Why Trust Matters More Than Detection in the Age of AI with Jeremy Carrasco

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Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team, and this week, Björk is interviewing Jeremy Carrasco, the creator behind Jeremy Finds AI and founder of Riddance. Jeremy's background in live streaming, encoding, and video production gave him an early edge in identifying synthetic content. But as AI videos get more realistic, he explains why that edge is disappearing fast and why the old advice to simply train your eye isn't enough anymore. In this episode, Jeremy makes the case that the real question is Can you spot AI? But do you trust the source? He and Björk get into the difference between acceptable and deceptive AI use, why disclosing your AI workflow might actually build more trust with your audience, and what human-forward creation looks like in an increasingly synthetic feed. Jeremy also shares candidly how he uses AI in his own work and why he refuses to let it touch his creative edge. If you create content in any capacity, this conversation gives you a clear-eyed look at where trust is headed next and what it'll take to hold on to yours. Speaking of AI and how you use it in your own work, before we jump in, I want to make sure you know about a new free email series from York called From Busy Work to Breathing Room. Running a creator business means juggling content, email, SEO, research, admin, and a dozen little tasks that pull you away from the work only you can do. Over 7 weeks, York will share one practical AI workflow each week to help lighten that behind-the-scenes load so you can reclaim your time, protect your creative energy, and build with more freedom. It kicks off Monday, August 31st. So be sure to head to the show notes to sign up before it starts. And now without further ado, I'll let Björk take it away.

Jamie, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. We're going to be talking about something that everybody— I'm going to, I almost never say this. I would almost say, almost always say almost everybody, but I'm going to go ahead and say everybody listening to this podcast is aware of, potentially concerned about, uh, probably using. We're going to be talking about AI. Uh, and you have gone deep in the world of AI, deep in the world of AI content creation. You understand it from all sorts of angles, but before we get into the weeds on some of the specifics of that world, I want to hear how you got into this world. Uh, it's a relatively new world to be in, but what did it look like for you to start creating content around people who create AI content?

Well, I mean, it's only been about a year and a half, not even a year and a half since I thought I might want to do this. It's been a little bit over a year now where I've been doing this more or less full-time. And I got into it for the same reasons that people are curious about it. I was just curious. I knew something big was happening in the AI media space, but the timing worked out really well for me. I'll admit that luck definitely plays into it. I started creating content on AI One, I think I launched my channels the day that Google VO3 got released. And Google VO3 was the first big— it was the first model that did voice with moving videos. And it was very realistic for like an entirely synthesized video. There were deepfakes before that, but wasn't really that popular. So I started creating right when an extremely pivotal AI model came out. And Before that, I was just really—

What did that look like? So this is, I'm all, I wanna talk about, uh, about a little bit as you as a creator, 'cause I'm really curious. You're, you're, you are fascinated by it. My guess is you're just like naturally curious about it. And an outflow of that is like, you wanna create content to document it.

Yeah.

Was it just this decision of like, ah, I feel like I wanna talk to people about this. I'm gonna launch all these channels and now I'm gonna start creating video. Like what were you doing before?

I was a live streaming and video producer before, so I was working for a production company that was for hire. Before that, I had done my own YouTube videos. I was doing YouTube videos for the company I worked at.

Sure.

But I would do these big shows for clients. So, I mean, I was in social media and in the creation space in like a for hire capacity for most of my career up until that point.

Got it. So you didn't have to learn best practices for the platforms. You were off and running. Yeah.

No, I mean, and even more so, I was a live streaming and coding engineer, which is a super niche thing where I would be quality control for live streams, um, which you get really hands-on with all these different things that can go wrong with videos. Like, I understood everything from the cameras and making those look good to the audio, making sure that sounded good, all the way down to like live video encoding, kind of like what Premiere Pro does, but in real time, to the point where I pretty much knew everything that could go wrong with the video enough that if a client would ask me, hey, what am I seeing here? What am I seeing here? I would have to have an on-the-spot, like detailed answer about exactly what they were seeing. That translated into being able to see AI videos really well because they looked so different to me than any other videos as they do for a lot of people. But I had also, I had quit my job. I was looking for something new to do and I quit my job in April. I took a month off or so, and I had been thinking about doing something with AI detection for about a year before then, but I thought I was going to go right back into live streaming or whatever. I launched my page. I used to also be a piano teacher on the side. Like, I have a passion for teaching and media literacy. And so it was just kind of, you know, the perfect match of the timing and my interests and the fact that there weren't a lot of people talking about AI from a creator space who weren't also selling AI. So like, I've never taken a sponsorship from an AI company or really any sponsorships for that matter. So that's how it happened.

How do you make money as a creator?

Um, so I don't make much money as a creator is the short term. I make more money in my other job, which is I run a company called Riddance, which is a media detection or AI media and media intelligence company. It depends who I'm explaining it to, but what we really do is we're tracking AI content and how it moves across Social media, so it is my job and my like it is partially my job in the way that it all kind of melds together into one thing, which is it's beneficial for you to be known as a expert in the world of AI because of the brand. I didn't start my business Riddance until after I was already a creator and looking for ways to make money that wasn't doing sponsorships because really the this the sponsorship. gigs for me would be taking money from AI companies, which I'm not comfortable doing.

Yeah. And then reporting on them as—

Yeah. Yeah.

Which a lot of people do, but I don't think that they can do it well. So.

Sure. Yeah, for sure. Um, so tell me a little bit about early stages, kind of what were you, what were you doing? Does it look pretty similar? You haven't, I mean, it's been a year, year and a half.

Yeah.

What is for you as a creator? What does that, what does day to day look like for you? Are you consuming a lot of content? Are you trying to decipher, hey, is this AI created? Is it not? What does that look like for you day to day to be creating content around AI content?

Yeah, well, the short answer is that it's changed in that when I was creating last year, I was pretty much nonstop looking at things on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, seeing them and creating videos about them and doing reactions all the time. And my reactions weren't like, hey, look at this, but it was dissecting videos, you know, pixel by pixel sometimes to try to figure out what was going on. Um, that was really fine, I think, when it was all new and relatively easy to spot. But as AI videos have improved, it's gotten a lot harder. And I have a much, much bigger audience now. So it feels pretty irresponsible to tell people that they're just going to be able to spot their way out of this whole mess. I just, I don't think that's a responsible message.

Um, it was never really my message. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why, why you feel like that?

Back when it was relatively easy to spot, I thought that it was just a really good way to introduce people to media literacy as one of the skills that you need to be able to figure out what's real or not. And those skills haven't changed. Figuring out if you trust a source is everything, and it will be everything for a long time.

Yeah.

And a lot of the tools that I'm most excited about to help us figure out what's real or not talk more about provenance and where did this come from more than is this AI or is this not? That was always my mindset, but there was such this, there was just such an urge to figure out what was happening with people's eyes. And I still think that's totally possible, but I think that once you reach a certain point with your audience, you just have to start tackling the bigger picture problems more, which is what I'm a little bit more interested in now, which is how AI content is spreading, what effects it's having on people.

Mm-hmm.

That's, it's an evolution of my personal interests as well as the environment where I do think that a year ago, maybe 20 to 25% of people weren't able to tell the difference between an AI video and real. I think now it is a coin flip at best, which effectively means people can't tell.

Sure.

I mean, there are people who can still tell for some AI videos, but There are a lot of AI videos that I've seen where I'm sure most people cannot tell. And studying this is really hard. People will ask, like, how do you know? Well, studying it's hard because you never really get more than, like, a 50% detection rate because that's chance, right? And the studies currently show people are about 50/50 if they can detect it. So that's chance. They're effectively guessing. It's coin flip. So it's really difficult to tell, but in my experience, Most people have a lot of trouble now.

It's one of my favorite responses when somebody is sending a video in a group chat is I will comment and say, people will say it's AI. And it's like always like a video from them. Like they're at their like aunt and uncle's house and like in the, in the mountains. And, but it's a little bit of this commentary on like when it's a coin flip, I think then when something is real. You are also presented with this like question around not trusting it, which is such an interesting observation for you to say. A year ago, we could kind of have some of these conversations and say, how do we look at this individual piece of content and make a decision around, is this AI or not? Uh, this video, here's some things, you know, okay, there's this fox that's drowning in the hole and somebody goes up to save it. Okay. But if you pause here, you can see like the fox has you know, a leg that's sticking out here and then it goes away, whatever it is. Like, there's probably more advanced ways to kind of tell on an individual piece of content. But what I hear you saying, I think this is really relevant for us as creators, is, okay, let's, maybe you can look content to content, video to video, but probably a better conversation to have as things become harder to detect is let's go to the source. And let's look at who this is coming from to try and understand if this is AI or not. And I think people are doing that with us as creators. They are looking at Food Blogger Pro and they are saying, is this AI? They're looking at Pinch of Yum, you know, our food and recipe site and saying, is this AI? And I think there is, and I want to hear your opinion on this, there is a category of content where AI is acceptable. Like I watch videos and I'm like, I know this isn't the actual Daniel from Daniel in the Lion's Den, uh, with lions, uh, live streaming, but it's somebody who's like taking a story and creating AI around that and saying, okay, this is compelling. What if we went down there? What would that be like?

Okay.

That's kind of fascinating. I know it's AI, but then there's a category. Where it's like, hey, this is somebody trying to pretend that this is real, pretend to be in the voice of the person, but it's not actually. And I think generally if people sniff that out and they're like, wait a minute, I have kind of identified that this might be AI. Generally, I feel like in the category where people expect it to be human, it becomes a significant Downgrade in the authority of your brand. Yeah, I want to hear your reflections on that because you spend way more time thinking about this and reflecting on it and also hearing from people on it.

Well, I mean, I'd like to go back to the example of your friend sending you something and you say it could be AI. And like the reason that you don't think it's AI is because you trust your friend not to send you AI. It's from him.

Yeah.

I do think that that can scale to some reasonable proportion on social media. Our current recommendation-based algorithms don't work like that because we don't oftentimes know why we are seeing something. We don't know if we can trust this source. And if this were, you know, 10 years ago where things were more sequential or, you know, on YouTube, it was more about who you were subscribing to, less about what the algorithm picked for you, maybe this would work a little bit differently. And I think that that's something we can look forward to as creators is if you're building a relationship with your audience and you can know that they trust you, then you're still in good hands. And I don't think that's going away. In fact, I think that's going to become more important as recommended or algorithmic feeds become less reliable sources for real content.

Can you talk more about that?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the short-form algorithm is not meant for verifying media. It is not, it's not built for that. On no social media platform, Are you less than 4 taps away? Actually, I think it's 3 taps, 3 taps away from figuring out how long an account's been around. So on Instagram, for example, if you're seeing something and you're like, okay, do I trust this? You have to tap on their profile. Then you have to tap on the 3 dots. Then you have to click on account transparency. It's 3 steps of interrupting your scroll. Most people are just going to be like, oh, I don't know. They're going to swipe away. Right. The, the, the UI is not built for us to figure out if something is real or not. And even the AI labels are. Yeah. Very difficult to read. They are unreliable. It, like, I think that we, we want some sort of tech solutions for this, but, but at the end of the day, I think it's going to be more about spending more time watching people that you know are legitimate versus letting an algorithm decide for you. And there are people who aren't going to care. I think the other thing here is that social media, at least in like the ideal thing that we have in our brain where we like to deny that it's all performative in some way. It's supposed to be a thing that connects you to real people. Maybe in the past you were watching, I can think of a YouTube channel that was called RocketJump from when I was getting into filmmaking and video making 10 years ago. And it was all about special effects and they would have special effects all the time, but you knew it was a channel that did special effects. You didn't think that was real.

Right.

You knew to suspend disbelief when you were watching that channel. What's happening now is these AI accounts that are mimicking real people, you don't know that you're supposed to suspend suspend disbelief, they're not labeling it. That's where the conflict comes in. And that's why it's different than just, oh, someone is really good at, like a Zach King or something.

Right.

Like, oh, they're very good at visual effects and special effects. With Zach King, it's like, Zach King is the famous guy who does all the visual effects, for people who don't know. People don't look at him and go like, ah, you tricked me, because they know he's a special effects guy. So it's very much a thing of expectations and the type of platforms that we're spending time on We expect those to bring us something that is real. We don't want it to be AI unless it is obviously AI labeled as AI, very clearly done. Then we're, we're not so much offended by that. We have the choice like, do I wanna watch this? Do I not want to watch this? So a lot of the discomfort comes from a misalignment of people expecting something real and it not being real. This is also at the time where we're recording this, you know, there are a lot of conversations coming from this Hank Green controversy around AI use for creators and how they use AI. It is again a misalignment between the audience's expectation of how much of a human creator they're watching is a result of their own human thought process versus some sort of AI thought process. So being transparent with AI use solves most of these problems, but the trick is we can't expect everyone to be honest about their AI use. And that's where a lot of my role is, is figuring out those those unknowns for people when it's either not labeled or people aren't sure.

Yeah. One of the things I've been doing as an example, as I try and navigate this, this is more in like a one-to-one level, but even within my emails, if I am, I'm just thinking about like yesterday, I think, had a meeting, I had some notes, I wanted to summarize it and send it to somebody in terms of action items.

Yeah.

Preface, hey, da da da da da, I'm typing this out. Da na na na na. Here I am. Da da da. Here's a little recap that was there. Dot dot dot. A line recap, AI recap. And then another line and say, hey, me again, not AI. But like, that's not because of some like moral obligation. I just feel like we are at a trust advantage.

Yeah.

Which will become increasingly harder to achieve as more people use this. Um, if we disclose when we are or aren't using it and, um, you know, there's a thousand different ways that you could use it. I've been using computer use now to like go and get information. It's like, that's a different use of AI. It's not AI in the creator space, but, um, what would your advice be? You know, you have, thousands of people who are creating content listening to this, food creators, and the temptation will be to like do 2 lines of a prompt and have it write an email on your behalf, in your voice. And in your opinion, what, how should creators be thinking about that?

The first thing is that people can tell. And I think that like, you just have to understand that people can tell, and most people aren't going to call you out for it. I use AI quite frequently, and I did a whole video about where I use it. I use it quite frequently for writing code. And when I'm watching the AI explain the code to me and the changes it made, it reads like AI. The smarter AIs don't sound less like AI. They just sound like a smarter AI. That is not going to change anytime soon because it's a fundamental problem with how you create and how you think about things, and the AI is not really thinking. It's doing something that resembles thinking. It's doing something that resembles communication. It's an incredible hack. It's extremely, extremely good at doing this. And a lot of incredible emergent things come out of that. But that's not going to change anytime soon from what I can tell, because it seems to not be getting less AI-ish as it gets smarter. It seems to just get smarter. So that's the first thing. You have to assume that people can tell because a lot of people can tell. The second thing is that I don't put it in anything that is like my edge as a creator. I don't use it in my creative process. I don't use it to write scripts. I do use it to like copy, or excuse me, to not copy. I was gonna say copyright. I meant like to edit emails.

Sure.

I use it to make sure I'm not making typos. I might make sure that I'm being clear by asking an AI like, is there, are there any major like convoluted arguments here, but then I'm not taking the AI's rewrite and I'll tell it like, I don't want you to rewrite this. I just want you to tell me if there's something that is blatantly wrong here or something that isn't, isn't clear. I think that that is okay. I think that now that I have coworkers, I'll say this, I'm more likely to ask them than the AI, 'cause I think that they give better advice.

Sure.

But I do understand why people do that. And it's just important to communicate that with your audience. I, I have an AI use disclosure on my YouTube page. I've made a video about it. People have said that they really appreciate my video about it. Um, I think that's the expectation now as a creator, but I also frankly don't think that everyone needs an AI use thing if there's not a big part of their, if you're just using it to like help you draft an email or something like that. I think that that is right on that border of advanced autocorrect that we would just expect to be an evolution of writing emails.

Yeah. One of the things it is so good at, and I've been thinking about this in all the different contexts of my life, is auditing.

Like, Finances.

Oh, it's like great at that. You know, advanced spell check, like you talk about, you know, double-checking, looking at my calendar and being like, hey, actually you're like way overscheduled on this day. Things like that. The thing that I find interesting, so are you doing that because of a moral consideration? Hey, I want to, you know, or even like ethical consideration, or is it, and this is how I think of it, it's almost a marketing position. Like as content becomes easier to create, it becomes more, there's more of it. How do you stand out when there's more of a thing? You have to be novel. What's the best way to be novel? It's to be different. One of the ways that you can be different when everybody is sounding like AI is to be more human. What is the reasoning for you in making some of those decisions around how you personally as a creator are using AI?

Well, I mean, in short, I'm not really using it as a creator that much. I'm using it much more in my business life. So it's a little bit easy for me because I can pretty much just say I don't use it. And that's not because I, it's not, it's often not a moral stance. It's a practical stance for me. I don't like the outputs of most of the AI systems. I've tested them. When I created my page. I created it, it was called Show Tools AI because I was optimistic of using AI tools for shows. Like that was, that was my amalgamation of those words.

Yeah.

I became less interested in that the more I used the tools and the less I saw utility in them. I used to create AI-generated backgrounds. I'd usually pop up a green screen behind me and you can see this in my first couple of videos on my YouTube page where I have AI-generated backgrounds behind me. I was really into virtual sets and green screens. I used to do LED wall work. Um, I thought that AI might be able to do that well. The more I learned about it and I thought about it, it's like, you know, it's just more practical for me to have a background behind me. Like, I'll just go upstairs and record. Like, this isn't necessary. Um, so I think for me, it's been actually not a moral thing, but quite practical. The reason I use it for code is not because I think that coding is low-value work that should only be outsourced to robots, but because I think it's an incredibly practical thing for me to use as a person. And then when I need something that's very high value, I'm still gonna hire a developer to do it.

Sure.

I don't think that AI is oftentimes a good thing to outsource to. I don't think it's ever a good replacement of the human that it's outsourcing. I think that it is useful if you are trying to do a low-value task that you wouldn't have hired a human for in the first place, and it's a rote task. Like, that's generally how I use it. And then if there's a chance that it could be replacing a human, I will tell people that I'm using it because I feel like that's the right thing to do.

Yeah.

But also, to your point, it's not even that I'm telling people I'm not using AI in order to market myself. It's like, I am not using AI so I can show up as myself, and I just expect that that comes through in the content that I make. And so it's all cohesive to me. I also really value transparency. My account is about transparency and about encouraging other people to be transparent about how they're making things. So it's very on brand for me, but it's just like, that's, that's just kind of who I am. And sometimes to a fault, sometimes I overshare, not about, I'm a pretty private person, but I'll like go very in depth about how I did something in a way that might seem frenetic to people, but that's just, that's just kind of the person I am. So I don't really think about it that much.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's like you have the, this core set of beliefs on how you want to operate. You're sharing those. And my guess is that that resonates with a lot of people as you share that journey, because a lot of people are trying to also figure that out, not only from a creator standpoint, how do I approach this, but also from a consumer standpoint, like how do I become educated around this so I'm not oblivious to what's happening? I had a conversation with somebody and one of the things they said was, yeah, I don't know. It was kind of like, I don't know, like older generations, it feels like they're being kind of tricked all the time. But I don't feel like I'm really, I feel like I'm always able to tell when something is AI. And the immediate thought I had is like, but you don't know when you see something because you think that it is real. And so it never does it trigger for you that this is fake because it passed. Like whoever created that thing was able to do so in a way where they consumed it and they were like, hey, this is from a human. I've noticed in myself that happening more. I had this conversation with Lindsay. This was probably a month ago. She was looking at, it was like a fashion video and it was 2 women standing side by side. I think maybe you've seen or like reported on some of these where it's like—

I've seen a ton of them.

Yeah. It's like, uh, and it grew, like the account grew like 100,000 followers. I don't know if it's like artificial or what, but hey, here's some like styling. If you're going to wear this, here's how you do it. And And she was like, it was, she eventually realized after kind of looking at it, seeing the different accounts, seeing the different posts and seeing how similar they were, where it was like, wait a minute, but it wasn't on the initial watch of it. And some similar things have happened to me where I really have to sit with it for a little bit. If I moved on too quickly, uh, I wouldn't have been able to catch that it was. And the question in this is for us as creators, if one of the paths that some people are taking is being an AI creator, is the, number one, just what are your thoughts on that, being an AI creator? And then number two, Is the important thing within that disclosure? Like, is that the key to let people know that this is AI-generated? AI content in and of itself maybe isn't necessarily bad, but is what we're getting at here that AI-generated content that is trying to trick people maybe is? Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. If you've ever opened Google Analytics or Google Search Console and then just looked at it for a little bit and closed the tab because it felt overwhelming, This is for you.

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I think so. I will say that I absolutely hate creating AI-generated content because I don't like the process. So that's one of the reasons I turned away from it. I don't think that a lot of the people who are creating AI content were creators before AI. That has been my experience talking to them. They're usually coming in from some other thing. AI content is much more transactional and attentional in nature rather than creative in nature.

You can create a system, you create a process.

Exactly.

You have the flow. Yeah. You hook everything up.

That's what a lot of those creators get off on is the process, the process and the numbers. And it's like a game. And I, I think that, um, you know, over just a year of creating, I've backed off from trying to like win the numbers game because I think it is really unfulfilling. And like, my page grew incredibly fast and I'm very lucky. I, you know, it's like I always dreamed of having a silver play button and now I have a silver play button and then some, right? And it's like, wow. And, but when I got that silver play button, I was just like, I didn't even put it up. I didn't do anything with it.

Yeah, for sure.

It took me 3 months to be like, oh, I should get my silver play button, right? So it's amazing how quickly that disappears once you get there. So I just don't think that chasing numbers is a worthwhile endeavor. But I think the other thing to consider, which like, this is my, like, you know, looking out into the near future here is I think that I think that we take a lot of things for granted that we can't take for granted anymore. One thing is that people don't care how things are made. I think that was true. I don't think that's true anymore. I think people care about how things are made now that there is this all-creative system that can do anything based on taking a lot of other people's work. And that's how it was trained. And a lot of people do care about that.

Mm-hmm.

The second thing is a lot of people took for granted that if you saw something, it was a trustworthy thing. And so all these things are changing beneath the surface in a way That makes me say I need to really lean in to being very transparent and very proactive about it so that I can try to like get above those things that people took for granted before that they can't take for granted now.

Yeah.

Additionally, I, I don't think that this path is going to continue in the exact way it is. I like, I, I don't see how these companies that have built themselves on personal connection and really rely on creators to keep their platforms fun to be on, you know, like, I don't think that they are actually going to be incentivized to have a flood of AI-generated content on their platforms that they can't control. So I think that it's a relatively temporary thing. I'm sure there will be AI-only platforms. I'm sure that people will continue to watch AI content.

I'm not— Mm-hmm.

But the idea even that humans need to be the ones creating the AI content for other people is something that I don't agree with. I think that the more likely endgame here is in the next few years, you're not going to need to have the person to create the AI content for you. You're just gonna have the algorithm creating the AI content for you.

Which is wild when you think about it. Yeah.

I mean, it's like, we're a ways off from that because the cost models don't work yet. Like, it's actually, that's actually a very expensive app to run, Sora. Was trying to be that for people. You know, it costs about, you know, $3 to make a 10-second-long video right now, right? So it's like, it is not, the cost is not ready for that reality yet. The possibility that it's going to be there is real though. And so I think that, you know, we're just in like a big transition period right now and like leaning all into AI content, I think, is relatively a mistake because you're not going to be able to like keep that, but you can keep yourself. You can control yourself. You can control if you're creating authentic content that people are going to connect with. I think that like diving all into the AI race as an individual creator is a lot riskier than the companies who are selling you those products are making it out to be.

That I've never heard that take before, but it makes so much sense specifically around being an AI creator. Your point in it is if you get really good at this, you might be able to over the next year, 2 years, maybe 3 years, become an expert in creating AI content and posting it to platforms. But eventually you also will be replaced by the platform itself, which will be able to generate the content. It reminds me of an interview that I heard with, I forget his name, but he was the The guy who figured out how to jailbreak the iPhone. And he was talking about, this was maybe 5, 6, 7 years ago, pre-ChatGPT public launch. And he said he had this bet, he had this kind of idea that in the future, that is kind of depressing, that algorithms would be so addicting that we would start to look at a phone and then we'd never be able to look away. And his, the premise was that they will get good because similar to the way that an algorithm works right now, it's able to micro-adjust and make decisions and say, oh, I saw that you were interested in this. I'm going to show you another thing here. Okay, great. I'm going to A/B test this across 1,000 different people. I see that out of, you know, the 500 that we showed this, These people stayed a little bit longer. So then it switches it again. And then eventually what you find is like, you're scrolling through TikTok for 3 hours. All of that content previously was human-made. But what does that look like in a world where not only is it able to tweak the algorithm, it's also able to tweak the content because it can create the content to then test against, which is like, oh man. It's like depressing to think of that. But that's what I hear you saying specifically around being an AI content creator is that you are not, you won't be able to differentiate yourself because eventually that too will be able to, that too will be replaced. And so the way you differentiate yourself is by being human.

Well, I think that if you're finding an audience that doesn't care if content is human created or not, they definitionally don't care. That's my point. So like, it is possible that you will be able to distinguish yourself as an AI creator and have some, super good taste that ascends you above the other algorithmically generated content. Totally possible. However, as someone who sees AI pages copying each other all the time, Yeah, right. you don't have any control over— once you get popular, there are going to be copycats that can be procedurally generated themselves. They can just look at this AI page's content and effectively duplicate it themselves over and over and over. And because the people who are watching it know it's AI, don't care, it just doesn't matter. And I think this is something like, if you are controlling yourself and you are like a scarce one-of-one entity that is like yourself, you can control what people see of you. And that is something that you can harness and like is not going to change. Perhaps the platforms that we spend our time on are going to have to change. Perhaps there's going to be different platforms that adjudicate if things are AI or real more diligently. I'm not sure. It's going to change our algorithms. Like it's about to change a lot.

Mm-hmm.

I am not proclaiming to know what is going to happen. But I do think that audiences, you like, you want to curate an audience that cares about your content, not an audience that is just cool with whatever AI-generated content is, is like consumable to them at that very time. And, um, as someone who Yeah. has seen the, the cutting edge of AI-generated content and like every day, see, I seem to see something that makes me a little bit more scared. Like, I am spending way less time on social media than I was a year ago. I mean, just way less because I've started to get disillusioned. I don't know if that's gonna— I don't think that's gonna be the reaction everyone has, but like, that is a serious risk we have is just losing faith in the content and just tuning out, which is— and I'm not doing that because I can't tell. I'm doing that because I find it exhausting and I know that the area around me is real. So I just— like try to spend more time there.

Yeah, it's anecdotal, but like my mom said the same thing. Like I was talking to her about it and she's like, I've just gotten tired of trying to figure it out. And so I just don't use the platforms as much. Obviously it's like, there's a certain corner of people. It doesn't apply to everybody, but I think it definitely does exist with a certain subset of people where it's just like the effort involved is too much and becomes friction against using the platform. So you had talked about the importance for those who want to be content creators, a way to stand out. It's like you are one of one. How do you lean into your one-of-oneness as a creator? You talked about live streaming before as a part of your history and a part of what you did. I've heard a lot of people talk about the importance of things like live streaming, the importance of a podcast like this where we're talking back and forth dynamically, all of people aren't watching this and listening to this and thinking like, is this AI? Maybe they will eventually, but not right now. What are the ways that you can be human? We talk a lot on this podcast, even we've talked a lot about like, hey, the importance is lean into your humanity. I think this conversation helps shine a light on why that's important to start to understand it. But functionally, how do you do that as a creator?

Well, I mean, I can I can speak for myself, like that's one of the reasons I like doing podcasts and I like collaborating with others. I try to lean into collaborative posts a lot. I wish I did more of them, honestly. When I find a certain video, maybe real creators being called AI, this happens sometimes, like I'll try to do joint posts with them. I find that to be exciting. I think it's just gonna be different for everyone, honestly. I mean, you know, I— This is especially difficult for not so much creators in like the food space, but creators who are animators or stop motion artists, they're kind of having existential problems with this right now because—

For sure.

They know their audiences are having a harder time telling purely aesthetically, so they're really trying to communicate. You know, I think that you can still tell that it's like, real and authentic hand-drawn animation or like, you know, laborious stop-motion, right? But like, for them to be going through it, I think is like, even more so difficult because they're not showing their face. So it's like, how do you differentiate yourself? And I do think that it's going to become harder. And I'm under no illusion that this AI content age that we're in is going to make it way harder to distinguish yourself as an individual. And I think it's going to make it harder to make probably money doing it because it might have a deflationary effect on— There's more content.

That's being monetized, less attention on your content.

Yeah, it's just like it's inflating the content amount, but also, um, you know, it's much easier to just like create cheap advertisements now. So I think that it'll have real, real effects. Um, so I'm trying to not give a no, a non-answer. I mean, for, for me, I, I am just like trying to create more things more often and just like always be creating. And like, it's not to, it's not to I'm not going to be able to out-create the AI systems. In fact, like I've kind of given up on that, um, because I just, I mean, it's impossible. It's like you can't, you can't outproduce a computer. That's like what they're for. They can do it instantly or not instantly, but very quickly. Um, and, and so I think for me it's just about being very communicative and communicating often. Ironically, I don't do many live streams even though I used to be a live streaming producer, 'cause I think Sure. The short-form video and also like longer-form podcasts or longer-form content, like, is where people spend most of their time, unless you're in the gaming space for sure, then a lot of it is live streaming. You know, but for me, it's just like, I learned that my look is primarily like, I shoot in front of a green screen, I have a nice camera, I have a teleprompter, I have like a nice studio, Like, that's just how I know how to create content. And I was really afraid that I'd get on TikTok and that wouldn't land, or like it would be too performative for like a younger audience. It turns out it's not at all. Like, I think that like it turned out that I was, um, that was a differentiator for me that I think I was afraid of for a while, but I just didn't know how to do it any other way. And, um, I still do kind of like the yapping direct-to-camera thing on TikTok sometimes. But my most well-performing videos are just like whatever comes the most natural to me in my production environment. I think that there's going to be, people are going to need to refine what that is for them and really look closely at like what their strengths are and try to avoid, you know, just like assimilating to the algorithm, which is going to be pulled in a lot of weird directions by AI.

Yeah. One of the things that I think about as a differentiator is like facts versus stories. And I think that, that as facts become easier to access, easier to talk about, easier to roll up into a video, like one of the differentiators is stories. And I think about like, how do we as creators overlap our own stories? I think people will always be compelled by stories.

Yeah.

Into the content that we're creating. You know, you could create like a top 3 breakfast spots in Charleston, but like you could also probably tell a story around what it looked like when you went out for breakfast in Charleston.

Yep.

And I think—

In my space, like AI is pretty good at figuring out if an account is real or fake, but it does an awful job communicating that in a way that people are actually engaged with. So like it can do the technical aspect. But it cannot do the communications aspect in some sort of like engaging or entertaining way. And I think it comes back to that story point you just made.

Yeah. Like it can tell if something is AI or not, but then to tell somebody about it being AI or not, suddenly it's not very good at it. Like factually it can communicate it, but not in a way where people want to like engage with it. I think the, the The thing that's hard for food creators right now is that there are certain categories of content, Pinterest being one, certain platforms where they've become flooded with AI content. There's this image that at a conference I went to that I'm thinking of where they showed there was like one real image and it was like a screenshot of the whole thing was filled with like Pinterest images and the rest were AI images. For creators who are engaging on platforms where they're like Pinterest as an example, do you think that there's something around leaning into your humanity, being forward, front and center with like who you are? Or even one of the thoughts that I've had is like, how do you, if you have a trustworthy brand, if you have a known brand, there's There's a certain group of people who know Pinch of Yum is a food and recipe website. How do we make that front and center? One of the things you said earlier that I think is so important is going back to the source, understanding the source. Do you trust this source? And so maybe what I'm getting at is like, how do we become a source? How do we become a brand that people trust? One of the things you said is like an AI statement. I'd never thought of that, but I think I think that would be super beneficial. It's not needed. It's not like it's required by Google or these platforms, but to say to people, hey, transparently, here's how we use AI and here's how we don't. And we want to let you know. So when you engage with us, you're aware of where we're using AI. Are there other pieces of advice that you'd give to creators to help them be in a position where they can be a trusted source on the internet?

Well, I think that a lot of creators are scared of showing their face, but I think that that is oftentimes very helpful. I know that might sound like a baseline to people who show their face, but a lot of people still don't. And I know it's become a little bit more normal on TikTok and just 'cause everything's like front-facing video, but So yes, there's a risk. The reason I'm bringing this up is people ask me all the time like, hey, I want to start creating, but I'm afraid of being deepfaked, or I'm afraid of being copied. It's like, well, I don't know what to say to that. That's kind of the reality.

It's just the reality.

This is kind of where we're at now. It's ironic. I've never, to my knowledge, been deepfaked. I've been copied a couple times, but I've gotten them taken down. But something I think about quite frequently is I expect that that will happen. So that's the first thing is I think that you have to create without some of that fear that comes with creating today. Again, it's hard for me to prescribe specific things for specific people, but I think that just be really wary about what you're trying to outsource to AI and if that lessens like your creative abilities in some way or like diminishes them. Um, and I think that's going to be different for everybody. Um, about statements, histories, things that, things that try to like really ground you. I mean, that can be copied by AI too. So like, I recognize that this is difficult. I, I'll be just really real. I don't think that there is like that magic bullet. I mean, there's, there's a comp— there are a couple of companies, um, that are working on You know, human creator certifications, which I think could be interesting in the near future, but that requires a lot of adoption for people to know what that means. There are going to be provenance tools like hopefully CTPA, which is like a technical provenance standard, becomes more widely adopted. I think that there are going to be some technical solutions that could help, but I think that The next few years are going to, to be really uncomfortable. Like, I'm just gonna be really honest. Like, I think they're gonna be really, really difficult.

In what way? When you, and, and you, you, you kind of alluded to this as well, where you said you've been seeing some things that kind of scare you. What are those things? What do you think will be difficult?

Well, just hyper-realistic AI models. I mean, I, I think that, um, I don't talk about, unfortunately, a lot of the most realistic stuff actually comes in not safe for work content, which I don't talk about.

Sure.

Um, But that's because that's where a lot of money is made. And so a lot of it is in these like scams and fraud and not safe for work content, which is starting to trickle into not— into safe for work content as well. I don't, again, I don't think that it's a real threat for people who have a real community and are trying to maintain that community and grow a community. I think that there will be a craving for that sort of content. Like, I think that the good old content might just be like what we're currently making right now, right? And I think that Like we just have to keep doing it and trust that the system's gonna work out.

Yeah.

But I think that the systems that have been, that we've been kind of relying on, um, such as algorithms are right now just, they're just getting played by AI. And I think it's gonna get worse before it gets better. Um, like they're just getting played. And, um, until there are some proactive steps taken by, you're, you're looking for a platform that takes proactive steps to try to help you. And, and this is something, I mean, I don't have a Patreon. I know like Patreon Patreon's trying, Substack is trying, like they're trying to do an AI detection thing. Pinterest has tried with AI detection, but like, these are— LinkedIn is trying, even though I think that might be hopeless. Like everyone's kind of trying.

LinkedIn, yeah.

Like every— all these platforms are trying because they're starting to recognize the like epistemic risk that's at play here of just what am I watching? Where is it coming from? But the technical tooling is far behind. It might not get there. So I'll just be real. Like, I don't, I'm not the most optimistic about this. I don't have a magic bullet other than all I can do is control what I create and tell people about it and hope that people follow. And that's what I've got. And it's working well enough, but I wouldn't just rely on some sort of technical solution to swoop in and save us because I think we're pretty far off from that.

Right. Like the platform's going to figure it out. They'll put together some badge system and that will then fix it. What you're saying is like, maybe, but also maybe let's not, let's not assume that will happen.

Um, maybe, but I think that algorithmic platforms are probably just not fitted fit for AI. Like, I think we're going to have to go back to more subscription-based models in order to really solve it. And the platforms are going to have to come to terms with the fact that means less ad revenue. Like it's, it's a huge, huge change for sure.

It's, I had never thought about this, but we talk a lot about the shift from platforms being social platforms to being content platforms or algorithmic platforms. You know, the most obvious example is Facebook used to be a feed, chronological feed of people that you followed and their updates.

Yep.

And then they were like, wait a minute, let's actually show the most interesting stuff from the people you follow at the top.

It's somebody's birthday. There's this dramatic interaction between these family members and all these comments coming in. Okay, let's show that at the top because now we see more people stick around for that. From there, it's like, well, what if we showed just like a random thing that was really engaging at the top?

Oh, actually people stay around even longer.

even if they don't know who it is, if we show that at the top. And suddenly what quote unquote social media has become is an algorithm that shows you topical or sometimes not even topical content to try and get you to stick around and engage with it. And what's interesting now that I'd never thought of until this point is that it is algorithmic, but now you also have the ability to algorithmically create content. Mm-hmm. And so now you just have these 2 algorithms, uh, like self-reinforcing their own content. And it's like, there's individuals who are creating their own little algorithm to say, hey, what's working? What's not working? Okay, I figured something out. I'm gonna ramp that up. I'm gonna create 200 pieces of content, put it onto Instagram because a lot of people watch a fashion video when there's 2 women standing by each other and talking about like the difference between a pencil skirt and like, uh, Yep. Nightgown. Like, okay, that's a very different type of platform. And what does that look like moving forward? Who knows? But our job, if we want to be human-forward creators, which is going to be a scarce resource in a world of algorithmically created content, our job is to figure out where can we show up and create value in a way that people are interested in consuming It might be a different platform. It might be a different type of content. But if that's how we want to show up, which your point is really, I think, important around this, that is going to be the scarce resource. It'll become increasingly scarce as AI-created content becomes increasingly easy to create.

Yeah.

Our job is to figure out where are we going to show up in a way that creates Uh, value in a way that people want to consume that content. And what I hear you saying is like TBD on where that is. Is that accurate?

Unfortunately, yes, because I think the dominant social media platforms are, I think, taking for granted a lot of things that, uh, are keeping their platform around, such as advertisers are just going to be okay with this indefinitely, or Or people are going to stick around indefinitely as the platforms become less and less real. Like, we don't know the answers to these yet. If I were, if I were Meta, for example, I would be much more concerned than they seem to be letting on that this, that AI content could legitimately overrun real content.

That it could become the vast majority of content that is consumed.

That's what has happened on Pinterest. Uh, that's what was happening on Pinterest. Pinterest has an existential problem with how people view their platform. And I think that video platforms are right behind it. Videos are just more expensive to create than AI images.

So, and even 6 months ago weren't as compelling as they are today. A year from now, it's going to be, it's a little bit like, yeah, we've crossed the chasm.

Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think that videos are harder just to be clear, like new, I've talked about on my page that newer video models still look like AI videos in a lot of ways, but you can create, you can really play to the strengths of the models that hides though, that hide that, hides it well enough to pass. So it won't be everywhere. Like, I don't think that AI-generated long-form influencers or not, I guess I wouldn't call it long-form influencers. I would say like long-form AI-generated content, I don't think really feels like real long-form content. So like, I think that we're still a ways away from that. So like, I'm not saying everything's cooked, but—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could create a 12-second video that maybe is compelling and could do well on a short-form video platform, but you probably won't create a 20-minute video strictly AI that somebody would sit down and watch like an interview or something like that.

I see it all the time in like history or like politics or something like that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of AI-generated stuff in that space or like, you know, top 10 lists or whatever, but it's, it's again, it's different.

Yep. Um, you have Riddance. You talked about that a little bit. Can you, as we close out, talk about what, uh, that looks like, what the company is about, who would be a good fit for that? Uh, if there's people that would be interested in learning more about that, obviously can follow you and, uh, as creators and also consumers, but I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your business as Yeah, so Jeremy Finds AI is my AI literacy page, and that's how most people know me.

Riddance, we're really doing research around AI-generated content and working with people who wanna stay on top of that, whether it's a platform or, for example, we'll be releasing a report on AI-generated wellness influencers and all this AI-generated health content that's coming out, or we are working with journals and newspapers, well, not newspapers anymore, but publications to—

True.

Figure out what's going on going on in that space. So look, it's also new for us. I mean, figuring out a business around AI-generated content, that's another thing, right? I think that there are so many things that are just changing in real time. And for us, that looks like just keeping an eye on AI-generated content and figuring out what to do with that intelligence.

Yeah.

So it has been a relatively new thing. And yeah, if people are interested in learning more about the AI-generated content in their space, that's something we can track at a pretty large scale. So feel free to reach out to Riddance. That's what we're all about.

Awesome. Jeremy, super fun to talk to you. We're going to have to have you on. I feel like it could be every week. That's how quickly this industry moves. Yeah, you didn't ask me about a specific AI video or anything.

Yeah, tell us one.

Tell us one specific one that people should check out that's interesting. Like, is there one video that you would point to that we can link to in the show notes that would do a good job of being like, this is interesting, fascinating, compelling?

It's so hard. I mean, I just did one on, I mean, for me, it's always the most recent one I did. The one I just did was on AI-generated political influencers that are doing like these AI-generated podcasts about specific political issues, which I find to be kind of troubling because we're seeing a lot of these like AI-generated policy Yeah. Podcasters, which is just like quite problematic because they're not real people and they shouldn't get a say in what our elections are like, you know?

So things like that. I mean, when you combine AI and politics and you start to think about like AI's role in politics, it gets— that's a wild corner of AI.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's the corner of the internet I'm occupying right now. So that's been, that's been pretty wild. But, uh, one of the, one of the things is I did a long-form video about a month and a half ago now about the AI-generated accounts that are going after artists. If they're a ceramicist making mugs or something along those lines, how they're fighting back, which I think is a pretty parallel thing to what we've been talking about here, which is artists who are trying to distinguish themselves and really talking to those artists about what it was like. So I think that was a really rewarding project because it highlighted some artists who have fought this battle and overcome it in some ways.

Cool. That's great. Jeremy, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Hey there, Anne again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week for our next episode as Björk and Timothy Packeron from Mississippi Vegan to talk about tapping into your creative passion without burning out and how he's been able to apply that mindset to his latest cookbook. We'll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week. Hey there, Anne again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week for our next episode as Burek interviews Timothy Pacharon from Mississippi Vegan to talk about tapping into your creative passion without burning out and how he's been able to apply that mindset to his latest cookbook. We'll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.

Bye.