it in your life personally and professionally. But seeing as I am not a professional when it comes to anything other than marketing at using AI, let’s let’s just kind of focus this conversation in, in around using AI in marketing. So we’ll do the pros first because why not? Some of the pros with using AI in marketing include having enhanced trade shows me targeting and personalization factors. Now this is a really exciting thing to do. We all know that personalization efforts in our marketing go a long way when it comes to conversion. And that’s because we as consumers really want to feel as if the businesses and brands that we like and buy from are talking to us, right? That they understand us that the offers that they have and the sales that they have Erin Ollila 23:24 were created for us or they have things that can help us. It’s not easy to be personalized. When you’re running a business. If you have, let’s say a list of 1000s of people, or an audience of 10s of 1000s of people, millions of people, whatever size your audience is, personalization doesn’t come easy in a large group. But having an AI tool that is able to do personalized marketing messages is glorious. Now at the most simple, simple, simple example, to think about when you send an email to your list. Depending on what tool you’re using, you could write something like hi, and then use code to insert their first name. That’s kind of an example of using a personalization from an extremely small scale. And because I’ve worked with really huge brands on customer experience, I can say there are some mind blowing, I couldn’t even wrap my brain around personalization techniques that big brands use it silly example, maybe you put something in your car and you don’t actually decide to purchase it. Well they send you coupon codes. This is obviously not the most complex example of using personalization. But that’s one quick example for you to consider. So all of that personalization and targeting then gives you the potential to improve your own customer experience and to get a higher conversion. It’s not simply about here’s an offer please convert. It’s the data and the analytics that you get from those personalization techniques and AI Is, is the absolute best option you have to do personalization and targeting. But it also when it comes to marketing gives you the improved productivity and improved efficiency and goodness gracious friends, I could use some more productivity and efficiency in my business, I’m gonna guess that you can to AI automates your time consuming tasks. So things like data analysis reporting, let’s think of more marketing things ad campaign optimization, and analyzation of the multiple different data points that you have after a launch, for example, AI can do that for you. It could be even like, again, a tiny option here is how Zapier or Zapier, or however you say it takes a task and connects to different tools to automate that for you. So for example, I think one of my setups is that if a contract signs within dubsado, their client folder is then created in my Google Drive, I don’t do that I don’t even think of it anymore, because it’s done for me. Small task, when it comes to things like productivity, bigger task is it could be having a system setup that alerts client, excuse me, let’s say, students, and of course, that they have a new module or dripping the module out over a set period of time to hundreds or 1000s of students. It’ll AI also really helps you produce another pro, I think we’re at three right now is with making decisions. Sounds silly, because it is a tool and it cannot make a decision for you. If it could, I would make I would have aI make all the decisions in my life, because I found that as an adult making decisions is laboris. And time consuming and a lot and overwhelming. I feel like I make a decision every four seconds. It would be wonderful if AI can make those for me, and they can’t. But they can give you information based on those analytics that I talked about before. So you feed AI data and it can provide insights, then you can take those insights and make the best decision for your own business brand or even personal life. But it can also talk about like predictive modeling. Well, I’m not going to talk about it, it can do predictive modeling, or trend analysis. And I think an example I gave earlier that might work here is using the bank or the credit card tools that talk about like what to predict in the future, how your spending might increase or what areas you’re spending in what you should do for budgeting, can you adjust your finances in any way to save for a certain amount, things like that. I’m not gonna go too much further now, or else this episode’s gonna be too loud, too long with pros and cons. Let’s do some cons. So one of the hugest cons in this is something I am extremely wary about. And we will talk about in the legalities episode that comes I think it’s either the last day of the month, or maybe the first day of August is ethical concerns like such as like intellectual property, privacy issues. This is all so new. And we are far too trusting as a society that we are giving AI so much information to train it. And we’re not necessarily considering where that information is coming from when we look at its output. And then another ethical concern is like I mentioned before, things like deep fakes, using someone’s image and likeness and the tone of their voice to create things that sound like them look like them but weren’t actually real. That’s, I think, what we should worry about. Another one is over reliance on AI for marketing. Again, I have a bone to pick with things being convenient. And yes, I love convenience myself. But I think that when we over rely on things in our own businesses, we don’t either learn the skill needed to do them ourselves. Let’s say for, for example, a very real one, when we come to AI, if tech fails, we need to know how to step in and do things ourselves and expecting automations to work without any error or expecting content to be created and used without any error in overreliance on, on on AI tools is something that I think is going to happen. We’re all going to be relying on things from happening. And we’re all going to have to know how to handle the repercussions quickly and easily. And I guess the final con could be things like the unknowns, the things that we assume as an average consumer, not an AI informed and educated and experienced tech person that we expect that is going to work one way or that we’re doing things for directly, only to find out that we’re actually not. So an easy example before is like intellectual property. Did you know that if you use a completely AI generated piece of content, let’s say they give you, you know, you ask for it to create a blog post for you, if you use that on your own blog, it was actually, it’s not yours, you don’t own it, it is not your intellectual property. Regardless of the information that you fed to the AI tool, the output is owned by AI, it’s owned by the tool that you’re using. So I think what will happen is people will accidentally use AI content and like 100% versus not editing it. And if they’re doing that, again, they don’t own the intellectual property. If they’re doing it in things like courses, they can’t claim that it is theirs that they created it, because they did not do it on their own. It’s kind of like the idea of like a byline. For example, if I’m writing and I have an editor that really heavily edits my writing, and we go back and forth. And they’re included so much in their own content is now included in the writing, we make both receive credits as the byline. So this article was written by Erin Ollila, and then the the editors name, because it’s not my article anymore. They’ve done it, like they’ve created part of it. So we both deserve the credit. The same here goes for AI. If AI writes it, you have to give AI the credit that it is there’s unless you step in like that editor, and then heavily edit it to have your own voice, your own stories, your own everything. So those are three pros and three cons. But again, I Erin Ollila 31:44 just want to recap, the key point here is that AI in itself is not good. It is not bad. It is a tool. And that’s it, the way that you use it is going to be up to you personally. And you’re going to have to check things like your experience, your education, your prejudices, your privileges, to know that you’re using it in a way that feels good, and you’re using it in a way that’s productive. And you’re using it in a way that does not cross any of your own personal ethical boundaries, and is not manipulating your audience, your customers, things like that. So there’s no real clear cut takeaway here. There are some pros and cons of using it, you have to determine yourself your comfort levels of using it. But I do really invite you to come back because I want you especially for the episode about the legalities, I want you to use it in a way that keeps you safe. And I don’t want you to put yourself in any risk or Jeopardy. And I don’t say this to scare you. Again, I mentioned my feelings on AI before. And I made it very clear that I at this point, I use AI on a daily basis in various ways. So I don’t think it’s bad. I think it’s actually great and an exciting thing. And I think that there’s a lot of misinformation about AI, which is why I wanted to make it very clear on this episode what my personal feelings were so that you understood that this was not my my experience and education in regard to research I’ve done on AI user my own personal thoughts and my personal beliefs, so that you can go out and make your own thoughts and beliefs on these things. But I want you to know the legalities. So you feel confident in how you’re using it and you don’t put yourself in any jeopardizing situations. And I want you to have the best tools that you can use so you can use AI in the easiest, most fun ways. I have one tool for you. You’ll hear her here next week in next week’s episode about using AI to create copy and content. But my next guest Stewart she has a tool called the marketing magic app. And it is genius. I was in the first group of people who bought it. And this episode is going to go out at the end of March I guess this one will be the middle of July. And her episode will go out at the end of July. But I want to make a key point before I end. Her tool until the end of this month is currently at a lifetime purchase meaning you buy it once and you have access to it for the lifetime of the tool. Once August rolls around though, it will be an annual license. So if you are at all interested in using the marketing magic app, I highly suggest you purchase it ASAP. As I mentioned I was in the first group of people who purchased it because I was flabbergasted utterly amazed on how incredible it is and how well it works. So if you’re considering buying an AI tool, I highly recommend that one I will leave the link to purchase it in the show notes. And again no pressure here in any way shape or form. But if If you’re interested in using it, I tend to love lifetime deals because it’s a once once a once in a lifetime purchase, right? I don’t love monthly payment plans. I hate those actually, it drives me crazy. But it’s a great deal. And if you decide that it’s not right for you right now, don’t stress at the price point that it is an annual like licensed to use the tool. It’s still such a steal. It is such a good price point. So you can get that at any point after August rolls around for the annual deal. And I think it’s a really great idea. But that’s it. I’m gonna end it here. Right we’ve, we’ve talked about my feelings. We’ve talked about my opinions, we’ve talked about the pros and the cons. Now it’s up to you. I hope you come back for the next week to continue the conversation that we’re going to have about AI. Have a great day. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Top copy to me. If you enjoyed spending your time with me today. I would be so honored if you could subscribe to the show and leave a review. Want to continue the conversation. Head on over to Instagram and follow me at Erin Ollila. Until next time friends.