Transcript
Welcome to the Flow State podcast. I am Flow State founder and managing director Stuart P Turner. In this five-episode mini-series we’re talking about the implications of AI, cutting through the hype to talk about real-world use cases, real examples, and what it means to people in their day-to-day jobs. So Brooke, thanks for joining, welcome to the podcast. And by way of an intro for people who may not be aware of your reputation already, so you’re the founder and director of The Contented Copywriter, branding Pro, published children’s author. Is there anything else that you think people need to know about you before we dive in? Oh, um, that sounds like a pretty great intro to me. Thanks for having me. That’s a pleasure. I’m actually super excited to talk to you actually, because obviously as a writer you’re directly in the firing line for, you know, kind of the the whole AI juggernaut if you believe the hype. So I thought it’d be good to kick off with obviously the question that everybody is asking: Is this the robot Revolution happening? Do we all need to quit our jobs and retrain as like a carpenter for example or something that cannot be reproduced at the moment? Like what are your what are your thoughts based on what you’re hearing so far? Oh gosh, um, there’s everyone’s gone crazy, the whole world’s gone mad. And, you know, look, I think so the first big thing to say is is that is is that it is still early days. I mean, yes, you know, everything kind of kicked off towards the end of last year with, you know, Chat GPT 2, 3, and then 4. And then yes, everyone’s kind of gone into this into this frenzy which is still swirling around. And, you know, so the short answer is no, I don’t think we’re all going to be out of out of our job. I still think there is a place for really well thought out, really well crafted content and words. But, you know, it really is going to change things and has already started to change things. And I think it’s about, you know, and I think we’re all still learning. So I I’m a firm believer that anyone who says that they’re an expert unless they’re actually employed by Chat GPT, you know, or any of its associates, yeah, you’re not an expert yet. So, you know, it’s still early days and we’re still all figuring it out.
Well, I think a very reassuring first of all to hear that you’re, you know, you’re not worried, which is great. And I I would tend to agree, like despite what you might read on LinkedIn in particular about people becoming experts in AI that they probably don’t really understand. Talk to me about how are you using it in your, you know, in your business or your team at the moment? Do you have any kind of quality concerns? I’m keen to get your way more expert than my opinion on this given that you’re, you know, wordsmithing every day. Like how are you feeling about it and have you found it to be useful at all so far? Yeah, so I think there are things which that there are ways in which it’s really useful and there are ways in which it needs to be really carefully and closely managed. So the short answer is yes, we are using it in very specific ways. And we’re probably a little bit different to a lot of agencies out there in that we only employ senior writers essentially. So our team is full of, you know, super experienced writers. For whom at this stage, the AI isn’t really creating massive shortcuts for. Because we, yeah, okay, we we can do a better job more quickly than it would take to actually put all the prompts in and get what you need to out of it. In saying that though, it’s it’s like anything, it’s another so yeah, so our experience has probably fairly unique. In saying that though, it is a tool which we absolutely will and have and have to add into our repertoire. So it’s like anything, whenever there is a new piece of machinery or a new, you know, new piece of technology for any Craftsman, you kind of have to look at it and you go, okay, how am I going to, you know, how am I going to understand it, how am I going to learn it, and how am I going to integrate it?
So there’s things that AI does really really well. And some of those things include, you know, content ideation. So it can be really good just to get some ideas going. It can be fun for headline inspiration. I mean, some of them you weigh off, but often if we’re stuck, put in some. We always give alternatives when we when we’re sharing content with client, we’ll always give alternative headlines and so sometimes, you know, we need a few. So we’ll we’ll ask it and some of the ideas are really great. And it’s really good for curing “blank pagitis”. You know, we all know what it’s like when we have to write something and we’re staring at a blank screen and the words just won’t come. So, you know, it’s really good for actually starting out a pretty decent first draft. Which can then be really thoroughly edited and reshaped and remolded and checked into something that is, you know, polished and shine and, you know, shines in this decent content. So those are the sorts of things that we’re using for it. Now it’s also good for, for research as well. For getting some, you know, some some for scouring the internet essentially for you and and pulling together some some research which you think can then turn into insights.
I think the things that we have to be really really careful about are things like, you know, accuracy of information. So there’s a lot of a lot of instances where discovering things which aren’t accurate, things which aren’t properly influenced as well. So we need to do okay checking because it’s like everything on the internet. Like, believe it or not, shock horror, what everything what we have on the internet isn’t all true. Don’t tell the that you’re about to say that everything on the internet is not 100% true with accurate but it seems like a wild claim. I know, I know, it’s remarkable. But, you know, but I don’t necessarily have the ability to distinguish. And the other and and so there’s yes, so there’s accuracy, there’s referencing, and there’s also, you know, getting the right tone. Now there are lots of prompts that you can do and you can kind of train it to get to to kind of get there. But it takes a lot of work and there’s still something lacking in the spontaneity and the nuance. That still needs work so that it doesn’t sound like a robot. So, you know, certainly it can get to a certain standard, but it still needs that work to, you know, to get it to where to a really quality piece of work. So yeah, that’s the kind of ways in which we are and aren’t using it.
Yeah, okay. I think it’s interesting to hear you talk through that actually because it’s it’s come up quite a bit in the the other conversations that we’ve had both on this show and also, you know, in kind of in in life outside of this that the the points you just made to kind of playing those backlight. Yeah, the quality is not really there. I think largely due to the body of information that it has access to to base this stuff off and the yeah, that kind of generic, you know, feel is definitely there in my experience as well. You can ask it as much as you’d like, but you’re always going to get a pretty stock-ish response with a few different, you know, kind of, I suppose, bells and whistles specific to whatever you’ve prompted. So I think, um, yeah, it’s interesting just to hear that you’ve you’ve having the same experience because I would tend to agree. I think it can help with efficiency in the mental block, but I don’t really feel like you get like a, you know, you’re not getting a sort of Ferrari out of it, are you? You’re getting like a Toyota Corolla, basically, is this I suppose the car analogy throw in there. Yeah, and and not at 1990 Mitsubishi Mirage, which was, you know, yeah, exactly, yeah. You know, it’s fine for a certain use case, but it’s you’re not going to drive it around to a prospect like. Basically the short version, that’s a really good way to put it. It will give you something A to B, but you’re not going to want to be telling your friends about it. You’re not going to be wanting to go up and impress people with it. And I think that’s a really great distinction.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I’m incredibly biases. I mean, the the same space as you in there. I would hope that we’re up in that, you know, upper echelon of doing work that’s above the the baseline. But I think that’s a really important thing to call out because there’s obviously a lot of discussion about, you know, who or what could be replaced by these tools. And it sounds like you agree that that is very much kind of jumping the gun at this stage. Would you say that’s accurate? I don’t think we’re ready just to be like fire those 10 people over there because this chat bot, you know, can do all their jobs. Like I don’t see that being a reality anytime soon personally. Yeah, and look, it’s not. I think that there I think that it’s not without risk, right? Because, um, and you know, you and I have kind of chatted about this before and that what sort of one of the things we have to be really mindful of is the future generation of writers. Yeah, because in your learning, you’re making mistakes and you’re not sometimes getting the right the facts right and you know, you the the quality, you know, isn’t quite there and you don’t quite understand the nuance of brand voice. And that’s what happens when you’re learning and you’re a junior to mid-way writer and you’re learning the ropes. And the reality is is that that’s about that that’s kind of how well the the Bots can write at the moment is is that kind of junior to mid-weight level. So there is a there there is something to be said for that. I think we need to be really mindful of how we train and, you know, and and nourish the next generation of writers because they’ll be coming up against that and may not necessarily have the ability to practice and learn. And they’re going to have to get really good really quick. So I think we need to really think about that. But yeah, in terms of just say saying a blanket, okay, this whole industry is going to be, you know, out of a job within the next couple of years. Look, I think, um, I think we we still need to be on to it. But I I think that you ultimately can’t replace, you know, human connection. And I think that’s what’s going to be of greater value is the humanness in it all.
Because, you know, things like so explainer content for example, so if we think about the different types of content that’s out there, you know, explainer content is really helpful content that, you know, most brands, well, all brands should have some form of it whether we’re there explaining, you know, things and concepts which make it easier for Their audience to understand. Now, Chat GPT can do that pretty well. Like you can ask it explain, you know, quantum physics in crazy dot points and it’ll do it and you’re like cool, okay. But what so, you know, perhaps the value of that sort of content will be less. But I think the value will get even higher on real human stories, you know, real perspectives by real people. There’s an opportunity for for more of those stories and more perspectives and more lived experience. And that’s something that, you know, can’t be automated. That has to be something that’s lived and then shared and teased out by the right writer in the right way.
Yeah, that I I think is another super interesting area that hasn’t I haven’t seen much discussion of this in the, you know, the sort of, you know, the the main, I suppose, the mainstream sort of coverage of this stuff, which is exactly what you just described. Like the The Human Experience side of things is very skewed, like as I’m sure you would agree based on the current data set that like the language models have been have been trained on. And I was listening to I’ve been I’ve been like shamelessly promoing Hard Fork, this podcast I listen to. It’s not the only one I listen to, it’s just really good. But they had one of their one of the colleagues of one of the hosts who works at the the paper that they they write for basically doing like a food segment. Where they were like, okay, well we’re going to I’ll share all the details by the way, but below the below the episode. But they were like, okay, we’re going to ask AI, I think that we’re using Chat GPT to put a menu together and then they’ll just cook that whole menu for I think they did it for Thanksgiving. And it came out with all these like super random kind of combinations and stuff that I think the gist was it turned out quite well. The lady who’s hosting it was basically like, oh, but when we asked it for things like, you know, how would you how would you put together like a, you know, a Malaysian dish, you’re like an Indian dish or something like Chat’s idea of like, you know, Malaysian food was pretty limited and like flat. And they were like, oh, you know, like for Indian food, it’s like just chucking some garam masala and make some rice and that’s like Indian food. It just really it really highlighted in a really nice way both of those points you made. Which is like, you know, it doesn’t really understand the one the depth of the culture even from a food perspective. And you’d assume there’s a fair amount of Indian recipes floating around online. And yeah, the second part was like, but it doesn’t it doesn’t give you any human parts. Like it doesn’t tell you what to taste for or smell for or, you know, how to prepare a recipe properly. So I found that quite interesting because a lot of people obviously have been using it for this kind of practical stuff like how do I cook blah blah or what’s my weekly shop look like. But, you know, as you said, it just can’t it doesn’t replace, you know, having like your mom tell you a recipe, for example, and just walk you through it. It’s yeah, it was interesting to listen to.
Yeah, I look, I think I think there’s a couple of things in there. I mean, certainly from a cultural perspective, it really is and I guess that’s a slightly concerning thing about it. And you hope that it does change that it’s a very limited view of the world currently. You know, so it’s understand cultural nuance. I mean, you know, you ask it to, you know, and I’ve tried, you ask it to, you know, put some Australian colloquialisms through any content and it’s awesome. How did that go? Quite the worst episode of The Simpsons, you know, coming from it’s so bad. Brilliant. And, you know, so you know, so there’s so there’s that, which it might eventually learn and you hope that it gets a bit better at. But there’s also, you know, how do you how could it really ever understand what it’s like to stand in the Australian Outback and feel that experience of, you know, the the hot dust and the the scorching heat and, yeah, the the the ground that hasn’t experienced rain in five years? You know, like those are the things that you can really only get by talking to people and by a really clever wordsmith crafting those words in a way that just draws you in and just puts you there and in that point, you know what I mean? So and and you know, to your cooking example, it can’t pass on that recipe and say, I learned this when my Nonna was in the kitchen with me. That story and that tenderness that comes through, you know, again, those that’s how we connect and and those are the things that will become of greater value, those stories.
Yeah, totally. I think, um, I think I’ve got another funny example, well, it was part part funny part tragic example for you actually. But, um, I am again coming back to your, you know, your own experiences as an author and a copywriter. I I completely agree with you and I think, um, I’m a big fan of, probably told you this already, like a big Cormac McCarthy fan. Who, you know, comes from a long tradition of very wordy kind of, you know, romantically kind of inclined writers. And, you know, you would never whether you like him or not, like the way he puts a book together and even just one sentence about, you know, to your point about the Australian Outback. He does kind of a similar thing with the the American sort of South, Southwestern Mexican border. And it’s like, you know, I would never in a million years expect something like a Chat GPT type models be able to construct a description of the world like that because it just physically will never have that experience. And it, you know, it might randomly get there one day, but it’s not going to be through design, it’ll be through, you know, sort of random, you know, happens dance just because it happens to hit on the right combination of things, I guess. I agree with you. I don’t think you can ever building the human connection. I think that’s kind of a bridge too far based on what I’ve seen currently.
Yes, yeah. And I think you’re right. I think and and that’s the thing it can it it can strike on these things. And as we say, it can be happenstance and and sometimes what it comes up with is is is brilliant and you’re like, far out, that’s amazing. But then it takes a human to be able to discern what is good and what is not. And I think that our role will come in as well, you know, as curators, as as discerners to go, this is really interesting and this bit isn’t really, you know, uninteresting and and yeah, be able to tell the difference. And look, I think, a big theme of this series has been obviously trying to cut through all the hype and, you know, noise around it and just kind of get down to what’s actually happening. And I think this is where there’s a big, sort of general public consciousness misunderstanding about what how models like Chat actually work. Like these predicted models where they are in fact only predicting like the next most likely thing to happen, you know, based on whatever you tell it and the information it has. So, you know, from that point of view, it’s not that surprising that they’re not very sophisticated or not, they’re not very sophisticated, but the the output is not as human perhaps as as you might expect. Because all it’s doing is saying, well, you know, exactly as you just said, Brooke’s saying she needs five different headlines. She’s given me three or four. She said that it should sound like this, this and this. So, you know, the predictive part’s amazing, obviously, because it’s like, well, the next most likely thing should be this or this based on that information. But it’s not exactly like real artificial intelligence at this point in the narrowest sense of the definition, right? Where it is not intelligent, it’s just, you know, performing a lot of complex predictions at the same time.
And that like I guess this is where I think the discussions are a bit maybe at odds in sort of the mainstream side of things versus what’s actually happening from a technical point of view. Because I know a lot of people are worried that we might get to, you know, we’ve we’ve unleashed a consciousness like Skynet style on on everybody. But the the current tools that are available just seem very far away from that to me. Like, do you think that that’s the case as well or are you are you concerned that we might be, you know, dancing along the raises Edge at the moment? Look, I think we’d we’d all be inhuman if we didn’t feel worried at some point. Because we’ve all watched enough dystopian movies and I mean, that’s like my original genre by the way. Really truly, everyone’s at least in The Matrix at this point, right? And when these things happen, there’s there is this sense of like, you know, okay, things are changing fast and and should we feel concerned? My honest belief is is that it’s we look at the here and now and we go, okay, right now they are no way near as sophisticated in terms of their output. I’m not saying it’s not sophisticated technology. I mean, it’s quite mind-blowing. But in terms of the language, and the sophistication of that of what comes out of it, it’s still not not going to be, you know, taking everyone’s jobs just yet. Do we have to be mindful or do we need to find ways to work with it? Absolutely.
And I think that’s also based on demand. I am seeing clients, you know, it’s coming into briefs now. Content strategy, “consider how we may use AI in the implementation of our plans”. So that’s interesting. So we have to demonstrate how we might do that. And you know, there are ways that where we are strategically integrating it into some of the work that we do. So I think there’s a role for it. But yeah, I think the fear-mongering isn’t helpful. And I think that there is a more pragmatic way to move forward through it.
Yeah, look, I I agree with you. I think there’s a lot of, yeah, flapping of hands stroke clutching of strings of pearls if you want to use a classic examples at the moment that isn’t very useful. So coming back to that human connection and exactly what you just talked about, obviously you’ve written one judges two two books so far, one published and then yes, hopefully published soon. Everyone thinks it’s really easy to write a kids book, but it is in fact probably one of the harder stories to actually write because they’re, you know, deceptively simple. Do you ever think like someone’s going to be sitting down, you know, he’d be little kids sat on there, you know, grandma or granddad’s knee reading an AI written children’s book? Probably there absolutely will be books that have been produced by AI, I have no doubt. And look, they will probably be explainer or, you know, there’s a lot of books out there at the moment that are written to help constructively guide children into, you know, behaving in a certain way or understanding something differently or what have you. That was kind of the original if you think back to the original fairy tales, that was the role of them, that was two guys children or scare them in many cases, behaving in a certain ways. Don’t roll off into the woods, you know, alone, a classic example.
So, you know, like just kind of taking that, inspiration and running with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some there there is AI generated explainer books that guy, you know, that talk them through difficult concepts. And that’s interesting, you know, try to guide in terms of certain, you know, certain whatevers, behaviors or whatever. And I think that funnily enough, the that kind of literature is only increasing in children’s books. There’s a great demand for and they’re really helpful books, don’t get me wrong, ones that explain, challenging concepts or big ideas to to kids. What I try to do with my books is to have them very centered around the children’s experience. So lots of fun and lots of silliness and lots of little micro moments. My book for example is about the the fun and the silliness that the two siblings can get up to. It’s more about what the joy and and fun and silliness that that they’ll their little new little buddy’s gonna bring and what they’ll get up to, right? So it’s sent around little moments around the house. And that’s not anything that an AI could write because they’re not in their, you know, watching. When, you know, one of the lines in the books is “Rumble tumble bang and crash bandage knees and hugs on lab on laps”. The the AI doesn’t know that kids get into squabbles and then there’s a bang and then there’s a whale and then the Band-Aid thing. They don’t know what it’s like to do snow angels with their, you know, brother or sister and stare up into the night sky. So yeah, there’s they’ll they’ll, I have no doubt there’ll be some that will be written by AI in the future. I think our homes and understand the tenderness of those little moments.
I think that’s a really eloquent way of putting it, Brooke, to be honest, though. Because you, you know, you’re bringing out the secret romance give me describing things like this. But I think it is exactly that. It’s like, you know, some people are perfectly happy with the dry cracker sort of version of life, right? But, um, you know, people hearing you talk through that and especially everyone who’s a mother or a parent would be like, yes, that immediately resonates with me. I agree with you. I think it’s very hard to authentically replicate that without having done it, right? Like you can tell that a person’s been involved.
I was reading a couple of, maybe two opposing examples here. A couple of articles about this. One which was about testing AI in advertising and apparently like a, you know, AI beat like, a group of advertising professionals. So you couldn’t tell the difference between AI generated ads and human written ones in some recent, you know, kind of just amusing awards thing to summarize this. But reading through that, I was like, I’m genuinely not that surprised because the advertising side of the internet has become so, you know, sort of myopic and functional that is there’s barely any room for being creative in like a, you know, 100 characters sort of headline or whatever. But then at the opposite end of the spectrum, I was reading another article this week about how all these, you know, kind of companies are now sort of starting to emerge into the mainstream that produce, you know, like AI companions for people, the majority our girlfriends for, you know, lonely men, which is partly funny, partly tragic. But a lot of the commentary about this was exactly what you were describing, which is while you can replicate on paper, you know, the sort of aspects of companionship, like you can talk to somebody and they’ll talk back to you and you can, you know, have a sort of companion. It wasn’t filling the emotional need for like actual human contacts. It just struck me as kind of a bit a bit weird, a bit funny, a bit sad that that was where people are going straight away. It’s like, well, you know, we can exploit all these poor like lonely saps who are hanging around who don’t have anyone and just sell them like a girlfriend. That seems like a great use of of the technology.
I think it I think that’s the thing. I think it went what what what do you want out of it? If the companion that you’re looking for is somebody who will tell you what you want to hear and, you know, and and fit to a very specific mold and to give you, you know, some well thought out but possibly not original responses. I brought this big marker for that. I really don’t make sure there is it. Like, there’s a lot of people probably sitting around going that sounds amazing. Some compliments for you, you know, every every morning as you leave the house, you did. I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful to go through life being told what we want to hear? But would you grow and evolve as a person? High profile examples of of how that definitely wouldn’t happen. Think when we all can, you know, imagine imagine that. But so, you know, I think that’s and I think that can apply to lots of other AI. It depends what you what you want from it. And that’s why like I say, it does a good job of some. It does a really good job of some types of content that are, you know, explainers and breaking things down and well-structured things and, you know, all of that sort of stuff. It does it well. But if if that’s all you want out of content, then that’s fine. But if you want things will tug on the heartstrings, make people, you know, feel something different, consider another point of view, learn something, feel inspired, feel goosebumps, then that’s where, you know, it kind of is invariably going to hit the mark.
It takes me back to the the early days of, you know, like before the internet, which I I was not born before, by the way, but, you know, in the early days of the internet, I should say, neither of us are that old. Before advertising models took over in the whole sort of commercial side of it became a big thing, the, you know, the kind of principles of like real marketing and like people just doing fun stuff because because you could. Like you remember when, you know, Facebook launched, when YouTube launched and stuff, they were all like new and people just did things because they were fun. And then like the advertising models and the algorithms kind of descended on everything and created the the kind of echo chamber situation that we’re in now where things are, I would say, broadly very much less fun and very much more commercially driven. I kind of feel like that’s, you know, that’s something that we that we lost online. But, you know, from your past experience as a as a brand person and current experiences as a writer, I think we’ve swung back the other way now where a lot of the conversations I’m having as you were just saying about your briefs as well, people are sort of coming back to like, oh, well, how do we stand out from all the generic online stuff? Like, how do we actually like represent our brand properly? I know the internet was a largely a force for sort of, not destroying, but it definitely sort of ate away a lot of that classic, what you might call traditional marketing thinking, right?
So like, are you seeing the same thing in the kind of briefs that you’re getting and back to what you were saying about how you guys work, Brooke, you know, you’ve got a very senior team of people who who get all this stuff? Like that to me is becoming a ironically a bit of a USP now. The fact that like, you know, I’m similar to you. I’m like, I get brand, I get marketing, but I also know how to do like internet stuff. So, you know, marrying them together, but leaning more into the brand side is now what makes a lot of our stuff work. Yeah, yeah, no, I think you’re right. Like distinctiveness or differentiation are definitely things that I think people I think brands are really going to be focusing more on. Because the demand for a velocity of content, you know, is it is very much at the forefront of everyone’s mind. We’ve got to be putting so much out so that we remain competitive and we remain top of mind. But with volume can come dilution. So how do you remain distinctive and versus your competitors when you’re operating on that massive scale? So I think yes, circling back to brand and having a really clear brand positioning, brand assets, brand voice, those thing brands and brand stories specific, running through that. Those are the things that become really important and more increasingly kind of as you say that that circle will come back again.
Yeah, it’s interesting here because I think, are you seeing I suppose similar things in the having worked online for a long time now, there still seems to be a bit of a feeling that like everybody still needs to be everywhere, like in every channel and doing everything. Obviously, I’m broad brushing it a bit here, but like obviously with marketing budgets are still being cut a fair bit, like especially down here. I think they’ve gone down like two or three percent over the last three or four years. And exactly to your point, I think, I’m seeing a lot of people who are stressing about being stretched too thin or like, still trying to do you too much. Whereas for the passcode is seven or eight years. I’ve been in obviously been startups where the Situation’s a little bit different, but the the end goal is the same. And we’ve like built those up in only two or three channels and just stayed really focused. And it just strikes me as surprising that I don’t see that same line of thinking in much bigger businesses.
Yeah, I agree. I think I’m a big fan of the 80 20 rule. And putting your efforts behind what works 80% of the time. I I do see a lot of companies investing very broadly, smattering across a lot of different channels. When really it’s a case of looking at what’s really really performing and just going, you know, putting all the effort behind that. I mean, you know, email marketing is one of those things as well, which so often falls to the bottom of the pile. And people are still so hesitant to, you know, invest. But you can so often it’s got the biggest ROI. And it’s so unglamorous. It’s not Threads and it’s not Instagram and it’s not, you know, all of the all of the shiny new things. Like actually performs really well. So it’s like you just do a good job of that and you can cut out half the, you know, with some with that links out to some really good website content. Keeping it really simple, I’m a big advocate for that.
Yeah, I I’ve been fully behind that line of thinking as well. As a reader of your own, you know, newsletter, book, like I think it’s the as you were saying, it’s a way to get your my pleasure, I enjoy them. The reason I like them though is because they share, you know, that you obviously write them and it’s a great way to share like your actual personality as well as what’s happening in your, you know, your world. So I just, you know, like I like that most of the ones I get are like, you know, SAS email sequence number three where I might have like once had a demo three years ago. And it’s just, you know, boilerplate like, did you see we’re doing a thing now? It seems like a very underutilized channel to me. But I think like you say, it’s just not very exciting unfortunately. But then weirdly, as I’m sure you’re well aware, you know, a lot of the challenges that marketers have is that they’re not taking that seriously necessarily and they don’t, they’re not often viewed as commercially Savvy people. But it’s exactly because of that line of thinking, right? Where like, they’ll probably go to a board meeting, you can be rambling on about Threads and why we should be on there instead of being like, well, we could just email our customer database and probably like, reactivate 20% of them or whatever.
Honestly, you could probably do. You’ll probably post for you a year on Threads before you ever see, you know, I mean, as exciting as it is, before or you could send one EDM and you’ll probably see an instant ROI on it. It’s just I just think it’s worth thinking about like doing that due diligence of, of an audit of all your channels and what’s performing, and what delivers the best ROI and and making decisions based around that.
It pays to also focus on those areas where you can get your message across in a more engaged and detailed manner, right? I mean, like email is the original and before that Direct Mail, right? Was the the place to be like, here’s who we are, here’s what we do. You’ve got someone’s attention is captured. You’re in their inbox or their physical hand with a letter or whatever. So like it just it surely makes sense, right? It’s not like as you said on Threads, someone’s going to read like what, 2, 300 words of some garbage that you’ve just pushed out and then it will be gone immediately. The level of attention engagement is is nowhere near the same for the volume of work required. I think with with email, it’s such a privilege that somebody has given you their email address because they have invited you into their personal world. And, you know, when they open it as well, that is an indication that they are genuinely interested in what you have to say. And so you have to take that privilege very seriously. And I think that it can become really, really powerful if you, yeah, if you understand that privilege and and you use it in the right way.
Bringing it back around to our friends, the the language models and, you know, the potential sort of next stages for, for how I think AI models broadly can help you. We’re seeing a lot of that now and we do a lot of this with our own kind of, audience and customer data. Like that kind of relationship analysis is where I’m seeing a big opportunity to actually leverage things like the language models. To say look, if you’ve been email communicating with people for a year and you’ve got a ton of, you know, responses and metrics and blah, blah, blah. Like exactly as you were saying earlier that kind of analysis to say, look, who are, you know, who are our most engaged customers? Who responded back to us? Like, what did they, what did they respond to? Like, that sort of thing I feel like is where the again, they’re not very sexy, but more pragmatic and useful, functional areas are that these models can fill.
I’m excited to see it grow in relevance. I think there’s a whole chunk of information and perspective that is currently missing on it. So I think the greatest opportunity for us to learn is when it actually fully wields that, you know, international, gender diverse, all the different perspectives that the world can hold that if we can actually tap into all of that, that could be pretty wonderful. At the moment, it’s a very I almost have this mental picture in my mind of who the robot is and looks like limited view. I actually really am loving the fact that the clients are saying, how can we use AI? Because it pushes us to really look at different ways that we can integrate it and and ultimately, and create a greater velocity of content but at a higher quality. And so that’s the that’s the bit that, you know, is our job as writers and as an agency is to go, okay, how do we make sure that we’re ramping up the velocity but that we’re that it’s that it’s quality and it’s and it’s, you know, not just more words into the wind?
I think as long as people are still pushing in that direction hopefully we’ll be we’ll be safe. What you what your kind of big big predictions in this space for for you or or more broadly, you know, in the in the industry, what do you think is going to happen for the rest of this year? Do you think that the models are going to get better or worse? Are we going to see any, you know, horrific missteps?
I do think it’s going to get better. And I do think that there’s the inevitable, you know, there’s good there’s going to be some big oopses that happen. And I think that that’s going to make for massively entertaining, you know, viewing. I think that there will be a higher value placed on thought leadership, on humanness, on people. I think that the value of influences will change. And there will hopefully be a demand for more I guess knowledge-based influences, who can share their own personal insights and experiences. And kind of elevating not just leaders, but also the the the other people in businesses and and brands that have interesting perspective and things to to share. So, yeah, I think that that that’s kind of what I’m what I my predictions is is that, yeah, the value of of thought leadership, unique voices, and human perspective will become higher. Because inevitably brands are going to need to stand out in some way, and that’s their best way to do it.
I look, I think that there will be inevitable missteps. Obviously, there’s there’s some significant interested parties that are all trying to, you know, group together to kind of resolve some of the the major issues, the copyright issues, the inaccuracies, the potential, you know, problems. And I think that that’s really difficult to navigate because those interested parties are have huge financial vested interests in it. So it kind of doesn’t it can’t it just can’t I don’t think it can be well navigated when they have that level of financial investment in the outcome, right? How that gets managed, I think is so important. That just seems a bit of a shit show at the moment to be fair. I think the, you know, the altruistic and the commercial aims are fairly far apart, right? So who steps in? Whose role is it? How do you how do you monitor that? How do you do that globally? They still haven’t worked out how to fix the internet issues globally. So how do you actually fix the AI issues is the big question. And so I have no doubt that there’s going to be a lot of missteps and potentially some, yeah, some interesting scenarios that fall out of that.
I think the key thing that I took away from that discussion was that the human connection and human spirit, I guess, won’t be replaced anytime soon. But we can hopefully reflect it more effectively with our AI friends as they continue to evolve.